The Avenging Saint (The Saint Series)

by Leslie Charteris

  3

  The ship ploughed on through a slow swell of dark shining steel, and the Saint’s lighter gritted and flared again in the gloom. His soft chuckle scarcely rose above the sigh of the breeze.

  “If you want to powder your nose, or anything, Sonia,” he murmured, “this is your chance. I guess we’ll be decanting ourselves in a few minutes now. We don’t want to drive this gondola right up to the front door—I’ve no idea what the coast is like around here, and it might be infernally awkward to run aground at the critical moment.”

  “And even then we don’t know where we are,” she said.

  “Well, I’m not expecting we’ll find ourselves a hundred miles away, and the nearest signpost will give us our bearings…Glory be! Do you know, old dear?—I believe I shall be more interested in Marius’s pantry than in his pyjamas when we do arrive!”

  He had had so many other things to think about that he was only just becoming aware that he had gone through a not uneventful day on nothing but breakfast and a railway-station sandwich, and when the Saint developed an idea like that he never needed roller-skates to help him catch up with it. After another wary glance at the land he wandered off the bridge in search of the galley, and in a few minutes he was back, with bulging pockets and a large sandwich in each hand. Even so, he had run it rather fine—the shore was looming up more quickly than he had thought.

  “Here we are, che-ild—and off you go,” he said briskly. “The orchestra’s tuned up again, and we’re surely going to start our symphony right now.” He grinned, thrusting the sandwiches into her hands. “Paddle along down the gangway, beautiful, and begin gnawing bits out of these, and I’ll be with you as soon as I’ve ported the plurry helm.”

  “OK, Simon…”

  Yet she did not go at once. She stood there facing him in the starlight. He heard her swift breath, and a puzzled question shaped itself in his mind, on the brink of utterance, but then, before he could speak, her lips brushed his mouth, very lightly…

  Then he was alone.

  “Thank you, Sonia,” whispered the Saint.

  He knew there was no one to hear.

  Then he went quickly into the wheel-house, and his hands flashed over the spokes as he put the wheel hard over. And once again he remembered his song.

  “Modest maiden will not tarry:

  Though but sixteen year she carry,

  She must marry, she must marry,

  Though the altar be a tomb—”

  The Saint smiled crookedly.

  For a space he held the wheel locked over, judging his time, and then he went out again on to the bridge. The line of land was slipping round to the starboard quarter, dangerously near. He went back and held the wheel for a few moments longer; when he emerged for a second survey the coast was safely astern, and he permitted himself a brief prayer of contented thanksgiving.

  The quartermaster and the third officer, at the starboard end of the bridge, had both returned to life. Simon observed them squirming in helpless fury as he made for the companion, and paused to sweep them a mocking bow.

  “Bon soir, mes enfants,” he murmured. “Remember me to Monsieur Vassiloff.”

  He sped down the upper deck to the cabin below. His business there detained him only for a matter of seconds, and then he raced down another companion to the main deck. Every second lost, now that the ship was headed away from the shore, meant so much more tedious rowing after the location, and the Saint, when pruning down an affliction of that kind of toil, was in the habit of moving so fast that a pursuing jack-rabbit would have suffocated in his dust.

  The girl was waiting at the foot of the gangway.

  “Filled the aching void, baby…? Well, stand by to make the jump when I give the word. It’s a walk-over really—but don’t lose your nerve, because I shan’t be able to hold the boat for ever.”

  He dropped on one knee, locking one arm round the lowest handrail stanchion and gripping the tow-rope with his other hand. Inch by inch he edged the boat up to the grating on which they stood, until it was plunging dizzily through the wash only a foot away.

  “Go!” said the Saint through his teeth, and she went.

  He saw her stumble as the boat heaved up on a vicious flurry of water, and held his breath, but she fell inside the boat—though only just—with one hand on the gunwale and the other in the sea. He watched her scramble away towards the stern, and then he let go the slack of the rope, buttoned his coat, and leapt lightly after her.

