The Brighter Buccaneer by Leslie Charteris

Author:Leslie Charteris
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781477842706
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer
Published: 2014-07-28T14:00:00+00:00

Two to be taken with water after each meal, as required.

He examined the tablets, and smiled gently to himself.

“Now could I see the bathroom?”

A very mystified Mr Teal rang for the butler, and they were shown upstairs. The bathroom was one of those magnificent halls of coloured marble and chromium plate which the most modern people find necessary for the preservation of their personal cleanliness, but Simon was interested only in the cupboard over the washbasin. It contained an imposing array of bottles, which Simon surveyed with some awe. Sir Joseph was apparently something of a hypochondriac.

Simon read the labels one by one, and nodded.

“Is he short-sighted?”

“He wears glasses,” said the detective.

“Splendid,” murmured Simon, and went back to the hotel to supervise the refuelling of his car without relieving Teal’s curiosity.

At six o’clock that evening a very frightened man, who had undergone one of the slickest feats of abduction with violence that he could ever have imagined, and who had been very efficiently gagged, bound, blindfolded, and carried across country by the masked bandit who was responsible, sat with his back to a tree where he had been roughly propped up in a deep glade of the New Forest and watched the movements of his captor with goggling eyes. The Saint had kindled a small, crisp fire of dry twigs, and he was feeding more wood to it and blowing into it with the dexterity of long experience, nursing it up into a solid cone of fierce red heat. Down there in the hollow where they were, the branches of the encircling trees filtered away the lingering twilight until it was almost as dark as midnight, but the glow of the fire showed up the Saint’s masked face in macabre shadings of red and black as he worked over it, like the face of a pantomime devil illuminated on a darkened stage. The Saint’s voice, however, was far from devilish—it was almost affectionate.

“You don’t seem to realize, brother,” he said, “that stealing secret treaties is quite a serious business, even when they’re the daft sort of treaties that We Politicians amuse ourselves with. And it’s very wrong of you to think that you can shift the blame for your crimes on to that unfortunate ass whom you dislike so much. So you’re going to tell me just where you put that treaty, and then there’ll be no more nonsense about it.”

The prisoner’s eyes looked as if they might pop out of his head at any moment, and strangled grunts came through the gag as he struggled with the ropes that bound his arms to his sides, but the Saint was unmoved. The fire had been heaped up to his complete satisfaction.

“Our friend Mr Teal,” continued the Saint, in the same oracular vein, as he began to unlace the captive’s shoes, “has been heard to complain about there being no Third Degree in this country. Now that’s obviously ridiculous, because you can see for yourself that there is a Third Degree, and I’m it.

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