The Saint Closes the Case (9 page)

“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 Govern
ment
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 out 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 cer
tain 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 with
out 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 ap
pealing 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 Nor
man’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 be
hind.
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 cam
paign, 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 pre
cision 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, amaz
ingly. “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 rush
ing 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 clat
tered 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 but 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.