The Saint Closes the Case (The Saint Series) Read online

  “You gain nothing…”

  “On the contrary, I gain everything,” said the Saint, in that dreamy sing-song. “I gain everything, or lose more than everything. But I’m tired of haggling. I’m tired of playing your safety game. You’re going to play my game now, Marius, my cherub. “Wait a second while I rearrange the scene…”

  As Conway came back with a length of cord, the Saint took from his pocket a little shining cylinder and screwed it swiftly on to the muzzle of the gun he held.

  “This will now make no noise worth mentioning,” he said, “You know the gadget, don’t you? So let me have your decision quickly, Marius, before I remember what I want to do more than anything else in the world.”

  “It will not help you to kill me.”

  “It will not help me to let you go. But we’ve had all that before. Besides, I mightn’t kill you. I might just shoot you through the kidneys, and long before you died of the wound you’d be ready to give me anything to put you out of your agony. I grant you it wouldn’t improve my chance of finding Miss Holm, but, on the other hand, it wouldn’t make it any worse—and you’d be so dead that it wouldn’t worry you, anyway. Think it over. I give you two minutes. Roger, time him by that clock!”

  Marius put his hands behind him at once.

  “Suppose I save you the time. I will be tied now—if you think that will help you.”

  “Carry on, Roger,” said the Saint.

  He knew that Marius still did not believe him—that the fat man’s description of his ordeal had not made the impression it should have made. He knew that Marius’s acquiescence was nothing but a bland calling of what the giant estimated to be a hopeless bluff. And he stood by, watching with a face of stone, while Conway tied the man’s hands behind his back and thrust him into a chair.

  “Take over the peashooter again, Roger.”

  Then an idea struck the Saint.

  He said, “Before we begin, Roger, you might search him.”

  A glimmer of fear, which nothing else in that interview had aroused, contorted the giant’s face like a spasm, and the Saint could have shouted for joy. Marius struggled like a fiend, but he had been well bound, and his effort was wasted.

  The weak spot in the armour…

  Simon waited, almost trembling. Torture he had been grimly prepared to apply, but he recognised at the same time how futile it was likely to prove against a man like Marius. He might have resumed the torture of the fat man, but that also would have been less efficacious now that the moral support—or threat—of Marius was there to counteract it. He would obtain some sort of information, certainly—the limits of human endurance would inevitably see to that—but he would have no means of proving its truth. Something in writing, though…

  And the colossal facility of the success made the Saint’s heart pound like a trip-hammer, in a devastating terror lest the success should turn out to be no success at all. For, if success it was, the rightness of his riposte could not have been more shatteringly demonstrated. If it were true—if Marius had plunged so heavily on the rules of the game as he knew them—if Marius had been so blindly certain that, under the menace which he knew he could hold over them, neither of the men in Brook Street would dare to lay a hand on him—if…

  “English swine!”

  “Naughty temper,” said Roger equably.

  “Thank you,” said the Saint, taking the letter which Roger handed to him. “Careless of you, Marius, to come here with that on you. Personally, I never commit anything to writing. It’s dangerous. But perhaps you meant to post it on your way, and forgot it.”

  He glanced at the address.

  “Our old friend the Crown Prince,” he murmured. “This should be interesting.”

  He slit open the envelope with one swift flick of his thumb, and drew out the typewritten sheet.

  It was in Marius’s own language, but that was a small difficulty. The Saint took it with him to the telephone, and in a few minutes he was through to a friend who held down a soft job at the Foreign Office by virtue of an almost incredible familiarity with every language on the map of Europe.

  “Glad to find you in,” said the Saint rapidly. “Listen—I’ve got a letter here which I want translated. I don’t know how to pronounce any of it, but I’ll spell it out word by word. Ready?”

  It took time, but the Saint had found an unwonted patience. He wrote between the lines as the receiver dictated, and presently it was finished.

  He came back smiling.

