Free The Saint vs Scotland Yard by Leslie Charteris

was simple. A few drops from a bottle
that I am never without —in her champagne—and the impression was that
she became helplessly drunk. She will recover without our assistance, per haps in
five minutes, perhaps in half an hour—according to her strength.”
Wilfred Garniman’s fleshy lips loosened in the travesty of a smile.
“You underestimated me, Templar.”
    “That,” said the Saint, “remains to be seen.”
    Mr. Garniman shrugged.
    “Need I explain that you have come to the end of your interesting
and adventurous life?”
    Simon twitched an eyebrow, and slid his mouth mockingly sideways.
    “What—not again?” he sighed, and Garniman’s smooth forehead
crinkled.
    “I don’t understand.”
    “But you haven’t seen so many of these situations through as I have,
old horse,” said the Saint. “I’ve lost count of the number of
times this sort of thing has happened to me. I know the tradition demands
it, but I think they might give me a rest sometimes. What’s the programme this
time—do you sew me up in the bath and light the geyser, or am I run through the mangle and buried under the billiard-table? Or can you think of
something really original?”
    Garniman inclined his head ironically. “I trust you
will find my method satisfactory,” he said. He lighted a
cigarette, and rose from the desk again; and as he picked up a length
of rope from the floor and moved across to Patricia, the Saint
warbled on in the same tone of gentle weariness.
    “Mind how you fix those ankles, Wilfred. That gauzy silk stuff you
see on the limbs costs about five pounds a leg, and it ladders if a fly settles
on it. Oh, and while we’re on the subject: don’t let’s have any nonsense
about death or dis honour. The child mightn’t want to die. And besides, that
stuff is played out, anyway… .”
    Garniman made no reply.
    He continued with his task in his ponderous methodical way, making every movement with
immensely phlegmatic de liberation. The
Saint, who had known many criminals, and who was making no great exaggeration when he said that this particular situation had long since lost all its
pristine charm for him, could recall
no one in his experience who had ever been
so dispassionate. Cold-blooded ruthlessness, a granite im passivity, he had met before; but through it all,
deep as it might be, there had always
run a perceptible taut thread of vindictive
purpose. In Wilfred Garniman there showed nothing of this. He went about his
work in the same way that he might
have gone about the setting of a mouse-trap—with elephantine efficiency, and a
complete blank in the ideological compartment
of his brain. And Simon Templar knew with an eerie intuition that this was no pose, as it might have been in others. And then he knew that Wilfred Garniman was
mad.
    Garniman finished, and straightened up. And then, still without
speaking, he picked Patricia up in his arms and carried her out of the
room.
    The Saint braced his muscles.
    His whole body tightened to the effort like a tempered steel spring, and
his arms swelled and corded up until the sleeves were stretched and
strained around them. For an instant he was absolutely motionless,
except for the tremors of titanic tension that shuddered down his frame
like wind-ripples over a quiet pool… . And then he relaxed and
went limp, loos ing his breath in a great gasp. And the Saintly smile
crawled a trifle crookedly over his face.
    “Which
makes things difficult,” he whispered—to the four unanswering walls.
    For the cords about his wrists still held him firmly.
    Free to move as he chose, he could have broken those ropes with his
hands; but bound as he was, he could apply scarcely a quarter of his
strength. And the ropes were good ones—new, half-inch, three-ply
Manila. He had made the test; and he relaxed. To have struggled longer
would have wasted valuable strength to no purpose. And he had come out
without Belle, the little knife that ordinarily went with him