"Wotcher mean?" demanded the little man again, indignantly. "Tailing yer?"
The Saint signed, and took the lapels of the little man's coat in his two hands. For half a hectic minute he bounced and shook the little man like a terrier shaking a rat.
"Talk," said the Saint monotonously.
But Pot Hat opened his mouth for something that could only have been either a swear or a scream; and the Saint disapproved of both. He tapped the little man briskly in the stomach, and he never knew which of the two possibilities had been the little man's intention, for whichever it was died in a choking gurgle. Then the Saint took hold of him again.
It was certainly very like bullying, but Simon Templar was not feeling sentimental. He had to do it, and he did it with cold efficiency. It lasted five minutes.
"Talk," said the Saint again, at the end of the five minutes; and the blubbering sleuth said he would talk.
Simon took him by the scruff of his neck and dropped him into a chair like a sack of peanuts.
The story, however, was not very helpful.
"I dunno wot 'is name is. I met 'im six months ago in a pub off Oxford Street, an' 'e gave me a job to do. I've worked for 'im on an' off ever since—followin' people an' findin' out things about 'em. 'E allus paid well, an' there wasn't no risk——"
"Not till you met me," said the Saint. "How do you keep in touch with him if he hasn't told you his name?"
"When 'e wants me, 'e writes to me, an' I meet 'im in a pub somewhere, an' 'e tells me wot I've got to do. Then I let 'im know wot's 'appening by telephone. I got 'is number."
"Which is?"
"Westminster double-nine double-nine."
"Thanks," said the Saint. "Good-looking man, isn't he?"
"Not 'arf! Fair gives me the creeps, 'e does. Fust time I sore 'im——"
The Saint shouldered himself off the mantelpiece and reached for the cigarette-box.
"Go home while the goin's good, Rat Face," he said. "You don't interest us any more. Door, Roger."
" 'Ere," whined Pot Hat, "I got a wife an' four children——"
"That," said the Saint gently, "must be frightfully bad luck on them. Give them my love, won't you?"
"I bin assaulted. Supposin' I went to a pleeceman——"
The Saint fixed him with a clear blue stare.
"You can either walk down the stairs," he remarked dispassionately, "or you can be kicked down by the gentleman who carried you up. Take your choice. But if you want any compensation for the grilling you've had, you'd better apply to your handsome friend for it. Tell him we tortured you with hot irons and couldn't make you open your mouth. He might believe you—though I shouldn't bet on it. And if you feel like calling a policeman, you'll find one just up the road. I know him quite well, and I'm sure he'd be interested to hear what you've got to say. Good-night."
"Callin' yerselves gentlemen!" sneered the sleuth viciously."You——"
"Get out," said the Saint quietly.
He was lighting his cigarette, and he did not even look up, but the next thing he heard was the closing of the door.
From the window he watched the man slouching up the street. He was at the telephone when Conway returned from supervising the departure, and he smiled lazily at his favourite lieutenant's question.
"Yes, I'm just going to give Tiny Tim my love. . . . Hullo —are you Westminster double-nine double-nine? . . . Splendid. How's life, Angel Face?"
"Who is that?" demanded the other end of the line.
"Simon Templar," said the Saint. "You may have heard of me. I believe we—er—ran into each other recently." He grinned at the stifled exclamation that came faintly over the wire. "Yes, I suppose it is a pleasant surprise. Quite overwhelming. . . . The fact is, I've just had to give one of your amateur detectives a rough five minutes. He's walking home. . The next friend of yours I find walking on my shadow will be removed in an ambulance. That's a tip from the stable. Pleasant dreams, old dear!"
He hung up the receiver without waiting for a reply. Then he was speaking to Inquiry.
"Can you give me the name and address of Westminster double-nine double-nine? . . . what's that? . . . Well, is there no way of finding out? . . . Yes, I know that; but there are reasons why I can't ring up and ask. Fact is, my wife eloped yesterday with the plumber, and she said if I really wanted her back I could ring her up at that number; but one of the bathtaps is dripping, and . . . Oh, all right. Thanks very much. Love to the supervisors."
