The Saint Closes the Case (10 page)

He might have said something about it. By
ordinary pro
cedure he should have given thanks to his saviour in a
break
ing voice; they should have wrung each other’s hands and
wept gently
on each other’s shoulders for a while; but some
thing 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
junc
ture. By some peaceful and lazy fireside, in his doddering old
age,
possibly … But in the immediate present he was con
cerned 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 con
cerned 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.

Conway was shaking Simon by the shoulder,
babbling:
“They’re getting away! Saint, why don’t you
shoot?”

Mechanically the Saint raised his automatic,
though he
knew that the chance of putting in an effective shot, in
that
light, was about a hundred to one against anybody—and the
Saint, as
a pistol shot, had never been in the championship
class.

Then he lowered the gun again, with something
like a gasp,
and his left hand closed on Conway’s arm in a vice-like
grip.

“They’ll never do it!”
he cried.
“I
left the car slap op
posite the lane, and they haven’t got room to
turn!”

And Roger Conway, watching, fascinated, saw
the lean
blue
shape of the Furillac revealed in the blaze of the flying
headlights, and heard, before the crash, the
scream of tortured tyres tearing ineffectually at the road.

Then the lights vanished in a splintering
smash, and there
was
darkness and a moment’s silence.

“We’ve got ‘em!” rapped the Saint
exultantly.

The bulky shadow had left the gate and was
lumbering to
wards them up the lane. The Saint was over the hedge like
a
cat, landing lightly on his toes directly in Teal’s path, and
the detective saw him too late.

“Sorry!” murmured the Saint, and
really meant it; but he
crowded every ounce of his one hundred and sixty
pounds of , dynamic fighting weight into the blow he jerked at the pit of
Teal’s stomach.

Ordinarily, the Saint entertained a sincere
regard for the
police force in general and Chief Inspector Teal in
particular,
but he had no time that night for more than the most
laconic courtesies. Moreover, Inspector Teal had a gun, and, in the
circumstances,
would be liable to shoot first and ask ques
tions afterwards.
Finally, the Saint had his own ideas and
plans on the subject
of the rescue of Vargan from the raiding
party, and they did
not include either the co-operation or in
terference of the
law. These three cogent arguments he
summed up in that one pile-driving jolt
to Teal’s third waist
coat button: and the detective dropped with a
grunt of agony.
Then the Saint turned and went flying up the lane after
Roger
Conway.

He heard a shout behind him, and again a gun
barked
savagely in the night. The Saint felt the wind of the bullet ac
tually
stroke his cheek. Clearly, then, there was at least one
more police
survivor of Marius’s raid; but Simon judged
that further disputes
with the law could be momentarily post
poned. He swerved
like a hare and raced on, knowing that
only the luckiest—or
unluckiest—of blind shots could have come so near him in such a light, and having
no fear that a
second would have the same fortune.

As it happened, the detective who had come
out of the
garden behind Teal must have realised the same feeling,
for
he held his fire. But as the Saint stopped by the yellow sedan,
now locked
inextricably with the wreckage of the battered
Furillac, he heard the
man pounding on through the darkness
towards him.

Conway was opening the near-side door; and it
was a
miracle that his career was not cut short then and there by
the shot
from the interior of the car that went snarling past
his ear. But there
was no report—just the throaty
plop!
of an
efficient silencer—and
he understood that the only shooting
they had heard had been done by the
police guards. The raiders had not been so rowdy as the Saint had accused them
of
being.

The next moment Simon Templar had opened a
door on
the other side of the sedan.

“Naughty boy!” said Simon Templar
reproachfully.

His long arm shot over the gun artist’s
shoulder, and his sinewy hand closed and twisted on the automatic in time to
send the
next shot through the roof of the car instead of
through Conway’s
brain.

Then the Saint had the gun screwed round till
it rammed
into the man’s own ribs.

“Now shoot, honeybunch,” encouraged
the Saint; but the
man sat quite still.

He was in the back of the car, beside Vargan.
There was no
one in the driver’s seat, and the door on that side was
open.
The Saint wondered who the chauffeur had been, and where he had got to,
and whether it had been Angel Face himself;
but he had little
time to give to that speculation, and any pos
sibility of danger
from the missing driver’s quarter would
have to be faced if
and when it materialised.

Conway yanked Vargan out into the road on one
side; and
the Saint, taking a grip on the gun artist’s neck with
his free
hand, yanked him out into the road on the other side. One
wrench disarmed the man, and then the Saint spun him smartly
round by
the neck.

“Sleep, my pretty one,” said the
Saint, and uppercut him
with a masterly blend of science and brute
strength.