  A loose oar caught him across the knees, almost bringing him down, but he found his balance, and pivoted round with Belle flashing in his hand. Once, twice, he hacked at the straining rope, and it parted with a dull twang. The side of the ship seemed to gather speed, slipping by like a huge moving wall.

  “Hallelujah!” said the Saint piously.

  The transshipment had been a merry moment, in its modest way, as he had known all along it would be, though he had characteristically refused to grow any grey hairs over it in anticipation. And in this case his philosophy was justified of the result…

  He waved a cheery hand to the girl, and clambered aft. It was like travelling over a rabid cake-walk. As he flopped on to a thwart and started to unship a pair of oars the black bulge of the steamer’s haunches went past him, so close that he could have put out a hand and touched it, and the flimsy cockleshell, slithering into the unabated maelstrom of the ship’s wake, lurched up on its tiller and smashed down into a seething trough with a report like a gunshot. An undercarry of fine spray whipped into his eyes. “Matchless for the complexion,” drawled the Saint, and dipped the first powerful oar.

  The lifeboat yawed round, reeling back into easier water. A few strong pulls, and the merry moment was over altogether.

  “Attaboy!…”

  He rested on his oars, with the frail craft settling down under him to comparative equilibrium, and carefully mopped the salt spume from his face. Over the girl’s shoulder he could watch the shadowy hull of the departing ship sliding monstrously away into the darkness. The steady pulse-beats of its engines came more and more faintly to his ears—fainter, very soon, than the booming and boiling of its wash against the coast…

  The Saint reached forwards, lifted a battered sandwich from the girl’s lap, and took a large contented bite.

  “Feelin’ good again, lass?”

  “All right now, Big Chief.”

  “That’s the spirit.” All the Saint’s buoyant optimism reached her through his voice. “And now you’d better get gay with those vitamins, old dear, while I do my Charon act. You can’t keep your end up on an empty stomach—and this wild party is just getting into its stride!”

  And, with his mouth full, Simon bent again to the oars.

  4

  It was a stiff twenty minutes’ pull to the shore, but the Saint took it in his night’s work cheerfully. It gave him a deep and enduring satisfaction to feel his muscles limbering up to the smooth rhythm of the heavy sweeps, and the fact that the boat had never been designed for one-man sculling practice robbed him of none of his pleasure. The complete night’s party wasn’t everyone’s idea of a solo piece, anyway, if it came to that, but the Saint wasn’t kicking. He was essentially a solo performer, and, if the circumstances required him to turn himself into a complete brass band—well, he was quite ready to warm himself up for the concert. So he rowed with a real physical enjoyment of the effort, and when the boat grounded at last, with a grating bump, there was a tingle of new strength rollicking joyously through every inch of his body.

  “This way, sweetheart!”

  He stood up in the bows. Fortunately the beach shelved steeply; watching his chance with the ebb of a wave he was able to jump easily to dry land. The girl followed. As her feet touched the shingle he caught her up and swung her bodily out of reach of the returning water, and stood beside her, his hands on his hips.

  “Home is the sailor, home from the spree…And now what price Everest?”

  With a hand on h
er arm he steered her over the stones. Something like a low wall rose in front of them. He lifted her to the top of it like a feather, and joined her there himself a moment later, and then he laughed.

  “Holy Haggai—this is indubitably our evening!”

  “Why—do you know where we are?”

  “That’s more than I could tell you. But I do know that there’s going to be no alpine work. Pass down the car, Sonia!”

  The land reared up from where they stood—not the scarp that he had expected, but a whale’s back, overgrown with stunted bushes. They moved on in a steady climb, the Saint’s uncanny instinct picking a way through the straggling obstacles without a fault. For about fifty yards the slope was steep and the foothold precarious; then, gradually, it began to flatten out gently for the summit. Their feet stumbled off the rubble on to grass…

  He stopped by a broken-down fence at the top of the climb to give the girl a breather.

