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

  He dropped on them out of the sky, and the heels of both his shoes impacted upon the back of the neck of one of them with all the Saint’s hurtling weight behind, so that the man lay very still where he was and did not stir again.

  The other man, rising and bringing up his rifle, saw a spinning sliver of bright steel whisking towards him like a flying fish over a dark sea, and struck to guard. By a miracle he succeeded, and the knife glanced from his gun-barrel and tinkled away over the road.

  Then he fought with the Saint for the rifle.

  He was probably the strongest of the four, and he did not know fear, but there is a trick by which a man who knows it can always take a rifle or a stick from a man who does not know it, and the Saint had known that trick from his childhood. He made the man drop the rifle, but he had no chance to pick it up for himself, for the man was on him again in a moment. Simon could only kick the gun away into the ditch, where it was lost.

  An even break, then.

  They fought hand to hand, two men on that dark road, lion and leopard.

  This man had the advantage of strength and weight, but the Saint had the speed and fighting savagery. No man who was not a Colossus, or mad, would have attempted to stand in the Saint’s way that night: but this man, who may have been something of both, attempted it. He fought like a beast. But Simon Templar was berserk. The man was not only standing in the way: he was the servant and the symbol of all the powers that the Saint hated. He stood for Marius, and the men behind Marius, and all the conspiracy that the Saint had sworn to break, and that had caused it to come to pass that at that moment the Saint should have been riding recklessly to the rescue of his lady. Therefore the man had to go, as his three companions had already gone. And perhaps the man recognised his doom, for he let out one sobbing cry before the Saint’s fingers found an unshakable grip on his throat.

  It was to the death. Simon had no choice, even if he would have taken it, for the man fought to the end, and even when unconsciousness stilled his struggles Simon dared not let him go, for he might be only playing ’possum, and the Saint could not afford to take any chances. There was only one way to make sure…

  So presently the Saint rose slowly to his feet, breathing deeply like a man who has been under water for a long time, and went to find Anna. And no one else moved on the road.

  As an afterthought, he commandeered a loaded automatic from one of the men who had no further use for it.

  Then he went to change the wheel.

  It should only have taken him five minutes, but he could not have foreseen that the spare tyre would settle down to a futile flatness as he slipped the jack from under the dumb-iron and lowered the wheel to the road.

  There was only the one spare.

  It was a very slight consolation to remember that Norman Kent, the ever-thoughtful, always carried an outfit of tools about twice as efficient as anything the ordinary motorist thinks necessary. And the wherewithal to mend punctures was included.

  Even so, with only the spotlight to work by, and no bucket of water with which to find the site of the puncture, it would not be an easy job.

  Simon stripped off his coat with a groan.

  It was more than half an hour before the Hirondel was ready to take the road again. Nearly three-quarters of an hour wasted altogether. Precious minutes squandered, that he had gambled life and limb to win…

  But it seemed like forty-five years, instead of forty-five minutes, before he was able to light a cigarette and climb back into the driver’s seat.

  He started the engine and moved his hand to switch on the headlights, but even as his hand touched the switch the road about him was flooded by lights that were not his.

  As he engaged the gears, he looked back over his shoulder, and saw that the car behind was not overtaking. It had stopped.

  Breathless with the reaction from the first foretaste of battle, he was not expecting another attack so soon. As he moved off, he was for an instant more surprised than hurt by the feel of something stabbing through his left shoulder like a hot spear-point.

  Then he understood, and turned in his seat with the borrowed 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 multiplying 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 handkerchief 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 too 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 arrived long before he had finished. Or had it been on its way to lay another ambush farther 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 windscreen still 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 swerving 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 foredoomed 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 hi
m: “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 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 in 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 he 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 decision 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 wallet 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 looking 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 Hermann 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 Hermann 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 covering 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 Klieg arcs. The boldness 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-purpose, 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? The truth should convince Teal. Roger could tell the truth so much more convincingly and circumstantially than he could tell a lie, and it would be so easy to substantiate. Even Hermann would find it hard to discredit. And…

  “Anyway,” said Teal, “I’ll be taking you boys along to the Yard, and we can talk there.”

  And the departure to the Yard might be postponed. The truth might be made sufficiently interesting to keep Teal in Brook Street. And then Norman Kent might arrive—and Norman was a much more accomplished conspirator than Roger…

  “Before we go,” said Roger, “there’s something you might like to hear.”

  Teal raised his eyebrows one millimetre. “What is it?” he asked. “Going to tell me you’re the King of the Cannibal Islands?”

  Roger shook his head. How easy it was! Teal might have been the one man in the CID who would have fallen for it, but he at least was a certainty. Such a lethargic man could not by any stretch of imagination be in a hurry over anything—least of all over the prosaic task of taking his prisoners away to the station.

  “I’ll do a squeal of my own,” said Roger. Teal nodded.

  As if he had nothing to do for the rest of the night, he settled himself in a chair and took a packet of chewing-gum from his pocket.

  Wi
th his jaws moving rhythmically, he prompted, “Well?”

  “If it’s all the same to you,” said Roger, to waste time, “I’d like to sit in a chair. This floor isn’t as soft as it might be. And if I could smoke a cigarette…”

  Teal rose again and lifted him into an armchair; provided him also with a cigarette. Then the detective resumed his own seat with mountainous patience.

  He made no objection to the delay on the grounds that there were men waiting for him outside the building. Which meant, almost certainly, that there weren’t. Roger recalled that Teal had the reputation of playing a lone hand. It was a symptom of the man’s languid confidence in his own experienced ability—a confidence, to give him his due, that had its justification in his record. But in this case…

  “I’m telling you the truth this time,” said Roger. “We’re in the cart—Simon Templar included—thanks to some pals of Hermann there—only Templar doesn’t know it. I don’t want him to be pinched, but if you don’t pinch him quickly something worse is going to happen to him. You see, we’ve got Vargan. But we weren’t the first raiders. They were Hermann’s pals…”

  “Another lie!” interposed Hermann venomously. “Do you have to waste any more time with him, Inspector? You have already caught him in one lie…”

  “And caught you sneaking about with a gun,” snapped Roger. “What about that? And why the hell am I tied up here? Go on—tell him you’re a private detective, and you were just going out to fetch a policeman and give me in charge!”

  Teal closed his eyes.

  “I can’t listen to two people at once,” he said. “Which of you is supposed to be telling this story?”

  “I am,” said Roger.

  “You sound more interesting,” admitted Teal, “even if Hermann does prove it to be a fairy-tale afterwards. Go on, Conway. Hermann—you wait for your turn, and don’t butt in again.”

  Hermann relapsed into a sullen silence, and Roger inhaled deeply from his cigarette and blew out with the smoke a brief prayer of thanksgiving.

  “We went down to Esher to take Vargan,” he said. “But when we got there, we found Vargan was already being taken. He seemed very popular all round, that night. However, we were the party that won the raffle and got him away.”