The Saint vs Scotland Yard (6 page)

Patricia laughed suddenly. Her hands fell on his shoulders.

“Give me a cigarette, boy,” she said, “and tell me what’s
been happening.”

And he did so—though what he had to tell was little
enough. And
Chief Inspector Teal himself knew no more. The
Scorpion had grown up
in darkness, had struck from the dark
ness, and crawled back deeper into the
dark. Those who could
have spoken dared not speak, and those who
might have
spoken died too soon …

But as he told his tale, the Saint saw the light of all the mad
old days
awakening again in Patricia’s eyes, and it was in a full
and
complete understanding of that light that he came to the
one thing
that Chief Inspector Teal would have given his ears
to know.

“Tonight, at nine——
”

“You’ll be there?”

“I shall,” said the Saint, with the slightest tightening of his
lips. “Shot up by a bloody amateur! Good God! Suppose he’d
hit me!
Pat, believe papa—when I pass out, there’s going to
be a first-class
professional, hall-marked on every link, at the thick end of the gun.”

Patricia, in the deep armchair, settled her sweet golden head among the
cushions.

“What time do we start?” she asked calmly.
For a
second, glancing at him sidelong. She saw the old
stubborn hardening of
the line of his jaw. It happened instinc
tively, almost without
his knowing it; and then suddenly he
swung off the arm of the chair in the
breath of an even older
Saintly laughter.

“Why not?” he said. “It’s impossible—preposterous—un
thinkable—but
why not? The old gang have gone—Dicky,
Archie, Roger—gone
and got spliced on to women and come
over all bowler-hat. There’s only you
left. It’d make the vicar’s
wife let out one piercing squawk and swallow
her knitting-
needles, but who cares? If you’d really like to have
another
sniff at the old brew——
”

“Give me the chance!”

Simon grinned.

“And you’d flop after it like a homesick walrus down a
water-chute,
wouldn’t you?”

“Faster,”
she said.

“And so you shall,” said the Saint. “The little date I’ve
got
for tonight will be all the merrier for an extra soul on the side
of
saintliness and soft drinks. And if things don’t turn out
exactly
according to schedule, there may be an encore for your
especial
entertainment. Pat, I have a feeling that this is going
to be our
week!”

Chapter VI

It was one of the Saint’s most charming characteristics
that he
never hurried and never worried. He insisted on spend
ing an idle hour in
the cocktail bar of the May Fair Hotel,
and seven-thirty had
struck before he collected his car, inserted
Patricia, and turned
the Hirondel’s long silver nose north
wards at an unwontedly moderate speed.
They dined at
Hatfield, after parking the Hirondel in the hotel garage,
and
after dinner the Saint commanded coffee and liqueurs and
proceeded
to incinerate two enormous cigars of a plutocratically
delicate bouquet. He
had calculated exactly how long it
would take to walk out to location,
and he declined to start
one moment before his time-table demanded it.

“I am a doomed man,” he said sombrely, “and I have my
privileges. If necessary, the
Scorpion will wait for me.”

Actually he had no intention of being late, for the plan of
campaign
that he had spent the nicotinised interval after din
ner adapting to
Patricia’s presence required them to be at the
rendezvous a shade in
advance of the rest of the party.

But this the Scorpion did not know.

He drove up slowly, with his headlights dimmed, scanning the dark
shadows at the side of the road. Exactly beside the
point where his
shaded lights picked up the grey-white blur of
the appointed
milestone, he saw the tiny red glow of a ciga
rette-end, and applied
his brakes gently. The cigarette-end
dropped and vanished under an
invisible heel, and out of the
gloom a tall dark shape stretched slowly
upwards.

The Scorpion’s right hand felt the cold bulk of the auto
matic
pistol in his pocket as his other hand lowered the near
side
window. He leaned over towards the opening.

“Garrot?”

The question came in a whisper to the man at the side of
the road,
and he stepped slowly forward and answered in a throaty undertone.

“Yes, sir?”

The Scorpion’s head was bent low, so that the man out
side the
car could only see the shape of his hat.

“You obeyed your orders. That is good. Come closer… .”

The gun slipped silently out of the Scorpion’s pocket, his forefinger
curling quickly round the trigger as he drew it. He
brought it up without
a sound, so that the tip of the barrel
rested on the ledge
of the open window directly in line with
the chest of the man
twelve inches away. One lightning glance to left and right told him that the
road was deserted.

“Now there is just one thing more——
”

“There is,” agreed Patricia Holm crisply. “Don’t
move!”

The Scorpion heard, and the glacial concentration of dispassionate
unfriendliness in her voice froze him where he sat. He
had not heard the
noiseless turning of the handle of the door
behind him, nor
noticed the draught of cooler air that trickled
through the car; but
he felt the chilly hardness of the circle of
steel that pressed
into the base of his skull, and for a second
he was paralysed. And
in that second his target vanished.

“Drop that gun—outside the car. And let me hear it go!”

