Saint on Guard Read Online Free PDF

have. The point, however, was not suitable for immediate discussion, since the only potential source of first-hand evidence was not a good prospect for interrogation at that time. He had a vertical cut in his forehead where the edge of the door had hit him, and he looked very uninterested indeed.
    Simon made sure of his continued neutrality by using his necktie to bind his ankles together, and then using the man’s shoelaces to tie his wrists behind his back and link them with the Charvet hobble.
    Then he went on quickly into the house.
    He moved through a huge kitchen, a series of pantries, and up a flight of stairs to the main floor. He found himself in a bare but richly carpeted hall, with the front door facing him and a single onyx bowl of light burning overhead, and turned off his torch.
    He didn’t need any extra light to see the crudely drawn skele-ton figure crowned with a symbolic halo which was chalked on one of the doors on his right.
    “What a quaint touch,” said the Saint to himself; but he was not smiling to himself at the same time.
    The door was ajar. He pushed it open with his foot, and took the one necessary step into the room. It was a slightly conventional library with built-in bookshelves and warm wood panels and deep comfortable chairs, but all of it unmistakably tinged with the vision of an interior decorator. It seemed regrettable that this was yet another subject that could not be discussed with the person who would normally have been the most likely source of information; but it was a little obvious that there was at least one linnet who would never pipe or sing any more.
    Aside from the simple probabilities, there were the initials “G L” embroidered on the breast pocket of the dark brocade dressing gown which the man wore over his tuxedo shirt and trousers. He lay on the floor in the middle of the room in an attitude of curious relaxation. But the piece of blind cord which was knotted around his throat so tightly that it had almost sunk into the skin could never have done his voice any good.
    Simon Templar lighted a cigarette very carefully, and stood looking down at the body for a space that must have run into minutes, while he grimly tried to think of himself as a secondhand murderer. And all the time the doorbell was buzzing on one ceaseless monotonous note.
    And then, abruptly, it was silent. After which it gave three or four distinct irregular peremptory rasps which could only have been produced by individual action.
    The Saint came back into movement as if he had never paused, as if all those moments of intense and ugly thought had been nothing but the gap between the stopping of a cinema projector and the starting up again. In an instant he had flipped off they light switch, and he was crossing to the window. He only had to move the drapes a hair’s breadth to peep out on to the doorway porch, and what he saw there enabled him to intellectually discard the effort of doubling back to the side door. He was a great believer in the economy of effort, and he could always tell at a glance when it would be completely wasted.
    He switched the library lights on again as he went out into the hall, and opened the front door with his most disarming bonhomie.
    “Hullo, there, John Henry,” he said. “Come on in and play. Somebody seems to have been trying to frame me for a murder.”
    4 There was no answering geniality in Inspector Fernack’s entrance. He stalked in rather heavily with two plain-clothes men following behind him like a pair of trained dogs, and his tough square-jawed face was as uncompromising as a cliff. His straight stolid eyes drove at the Saint like fists. Then, in a quick glance around, they fell on the childish chalked sketch on the library door, and his mouth set like a ridge of granite.
    “Hold him here,” he said, and went into the room.
    He was gone only a couple of minutes, and when he came back he looked several years older. He spoke to one of his