The Saint Closes the Case (21 page)

Then he understood, and turned in his seat
with the bor
rowed automatic in his hand.

He was not, as he had admitted, the greatest
pistol shot
in the world; but on that night some divine genius guided
his
hand. Coolly he sighted, as if he had been practising on a range, and
shot out both the headlights of the car behind.
Then, undazzled, he
could see to puncture one of its front
wheels before he swept
round the next corner with a veritable
storm of pursuing
bullets humming about his ears and multi
plying the stars in
the windscreen.

He was not hit again. The same power must
have guarded
him as with a shield.

As he straightened the car up he felt his
injured shoulder
tenderly. As far as he. could discover, no bone had been
touched: it
was simply a flesh wound through the trapezius
muscle, not in itself
fatally disabling, but liable to numb the
arm and weaken him
from loss of blood. He folded his hand
kerchief into a pad,
and thrust it under his shirt to cover the
wound.

It was all he could do whilst driving along;
and he could
not stop to examine the wound more carefully or improvise
a
better dressing. In ten minutes, at most, the chase would be
resumed.
Unless the pursuers were as unlucky with their spare
as he had been. And
that was tod much to bank on.

But how had that car come upon the scene? Had
it been waiting up a side turning in support of the four men, and had
it started
on the warning of the first man’s scream or the
fourth man’s cry?
Impossible. He had been delayed too long
with the mending of
the puncture. The car would have ar
rived long before he had finished. Or
had it been on its way
to lay another ambush further along the road,
in case the first
one
failed?

Simon turned the questions in his mind as a
man might
flick over the pages of a book he already knew by heart,
and
passed over them all, seeking another page more easily read.

None was right. He recognised each of them,
grimly, as a
subconscious attempt to evade the facing of the
unpleasant
truth; and grimly he choked them down. The solution he had
found when that first shot pinged through the window-screen s
till
fitted in. If Marius had somehow escaped, or been
rescued, or contrived
somehow to convey a warning to his
gang, the obvious thing to do would be
to get in touch with
agents along the road. And warn the men in the
house on the
hill itself, at Bures. Then Marius would follow in
person. Yes,
it must have been Marius… .

Then the Saint remembered that the fat man and
the lean
man had not been tied up when he left Roger. And Roger
Conway,
incomparable lieutenant as he was, was a mere tyro
at this game without
the hand of his chief to guide him.

“Poor old Roger,” thought the
Saint; and it was typical of
him that he thought only of Roger in that
spirit.

And he drove on.

He drove with death in his heart and murder
in the clear,
cold blue eyes that followed the road like twin hawks
swerv
ing in the wake of their prey. And a mere wraith of the
Saintly
smile rested unawares on his lips.

For, figured out that way, it meant that he
was on a fore
doomed errand.

The thought gave him no pause.

Rather, he drove on faster, with the throbbing
of his
wounded shoulder submerged and lost beneath the more
savage and
positive throbbing of every pulse in his body.

Under the relentless pressure of his foot on
the accelerator, the figures on the speedometer cylinder, trembling past the
hairline in
the little window where they were visible, showed
crazier
and
crazier speeds.

Seventy-eight.

Seventy-nine.

Eighty.
        

Eighty-one … two … three … four, .
. .

Eighty-five.

“Not good enough for a race-track,”
thought the Saint, “but
on an ordinary road—and at night
…”

The wind of the Hirondel’s torrential passage
buffeted him
with almost animal blows, bellowing in his ears above the
thunderous fanfare of the exhaust.

For a nerve-shattering minute he held the car
at ninety.

“Patricia!
…”

And he seemed to hear her voice calling him:
“Simon!”

“Oh, my darling, my darling, I’m on my
way!” cried the
Saint, as if she could have heard him.

As he clamoured through Braintree, with
thirteen miles still
to go by the last signpost, two policemen
stepped out from the side of the road and barred his way.

Their intention was plain, though he had no
idea why they
should wish to stop him. Surely his mere defiance of a
London
constable’s order to stop would not have merited such a
drastic and
far-flung effort to bring him promptly to book! Or
had Marius, to make the assurance of his
own ambushes doubly
sure, informed Scotland
Yard against him with some ingenious and convincing story about his activities
as the Saint? But how
could Marius
have known of those? And Teal, he was certain, couldn’t.
…
Or
had Teal traced him from the Furillac more
quickly than he had expected? And, if so, how could Teal
have known that the Saint was on that road?

Whatever the answers to those questions might
be, the Saint
was not stopping for anyone on earth that night. He set
his
teeth, and kept his foot flat down on the accelerator.

The two policemen must have divined the
ruthlessness of
his defiance, for they jumped to safety in the nick of
time.

And then the Saint was gone again, breaking
out into the
open country with a challenging blast of klaxon and a
snarling
stammer of unsilenced exhaust, blazing through the night
like
the shouting vanguard of a charge of forgotten valiants.