Again that crisp, commanding voice, as inclemently smooth
as an
arctic sea, whisked into his eardrums like a thin cold
needle. He hesitated
for a moment, and then, as the muzzle of
the gun behind his
neck increased its pressure by one warning
ounce, he moved his
hand obediently and relaxed his fingers. His automatic rattled on to the
runningboard, and almost
immediately the figure that he had taken for
Long Harry rose
into view again, and was framed in the square space of
window.

But the voice that acknowledged the receipt of
item,
Colts,
automatic,
scorpions, for the use of, one, was not the voice of
Long Harry. It was the
most cavalier, the most mocking, the
most cheerful voice that the Scorpion
had ever heard—he
noted those qualities about it subconsciously, for he was
not in
a position to revel in the discovery with any hilariously whole
hearted
abandon.

“O.K… . And how are you, my Scorpion?”

“Who are you?” asked the man in the car.

He still kept his head lowered, and under the brim of his
hat his
eyes were straining into the gloom for a glimpse of the
man who
had spoken; but the Saint’s face was in shadow.
Glancing away to one
side, the Scorpion could focus the head
of the girl whose gun
continued to impress his cervical
vertebrae with the sense of its rocklike steadiness; but a
dark
close-fitting hat covered the upper part
of her head, and a
scarf that was
loosely knotted about her neck had been pulled
up to veil her face from
the eyes downwards.

The Saint’s light laugh answered the question.

“I am the world’s worst gunman, and the lady behind you is
the next
worst, but at this range we can say that we never
miss. And that’s all
you need to worry about just now. The
question that really arises is—who are you?”

“That is what you have still to discover,” replied the man in
the car impassively.
“Where is Garrot?”

“Ah! That’s what whole synods of experts are still trying to
discover.
Some would say that he was simply rotting, and
others would say that
that was simply rot. He might be float
ing around the glassy sea, clothed in
white samite, mystic,
wonderful, with his new regulation nightie
flying in the breeze
behind; or he might be attending to the
central heating plant
in the basement. I was never much of a
theologian myself——
”

“Is he dead?”

“Very,” said the Saint cheerfully. “I organised the
decease
myself.”

“You
killed him?”

“Oh, no! Nothing like that about me. I merely arranged for
him to die.
If you survive to read your morning paper tomor
row, you may be
informed that the body of an unknown man
has been fished out of
the Thames. That will be Long Harry.
Now come out and take your curtain,
sweetheart!”

The Saint stepped back and twitched open the door, pocket
ing the
Scorpion’s gun as he did so.

And at the same moment he had a queer feeling of futility. He knew that
that was not the moment when he was destined
to lay the Scorpion
by the heels.

Once or twice before, in a life which had only lasted as long
as it had
by reason of a vigilance that never blinked for one split second, and a
forethought that was accustomed to skid along half a dozen moves ahead of the
opposition performers
in every game with the agility of a startled
streak of lightning
zipping through space on ball bearings with the wind
behind
it, he had experienced the same sensation—of feeling as if an
intangible
shutter had guillotined down in front of one vitally
receptive lens in his
alertness. Something was going to happen —his trained intuition told him that
beyond all possibility of
argument, and an admixture of plain
horse-sense told him
what would be the general trend of that
forthcoming event,
equally beyond all possibility of argument—but exactly
what shape that event would take was more than any faculty of his
could divine.

A tingling stillness settled upon the scene, and in the still
ness some
fact that he should have been reckoning with
seemed to hammer
frantically upon that closed window in his
mind. He knew that
that was so, but his brain produced no
other response. Just
for that fractional instant of time a cog
slipped one pinion,
and the faultless machine was at fault.
The blind spot that
roams around somewhere in every human
cerebral system suddenly broke its
moorings, and drifted down
over the one minute area of co-ordinating
apparatus of which
Simon Templar had most need; and no effort of his could
dislodge
it.

“Step out, Cuthbert,” snapped the Saint, with a slight rasp
in his
voice.

In the darkness inside the car, a slight blur of white caught
and
interested Simon’s eye. It lay on the seat beside the driver.
With that
premonition of failure dancing about in his subcon
scious and making
faces at his helpless stupidity, the Saint
grabbed at the straw.
He got it away—a piece of paper—and
the Scorpion, seeing it go, snatched
wildly but not soon
enough.

Simon stuffed the paper into his coat pocket, and with his
other hand
he took the Scorpion by the neck.

“Step!” repeated the Saint crisply.

And then
his forebodings were fulfilled—simply and straightforwardly, as he had known
they would be.

The Scorpion had never stopped the engine of his car—that
was the
infinitesimal yet sufficient fact that had been strug
gling ineffectively
to register itself upon the Saint’s brain. The
sound was scarcely anything at all, even
to the Saint’s hypersen
sitive ears—scarcely
more than a rhythmic pulsing disturbance
of the stillness of the night.
Yet all at once—too late—it seemed
to rise
and racket in his mind like the thunder of a hundred
dynamos; and it was then that he saw his mistake.

But that was after the Scorpion had let in the clutch.