The Saint Closes the Case Read Online Free PDF Page B

the
Saint’s very dear acquaintance, who had been rung up in the small hours of that
morning to be summoned to a conference; and he put the sheet before Simon
Templar at once.
    “Were you loose in England last
night?” he demanded ac cusingly.
    “There are rumours,” murmured the
Saint, “to that effect.”
    Mr. Conway sat down in his usual chair, and
produced ciga rettes and matches.
    “Who was your pal—the cross-country
expert?” he inquired calmly.
    The Saint was looking out of the window.
    “No one I know,” he answered.
“He kind of horned in on the party. You’ll have the whole yarn in a
moment. I phoned Norman directly after I phoned you; he came staggering under the castle walls a few
seconds ago.”
    A peal on the bell announced that Norman Kent
had reached the door of the apartment, and the Saint went out to admit him.
Mr. Kent carried a copy of the Evening Record, and his very first
words showed how perfectly he understood the Saint’s eccentricities.
    “If I thought you’d been anywhere near
Esher last night—— ”
    “You’ve been sent for to hear a speech
on the subject,” said the Saint.
    He waved Norman to a chair, and seated himself
on the edge of a littered table which Patricia Holm was trying to reduce to
some sort of order. She came up and stood beside him, and he slid an
arm round her waist.
    “It was like this,” he said.
    And he plunged into the story without
preface, for the time when prefaces had been necessary now lay far
behind those four. Nor did he need to explain the motives for any of
his actions. In clipped, slangy, quiet, and yet vivid sentences he told what
he had seen in the greenhouse of the house near Esher; and the two men
listened without interruption.
    Then he stopped, and there was a short
silence.
    “It’s certainly a marvellous
invention,” said Roger Conway at length, smoothing his fair hair.
“But what is it?”
    “The devil.”
    Conway blinked.
    “Explain yourself.”
    “It’s what the Clarion called
it,” said the Saint; “something we haven’t got simple
words to describe. A scientist will pre tend to understand
it, but whether he will or not is another matter. The best he
can tell us is that it’s a trick of so modifying the structure of a gas that
it can be made to carry a tre mendous charge of electricity, like a
thunder-cloud does— only it isn’t a bit like a thunder-cloud. It’s also
something to do with a ray—only it isn’t a ray. If you like, it’s
something entirely impossible—only it happens to exist. And the
point is that this
gas just provides the flimsiest sort of sponge in the atmosphere, and Vargan knows how to saturate the pores in the
sponge with millions of volts and amperes of compressed lightning.”
    “And when the goat got into the cloud—— ”
    “It was exactly the same as if it had butted
into a web of live wires. For the fraction of a second that goat burnt
like a scrap of coal in a blast furnace. And then it was ashes. Sweet idea,
isn’t it?”
    Norman Kent, the dark and saturnine, took his
eyes off the ceiling. He was a most unsmiling man, and he spoke little and always to the point.
    “Lester Hume Smith has seen it,”
said Norman Kent. “And Sir Roland Hale. Who else?”
    “Angel Face,” said the Saint;
“Angel Face saw it. The man our friend Mr. Teal assumes to have been one
of us—-not hav ing seen him wagging a Colt at me. An adorable pet, built
on the lines of something between Primo Carena and an over grown
gorilla, but not too agile with the trigger finger—other wise I
mightn’t be here. But which country he’s working for is yet to be discovered.”
    Roger Conway frowned.
    “You think—— ”
    “Frequently,” said the Saint.
“But that was one think I didn’t need a cold towel round my head for.
Vargan may have thought he got a raw deal when they missed him off the
front page, but he got enough publicity to make any wideawake foreign
agent curious.”
    He tapped a cigarette