The Saint and Mr Teal (Once More the Saint)

Georgian style, reminiscent of a fat archdeacon suffering an attack of liver with rhinocerine fortitude; and the only light visible on that side of it was a pale pink bulb that hung in the drab portico like a forlorn plum in an orchard that the pickers have finished with. The neglected front garden was dappled with the shadows of a few laurel bushes and unkempt flower beds. Of the taxi there was no sign; but a dim nimbus of light was discernible beyond the shrubbery on the right.

The Saint's leisured step eased up gradually and reached a standstill. After all, Mr. Jones was the man he wanted to meet: this appeared to be Mr. Jones's headquarters: and there were no counter-attractions in the way of night life to be seen in that part of Hamp­stead. The main idea suffered no competition; and a shrewd glance up and down the road revealed no other evening prowlers to notice what happened.

Simon dropped his hands into his pockets and grinned gently at the stars.

'Here goes,' he murmured.

The dense shadows inside the garden swallowed him up like a ghost. A faint scraping of gears came to him as he skirted a clump of laurels and padded warily along the grass border of a part of the drive which circled round towards the regions where he had seen the light; and he rounded the corner of the house in time to see the taxi's stern gliding through the doors of a garage that was built onto the side of Mr. Jones's manor. Simon halted again, and stood like a statue while he watched a vague figure scrunch out of the darkness and pull the doors shut behind the cab- from the inside. He surmised that there was a direct communication from the garage through into the house, but he heard a heavy bolt grating into its socket as he drew nearer to investigate.

The Saint sidled on past the garage to the back of the house and waited. After a time he saw two parallel slits of subdued radiance blink out around the edges of a drawn blind in a first-floor window: they were no more than hairlines of almost imperceptible luminance etched in the blackness of the wall, but they were enough to give him the information he needed.

Down on the ground level, almost opposite, where he stood, he made out another door-obviously a kitchen entrance for the convenience of servants, trades­men, and policemen with ten minutes to spare and a sheik-like style with cooks. He moved forward and ran his fingers over it cautiously. A gentle pressure here and there told him that it was not bolted, and he felt in his pocket for a slim pack of skeleton keys. At the third attempt the heavy wards turned solidly over; and Simon replaced the keys in his pocket and pushed the door inwards by fractions of an inch, with the blade of his penknife pressing against the point where it would first be able to slip through. He checked the movement of the door at the instant when his knife slid into the gap, and ran the blade delicately up and down the minute opening. At the very base of the door it en­countered an obstruction; and the Saint flicked the burglar alarm aside with a neat twist and an inaudible sigh of satisfaction, and stepped in.

Standing on the mat, with his back to the closed door, he put away the knife and snapped a tiny electric flashlight from its clip in his breast pocket. It was no longer than a fountain pen, and a scrap of tinfoil with a two- millimetre puncture in it was gummed over the bulb so that the beam it sent out was as fine as a needle. A three- inch ellipse of concentrated light whisked along the wall beside him and rounded itself off into a perfect circle as it came to rest on another door facing the one by which he had entered.

Simon Templar's experience as a burglar was strictly limited. On the rare occasions when he had unlawfully introduced himself into the houses of his victims, it had nearly always been in quest of information rather than booty. And he set out to explore the abode of the man called Jones with the untainted zest of a man to whom the crime was still an adventure.

With one hand still resting lightly in the side pocket of his coat, he opened the opposite door soundlessly and admitted himself to a large, dimly illuminated central hall. A broad marble staircase wound up and around the sides of the hall, climbing from gallery to gallery up the three floors of the house until it was indistinguishable against the great shrouded emptiness of what was probably an ornate stained-glass skylight in the roof. Everything around was wrapped in the silence of death, and the atmosphere had the damply naked feel of air that has not been breathed for many months. A thin smear of dust came off on his fingers from everything he touched; and when he flashed his torch over the interior of one of the ground-floor rooms he found it bare and dilapidated, with the paint peeling off the walls and cobwebs festooning an enormous dingy gilt chandelier.

'Rented for the job,' he diagnosed. 'They wouldn't bother about the ground floor at all-not with kid-napped prisoners.'

He flitted up the staircase without so much as a tap from his feather-weight crepe-soled shoes. A strip of cheap carpet had been roughly laid around the gallery which admitted to the first-floor rooms; and the Saint walked softly over it, listening at door after door.

Then he heard, with startling clarity, a voice that he recognized.

'You have nothing to be afraid of, Miss Holm, so long as you behave yourself. I'm sorry to have had to take the liberty of abducting you, but you doubtless know one or two reasons why I must discourage your friend's curiosity.'

He heard the girl's calm reply: 'I think you could have invented a less roundabout way of committing suicide.'

The man's bass chuckle answered her. Perhaps only the Saint's ears could have detected the iron core of ruthless menace that hardened the overtones of its full-throated heartiness.

'I'm glad you're not hysterical.' A brief pause. 'If there's anything within reason that you want, I hope you'll ask for it. Are you feeling hungry?'

'Thanks,' said the girl coolly. 'I should like a couple of sausages, some potatoes, and a cup of coffee.'

Simon darted along the gallery and whipped open the nearest door. Through the gap which he left open he saw a heavily built, grey-haired man emerge from the next room, lock the door after him, and go down the stairs. As the man bent to the key, the Saint had a photographic impression of a dark, large-featured, smooth-shaven face; then he could only see the broad, well-tailored back passing downwards out of view.

The man's footsteps died away; and Simon returned to the landing. He stood at the door of Patricia's room and tapped softly on the wood with his fingernails.

'Hullo, Pat!'

Her dress rustled inside the room.

'Quick work, boy. How did you do it?'

'Easy. Are you all right?'

'Sure.'