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

the premises, that’s what they
are. But if we did anything suspicious we should find ourselves be ing very
quietly and carefully bounced towards the nearest clink. That’s what
we call Efficiency.”
    A couple of hundred yards further on, on the
blind side of a convenient corner, the Saint stopped.
    “Walk on for as long as it takes you to
compose a limerick suitable for the kind of drawing-room to which you would never be
admitted,” he ordered. “And then walk back. I’ll be here.”
    Conway obediently passed on, carrying in the
tail of his eye a glimpse of the Saint sidling through a gap in the hedge into the fields
on the right. Mr. Conway was no poet, but he ac cepted the Saint’s
suggestion, and toyed lazily with the lyrical possibilities of a
young lady of Kent who whistled wherever she went. After wrestling for some
minutes with the problem of bringing this masterpiece to a satisfactory
conclusion, he gave it up and turned back; and the Saint returned
through the hedge, a startlingly immaculate sight to be seen coming through a
hedge, with a punctuality that suggested that his estimate of Mr. Conway’s
poetical talent was dreadfully accurate .
    “For the first five holes I couldn’t put
down a single putt,” said the Saint sadly, and he continued to
describe an entirely imaginary round of golf until they were back
on the main road and the watchers at the end of the lane were out of
sight.
    Then he came back to the point.
    “I wanted to do some scouting round at
the back of the house
to see how sound the defences were. There was a sixteen- stone seraph in his shirtsleeves pretending to garden, and an other little bit of fluff sitting in a deck chair
under a tree read ing a newspaper.
Dear old Teal himself is probably sitting in the bathroom disguised as a clue. They aren’t taking any more chances!”
    “Meaning,” said Conway, “that
we shall either have to be very cunning or very violent.”
    “Something like that,” said the
Saint.
    He was preoccupied and silent for the rest of
the walk back to the Bear, turning over the proposition he had set
himself to tackle.
    He had cause to be—and yet the tackling of
tough proposi tions was nothing new to him. The fact of the ton or so of official majesty
which lay between him and his immediate ob jective
was not what bothered him; the Saint, had he chosen to turn his professional attention to the job,
might easily have been middleweight
champion of the world, and he had a poor opinion both of the speed and fighting
science of police men. In any case,
as far as that obstacle went, he had a vast confidence in his own craft and ingenuity for circumventing mere massive force. Nor did the fact that he was
meddling with the destiny of nations give him pause: he had once, in his quixotic adventuring, run a highly successful
one-man revolution in South America,
and could have been a fully ac credited
Excellency in a comic-opera uniform if he had chosen. But this problem, the immensity of it, the colossal forces
that were involved, the millions of tragedies that might follow one slip in his enterprise … Something in
the thought tightened tiny muscles
around the Saint’s jaw.
    Fate was busy with him in those days.
    They were running into Kingston at the modest
pace which was all the hired car permitted, when a yellow sedan purred effortlessly
past them. Before it cut into the line of traffic ahead, Conway had had
indelibly imprinted upon his mem ory the bestial, ape-like face that stared
back at them through the rear window with the fixity of a carved
image.
    “Ain’t he sweet?” murmured the
Saint.
    “A sheik,” agreed Conway.
    A smile twitched at Simon Templar’s lips.
    “Known to us,” he said, “as
Angel Face or Tiny Tim—at the option of the orator. The world knows him
as Rayt Marius. He recognised me, and he’s got the number of the car.
He’ll trace us through the garage we hired it from, and in twenty- four hours
he’ll have our names and