The Saint and Mr. Teal: Formerly Called "Once More the Saint" by Leslie Charteris Read Free Book Online Page B

door ajar and saw that the room was in darkness. He stepped boldly in, quartering the room with his weaving pencil of light. The flying disk of luminance danced along the walls and suddenly stopped, splashing itself in an irregular pool over the motionless form of a man who lay quietly on the floor as if asleep. But the Saint knew that he was dead.
    He knelt down and made a rapid examination. The man had been dead about forty-eight hours-there was no trace of a wound, but with his face close to the dead man’s mouth he detected the unmistakable scent of prussic acid. It was as he was rising to go that he accidentally turned over the lapel of the dead man’s coat, and saw the thin silver badge underneath-the silver greyhound of a King’s Messenger.
    The Saint came to his feet again rather slowly. The waters were running deeper than he had ever expected, and he felt an odd sense of shock. That slight silver badge had transformed the adventure at one glance from a more or less ordinary if still mysterious criminal problem to an intrigue that might lead anywhere.
    As he left the room he heard the man called Jones coming up the stairs again. Peeping over the wooden balustrade, he saw that the man carried a tray-the catering arrangements in that house appeared to be highly commendable, even if nothing else was.
    Simon slipped along the gallery without a sound. He opened two more rooms and found them both empty; then he paused outside another and saw a narrow line of light under the door.
    He stood still for a few seconds, listening. He heard an occasional faint chink of glass or metal, and the shuffling of slippered feet over the carpet; but there were no voices. Almost mechanically he tried the door, and had one of the biggest surprises of his life when he felt it opening.
    The Saint froze up motionless, with a dry electric tingle glissading over the surface of his skin. The way the door gave back under his light touch disintegrated the very ground from under his nebulous theory about the occupant of that room. In the space of four seconds his brain set up, surveyed, and bowled over a series of possible explanations that were chiefly notable for their complete uselessness. In the fifth second that ultimate fact impressed itself unanswerably on his consciousness, and he acknowledged it with a wry shrug and the decimal point of a smile. Theories were all very well in their place; but he had come to the house of Mr. Jones on a quest for irrefutable knowledge, and an item of irrefutable knowledge was awaiting his attention inside that room. It remained for him to go in and get introduced-and that was what he had given up a peaceful evening in his own home to do.
    He glanced downwards into the hall. There was no sound or movement from below. For a minute or two he might consider he had the field to himself-if he was quick and quiet about taking it over.
    The door of the lighted room opened further, inch by inch, against the steady persuasion of his fingers, while his nerves were keyed up to check its swing at the first faint hint of a squeak out of the hinges. Gradually the strip of light at the edge widened until he could see part of the room. A grotesque confusion of metal and glass, tangled up with innumerable strands and coils of wire, was heaped over all the floor space that he could see like the scrap heap of one of those nightmare laboratories of the future which appear in every magazine of pseudo-scientific fiction. The Saint’s unscientific mind could grasp nothing but the bare visual impression of it-an apparently aimless conglomeration of burnished steel spheres and shining crystal tubes that climbed in and out of each other like a futurist sculptor’s rendering of two all-in wrestlers getting acquainted. Back against the far wall ran a long workbench of wood and porcelain surmounted by racks and shelves of glass vessels and bottles of multicoloured mixtures. It was the most fantastic collection of incomprehensible