He put down the instrument and turned to shrug at Conway's interrogatively raised eyebrows.
" 'I'm sorry—we are not permitted to give subscribers' names and addresses,' " he mimicked. "I knew it, but it was worth trying. Not that it matters much."
"You might," suggested Conway, "have tried the directory."
"Of course. Knowing that Marius doesn't live in England, and that therefore Westminster double-nine double-nine is unlikely to be in his name——Oh, of course."
Conway grimaced.
"Right. Then we sit down and try to think out what Tiny Tim'll do next."
"Nope," contradicted the Saint cheerfully. "We know that one. It'll either be prussic acid in the milk to-morrow morning, or a snap shot from a passing car next time I walk out of the front door. We can put our shirts on that, and sit tight and wait for the dividends. But suppose we didn't wait. . . ." The emphatic briskness of his first words had trailed away while he was speaking into the gentle dreamy intonation that Conway knew of old. It was the sign that the Saint's thoughts had raced miles ahead of his tongue, and he was only mechanically completing a speech that had long since become unimportant.
Then for a little while he was silent, with his cigarette slanting up between his lips, and a kind of crouching immobility about his lean body, and a dancing blue light of recklessness kindling in his eyes. For a moment he was as still and taut as a leopard gathering itself for a spring. Then he relaxed, straightening, and smiled; and his right arm went out in one of those magnificently romantic gestures that only the Saint could make with such a superb lack of affectation.
"But why should we wait?" he challenged.
"Why, indeed?" echoed Conway vaguely. "But——"
Simon Templar was not listening. He was already back at the telephone, calling up Norman Kent.
"Get out your car, fill her up with gas, and come right round to Brook Street. And pack a gun. This is going to be a wild night!"
A few minutes later he was through to his bungalow at Maidenhead—to which, by the grace of all the Saint's gods, he had sent his man down only that very day to prepare the place for a summer tenancy that was never to materialise as Simon Templar had planned it.
"That you, Orace? . . . Good. I just phoned up to let you know that Mr. Kent will be arriving in the small hours with a visitor, I want you to get the cellar ready for him—for the visitor, I mean. Got me?"
"Yessir," said Orace unemotionally, and the Saint rang off.
There was only one Orace—late sergeant of Marines, and Simon Templar's most devoted servant. If Simon had said that the visitor would be a kidnapped President of the United States, Orace would still have answered no more than that gruff, unemotional "Yessir!"—and carried on according to his orders.
Said Roger Conway, climbing out of his chair and squashing his cigarette end into an ash-tray: "The idea being——"
"If we leave it any longer one of two things will happen. Either (a) Vargan will give his secret away to the Government experts, or (b) Marius will pinch it—or Vargan—or both. And then we'd be dished for ever. We've only got a chance for so long as Vargan is the one man in the wide world who carries that invention of the devil under his hat. And every hour we wait gives Tiny Tim a chance to get in before us!"
Conway frowned at a photograph of Patricia Holm on the mantelpiece. Then he nodded at it.
"Where is she?"
"Spending a couple of days in Devonshire with the Mannerings. The coast's dead clear. I'm glad to have her o
ut of it. She's due back to-morrow evening, which is just right for us. We take Vargan to Maidenhead to-night, sleep off our honest weariness to-morrow, and toddle back in time to meet her. Then we all go down to the bungalow—and we're sitting pretty. How's that?"
Conway nodded again slowly. He was still frowning, as if there was something troubling the back of his mind.
Presently it came out.
"I never was the bright boy of the class," he said, "but I'd like one thing plain. We agree that Vargan, on behalf of certain financial interests, is out to start a war. If he brings it off we shall be in the thick of it. We always are. The poor blessed Britisher gets roped into everybody else's squabbles. . . . Well, we certainly don't want Vargan's bit of frightfulness used against us, but mightn't it save a lot of trouble if we could use it ourselves?"