  Eighty feet below the sea was like a dark cloth laid over the floor of the world, and over the cloth moved two steady points of luminance—the masthead lights of the ship that they had left. To right and left of them the coast was shrouded in unbroken obscurity. Behind them, the land fell smoothly away in an easy incline, rising again in the distance to the line of another hill, a long slow undulation with one lonely spangle of light on its farthest curve.

  “Where there’s a house there’s a road,” opined the Saint. “We may even find a road before that, but we might as well head that way. Ready?”

  “Sure.”

  He picked her up lightly in his arms and set her down on the other side of the fence. In a moment they were pushing on again together.

  His zest was infectious. She found that the spirit of the adventure was gathering her up again, even as it had gathered up the Saint. Reason went by the board; the Saint’s own fantastic delight took its place. She managed a glance at the luminous dial of her wrist watch, and could have gasped when she saw the time. A truly comprehensive realization of all that she had lived through in a day and two half-nights was only just beginning to percolate into her brain, and the understanding of it dazed her. In four circuits of the clock she had lived through an age, and yet with no sense of incongruity until that moment; her whole life had been speeded up in one galvanic acceleration, mentally and emotionally as well as in event, and somewhere in that fabulous rush she had found something that would have amazed herself of yesterday.

  Long ragged grasses rustled about their ankles. They dropped into a hollow, rose again momentarily, faced a hedge, but the Saint found a gap for them as if he could see as clearly in the dark as he could have seen by daylight. Then they plodded over a ploughed field. Once she stumbled, but he caught her in a moment. He himself had an almost supernatural sense of country; in the next field he checked her abruptly and guided her round a fallen tree that she would have sworn he could not have been told of by his eyes. Came another hedge, a ditch, and a field of corn; he found a straight path through it, and she heard him husking a handful of ears as he walked.

  “It’s not even Sunday any longer,” he remarked, “so we shan’t be bawled out.”

  And once again she was bewildered by a mind that could remember such pleasant far-off things at such a time—Scribes and Pharisees, old family Bibles, fields of Palestine!

  Presently they came to a gate; the Saint ran his fingers lightly along the top, feeling for wire; then he stood still.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “The road!”

  He might have been Cortes at gaze before the Pacific; his ravishment could not have been greater.

  He vaulted over; she followed more cautiously, and he lifted her down, with a breath of laughter. They went on. Road he might have called it, but it was really no more than a lane, yet it was something—a less nerve-racking surface for her feet, at least. For about half a mile they took its winding course, until she had lost her bearings altogether. With that loss she lost also an iota of the fickle enthusiasm that had helped her over the fields; about a road, or even a lane, there was a brusque reminder of more prosaic atmospheres and more ordinary nights. And it was definitely the threshold of a destination…

  But Simon Templar was happy; as he walked he hummed a little tune; she could feel, as by a sixth sense, the quickened spring in his step, though he never set a pace that would have spent her endurance. His presence was even more vital for this restraint. For the destination and the destiny were his own, and she knew that there was a song in his heart as well as on his lips, an exultation that no one could share.

  So they were following the lane. And then, of a sudden, he stopped, his song stopping with him, and she saw that the lane had at last brought them out upon an unquestionable road. She saw the telegraph poles reaching away on either side—not very far, for they stood between two bends. But it was a road…

  “I don’t see a signpost,” she remarked dubiously. “Which way shall we—”

  “Listen!”

  She strained her ears, and presently she was able to pick up the sound he had heard—the purr of a powerful car.

  “Who cares about signposts?” drawled the Saint. “Why, this bird might even give us a lift—it might even be Roger!”

  They stood by the side of the road, waiting. Slowly the purr grew louder. Simon pointed, and she saw the reflection of the headlights as a pale nimbus in the sky; then, suddenly, a clump of trees stood out black and stark against a direct glare.

  “Stand by to glom the Saltham Limited!”