He turned, to look down the muzzle of an
automatic, and
put up his hands at once. He had slipped his own gun into
his pocket
in order to deal more comfortably with the man from the car, and he knew it
would be dangerous to try to
reach it.

“Lovely weather we’ve been having,
haven’t we?” drawled
the Saint genially.

This, he decided, must be the guard who had
fired at him
down the lane; the build, though hefty, was nothing like
Angel
Face’s gigantic proportions. Besides, Angel Face, or any of
his men,
would have touched off the trigger ten seconds ago.

The automatic nosed into the Saint’s chest,
and he felt his
pocket deftly lightened of its gun. The man exhaled his
satis
faction in a long breath.

“That’s one of you, anyway,” he
remarked grimly.

“Pleased to meet you,” said the
Saint.

And there it was.

The Saint’s voice was as unperturbed as if he
had been
conducting some trivial conversation in a smokeroom,
instead
of talking with his hands in the air and an unfriendly detective
focussing a Smith-Wesson on his diaphragm. And the
corner was
undoubtedly tight. If the circumstances had been
slightly different,
the Saint might have dealt with this obstacle
in the same way as he had dealt with
Marius on their first en
counter. Marius had
had the drop on him just as effectively
as this. But Marius had been expecting a walk-over, and had
therefore
been just the necessary fraction below concert pitch;
whereas this man was obviously expecting trouble. In view of what he
must have been through already that night, he would have been a born fool if he
hadn’t. And something told Simon that the man wasn’t quite a born fool. Something
in the busi
nesslike steadiness of
that automatic …

But the obstacle had to be surmounted, all the
same.

“Get Vargan away, Roger,” sang the
Saint cheerfully, coolly.
“See you again some time… .”

He took two paces sideways, keeping his hands
well up.

“Stop that!” cracked the detective,
and the Saint promptly
stopped it; but now he was in a position to
see round the back
of the sedan.

The red tail-light of the Hirondel was
moving—Norman
Kent was backing the car up closer to save time.

Conway bent and heaved the Professor up on to
his shoulder
like a bag of potatoes; then he looked back hesitantly at
Simon.

“Get him away while you’ve got the
chance, you fool!”
called the Saint impatiently.

And even then he really believed that he was
destined to
sacrifice himself to cover the retreat. Not that he was
going
quietly. But …

He saw Conway turn and break into a trot, and
sighed his
relief.

Then, in a flash, he saw how a chance might be
given, and
tensed his muscles warily. And the chance was given him.

It wasn’t the detective’s fault. He merely
attempted the im
possible. He was torn between the desire to retain his
prisoner
and the impulse to find out what was happening to the man
it was his duty to guard. He knew that that man was being
taken away,
and he knew that he ought to be trying to do
something to prevent
it; and yet his respect for the despera
tion of his captive
stuck him up as effectively as if it had been
the captive who held
the gun. And, of course, the detective
ought to have shot
the captive and gone on with the rest of
the job; but he
tried, in a kind of panic, to find a less blood
thirsty solution, and
the solution he found wasn’t a solution at all. He tried to divide his mind and
apply it to two things at once; and that, he ought to have known, was a fatal
thing
to do with a man like the Saint. But at that moment he didn’t
know the
Saint very well.

Simon Templar, in those two sideways steps
that the de
tective had allowed him to take, had shifted into such a
posi
tion that the detective’s lines of vision, if he had been able
to look two
ways at once, at Conway with one eye and at the
Saint with the other,
would have formed an obtuse angle.
Therefore, since the detective’s optic
orbits were not capable of this feat, he could not see what Conway was doing
without
taking his
eyes off Simon Templar.

And the detective was foolish.

For an instant his gaze left the Saint. How
he imagined he
would get away with it will remain a mystery. Certainly
Simon
did not inquire the answer then, nor discover it afterwards.
For in that
instant’s grace, ignoring the menace of the auto
matic, the Saint shot
out a long, raking left that gathered
strength from every muscle in his body
from the toes to the
wrist

And the Saint was on his way to the Hirondel
before
the man reached the ground.

Conway had only just dumped his struggling
burden into
the back seat when the Saint sprang to the running-board
and
clapped Norman Kent on the shoulder.

“Right away, sonny boy!” cried the
Saint; and the Hiron
del was sliding away as he and Conway climbed
into the back.

He collected Vargan’s flailing legs in an
octopus embrace,
and held the writhing scientist while Conway pinioned his
ankles with the rope they had brought for the purpose. The
expert
hands of the first set of kidnappers had already dealt
with the rest of
him—his wrists were lashed together with a
length of stout cord, and a professional
gag stifled the screams
which otherwise he
would undoubtedly have been loosing.