Alias the Saint Read Free

there, in front of you, is a man gagged and bound. Stand away, you two!”
    The Professor’s voice suddenly cracked out the order with a startling intenseness, and the two men who had stood on either side of the prisoner hurried into the opposite corner of the room and left him standing alone.
    Betty Tregarth stared stupidly at the gleaming weapon in her hand, and looked from it to the bound man who stood stiffly erect by the door.
    Then something seemed to snap in her brain, and everything went black; but through the whirling, humming kaleidoscope of spangled darkness that swallowed up consciousness, she heard a thousand miles away, the report of an automatic, that echoed and reechoed deliriously through an eternity of empty blackness.
    She woke up in bed, with a splitting headache.
    Opening her eyes sleepily, she grasped the general geography of the room in a dazed sort of way. The blinds were drawn, and the only light came from a softly shaded reading lamp by the side of the bed. There was a dressing table in front of the window, and a washstand in one corner. Everything was unfamiliar. She couldn’t make it out at first— it didn’t seem like her room.
    Then she turned her head and saw the man who sat regarding her steadily, with a book on his knee, in the armchair beside the bed, and the memory of what had happened, before the drug she had inhaled overcome her, returned in its full horror. She sat up, throwing off the bedclothes, and found that she was still wearing the dress in which she had left the flat. Only her shoes had been removed.
    The effort to rise made the room swim dizzily before her eyes, and her head felt as if it would burst.
    “If you he still for a moment,” said Raxel suavely, “the headache will pass in about ten minutes.”
    She put her hand to her forehead and tried to steady herself. All her strength seemed to have left her, and even the terror she felt could not give her back the necessary energy to leap out of bed and dash out of the door and out of the house.
    “You’ll be sorry about this,” she said faintly. “You can’t keep me here for ever, and when I get out and tell the police—”
    “You will not tell the police,” said Raxel soothingly, as one might point out the fallacies in the argument of a child. “In fact, I should think you will do your best to avoid them. You may not remember doing it, but you have killed a man. What is more, he was a detective.
    She looked at him aghast.
    “That man who was tied up?”
    “He was a detective,” said Raxel. “This is his house. I may as well put my cards on the table, I am a criminal, and I had need of your services. The detective you killed was on my trail, and it was necessary to remove him. I killed two birds with one stone. We captured him in the North, and brought him back here to his own house in London, a prisoner. His housekeeper’s absence had already been assured by a fake telegram summoning her to the deathbed of her mother in Manchester. I then brought you here, drugged you with bhang, and gave you an automatic pistol.”
    She was aghast at a sudden recollection.
    “I heard a shot—just as everything went blank. …”
    “You fired it,” said Raxel smoothly, “but you are unlikely to remember that part.”
    Betty Tregarth caught her breath.
    “It’s impossible!” she cried hysterically. “I couldn’t—”
    Raxel sighed.
    “You will disappoint me if you fail to behave rationally,” he said, “The ordinary girl might be pardoned for such an outburst; but you, with your scientific training, should not need me, a layman, to explain to you the curious effects that bhang has upon those who take it. A blind madness seizes them. They kill, not knowing whom they kill, or why. That is what you did. Your first shot was successful. Naturally, you fired first at the unfortunate Inspector Henley, because I had so arranged the scene that he was the first man you saw at the instant when the drug took effect. I might