The Saint Closes the Case s-2

by Leslie Charteris

  He turned.

  "Heave over the time-table, Norman—it's in that corner, under the back numbers of La Vie Parisienne. . . ."

  He caught the volume dexterously.

  "What time can you get away from this fête effect? . . . Sevenish? . . . No, that'll do fine. Terry can drive you over to Exeter, and if you get there alive you'll have heaps of time to catch a very jolly-looking train at—— Damn! I'm looking at the week-day trains. . . . And the Sunday trains are as slow as a Scotchman saying good-bye to a bawbee. . . . Look here, the only one you'll have time to catch now is the 4.58. Gets in at 9.20. The only one after that doesn't get to London till nearly four o'clock to-morrow morning. I suppose you were thinking of staying over till to-morrow. . . . I'm afraid you mustn't, really. That is important. . . . Good enough, darling. Expect you at Brook Street about half-past nine. . . . So long, lass. God bless . . ."

  He hung up the receiver with a smile as Roger Conway returned after a commendably quick toilet.

  "And now, Roger, me bhoy, we make our dash!"

  "All set, skipper."

  "Then let's go."

  And the Saint laughed softly, hands on hips. His dark hair was at its sleekest perfection, his blue eyes danced, his brown face was alight with an absurdly boyish enthusiasm. He slipped an arm through Conway's, and they went out to­gether.

  Roger approached the car with slower and slower steps. An idea seemed to have struck him.

  "Are you going to drive?" he asked suspiciously.

  "I am," said the Saint.

  Conway climbed in with an unhappy sigh. He knew, from bitter past experience, that the Saint had original and hair-raising notions of his own about the handling of high-pow­ered automobiles.

  They reached Brook Street at half-past four.

  "Are you going to drive back as well?" asked Roger.

  "I am," said the Saint.

  Mr. Conway covered his eyes.

  "Put me on a nice slow train first, will you?" he said. "Oh, and make a will leaving everything to me. Then you can die with my blessing."

  Simon laughed, and took him by the arm.

  "Upstairs," he said, "there is beer. And then—work. Come on, sonny boy!"

  For three hours they worked. Part of that time Conway gave to helping the Saint; then he went on to attend to his own packing and Norman Kent's. He returned towards eight o'clock, and dumped the luggage he brought with him directly out of his taxi into the Hirondel. The Saint's completed contribution—two steamer trunks on the carrier, and a heavy valise inside—was already there. The Hirondel certainly had the air of assisting in a wholesale removal.

  Conway found the Saint sinking a tankard of ale with phenomenal rapidity.

  "Oil" said Conway, in alarm.

  "Get yours down quickly," advised the Saint, indicating a second mug, which stood, full and ready, on the table. "We're off."

  "Off?" repeated Roger puzzledly.

  Simon jerked his empty can in the direction of the window.

  "Outside," he said, "are a pair of prize beauties energetically doing nothing. I don't suppose you noticed them as you came in. I didn't myself, until a moment ago. I'll swear they've only just come on duty—I couldn't have missed them when I was loading up the car. But they've seen too much. Much too much."

  Conway went to the window and looked out.

  Presently:

  "I don't see anyone suspicious."

  "That's your innocent and guileless mind, my pet," said the Saint, coming over to join him. "If you were as old in sin as I am, you'd . . . Well, I'll be b-b-blowed!"

  Conway regarded him gravely.

  "It's the beer," he said. "Never mind. You'll feel better in a minute."

  "Damned if I will!" crisped the Saint.

  He slammed his tankard down on the window-sill, and caught Roger by both shoulders.

  "Don't be an old idiot, Roger!" he cried. "You know me. I tell you this place was being watched. Police or Angel Face. We can't say which, but almost certainly Angel Face. Teal couldn't possibly have got as far as this in the time, I'll bet anything you like. But Angel Face could. And the two sleuths have beetled off with the news about us. So, to save trouble, we'll beetle off ourselves. Because, if I know anything about Angel Face yet, Brook Street is going to be rather less healthy than a hot spot in hell—inside an hour!"