The Saint shook his head.
"If Marius doesn't get Vargan," he said, "I don't think the war will come off. At least, we'll have said check to it—and a whole heap may happen before he can get the show started again. And as for using it ourselves—— No, Roger, I don't think so. We've argued that already. It wouldn't be kept to ourselves. And even if it could be—do you know, Roger?—I still think the world would be a little better and cleaner without it. There are foul things enough in the armoury without that. And I say that it shall not be. . . ."
Conway looked at him steadily for some seconds.
Then he said: "So Vargan will take a trip to Maidenhead. You won't kill him to-night?"
"Not unless it's forced on me," said the Saint quietly. "I've thought it out. I don't know how much hope there is of appealing to his humanity, but as long as that hope exists, he's got a right to live. What the hope is, is what we've got to find out. But if I find that he won't listen——"
"Quite."
The Saint gave the same explanation to the third musketeer when Norman Kent arrived ten minutes later, and Norman's reply was only a little less terse than Roger Conway's had been.
"We may have to do it," he said.
His dark face was even graver than usual, and he spoke very quietly, for although Norman Kent had once sent a bad man to his death, he was the only one of the three who had never seen a man die.
4. How Simon Templar lost an automobile, and won an argument
"The ancient art of generalship," said the Saint, "is to put yourself in the enemy's place. Now, how should I guard Vargan if I were as fat as Chief Inspector Teal?"
They stood in a little group on the Portsmouth Road about a mile from Esher, where they had stopped the cars in which they had driven down from London. They had been separated for the journey, because the Saint had insisted on taking his own Furillac as well as Norman Kent's Hirondel, in case of accidents. And he had refused to admit that there was time to make plans before they started. That, he had said, he would attend to on the way, and thereby save half an hour.
"There were five men when we came down yesterday," said Conway. "If Teal hasn't got many more than that on the night shift I should say they'd be arranged much as we saw them—outposts in the lane, the front garden, and the back garden, and a garrison in the greenhouse and the house itself. Numbers uncertain, but probably only couples."
The Saint's inevitable cigarette glowed like a fallen star in the darkness.
"That's the way I figured it out myself. I've roughed out a plan of attack on that basis."
He outlined it briefly. That was not difficult, for it was hardly a plan at all—it was little more than an idea for desperate and rapid action, a gamble on the element of surprise. The Saint had a pleasant habit of tackling some things in that mood, and getting away with it. And yet, on this occasion, as it happened, even that much planning was destined to be unnecessary.
A few minutes later they were on their way again.
The Saint led, with Conway beside him, in the Furillac. The Hirondel, with Norman Kent, followed about fifty yards behind. Norman, much to his disgust, was not considered as an active performer in the early stages of the enterprise. He was to stop his car a little way from the end of the lane, turn round, and wait with the engine ticking over until either Conway or the Saint arrived with Vargan. The simplicity of this arrangement was its great charm, but they were not able to make Norman see their point—which, they said, was the fault of his low and brawlsome mind.
And yet, if this reduction of their mobile forces had not been an incidental part of the Saint's sketchy plan of campaign, the outcome of the adventure might have been very different.
As Simon pulled up at the very mouth of the lane, he flung a lightning glance over his shoulder, and saw the Hirondel already swerving across the road for the turn.
Then he heard the shot.
"For the love of Pete!"
The invocation dropped from the Saint's lips in a breathless undertone. He was getting out of the car at that moment, and he completed the operation of placing his second foot on the road with a terrifically careful intentness. As he straightened up with the same frozen deliberation, he found Conway at his elbow.
"You heard it?" Conway's curt, half-incredulous query.
"And how. . . ."
"Angel Face——"
"Himself!"
Simon Templar was standing like a rock. He seemed, to Conway's impatience, to have been standing like that for an eternity, as though his mind had suddenly left him. And yet it had only been a matter of a few seconds, and in that time the Saint's brain had been whirling and wheeling with a wild precision into the necessary readjustments.