  Roger prompted him. “Which, being interpreted, means…”

  “I’m leaving now.”

  “Where for?”

  “The house on the hill, Bures, Suffolk.”

  “She’s there?”

  “According to the letter.”

  The Saint passed it over, and Conway read the scribbled notes between the lines: “…the girl, and she is being taken to a quiet part of Suffolk…Bures…house on the hill, far enough from the village to be safe…cannot fail this time…”

  Conway handed it back.

  “I’ll come with you.”

  The Saint shook his head.

  “Sorry, son, but you’ve got to stay here and look after the menagerie. They’re my hostages.”

  “But suppose anything goes wrong, Simon?”

  The Saint consulted his watch. It was still stopped. He wound it up and set it by the mantelpiece clock.

  “I’ll be back,” he said, “before four o’clock tomorrow morning. That allows for punctures, breakdowns, and everything else. If I’m not here on the stroke, shoot these birds and come after me.”

  Marius’s voice rasped in on Conway’s hesitation.

  “You insist on being foolish, Templar? You realise that my men at Bures have orders to use Miss Holm as a hostage in an attack or any other emergency?”

  Simon Templar went over and looked down at him.

  “I could have guessed it,” he said. “And it makes me weep for your bad generalship, Marius. I suppose you realise that if they sacrifice her, your first and last hold over me is gone? But that’s only half the fundamental weakness in your bright scheme. The other half is that you’ve got to pray against yourself. Pray that I win tonight, Marius—pray as you’ve never prayed before in your filthy life! Because, if I fail, I’m coming straight back here to kill you in the most hideous way I can invent. I mean that.”

  He swung round, cool, cold, deliberate, and went to the door as if he were merely going for a stroll round the block before turning in. But at the door he turned to cast a slow, straight glance at Marius, and then to smile at Roger.

  “All the best, old boy,” said Roger.

  “‘Battle, murder, and sudden death,’” quoted the Saint softly, with a gay, reckless gesture, and the Saintly smile could never have shone more superbly. “Watch me,” said the Saint, and was gone.

  9

  HOW ROGER CONWAY WAS CARELESS, AND HERMANN ALSO MADE A MISTAKE

  Roger Conway shifted vaguely across the room as the hum of Norman Kent’s Hirondel faded and was lost in the noises of Regent Street. He came upon the side table where the decanter lived, helped himself to a drink, and remembered that last cavalier wave of the Saint’s hand and the pitiful torment in the Saint’s eyes. Then he put down the drink and took a cigarette instead, suddenly aware that he might have to remain wide awake and alert all night.

  He looked at Marius. The giant had sunk into an inscrutable apathy, but he spoke.

  “If you would allow it, I should like to smoke a cigar.”

  Roger deliberated.

  “It might be arranged—if you don’t need your hands free.”

  “I can try. The case is in my breast pocket.”

  Conway found it, bit the end, and put it in Marius’s mouth and lighted it. Marius thanked him.

  “Will you join me?”

  Roger smiled.

  “Try something newer,” he advised. “I never take smokes from strangers these days, on principle. Oh, and by the way
, if I catch you trying to burn through your ropes with the end, I shall have much pleasure in grinding it into your face till it goes out.”

  Marius shrugged and made no reply, and Roger resumed his cigarette.

  Coming upon the telephone, he hesitated, and then called a number. He was through in a few minutes.

  “Can I speak to Mr Kent, Orace?—Oh, hullo, Norman!”

  “Who’s that? Roger?”

  “Yes. I rang up in case you were getting worried about us. Heaven knows what time we shall get down…No, the car’s all right—as far as I know. Simon’s gone off in it…Brook Street…Well—Marius has got Pat…Yes, I’m afraid so. Got her on the train. But we’ve got Marius…Yes, he’s here. I’m standing guard. We’ve found out where Pat’s been taken, and Simon’s gone after her…Somewhere in Suffolk.”

  “Shall I come up?”