  "But Pat——"

  The Saint looked at his watch.

  "We've got two hours to fill up somehow. The Hirondel'll do it easy. Down to Maidenhead, park the luggage, and back to Paddington Station in time to meet the train."

  "And suppose we have a breakdown?"

  "Breakdown hell! . . . But you're right. . . . Correction, then: I'll drop you at the station, and make the return trip to Maidenhead alone. You can amuse yourself in the bar, and I'll meet you there. . . . It's a good idea to get rid of the lug­gage, too. We don't know that the world won't have become rather sticky by half-past nine, and it'd be on the safe side to make the heavy journey while the going's good. If I leave now they won't have had time to make any preparations to follow me; and later we'd be able to slip them much more easily, if they happened to get after us, without all the impedi­menta to pull our speed down."

  Conway found himself being rushed down the stairs as he listened to the Saint's last speech. The speech seemed to begin in Brook Street and finish at Paddington. Much of this impression, of course, was solely the product of Conway's over­wrought imagination; but there was a certain foundation of fact in it, and the impression built thereon was truly symp­tomatic of Simon Templar's appalling velocity of transform­ing decision into action.

  Roger Conway recovered coherent consciousness in the station buffet and a kind of daze; and by that time Simon Templar was hustling the Hirondel westwards.

  The Saint's brain was in a ferment of questions. Would Marius arrange a raid on the flat in Brook Street? Or would he, finding that the loaded car which his spies had reported had gone, assume that the birds had flown? Either way, that didn't seem to matter; but the point it raised was what Marius would do next, after he had either discovered or decided that his birds had flown. . . . And, anyway, since Marius must have known that the Saint had attended the rough party at Esher, why hadn't Brook Street been raided before? . . . An­swer: Because (a) a show like that must take a bit of organis­ing, and (b) it would be easier, anyhow, to wait until dark. Which, at that time of year, was fairly late at night. Thereby making it possible to do the return journey to and from Maid­enhead on good time. . . . But Marius would certainly be doing something. Put yourself in the enemy's place. . . .

  So the Saint reached Maidenhead in under an hour, and was on the road again five minutes later.

  It was not his fault that he was stopped halfway back by a choked carburettor jet which it took him fifteen minutes to locate and remedy.

  Even so, the time he made on the rest of the trip amazed even himself.

  In the station entrance he actually cannoned into Roger Conway.

  "Hullo," said the Saint. "Where are you off to? The train's just about due in."

  Conway stared at him.

  Then he pointed dumbly at the clock in the booking-hall.

  Simon looked at it, and went white.

  "But my watch," he began stupidly, "my watch——"

  "You must have forgotten to wind it up last night."

  "You met the train?"

  Conway nodded.

  "It's just possible that I may have missed her, but I'd swear she wasn't on it. Probably she didn't catch it——"

  "Then there's a telegram at Brook Street to say so. We'll go there—if all the armies of Europe are in the way!"

  They went. Conway, afterwards, preferred not to remem­ber that drive.

  And yet peace seemed to reign in Brook Street. The lamps were alight, and it was getting dark rapidly, for the sky had clouded over in the evening. As was to be expected on a Sun­day, there were few people about, and hardly any traffic. There was nothing at all l
ike a crowd—no sign that there had been any disturbance at all. There was a man leaning negligently against a lamp-post, smoking a pipe as though he had nothing else to do in the world. It happened that, as the Hirondel stopped, another man came up and spoke to him. The Saint saw the incident, and ignored it.

  He went through the front door and up the stairs like a whirlwind. Conway followed him.

  Conway really believed that the Saint would have gone through a police garrison or a whole battalion of Angel Faces; but there were none there to go through. Nor had the flat been entered, as far as they could see. It was exactly as they had left it.

  But there was no telegram.

