The Saint vs Scotland Yard by Leslie Charteris Page A

performed the trans portation, and closed
the door on them.
    Then he whipped from his pocket a thin nickelled case which he
had brought from a pocket in the car. He snapped the neck of a small
glass phial and drew up the colourless fluid it contained into the
barrel of a hypodermic syringe. His latest prot é g é was
still sleeping the sleep of sheer exhaustion, but Simon had no
guarantee of how long that sleep would last. He proceeded to provide
that guarantee himself, stabbing the needle into a limp arm and pressing home
the plunger until the complete dose had been administered.
    Then he closed and locked the door behind him and went quickly down the stairs.
    Below, the
reception clerk stopped him. “What name
shall I register, sir?”
    “Teal,” said the Saint, with a wry flick of humour. “Mr. C. E.
Teal. He’ll sign your book later.”
    “Yes, sir… . Er—has Mr. Teal no luggage, sir?” “Nope.”
A new ten-pound note drifted down to the desk. “On
account,” said the Saint. “And see that the doctor’s wait ing here
for me at eleven, or I’ll take the roof off your hotel and crown you with
it.”
    He pulled his cap sideways and went back to his car. As he turned into
Upper Berkeley Mews for the second time, he saw that his first
homecoming had only just been soon enough. But that did not surprise
him, for he had figured out his chances on that schedule
almost to a second. A warning blink of white from an upper window
caught his expectant eye at once, and he locked the wheel hard over and
pulled up broadside on across the mews. In a flash he was out of his
seat unlocking a pair
of garage doors right at the street end of the mews, and in another second or two the car was hissing back
into that garage with the cut-out firmly closed.
    The Saint, without advertising the fact, had recently become the owner
of one complete side of Upper Berkeley Mews, and he was in process of
making some interesting structural alterations to that block of real estate of
which the London County Council had not been informed and about which
the District Surveyor had not even been consulted. The great work was not yet by
any means completed, but even now it was capable of serving part of
its purposes.
    Simon went up a ladder into the bare empty room above. In one corner
a hole had been roughly knocked through the wall; he went through it
into another similar room, and on the far side of this was
another hole in a wall; thus he passed in quick succession through numbers 1,
3, and 5, until the last plunge through the last hole and a curtain beyond it
brought him into No. 7 and his own bedroom.
    His tie was already off and his shirt unbuttoned by that time, and
he tore off the rest of his clothes in little more than the time
it took him to stroll through to the bathroom. And the bath was already
full—filled long ago by Patricia.
    “Thinks of everything!’ sighed the Saint, with a wide grin of pure
delight.
    He slid into the bath like an otter, head and all, and came out of it
almost in the same movement with a mighty splash, tweaking the plug out
of the waste pipe as he did so. In another couple of seconds he was
hauling himself into an enormously woolly blue bath-robe and grabbing
a towel … and he went paddling down the stairs with his feet kicking about in a pair of gorgeously dilapidated moccasins, humming the hum of
a man with a copper-plated liver and not one solitary little baby
sin upon his conscience.
    And thus he rolled into the sitting-room.
    “Sorry to have kept you waiting, old dear,” he murmured; and Chief
Inspector Claud Eustace Teal rose from an arm chair and surveyed him heavily.
    “Good morning,” said Mr. Teal.
    “Beautiful, isn’t it?” agreed the Saint affably.
    Patricia was smoking a cigarette in another chair. She should,
according to the book of etiquette, have been beguiling the visitor’s wait
with some vivacious topical chatter; but the Saint, who was sensitive to
atmosphere, had perceived