Roger said nothing. He knew exactly why his life wasn’t quiet. It was because he happened to be a friend of Simon Templar’s, and Simon Templar was a man who couldn’t help spreading melodrama all around him like an infectious disease.
3
But the Saint did not feel at all guilty about the adventure. He could not have seen, if the suggestion had been made to him, how he could possibly be blamed for an incidental melodrama therein involved. The girl was Roger’s, the story so far had been Roger’s, and the romantic rewards, if any, would be Roger’s—therefore the whole shout was Roger’s.
Anyhow, the Saint was quite happy.
He leaned back with half-closed eyes, enjoying his cigarette. Simon Templar had the gift of being able to relax instantaneously, and thereby being able to benefit to the full from the intervals of relative quiet between moments of crisis; and then, when the next crisis cropped up, he could snap back to a quivering steel-spring alertness without the loss of a second. That, he said, was the way he stayed young—by refusing to take anything quite as seriously as he should have done.
As a matter of fact, he was elaborating a really brilliant idea for a new improper story about a giraffe when Roger Conway rapped out, “There’s a car in front…”
“No!” demurred the Saint, dreamily. “Are we going to hit it?”
But his eyes were wide open, and he saw the car at once—on the crest of the next switchback.
“What kind of car?”
“A Morris—and Betty’s is a Morris. A man was driving, with a girl beside him, but he was wearing an ordinary soft hat—”
“Dear old ass,” said the Saint. “Naturally he’d have an ordinary coat on under his tunic, and a soft hat in his pocket, ready to transform himself on the first quiet piece of road. Policemen driving cars in uniform are so damn conspicuous. He might easily be our man. Step on it, son!”
“Damn it!” said Roger. “The accelerator won’t go down any further—unless I push it through the floor.”
“Then push it through the floor,” instructed the Saint, hopefully, and lighted another cigarette.
The car in front was out of sight then, but Roger was slamming the Desurio at the immediate slope with all the force of its eighty developed horses. Half a minute later they topped the rise and went bucketing down the subsequent slant in a roar and whistle of wind. They hurtled through the dip and slashed into the opposite grade with a deep-throated snarl…
“In England,” remarked the Saint mildly, as a proposition of philosophical interest, “there is a speed limit of twenty miles an hour.”
“Is that so?”
“Yes, that is so.”
“Then I hope it keeps fine for them.”
“Kind of you,” drawled the Saint. “Kind of you, Mr Conway!”
The Desurio ate up the hill, whipped round the bend at the top. There was a breath-taking second in which, by a miracle that no one will ever be able to explain, they escaped being sandwiched to death between two motor coaches moving in opposite directions, then they skimmed round the next corner into the temporary safety of a straight stretch of road, on which, for the moment, there was only the Desurio and the Morris in front—a quarter of a mile in front.
The Desurio devoured the intervening distance like a hungry beast.
“I can see the number!” came Roger’s voice like the crack of a whip. “It’s Betty’s car—”
“OK, Big Boy!”
But it never occurred to the Saint to abandon his half-smoked cigarette.
Another corner, taken at death-defying pace, and then another straight stretch, with the Morris only thirty yards in the lead.
The klaxon blared, under Roger’s hand, and the man in front signalled them to pass.
“Slacken up as you come level,” ordered the Saint. “I’ll board the galleon. Ready?”
“Yes.”
“Then we’ll go!”
The Saint had the door on his side of the car open in a flash. He slipped out on to the running-board and rode there, closing the door carefully behind him as the nose of the Desurio slid past the rear wing of the Morris. And he was serenely finishing off his cigarette.
On these occasions, the Saint’s sang-froid would have made an icebox look like an overheated gas oven.
Then the driver of the Morris saw him in the mirror, and crowded on speed. The Saint saw the man’s hand leave the wheel and dive for his pocket.
“Drop behind as soon as I’m aboard,” rapped the Saint. “Now!”
The Desurio came abreast, slackened, hung there.