  “How? It’s too late for a train, and you won’t be able to hire anything worth calling a car at this hour. I don’t see what you could do, anyway…Look here, I can’t talk any more now. I’ve got to keep both eyes on Marius and Co.… I’ll leave it to you…Right. So long, old boy.”

  He hooked up the receiver.

  It occurred to him afterwards that there was something that Norman could have done. He could have tied up the fat man and the lean man, both of whom were now conscious and free to move as much as they dared. That ought to have been done before Simon left. They ought to have thought of it—or Simon ought to have thought of it. But the Saint couldn’t, reasonably, have been expected to think of it, or anything else like it, at such a time. Roger knew both the Saint and Pat too well to be able to blame Simon for the omission. Simon had been mad when he left. The madness had been there all the time, since half past nine, boiling up in fiercer and fiercer waves behind all the masks of calmness and flippancy and patience that the Saint had assumed at intervals, and it had been at its whitest heat behind that last gay smile and gesture from the door.

  Half an hour passed.

  Roger was beginning to feel hungry. He had had a snack in the station buffet while he was waiting, but the satisfaction of that was starting to wear off. If he had gone to the kitchen to forage, that would have meant compelling his three prisoners to precede him at the point of his gun. And the kitchen was small…Ruefully Roger resigned himself to a hungry vigil. He looked unhappily at the clock. Four and a half hours before he could shoot the prisoners and dash to the pantry, if he obeyed the Saint’s orders. But it would have to be endured. The Saint might have managed the cure, and got away with it, but then, the Saint was a fully qualified adventurer, and what he didn’t know about the game was not knowledge. Conway was infinitely less experienced, and knew it. In the cramped space of the kitchen, while he was trying to locate food with one eye and one hand, he might easily be taken off his guard and overpowered. And, in the circumstances, the risk was too great to take. If only Norman decided to come…

  Roger Conway sat on the edge of the table, swinging the gun idly in his hand. Marius remained silent. His cigar had gone out, and he had not asked for it to be relighted. The fat man slouched in another chair, watching Roger with venomous eyes. The lean man stood awkwardly in one corner. He had not spoken since he recovered consciousness, but he also watched. The clock ticked monotonously.

  Roger started to whistle to himself. It was extraordinary how quickly the strain began to tell. He wished he were like the Saint. The Saint wouldn’t have gone hungry, for one thing. The Saint would have made the prisoners cook him a four-course dinner, lay the table, and wait on him. The Saint would have kept them busy putting on the gramophone and generally running his errands. The Saint would probably have written a letter and composed a few limericks into the bargain. He certainly couldn’t have been oppressed by the silence and the concentrated malevolence of three pairs of eyes. He would have dismissed the silence and whiled away the time by indulging in airy persiflage at their expense.

  But it was the silence and the watchfulness of the eyes. Roger began to understand why he had never felt an irresistible urge to become a lion-tamer. The feeling of being alone in a cage of wild beasts, he decided, must be very much like what he was experiencing at that moment. The same fragile dominance of the man, the same unresting watchfulness of the beasts, the same tension, the same snarling submission of the beasts, the same certainty that the beasts were only waiting, waiting, waiting. These human beasts were sizing him up, searching his soul, stripping him naked of all bluff, finding out all his weaknesses in silence, planning, scheming, considering, alert to pounce. It was getting on Roger’s nerves. Presently, sooner or later, somehow, he knew, there would be a bid for liberty. But how would it happen?

  And that uncertainty must go on for hours and hours, perhaps. Move and counter-move, threat and counter-threat, the snarl and the lash, the silence and the watchfulness and the eyes. How long?…

  Then from the fat man’s lips broke the first rattle of words, in his own language.

  “Stop that!” rapped Conway, with his nerves all on edge. “If you’ve anything to say, say it in English. Any more of that, and you’ll get a clip over the ear with the soft end of this gun.”

  And the man deliberately and defiantly spoke again, still in his own language.

