"Then why the hell couldn't you say so before?" he squawked. "Where is he?"
"You were having such a lovely time sending me to the chair, it seemed a shame to break it up," said the Saint. "But he ought to be where I left him, in the basement. Would you like to say hullo?"
He turned and led the way back as he had come in; and Fer-nack followed him without a word.
They went down the stairs, past the series of pantries, and through the huge kitchen to the place where Simon had left his captive. And that was when the incipient anticlimax suddenly ceased to be incipient at all, and in fact turned a complete somersault and made the Saint's stomach turn one with it.
For the cadaverous gent with the cracked forehead wasn't there any more.
There was just nothing to argue about in it. He wasn't there. The entire area of stone flooring at the foot of the back steps was burdened with nothing more substantial than a probable film of New York grime.
Simon Templar stood and gazed down at it with the utmost restraint for several seconds; until Fernack said impatiently: "Well, where is this man?"
"This is going to make you very unhappy, Henry," said the Saint, raising his eyes, "but he doesn't seem to be here any more. I'm afraid he must have had a boy friend who came back for him. The way I had him tied, he couldn't possibly have gotten loose by himself. But he's certainly gone away."
The gastric ulcers of innumerable haggard authors bear witness to the awful responsibility of attempting an adequate description of such scenes as this. The present chronicler, however, having much more respect and affection for his mucosa, intends to court no such disaster. He proposes to leave most of the detailed etching to the imagination of the reader, for whose lambent perspicacity he has the very highest regard.
He will nevertheless go so far as to give a slight lead by mentioning that the calorific swelling of a moderately understandable indignation caused Inspector Fernack's face to give a startling imitation of an overripe plum which is receiving an unexpected hypodermic from a jet of high-pressure steam.