The Saint and Mr Teal (Once More the Saint)

"The police?" Osman's sinister chuckle whispered through the room. "They would be delighted to see him. You little fool! Didn't you know where his money came from? Didn't you know that all his life he's done nothing but trade in women and drugs-that I hold enough evidence to send him to prison for twenty years? You, my dear Laura, are the price of his liberty: you and-er-his retirement from business. A price that he was glad to offer, and that I was very happy to accept."

She could not think properly, could not comprehend the whole hideous significance of what he was saying. She could not believe it; and yet, from the manner in which he said it, either it must be true or he must be mad And neither alternative opened out a gleam of hope. But she remembered the strangeness that she had seen in Galbraith Stride's eyes when he insisted that she must deliver his message herself, and she was frozen with dread before that unspeakable explanation.

Beside her, Toby Halidom was struggling again in a blind fury of helplessness; and Osman looked at him again.

"I shall commence your treatment very soon, my friend," he said; and then he spoke again to Ali. "Take him away and bind him carefully-I shall ring when I wish to see him again."

Almost before he could speak, Halidom was hustled out of the room, with the girl's wild pitiful cry ringing in his ears. Rough brown hands forced him down a dark alleyway, tightened ropes round his wrists and ankles, and hurled him into an evil-smelling unlighted cabin. He heard the door locked on the outside, and was alone with a despair such as he had never dreamed of in his life, a despair haunted with visions that verged on sheer shrieking madness. There was only one hope left for him-a hope so small that it was almost worse than no hope at all. They had not troubled to search him, and there was a penknife in his pocket. If he could reach that, saw at the ropes on his wrists . . . then there would still be the locked door, and a hostile crew to break through unarmed. . . . But he was trying to get at that knife, with strange futile tears burning under his eyelids.

Laura Berwick thought that her reason would break. The last of the swarthy seamen had released her and gone out with Toby-there was no one in the saloon but herself and Abdul Osman, and that ghastly relic of a man cowering in a corner and watching Osman's movements with blubbering hate-filled eyes. Osman did not even seem to be aware of his existence-perhaps he had grown so used to having that thing of his own creation with him that he took no more notice of him than if he had been a dog; or perhaps in the foul depths of his mind there was some spawning idea of heaping humiliation on humiliation both for the girl and his beaten slave. He edged towards her unsteadily, his glittering eyes leering with unutterable things, and she retreated from him as she would have done before a snake, until her back was to the wall and she could retreat no further.

"Come to me, beautiful white rose!"

His arms reached out for her. She tried to slip side­ways away from their clawing grasp, keeping her eyes out of sheer terror from looking full into that puffed lecherous face; but he caught her arm and held it with a strength greater than her own. She was drawn irresist­ibly into his hot embrace-she felt the horrible softness of his paunch against her firm young flesh, and shud­dered until mists swam before her eyes. She could not possibly endure it much longer. Her senses reeled, and she seemed to have lost all her strength. . . .

And then, as his greedy lips found her face, her brain went out at last into merciful blackness; and she heard the shot that struck him down only as a dim part of her dream.

CHAPTER VIII

SIMON TEMPLAR slammed the door of the glory hole forward, twisted the key, and snapped it off short in the lock. He heard a babel of shouts and jabbering in heathen tongues break out behind it, and grinned gently. So far as he had been able to discover in a lightning reconnaissance, practically the whole of Osman's crew was congregated up there in the fo'c'sle: he had already battened down the hatch over their heads, and it would take them nothing less than an hour to break out.

It was the moment for a speed of action that could be outdistanced by nothing less nimble than a Morality Squad discovering new vices to suppress-that speed of decision and performance in which the Saint had no equal. With the stillness of the ship still freshly bruised by the sharp thud of that single shot, it was a time when committee meetings and general philosophy had to take second place.