  Roger came off the table as though it had been red-hot. He stood over the man with his hand raised, and the man stared back with sullen insolence.

  Then it happened.

  The plan was beautifully simple.

  Roger had forgotten for the moment that only Marius’s hands were tied. The giant’s feet were free. And, standing over the fat man’s chair, where he had been so easily lured by the bait that was also an explanation of the trap to the others, Roger’s back was half turned to Marius.

  Conway heard the movement behind him, but he had no time to spin round to meet it. The giant’s foot crashed into the small of his back with a savage force that might well have broken the spine—if it had struck the spine. But it struck to one side of the spine, in a place almost as vulnerable, and Roger went to the floor with a gasp of agony.

  Then both the fat man and the lean man leapt on him together.

  The gun was wrenched out of Roger’s hand. He could not have seen to shoot, anyway, for the pain had blinded him. He could not cry out—his throat was constricted with a horrible numbing nausea, and his lungs seemed to be paralysed. The lean man’s fist smacked again and again into his defenceless jaw.

  “Untie me quickly, fool!” hissed Marius, and the fat man obeyed, to the accompaniment of a babbling flood of excuses.

  Marius cut him short.

  “I will consider your punishment later, Otto. Perhaps this will atone for a little of your imbecility. Tie him up now with this rope…”

  Roger lay still. Somehow—he did not know how—he retained his consciousness. There was no strength in any of his limbs; he could see nothing; his battered head sang and ached and throbbed horribly; the whole of his body was in the grip of a crushing, cramping agony that centred on the point in his back where he had taken the kick, and from that point spread iron tentacles of helplessness into every muscle; yet his mind hung aloof, high and clear above the roaring blackness, and he heard and remembered every word that was said.

  “Look for more rope, Hermann,” Marius was ordering.

  The lean man went out and returned. Roger’s feet were bound as his wrists had been.

  Then Marius was at the telephone.

  “A trunk call…Bures…”

  An impatient pause. Then Marius cursed gutturally.

  “The line is out of order? Tell me when it will be working again. It is a matter of life and death…Tomorrow?…God in Heaven! A telegram—would a telegram be delivered in Bures tonight?”

  “I’ll put you through to…”

  Pause again.

  “Yes. I wish to ask if a telegram would be delivered in Bures tonight…Bures, Suffolk…You think not?…You are almost sure not?…Very well. Thank you. No, I will not send it now.”
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  He replaced the receiver, and lifted it again immediately.

  This time he spoke to Westminster 9999, and gave staccato instructions which Roger could not understand. They appeared to be detailed instructions, and they took some time. But at last Marius was satisfied.

  He rang off, and turned and kicked Roger contemptuously.

  “You stay here, pig. You are a security for your friend’s behaviour.”

  Then again he spoke to the lean man in the language which was double-Dutch to Roger: “Hermann, you remain to guard him. I will leave you the gun. Wait—I find out the telephone number…” He read it off the instrument. “If I have orders to give, I will telephone. You will not leave here without my permission…Otto, you come with me. We go after Templar in my car. I have agents on the road, and I have ordered them to be instructed. If they are not all as incapable as you, he will never reach Bures alive. But we follow to make sure…Wait again! That pig on the floor spoke to a friend at Maidenhead who may be coming to join him. You will capture him and tie him up also. Let there be no mistake, Hermann.”

  “There shall be no mistake.”

  “Good! Come, Otto.”

  Roger heard them go, and then the roaring blackness that lay all about him welled up and engulfed that lonely glitter of clarity in his mind.

  He might have been unconscious for five minutes or five days; he had lost all idea of time. But the first thing he saw when he opened his eyes was the clock, and he knew it must have been about twenty minutes.

  The man Hermann sat in a chair opposite him, turning the pages of a magazine. Presently he looked up and saw that Roger was awake, and he put down the magazine and came over and spat in his face.

  “Soon, English swine, you will be dead. And your country…”