The Saint Closes the Case by Leslie Charteris Read Free Book Online

a genuine international hatred. It’d want a much
bigger final spark to make it blaze up. And the Crown Prince and his
am bitions—and Vargan’s invention—they’d make the spark! They’re
Marius’s trump card. If he didn’t bring them off his whole scheme might be
shipwrecked. I know that’s right!”
    “That man in the garden,” whispered
Patricia. “If he was one of Marius’s men——”
    “It was Marius!”
    The Saint snatched a paper from the table,
and wrung and smashed it out so that she could see the photograph.
    Bad as had been the light when they had found
themselves face to face with the original, that face could never
have been mistaken anywhere—that hideous, rough-hewn, nightmare ex pressionlessness,
like the carved stone face of a heathen idol.
    “It was Marius… ,”
    Roger Conway came out of his chair.
    “If you’re right, Saint—I’ll believe
that you didn’t dream last night—— ”
    “It’s true!”
    “And we haven’t all suddenly got
softening of the brain— to be listening to these howling, daft
deductions of yours—— ”
    “God knows I was never so sure of
anything in my life.”
    “Then—— ”
    The Saint nodded.
    “We have claimed to execute some sort of justice,” he
said. “What is the just thing for us to
do here?”
    Conway did not answer, and the Saint turned
to meet Norman Kent’s thoughtful eyes; and then he knew that they were both
waiting for him to speak their own judgment.
    They had never seen the Saint so stern.
    “The invention must cease to be,”
said Simon Templar. “And the brain that conceived it, which could
recreate it— that also must cease to be. It is expedient that one man
should die for many people… .”
     
     
    3. How Simon Templar returned to Esher,
    and decided to go there again
     
    This was on the 24th of June—about three
weeks after the Saint’s reply to the offer of a free pardon.
    On the 25th, not a single morning paper gave
more than an inconspicuous paragraph to the news which had filled
the afternoon editions of the day before; and thereafter nothing more at
all was said by the Press about the uninvited guests at Vargan’s demonstration.
Nor was there more than a passing reference to the special Cabinet meeting
which followed.
    The Saint, who now had only one thought day
and night, saw in this unexpected reticence the hand of something dangerously
like an official censorship, and Barney Malone, ap pealed to, was so
uncommunicative as to confirm the Saint in his forebodings.
    To the Saint it seemed as if a strange
tension had crept into the atmosphere of the season in London. This
feeling was purely subjective, he knew; and yet he was unable to laugh
it away. On one day he had walked through the streets in care less
enjoyment of an air fresh and mild with the promise of summer, among people
quickened and happy and alert; on the next day the clear skies had
become heavy with the fear of an awful thunder, and a doomed generation
went its way furtively and afraid.
    “You ought to see Esher,” he told
Roger Conway. “A day away from your favourite bar would do you
good,”
    They drove down in a hired car; and there the
Saint found further omens.
    They lunched at the Bear, and afterwards
walked over the Portsmouth Road. There were two men standing at the end of the
lane in which Professor Vargan lived, and two men broke off their
conversation abruptly as Conway and the Saint turned off the main
road and strolled past them under the trees. Further down, a third man hung
over the garden gate sucking a pipe.
    Simon Templar led the way past the house
without glancing at it, and continued his discourse on the morrow’s probable
runners; but a sixth sense told him that the eyes of the man at the gate
followed them down the lane, as the eyes of the two men at the corner had
done.
    “Observe,” he murmured, “how
careful they are not to make any fuss. The last thing they want to do
is to attract attention. Just quietly on