For a second the two cars raced side by side, with a bare foot of space between them, at fifty miles an hour, and the Saint stepped across to the running-board of the Morris as one might step across a garden path.
The Desurio fell astern instantly, with a scream of overworked brakes. It was scarcely too soon, for the Morris swerved drunkenly across the road as the Saint grabbed the steering wheel with one hand and struck twice with the other…
The driver sagged sideways, and the gun slipped through his fingers and thumped to the floor.
Simon straightened the car with a steady hand. They were losing speed rapidly, for the driver’s foot had come off the accelerator when he collapsed under the Saint’s two crashing blows to the jaw—otherwise, they would never have been able to take the next corner.
Round the corner, twenty yards away, a lane opened off the main road. The Saint signalled the turn, and then, reaching over, used the handbrake and spun the wheel. They ran a little way down the lane, and stopped, and Roger brought the Desurio to rest behind them.
Through all that violent and hair-raising action, the girl had never stirred. Her eyes were closed as if in sleep. The Saint looked at her thoughtfully, and thoughtfully felt in the pockets of the unconscious driver.
Roger was shaking her and called her name helplessly. He looked up at the Saint.
“They’ve doped her—”
“Yes,” said the Saint, thoughtfully examining a little glass hypodermic syringe that was still half-filled with a pale, straw-coloured liquid, “they’ve certainly doped her.”
In the same thoughtful way, he lifted the driver’s right arm, turned back the sleeve, drove the needle into the exposed flesh, and pressed home the plunger. The empty syringe went into a convenient ditch.
“I think, Roger,” said the Saint, “we will now move with some speed. Get your bag out of the car and unload the police effects. I want to see you in those glad rags.”
“But where are we going?”
“I’ll think while you’re changing. The one safe bet is that we’ve got to go at once. The housekeeper bird will be spreading the alarm already, and we’ve got to get away before the roads are stopped. Jump to it, my beautiful cherub!”
The Saint sometimes said that Roger was too good-looking to be really intelligent, but there were times when Roger could get off the mark with commendable promptness, and this was one of them.
While Conway was rustling into his uniform, the Saint picked the driver out of the Morris, carried him over, and dumped him into the back of the Desurio.
“We’ll do some third degree on him later,” said the Saint. “If he recovers,” he added carelessly.
“Which way can we go?” asked Conway. “It wouldn’t be safe to go back through Newton, and we can’t head out into the blue towards Land’s End—”
“Why not?” drawled the Saint, who was apt to become difficult on the slightest provocation. “Land’s End sounds a good romantic place to establish a piratical base, and we must have one somewhere. Besides, it has the great advantage that nobody’s ever used it before. The only alternative is to make for Tavistock and Okehampton, and either take the north coast road through Barnstaple and Minehead or chance going through Exeter.”
“I thought you wanted to be seen.”
“I do—but some place where they can’t stop us. They can see us go through any village, but they can hold us up in Exeter—it’
s a slow place to get through at the best of times.”
“You may be right. There’s nowhere for us to go if we do head east. Unless we make back for Brook Street.”
“Teal knows about Brook Street,” said the Saint. “He’s liable to drop in there any time. Your maiden aunt at Stratford upon Avon—”
“You don’t know her,” snorted Roger, testing the fit of his helmet.
“I can imagine it,” said the Saint. “No—we’ll spare the feelings of Auntie. I can understand her getting rather excited when Whiskers tools up with his gang to recapture the hostage.”
Roger picked up his discarded clothes and took them over to the Morris, and the Saint walked beside him. A barren waste of moorland stretched around them, and a hump of ground capped with gorse screened them from the main road.
“Then where can we go? Remember that anything that Whiskers gets to know through the papers will be known to the real police first. We’ve overlooked that.”
“Yes, we’ve overlooked that,” said the Saint thoughtfully, and he paused, with one foot propped up on the running-board of the Morris and his hands deep in his trouser pockets and his eyes fixed on the girl in a blank and distracted way. “We’ve overlooked that,” he said.