So Angel Face had beaten them to the jump—it could have been by no more than a fraction. And, as they had asked for trouble, they were well and truly in the thick of it. They had come prepared for the law; now they had to deal with both law and lawlessness, and both parties united in at least one common cause—to keep K. B. Vargan to themselves. Even if both parties were at war on every other issue. . . .
"So we win this hands down," said the Saint softly, amazingly. "We're in luck!"
"If you call this luck!"
"But I do! Could we have arrived at a better time? When both gangs have rattled each other—and probably damaged each other—and Tiny Tim's boy friends have done the dirty work for us——"
He was cut short by another shot . . . then another . . . then a muddled splutter of three or four. . . .
"Our cue!" snapped the Saint, and Roger Conway was at his side as he leapt down the lane.
There was no sign of the sentries, but a man came rushing towards them out of the gloom, heavy-footed and panting. The Saint pushed Conway aside and flung out a well-timed foot. As the man sprawled headlong, Simon pounced on him and banged his head with stunning force against the road. Then he yanked the dazed man to his feet and looked closely at him.
"If he's not a policeman, I'm a Patagonian Indian," said the Saint. "A slight error, Roger."
The man answered with a wildly swinging fist, and the Saint hit him regretfully on the point of the jaw and saw him go down in a limp heap.
"What next?" asked Conway; and a second fusillade clattered out of the night to answer him.
"This is a very rowdy party," said the Saint mournfully. "Let's make it worse, shall we?"
He jerked an automatic from his pocket and fired a couple of shots into the air. The response was far more prompt than he had expected—two little tongues of flame that spat at them out of the further blackness, and two bullets that sang past their heads.
"Somebody loves us," remarked Simon calmly. "This way——"
He started to lead down the lane.
And then, out of the darkness, the headlights of a car came to life dazzlingly, like two monstrous eyes. For a second Con-way and the Saint stood struck to stillness in the glare that had carved a great trough of luminance out of the obscurity as if by the scoop of some gigantic dredge. So sudden and blinding was that unexpected light that an instant of time was almost fatally lost before either of them could see that it was not standing still bu
t moving towards them and picking up speed like an express train.
"Glory!" spoke the Saint, and his voice overlapped the venomous rat-tat-tat! of another unseen automatic.
In the same instant he was whirling and stooping with the pace of a striking snake. He collared Conway at the knees and literally hurled him bodily over the low hedge at the side of the lane with an accuracy and expedition that the toughest and most seasoned footballer could hardly have bettered.
The startled Conway, getting shakily to his feet, found the Saint landing from a leap beside him, and was in time to see the dark shape of a closed car flash past in the wake of that eye-searing blaze of headlights—so close that its wings and running-board tore a flurry of crackling twigs from the hedge. And he realised that, but for the Saint's speed of reaction, they would have stood no chance at all in that narrow space.
He might have said something about it. By ordinary procedure he should have given thanks to his saviour in a breaking voice; they should have wrung each other's hands and wept gently on each other's shoulders for a while; but something told Conway that it was no time for such trimmings. Besides, the Saint had taken the incident in his stride: by that time it had probably slithered through his memory into the dim limbo of distant reminiscence, and he would probably have been quite astonished to be reminded of it at that juncture. By some peaceful and lazy fireside, in his doddering old age, possibly . . . But in the immediate present he was concerned only with the immediate future.
He was looking back towards the house. There were lights showing still in some of the windows—it might altogether have been a most serene and tranquil scene, but for the jarring background of intermittent firing, which might have been nothing worse than a childish celebration of Guy Fawkes' day if it had been Guy Fawkes' day. But the Saint wasn't concerned with those reflections, either. He was searching the shadows by the gate, and presently he made out a deeper and more solid-looking shadow among the other shadows, a bulky shadow. ...
Crack!
A tiny jet of flame licked out of the bulky shadow, and they heard the tinkle of shattered glass; but the escaping car was now only a few yards from the main road.
The Saint Closes the Case s-2 Page 5
