Free The Saint Closes the Case by Leslie Charteris Page B

it’s a
dud address, they’ll get on to the agents I bought it from. And I sent it back
to them for decarbonising only a month ago, and gave Brook Street as my
address. That was careless! … What’s to-day?”
    “It’s now Sunday morning.”
    Simon sat up.
    “Saved again! They won’t be able to find
out much before Monday. That’s all the time we want. I must get hold of
Pat… .”
    He sank back again in the seat and fell
silent, and remained very quiet for the rest of the journey; but
there was little quietude in his mind. He was planning vaguely, scheming wildly,
daydreaming, letting his imagination play as it would with this new state of
affairs, hoping that something would emerge from the chaos; but all he
found was a certain rueful resignation.
    “At least, one could do worse for a last
adventure,” he said.
    It was four o’clock when they drew up outside
the bunga low, and found a tireless Orace opening the front door
before the car had stopped. The Saint saw Vargan carried into the house, and
found beer and sandwiches set out in the dining- room against their arrival.
    “So far, so good,” said Roger
Conway, when the three of them reassembled over the refreshment.
    “So far,” agreed the Saint—so
significantly that the other two both looked sharply at him.
    “Do you mean more than that?” asked
Norman Kent.
    Simon smiled.
    “I mean—what I mean. I’ve a feeling that
something’s hanging over us. It’s not the police—as far as they’re concerned I should say the odds are two to one on us. I don’t know if it’s Angel
Face. I just don’t know at all. It’s a premonition, my cherubs.”
    “Forget it,” advised Roger Conway sanely.
    But the Saint looked out of the window at the
bleak pallor that had bleached the eastern rim of the sky, and wondered.
     
     
    5. How Simon Templar went back to Brook Street,
    and what happened
there
     
     
    Breakfast was served in the bungalow at an
hour when all ordinary people, even on a Sunday, are finishing their
midday meal. Conway and Kent sat down to it in their shirtsleeves and a stubby
tousledness; but the Saint had been for a swim in the river, shaved with Orace’s razor,
and dressed himself with as much care as if
he had been preparing to pose for a maga zine cover, and the proverbial morning daisy would have looked
positively haggard beside him.
    “No man,” complained Roger, after
inspecting the appari tion, “has a right to look like this at
this hour of the morn ing”
    The Saint helped himself to three fried eggs
and bacon to match, and sat down in his place.
    “If,” he said, “you could open
your bleary eyes enough to see the face of that clock, you’d see that
it’s after half-past two of the afternoon.”
    “It’s the principle of the thing,”
protested Conway feebly. “We didn’t get to bed till nearly six.
And three eggs …”
    The Saint grinned.
    “Appetite of the healthy open-air man. I
was splashing mer rily down the Thames while you two were snoring.”
    Norman opened a newspaper.
    “Roger was snoring,” he corrected.
“His mouth stays open twenty-four hours a day. And now he’s talking
with his mouth full,”
he added offensively.
    “I wasn’t eating,” objected Conway.
    “You were,” said the Saint
crushingly. “I heard you.”
    He reached for the coffee-pot and filled a
cup for himself with
a flourish.
    The premonition of danger that he had had
earlier that morning was forgotten—so completely that it was as if a
part of his memory had been blacked out. Indeed, he had rarely felt fitter
and better primed to take on any amount of odds.
    Outside, over the garden and the lawn running
down to the river, the sun was shining; and through the open French windows of
the morning-room came a breath of sweet, cool air fragrant with the
scent of flowers.
    The fevered violence of the night before had
vanished as utterly as its darkness, and with the vanishing of
darkness and violence vanished also all moods of dark