Maggs took the girl’s chin in his thick fingers and tilted up her face, leering down at her.
“You might’ve killed me,” he said—“hitting me like that. But I’ll make you apologise later, and I like my apologies sweet.”
“Sit down, Maggs,” snapped Bittle.
Maggs still persisted.
“Give us a kiss to be getting on with, like a good girl.”
“Sit—down—Maggs!”
Bittle was on his feet, and there was death in his hand. Grumbling, Mr. Maggs lurched into a chair and sat staring at Patricia in his ugly way.
Bloem went round to the chair opposite Maggs, but Bittle remained standing at one end of the table. The Saint sat at the other end.
Bittle paused for a moment, and the men grouped round the walls fidgeted into stillness. A macabre atmosphere of fiendish cold-bloodedness began to fill the room. It came from the hate-smouldering eyes of all those silent men, and it clouded malevolently behind the stocky figure of John Bittle. Bittle was posing at the end of the table, waiting for the theatrical effect of the gathering to tense up to a nerve-tearing pitch, and a sensitive man could have felt the silence keying up to the point at which unreasoning terror crowds in like a foul vapour. Seconds throbbed away in that pulsating suspense. . . .
The Saint cleared his throat.