“Well?”
Roger asked the question as if he had no hope of receiving a useful answer, yet it seemed quite natural to ask it. People naturally asked such impossible questions of the Saint.
Half an hour ago (Roger knew it was half an hour because the Saint had smoked two cigarettes, and the Saint consumed four cigarettes an hour with the regularity of clockwork) they had calmly driven up to a house in Newton Abbot in the expectation of dinner, a short convivial evening, a bath, and a well-earned night’s rest before proceeding with the problem in hand.
Now—it seemed only five minutes later—they had risked their neck a dozen times in a hectic motor chase, stopped the fugitive car, laid out the driver, doped him with his own medicine, and found themselves saddled with two bodies and the necessity of putting their plans forward by twenty-four hours.
And Simon Templar was quite unperturbed, and apparently unaware that there was, or had been, any excitement whatever.
“On the other hand,” said the Saint thoughtfully, still looking at the girl, “we might revise our strategy slightly. There’s one place in the whole of England where the police will never think of looking for anybody.”
“Where’s that?”
“That,” said the Saint, “is Uncle Sebastian’s house.”
Roger was beyond being startled by anything the Saint suggested. Besides, he was swift on the uptake.
“You mean we should go there now?”
“No less.”
“But the housekeeper—”
“The housekeeper, with her heart full of the fear of winged policemen, and her boots full of feet, will have shut up the house and fled to the bosom of her family and Torquay—or wherever her family keeps its official bosom. We navigate first to a pub I wot of in St. Marychurch, to demand liquor and provisions—”
“Not in these trousers,” said Roger, indicating his costume.
“In those trousers,” said the Saint, “but not in that coat and hat. You’d better stick to as much of the outfit as you can, to save time, because you’ll want it later in the evening. Speed, my angel, is the order of the night. The great brain is working…”
Roger, feeling somewhat dazed, but still on the spot, was starting to peel off his tunic. The Saint helped him on with his gent’s jacket.
“I’ll think out the further details on the way,” he said. “I’ve got another colossal idea which won’t work unless we get the dope bird to a quiet place before he comes to. I’ll take the Desurio and the dope bird, and you take the Morris and the moll—and let’s burn the road!”
He spoke the last words from his way back to the Desurio, and he was already reversing up the lane as Roger ripped his police lid into the dickey and climbed into the driving seat of the Morris.
As Conway backed round into the main road, the Desurio slid past him and the Saint leaned out.
“She’s a nice girl, by appearance,” said the Saint. “Mind you keep both hands on the steering wheel all the way home, sonny boy!”
Then he was gone, with a gay wave of his hand, and Roger pulled out the Morris after him.
It was still daylight, for the month was August. The rays of the sun slanted softly across the purple desert; overhead, a shadow on a pale blue sky, a curlew flew towards the sunset with a weird titter; the evening air went to Roger’s head like wine.
Roger had got into his stride.
He should have been concentrating exclusively on the task of keeping on the tail of the Desurio, but he was not. With both hands clinging religiously to the steering wheel, he stole a sidelong glance at the girl. With one hand clinging religiously to the steering wheel, he reached out the other and tugged off her small hat—in order, he told himself, that the rush of cool air might help to revive her.
Black hair, straight and sleek, framing a face that was all wrong. Eccentric eyes, an absurd nose, a ridiculous mouth—all about as wrong as they could be. But a perfect skin. She must have been tall. “No nonsense with tall girls,” thought Roger, as an expert.
“But,” thought Roger as an expert, “there might be something doing. Adroitly handled…”
The pub at St. Marychurch which both he and the Saint wotted of, where a friendly proprietor would not ask too many questions. The removal of the “Dope bird” to a quiet cellar where a ruthless interrogation could proceed without interruption. The development of the Saint’s unrevealed stratagem. Then, perhaps—
It was an utterly ridiculous mouth, but rather intriguing. And if a man couldn’t yank a girl out of a maze of mysterious melodrama without claiming, and getting, something in return for romantic services tendered—by what right did he call himself a man?