  "I might have missed her," said Conway helplessly. "She may be on her way now. The taxi may have broken down—or had a slight accident——"

  He stopped abruptly at the blaze in the Saint's eyes.

  "Look at the clock," said the Saint, with a kind of curbed savagery.

  Roger looked at the clock. The clock said that it was a quarter to ten.

  And he saw the terrible look on the Saint's face, and it hypnotised him. The whole thing had come more suddenly than anything that had ever happened to Roger Conway be­fore, and it had swirled him to the loss of his bearings in the same way that a man in a small boat in tropical seas may be lost in a squall. The blow had fallen too fiercely for him. He could feel the shock, and yet he was unable to determine what manner of blow had been struck, or even if a blow had been struck at all, in any comprehensible sense.

  He could only look at the clock and say helplessly: "It's a quarter to ten."

  The Saint was saying: "She'd have let me know if she'd missed the train——"

  "Or waited for the next one."

  "Oh, for the love of Mike!" snarled the Saint. "Didn't you hear me ring her up from Maidenhead? I looked out all the trains then, and the only next one gets in at three fifty-one to-morrow morning. D'you think she'd have waited for that one without sending me a wire?"

  "But if I didn't see her at Paddington, and anything had happened to her taxi——"

  But the Saint had taken a cigarette, and was lighting it with a hand that could never have been steadier; and the Saint's face was a frozen mask.

  "More beer," said the Saint.

  Roger moved to obey.

  "And talk to me," said the Saint, "talk to me quietly and sanely, will you? Because fool suggestions won't help me. I don't have to ring up Terry and ask if Pat caught that train, because I know she did. I don't have to ask if you're quite sure you couldn't have missed her at the station, because I know you didn't. ..."

  The Saint was deliberately breaking a match-stick into tiny fragments and dropping them one by one into the ash-tray.

  "And don't tell me I'm getting excited about nothing," said the Saint, "because I tell you I know. I know that Pat was coming on a slow train, which stops at other places before it gets to London. I know that Marius has got Pat, and I know that he's going to try to use her to force me to give up Vargan, and I know that I'm going to find Dr. Rayt Marius and kill him. So talk to me very quietly and sanely, Roger, because if you don't I think I shall go quite mad."

  6. How Roger Conway drove the Hirondel, and the Saint took a knife in his hand

  Conway had a full tankard of beer in each hand. He looked at the tankards as a man might look at a couple of dragons that have strayed into his drawing-room. It seemed to Roger, for some reason, that it was unaccountably ridiculous for him to be standing in the middle of the Saint's room with a tankard of beer in each hand. He cleared his throat.

  He said: "Are you sure you aren't—making too much of it?"

  And he knew, as he said it, that it was the fatuously use­less kind of remark for which he would cheerfully have or­dered anyone else's execution. He put down the tankards on the table and lighted a cigarette as if he hated it.

  "That's not quiet and sane," said the Saint. "That's wasting time. Damn it, old boy, you know how it was between Pat and me! I always knew that if anything happened to her I'd know it at once—if she were a thousand miles away. I know."

  The Saint's icy control broke for a moment. Only for a mo­ment. Roger's arm was taken in a crushing grip. The Saint didn't know his strength. Roger could have cried out with pain; but he said nothing at all. He was in the presence of something that he could only understand dimly.

  "I've seen the whole thing," said the Saint, with a cold devil in his voice. "I saw it while you were gaping at that clock. You'll see it, too, when you've got your brain on to it. But I don't have to think."

  "But how could Marius——"

  "Easy! He'd already tracked us here. He'd been watching the place. The man's thorough. He'd naturally have put other agents on to the people he saw visiting me. And how could he have missed Pat? . . . One of his men probably followed her down to Devonshire. Then, after the Esher show, Marius got in touch with that man. She could easily be got at on the train. They could take her off, say, at Reading—doped. . . . She wasn't on her guard. She didn't know there was any danger. That one man could have done it. ... With a car to meet him at Reading. . . . And Marius is going to hold Pat in the scales against me—against everything we've set out to do. Binding me hand and foot. Putting my dear one in the forefront of the battle, and daring me to fire. And laying the powder-train for his foul slaughter under the shield of her blessed body. And laughing at us. . . ."

