Read Saint on Guard for Free Online

almost wavered. You could see the doubt beginning to curdle and grow heavier inside him, like a complicated meal in a fragile stomach.
    “Besides which,” Simon mentioned diffidently, “wouldn’t it be just a little bit silly of me to leave that trademark around at all in these days, so that you wouldn’t even waste a minute before you had the dragnet out for me?”
    “I’ve heard you say something like that before, loo,” Fernack retorted. “But it isn’t my job to throw out evidence just because it looks silly. You give me your story, and we’ll start from there.”
    “Figure it for yourself,” Simon persisted inexorably. “Somebody wanted to keep me from talking to Linnet in the worst way. They wanted it badly enough to make quite sure he wouldn’t sing. And they thought they could tie it off with the corny slickness of putting me out of action at the same fell swoop. So they must be just a little bit worried about me. And it also suggests that our iridium merchants may have something quite ingenious to put over while I’m presumably languishing in the jug. Now would you like to play their game for them, or shall we try to make sense?”
    Fernack studied his face with intractable doggedness. He might have been about to make any comeback, or none at all. It was one of those teetering moments that might have toppled on either side.
    And it inevitably had to be that moment when the plain-clothes man called Al appeared at the top of the stairs with another individual who was a stranger to all of them, to whom he was probably trying to give sympathetic assistance, but who looked more as if he were being frogmarched into a back room for a friendly rubber of third degree. This specimen wore the black coat and striped trousers of a conventional butler, and his fleshy face was as distressed as the face of any conventional butler would have been at the humiliation of his production.
    “I found ‘im,” Al announced cheerfully, helping his patient down the stairs with much the same tenderness as he would have helped any old trunk. “The guy slugged ‘im when he opened the door, an’ tied ‘im up an’ locked him in a closet.”
    There was a different and hardening detachment about the way that Fernack waited until the man had been shepherded down to his level, and then said: “Would you know the man who slugged, you if you saw him again?”
    “I don’t really know, sir. He had his coat collar turned up, anc there wasn’t much light on the porch, but he seemed to be fairlyJ tall and slim. He had an air-raid warden’s armlet on, and I was looking at that mostly, because he was saying we had some lights showing that shouldn’t have been; and then he pointed to sortie-thing behind me, and I turned to look, and that’s when he must have hit me, because I don’t remember anything more.”
    “Could it have been this man here?” Fernack asked flatly, stabbing his thumb back at the Saint.
    The butler’s puffy eyes hesitated over actuality and recollection.
    “It could have been, sir. I wouldn’t like to be too definite, but this man was built a bit similar.”
    You could feel the weakness ebbing out of Fernack like the fluidity of setting concrete. He turned on his heels to face the Saint again, and his jaw was tightening up again like a trap.
    “Well,” he said, “you were going to tell your story. Go on with it.”
    Simon found a rim of floor that was clear of the late Mr Linnet’s beautiful carpet, and studiously trod the stub of his cigarette out on it. In the same leisured tempo, he lighted another to replace it. He had a sense of incipient anticlimax, just the same.
    It was, admittedly, a little bit on the hammy side to have tried to talk himself through his contract without showing any trumps; but as a challenge to professional vanity the temptation had been irresistible. He only resigned himself to quit because he realised that time was marching on, and fun might be fun but it had to take second