The Saint Closes the Case Read Online Free PDF

of
those men before—or a picture of him—— ”
    “Which one?” asked the Saint, a
trifle grimly, “The young secretary bird—or Professor K. B. Vargan—or
Sir Roland Hale—or Mr. Lester Hume Smith, His Majesty’s Secretary of State for
War?”
    He marked her puzzlement, turning to meet her
eyes. Now Patricia Holm was very lovely; and the Saint loved her.
At that moment, for some reason, her loveliness took him by the throat.
    He slipped an arm around her shoulders, and
drew her close to him.
    “Saint,” she said, “you’re on
the trail of more trouble. I know the signs.”
    “It’s even more than that, dear,”
said the Saint softly. “To night I’ve seen a vision. And if it’s a true
vision it means that I’m going to fight something more horrible
than I’ve ever fought before; and the name of it may very well be the
same as the name of the devil himself.”
     
     
    2. How Simon Templar read newspapers, and
    understood what was
not written
    Here may conveniently be quoted an item from
one of the stop press columns of the following morning.
    “The Clarion isofficially
informed that at a late hour last night Mr. Lester Hume Smith, the
Secretary for War, and Sir Roland Hale, Director of Chemical Research to
the War Of fice, attended a demonstration of Professor K. B.
Vargan’s ‘electroncloud.’ The demonstration was held secretly, and
no details will be disclosed. It is stated further that a special meeting of
the Cabinet will be held this morning to receive Mr. Hume Smith’s
report, and, if necessary, to consider the Government’s attitude
towards the invention.”
    Simon Templar took the paragraph in his
stride, for it was no more than a confirmation and amplification of what he
al ready knew.
    This was at ten o’clock—an extraordinary hour
for the Saint to be up and dressed. But on this occasion he had risen early to
break the habits of a lifetime and read every page of every newspaper that
his man could buy.
    He had suddenly become inordinately
interested in politics; the news that an English tourist hailing from
Manchester and rejoicing in the name of Pinheedle had been arrested for
punching the nose of a policeman in Wiesbaden fascinated him; only
such articles as “Why Grandmothers Leave Home” (by Ethelred Sapling,
the brilliant author of Lovers in Leeds) continued to leave him
entirely icebound.
    But he had to wait for an early edition of the Evening Rec ord for the account of
his own exploit.
    “… From footprints found this morning
in the soft soil, it appears that three persons were involved—one of them a woman. One of the men, who must have been of exceptional stature,
appears to have tripped and fallen in his flight, and then to have made off
in a different direction from that taken by his companions,
who finally escaped by car.
    “Mr. Hume Smith’s chauffeur, who
attempted to arrest these two, and was knocked down by the man,
recovered toolate to reach the road in time to take the number of
their car. From the sound of the exhaust, he judges it to have been some
kind of high-powered sports model. He had not heard its approach or the
entrance of the three intruders, and he admits that when he first saw the
man and the woman he had just woken from a doze.
    “The second man, who has been tracked
across two fields at the back of Professor Vargan’s house, is believed to
have been picked up by his confederates further along the road. The fact of
his presence was not discovered until the arrival of the detectives from
London this morning.
    “Chief Inspector Teal, who is in charge
of the case, told an Evening Record representative that
the police have as yet formed no theory as to what was the alarm
which caused the hurried and clumsy departure of the spies. It is believed, how ever, that
they were in a position to observe the conclusion of the experiment.
…”
    There was much more, stunted across the two
middle col umns of the front page.
    This blew in with Roger Conway, of