  Then Roger began to understand less dimly, and he stared at the Saint as he would have stared at a ghost.

  He said, like a man waking from a dream: "If you're right, our show's finished."

  "I am right," said the Saint. "Ask yourself the question."

  He released Roger's arm as if he had only just become aware that he was holding it.

  Then, in three strides, the Saint was at the window; and Conway had just started to realise his intention when the Saint justified, and at the same time smithereened, that realisation with one single word.

  "Gone."

  "You mean the——"

  "Both of 'em. Of course, Marius kept up the watch on the house in case we were being tricky. The man who arrived at the same time as we did was the relief. Or a messenger to say that Marius had lifted the trump card, and the watch could pack up. Then they saw us arrive."

  "But they can't have been gone a moment——"

  The Saint was back by the table.

  "Just that," snapped the Saint. "They've gone—but they can't have been gone a moment. The car's outside. Could you recognise either of them again?"

  "I could recognise one."

  "I could recognise the other. Foreign-looking birds, with ugly mugs. Easy again. Let's go!"

  It was more than Roger could cope with. His brain hadn't settled down yet. He couldn't get away from a sane, reason­able, conventional conviction that the Saint was hurling up a solid mountain from the ghost of a molehill. He couldn't quite get away from it even while the clock on the mantelpiece was giving him the lie with every tick. But he got between the Saint and the door, somehow—he wasn't sure how. "

  "Hadn't you better sit down and think it out before you do anything rash?"

  "Hadn't you better go and hang yourself?" rapped the Saint impatiently.

  Then his bitterness softened. His hands fell on Roger's shoul­ders.

  "Don't you remember another time when we were in this room, you and I?" he said. "We were trying to get hold of Marius then—for other reasons. We could only find out his telephone number. And that's all we know to this day—unless we can make one of those birds who were outside tell us more than the man who gave us the telephone number. They're likely to know more than that—we're big enough now to have the bigger men after us. They're the one chance of a clue we've got, and I'm taking it. This way!"

  He swept Conway aside, and burst out of the flat. Conway followed. When the Saint stopped in Brook Street, and turned to look, Roger was beside him.

  "You drive."

  He was opening the door of the car as he cracked th
e order. As Roger touched the self-starter, the Saint climbed in beside him.

  Roger said hopelessly: "We've no idea which way they've gone."

  "Get going! There aren't so many streets round here. Make this the centre of a circle. First into Regent Street, cut back through Conduit Street to New Bond Street—Oxford Street— back through Hanover Square. Burn it, son, haven't you any imagination?"

  Now, in that district the inhabited streets are slashed across the map in a crazy tangle, and the two men might have taken almost any of them, according to the unknown destination for which they were making. The task of combing through that tangle, with so little qualification, struck Roger as being rather more hopeless than looking for one particular grain of sand in the Arizona Desert; but he couldn't tell the Saint that. The Saint wouldn't have admitted it, anyway, and Roger wouldn't have had the heart to try to convince him.

  And yet Roger was wrong, for the Saint sat beside him and drove with Roger's hands. And the Saint knew that people in cities tend to move in the best-beaten tracks, particularly in a strange city, for fear of losing their way—exactly as a man lost in the bush will follow a tortuous trail rather than strike across open country in the direction which he feels he should take. And the men looked foreign and probably were foreign, and the foreigner is afraid of losing himself in any but the long, straight, bright roads, though they may take him to his objec­tive by the most roundabout route.

  Unless, of course, the foreigners had taken a native guide in the shape of a taxi. But Conway could not suggest that to the Saint, either.

  "Keep on down here," Simon Templar was saying. "Never mind what I told you before. Now I should cut away to the right—down Vigo Street."