11. How Roger Conway told the truth,

and Inspector Teal believed a lie

Inspector Teal set Hermann down in the
sitting-room, and
adroitly snapped a pair of handcuffs on his wrists. Then
he
turned his slumbrous eyes on Roger.

“Hullo, unconscious!” he sighed.

“Not quite,” retorted Roger
shortly. “But darn near it. I
got a good crack on the head giving
you that shout.”

Teal shook his head. He was perpetually
tired, and even
that slight movement seemed to cost him a gargantuan
effort.

“Not me,” he said heavily. “My
name isn’t Norman. What
are you doing there?”

“Pretending to be a sea-lion,” said
Roger sarcastically. “It’s
a jolly game. Wouldn’t you like to join in?
Hermann will
throw us the fish to catch in our mouths.”

Mr. Teal sighed again, slumbrously.

“What’s your name?” he demanded.

Roger did not answer for a few seconds.

In that time he had to make a decision that
might alter the course of the Saint’s whole life, and Roger’s own with it—if
not the
course of all European history. It was a tough de
cision to take.

Should he give his name as Simon Templar? That
was the
desperate question that leapt into his head immediately.
…
It so happened that he never carried much in his pockets,
and so far as he could remember there was nothing
in his wal
let that would give him
away when he was searched. The
fraud
would certainly be discovered before very long, but he
might be able to bluff it out for twenty-four
hours. And in all that time the Saint would be free—free to save Pat, return to
Maidenhead, deal with Vargan,
complete the mission to which he had pledged himself.

To the possible, and even probable,
consequences to himself
of such a course, Roger never gave a thought.
The sacrifice
would be a small one compared with what it might achieve.

“I am Simon Templar,” said Roger.
“I believe you’re look
ing for me.”

Hermann’s eyes widened.

“It is a lie!” he burst out.
“He
is not Templar!”

Teal turned his somnambulistic gaze upon the
man.

“Who asked you to speak?” he demanded.

“Don’t take any notice of him,”
said Roger. “He doesn’t
know anything about it. I’m Templar, all
right. And I’ll go
quietly.”

“But he is not Templar!” persisted
Hermann excitedly.
“Templar has been gone an hour! That man——
”

“You shut your disgusting mouth!”
snarled Roger. “And
if you don’t, I’ll shut it for you. You——
”

Teal blinked.

“Somebody’s
telling a naughty
fib,” he remarked sapiently. “Now will you both shut up a
minute?”

He locomoted fatly across the room, and
stooped over
Roger. But he based his decision on the tailor’s tab
inside
Roger’s coat pocket, and Roger had not thought of that.

“I’m afraid you’re the story-teller,
whoever you are,” he
sighed.

“That’s my real name,” said Roger
bitterly. “Conway—
Roger Conway.”

“It sounds more likely.”

“Though what that fatherless streak of
misery——
”

“A squeal,” explained Teal
patiently. “A time-honoured
device among crooks to get off lightly
themselves by helping
the police to jump more heavily on their
pals. I suppose he
is
your pal?” added
the detective sardonically. “You seem
to know each other’s
names.”

Roger was silent.

So that was that. Very quickly settled. And what next?

Hermann, then, had patently decided to
squeal. Which
seemed odd, considering the type of man he had made Her
mann out
to be. But… .

Roger looked at the man, and suddenly saw the
truth. It
wasn’t a squeal. The protest had been thoughtless,
instinctive,
made in a momentary access of panic lest his master should
be proved to have made a mistake. Even at that moment Her
mann was
regretting it, and racking his brains for a lie to
cover it up. Racking
his brains, also, for his own defence… .

The situation remained just about as
complicated as it had
been before the incident. Now Hermann would be
racking
his brains for lies, and Conway would be racking his brains for lies,
and both of them would have the single purpose of cover
ing their
leaders at all costs, and they’d both inevitably be
contradicting each
other right and left, and both inevitably
ploughing deeper and
deeper into the mire. And neither of them could tell the truth.
…

But could neither of them tell the truth?

The idea shattered the groping darkness of
Roger’s dilemma
like the sudden kindling of a battery of Kleig arcs. The
bold
ness of it
took his breath away.

Could neither of them tell the truth?

As
Roger would have prayed for the
guidance of his leader
at that moment, his leader was there to help
him.

Wasn’t the dilemma the same in principle as
the one which
the Saint had solved an hour ago? The same deadlock, the
same
cross-purposes, the same cataleptic standstill? The same
old story
of the irresistible force and the immovable object?
… And the Saint
had solved it. By sweeping the board clear
with the one wild
move that wasn’t allowed for in the rules.

Mightn’t it work again—at least, to clear the
air—and, in
the resultant reshuffling, perhaps disclose a loophole
that had
not been there before—if Roger did much the same thing—
did the one
thing that he couldn’t possibly do
—and told the
truth?