The Saint Closes the Case (13 page)

“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 Con
way 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, reason
able,
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 shoul
ders.

“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 the 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 objec
tive 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.”

Roger spun the wheel, and the Hirondel
skidded and
swooped across the very nose of an omnibus. For one
fleeting
second, in the bottleneck of Vigo Street, a taxi-driver
appeared to meditate, disputing their right of way; fortunately for all
concerned,
he abandoned that idea hurriedly.

Then Simon was speaking again.

“Right up Bond Street. That’s the
spirit.”

Roger said: “You’ll collect half a dozen
summonses before
you’ve finished with this.
…”

“Damn that,” said the Saint; and
they swept recklessly past
a constable who had endeavoured to hold them
up, and
drowned his outraged shout in the stutter of their departing
exhaust.

By Roger Conway that day’s driving was afterwards to be
remembered in nightmares, and that last drive more
than any other journey.

He obeyed the Saint blindly. It wasn’t Roger’s
car, anyway.
But he would never have believed that such feats of
murderous
road-hogging could have been performed in a London street
—if he had not been made to perform them himself.

And yet it seemed to be to no purpose; for
although he was
scanning,
in every second of that drive in which he was able to
take his eyes off the road, the faces of the pedestrians they passed, he
did not see the face he sought. And suppose, after
all, they did find the men they were after? What
could be done
about it in an open
London street—except call for the police,
whom they dared not appeal to?

But Roger Conway was alone in discouragement.

“We’ll try some side streets now,”
said the Saint steadily.
“Down there——”

And Roger, an automaton, lashed round the
corner on two
wheels.

And then, towards the bottom of George Street,
Roger
pointed, and
the Saint saw two men walking side by side.

“Those two!”

“For Heaven’s sake!” said the Saint softly,
meaninglessly,
desperately; and the car
sprang forward like a spurred horse
as
Roger opened the throttle wide.

The Saint was looking about him and rising
from his seat at
the same moment. In Conduit Street there had been
traffic;
but in George Street, at that moment, there was nothing
but a
stray car parked empty by the kerb, and three pedestrians go
ing the
other way, and—the two.

Said the Saint: “I think so… .”

“I’m sure,” said Roger; and, indeed,
he was quite sure, be
cause they had passed the two men by that
time, and the
Hirondel was swinging in to the kerb with a scream of
brakes
a dozen feet in front of them.

“Watch me!” said the Saint, and was
out of the car before
it had rocked to a standstill.

He walked straight into the path of the two
men, and they
glanced at him with curious but unsuspecting eyes.

He took the nearest man by the lapels of his
coat with one
hand, and the man was surprised. A moment later the man
was not
feeling surprise or any other emotion, for the Saint
looked one way and
saw Roger Conway following him, and
then he looked the other way and hit
the man under the jaw.

The man’s head whipped back as if it had been
struck by a cannon-ball; and, in fact, there was very little difference be
tween the
speed and force of the Saint’s fist and the speed and
force of a cannon-ball.

But the man never reached the ground. As his
knees gave limply under him, and his companion sprang forward with a
shout
awakening on his lips, the Saint caught him about the
waist and lifted him
from his feet, and heaved him bodily
across the pavement, so that he
actually fell into Conway’s
anus.

“Home, James,” said the Saint, and
turned again on his
heel.

On the lips of the second man there was that
awakening of
a shout, and in his eyes was the awakening of something
that
might have been taken for fear, or suspicion, or a kind of
vague and
startled perplexity; but these expressions were nebulous and half-formed, and
they never came to maturity,
for the Saint spun the man round by one
shoulder and locked
an arm about his neck in such a way that it was
impossible for
him to shout or register any other expression than that of
a
man about to
suffocate.

And in the same hold the Saint lifted him off
the ground, mostly by the neck, so that the man might well have thought that
his neck was about to be broken; but the only thing that was broken was the
spring of one of the cushions at the back
of the car when the
Saint heaved him on to it.

The Saint followed him into the back seat;
and, when the
man seemed ready to try another shout, Simon seized his
wrists
in a grip that might have changed the shout to a scream if the
Saint had
not uttered a warning.

“Don’t scream, sweetheart,” said the
Saint coldly. “It might
break both your arms.”

The man did not scream. Nor did he shout. And
on the floor of the car, at the Saint’s feet, his companion lay like one dead.

In the cold light of sanity that came long
afterwards, Simon
Templar was to wonder how on earth they got away with it.
Roger Conway, who was even then far too coldly sane for his
own comfort,
was wondering all the time how on earth they
were getting away with
it. But for the moment Simon Templar
was mad—and the fact remained that they
had got away with
it.

The Saint’s resourceful speed, and the
entirely fortuitous
desertedness of the street, had made it possible to carry
out the
abduction without a sound being made that might have at
tracted
attention. And the few people there were whose atten
tion might have been
attracted had passed on, undisturbed,
unconscious of the swift seconds of hectic melodrama that
had
whirled through George Street, Hanover
Square, behind their
peaceful backs.