Roger rumbled for a cigarette and drove on, characteristically grim, but quite contented.
4
Driving straight into the garage of the Golden Eagle Hotel, St. Marychurch, Conway found the Saint’s Desurio there before him. The Saint was not there, but the “Dope bird” remained in the back of the car in unprotesting tenancy. His mouth was open, and he appeared to snore with distressing violence.
Roger picked the girl out of the Morris and carried her through a back entrance to the hotel adjoining the garage. He was unobserved, for the population was at dinner. Finding an empty lounge, he put the girl down in an armchair and went on his way. There was no one to question his right to leave stray unconscious females lying about the place, for Roger himself happened to be the proprietor of the pub in his spare time.
He continued down the corridor to the hall, and there found Simon Templar interviewing the manageress.
“It has been,” the Saint was saying, staggering rhythmically, “a b-beautiful b-binge. Champagne. An’ brandy. An’ beer. Barrels an’ barrels of it.” He giggled inanely, and flung out his arms in a wide sweep to indicate the size of the barrels. “Barrels,” he said. “An’ we won’t go home till the morning, we won’t go home till the morning, we won’t go home till the mor-hor-ning—”
He caught sight of Roger, and pointed to him with one hand while he grasped the hand of the manageress passionately with the other.
“An there’s dear ole Roger!” he crowed. “You ask dear ole Roger if it wasn’t a b-beautiful b-binge. ’Cos we won’t go home till the morning, we won’t go home—”
“I’m afraid,” said Conway, advancing with solemn disapproval written all over his face, “that my friend is rather drunk.”
The Saint wagged a wobbly forefinger at him.
“Drunk?” he expostulated, with portentous gravity. “Roger, ole darling, that’s unkind. Frightfully unkind. Now, if you’d said that about Desmond…Poor ole Dismal Desmond, he’s passed right out…I left him in the car. An’ he won’t go home till the morning, he won’t—”
The sho
cked manageress drew Roger to one side.
“We can’t let him in like that, Mr Conway,” she protested, twittering. “There are guests staying in the hotel—”
“Are there any rooms vacant?” asked Roger.
“None at all. And people will be coming out from dinner in a minute—”
“But,” carolled the Saint unmelodiously, “we won’t go home till the mor-hor-ning—an’ so say all of us. Gimme a drink.”
The manageress looked helplessly about her.
“Are there any more of them?”
“There’s one in the car, but he’s dead to the world.”
“Why don’t you turn them out?”
“Drink,” warbled the Saint happily, “thousan’s of drinks. Drink to me only wi-hith thine eye-heys an’ I-hi will pledge with miiiiine…”
Roger glanced down the corridor. A red-faced man poked his head out of the smoke-room door and glared around to discover the source of the uproar. He discovered it, snuffled indignantly through a superb white moustache, and withdrew his head again, banging the door after it. The manageress seemed to be on the verge of hysterics.
“I,” chanted the Saint, pleasantly absorbed in his own serenade, “sent thee late a ro-hosy wre-he-heath, not so much hon-hon’ring theeee, as giving it—”
“Can’t you do something, Mr Conway?” pleaded the unfortunate manageress, almost wringing her hands.
“You can’t sing without drink,” insisted the Saint throatily, as a man propounding one of the eternal verities.
Conway shrugged.
“I can’t very well turn him out,” he said. “I’ve known him a long time, and he was coming to stay here. Besides, he isn’t often taken like this.”
“But where can we put him?”
“How about the cellar?”
“What? Among all the bottles?”
Roger had to think fast.
“There’s the porter’s room. I’ll shove him in there to cool off. And the other man can go in with him.”
“You can’t sing without drink,” insisted the Saint pathetically. “You can’t, really, ole sweetheart.”
Enter the Saint (The Saint Series) Page 12