  The Saint had slipped out into the middle of the road. Beyond him, at the next bend in the road, a hedge and a tree were picked out in a strengthening shaft of light. The voice of the car was rising to a querulous drone. Then, all at once, the light began to sweep along the hedge; then, in another instant, it blazed clear down the road itself, corrugating the tarmac with shadows, and the Saint stood full in the centre of the blinding beam, waving his arms.

  She heard the squeal of the brakes as he stepped aside, and the car slid past with an expiring swish of wind, and came to rest a dozen yards beyond.

  The Saint sprinted after it, and Sonia Delmar was only just behind him. “Could you tell me—”

  The monosyllable cracked out with a guttural swiftness that sent the Saint’s hand flying to his hip, but the man in the car already had him covered. Simon grasped the fact—in time.

  But the girl was not a yard away, and she also had a gun. Simon tensed himself for the shot…

  “Put up your hands, Herr Saint.”

  There was a note of leering triumph in the harsh voice, and the Saint, blinking the last of the glare of the headlights out of his eyes, recognized the man. Slowly he raised his hands, and his breath came in a long sigh.

  “Bless my soul!” said the Saint, who was never profane on really distressing occasions. “It’s dear old Hermann. And he’s going to give us our lift!”

  CHAPTER TEN:

  HOW SIR ISAAC LESSING TOOK EXERCISE AND RAYT MARIUS LIGHTED A CIGAR

  1

  Roger Conway’s foot shifted off the accelerator and trod urgently upon the brake, and the Hirondel skidded to a protesting standstill.

  “We’ve arrived,” said Roger grimly.

  The man beside him glanced at the big iron gates a few yards down the road and gained one momentary glimpse of them before the headlights went out under Roger’s hand on the switch.

  “This is the place?” he asked.

  “It is.”

  “And where is your friend?”

  “If I were a clairvoyant, Sir Isaac, I might be able to tell you. But you saw me get out and look for the message where he arranged to leave one if he could—and there was no message. That’s all I know, except—have you ever seen a man shot through the stomach, Sir Isaac?”

  “No.”

  “You probably will,” said Roger, and Lessing was silent.

  He had no idea why he should have been silent. He knew that he ought to have said things—a
ngry and outraged and ordinary things. He ought to have been saying things like that all the way from London. But, somehow, he hadn’t said them. He’d certainly started to say them, once, two hours ago, when he had been preparing his second after-dinner Corona, and this curt and crazy young man had forced his way past butler and footman and penetrated in one savage rush to the sanctum sanctorum of the Oil Trade; he had nobly gone on trying to say them for a while after that, while the butler and the footman, torn between duty and discretion, had wavered apoplectically before the discouragement of the automatic in the curt and crazy young man’s hand, and yet—somehow that had been as far as he’d got. The young man had had facts. The young man, compelling audience at the business end of his Webley, had punched those facts home one on top of the other with the shattering effect of a procession of mule-kicks, and the separate pieces of that preposterous jig-saw had fitted together without one single hiatus that Sir Isaac Lessing could discover—and he was a man cynically practised at discovering the flaws in ingenious stories. And the whole completed edifice, fantastic as were its foundations, and delirious as were the lines on which it reared itself, stood firm and unshakable against the cyclone of reasonable incredulity that he loosed upon it when he got his turn. For the young man spoke freely of the Saint, and that name ran through the astounding structure like a webwork of steel girders, poising its most extravagant members, bearing it up steadfast and indefeasible against the storm. And the climax had come when, at the end of narrative and cross-examination, the crazy young man had laid his gun on the table and invited the millionaire to take his choice—Saltham or Scotland Yard…

  “Come on,” snapped Roger.

  He was already out of the car, and Lessing followed blindly. Roger had his finger on the bell beside the gate when Lessing caught up with him—Lessing was not built for speed. He stood beside his guide, breathing heavily, and they watched a window light up in the cottage that served for a lodge. A grumbling figure came through the gloom to the other side of the gates.