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

  “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 the 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 Government 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 tomorrow evening, which is just right for us. We take Vargan to Maidenhead tonight, sleep off our honest weariness tomorrow, 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 certain 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 without 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 tonight?”

  “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 appealing 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 Norman’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 behind. 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 campaign, 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 precision 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, amazingly. “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 rushing 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 clattered 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 farther 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 Conway 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-rat-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 action, they would have stood no chance at all in that narrow space.

  He might have said something about it. By ordinary procedure he should have given thanks to his saviour in a breaking voice; they should have wrung each other’s hands and wept gently on each other’s shoulders for a while, but something told Conway that it was no time for such trimmings. Besides, the Saint had taken the incident in his stride: by that time it had probably slithered through his memory into the dim limbo of distant reminiscence, and he would probably have been quite astonished to be reminded of it at that juncture. By some peaceful and lazy fireside, in his doddering old age, possibly…But in the immediate present he was concerned only with the immediate future.

  He was looking back towards the house. There were lights showing still in some of the windows—it might altogether have been a most serene and tranquil scene, but for the jarring background of intermittent firing, which might have been nothing worse than a childish celebration of Guy Fawkes’ day if it had been Guy Fawkes’ day. But the Saint wasn’t concerned with those reflections either. He was searching the shadows by the gate, and presently he made out a deeper and more solid-looking shadow among the other shadows, a bulky shadow…

  Crack!

  A tiny jet of flame licked out of the bulky shadow, and they heard the tinkle of shattered glass, but the escaping car was now only a few yards from the main road.

  Conway was shaking Simon by the shoulder, babbling, “They’re getting away! Saint, why don’t you shoot?”

  Mechanically the Saint raised his automatic, though he knew that the chance of putting in an effective shot, in that light, was about a hundred to one against anybody—and the Saint, as a pistol shot, had never been in the championship class.

  Then he lowered the gun again, with something like a gasp, and his left hand closed on Conway’s arm in a vice-like grip.

  “They’ll never do it!” he cried. “I left the car slap opposite the lane, and they haven’t got room to turn!”

  And Roger Conway, watching fascinated, saw the lean blue shape of the Furillac revealed in the blaze of the flying head-lights, and heard, before the crash, the scream of tortured tyres tearing ineffectually at the road.

  Then the lights vanished in a splintering smash, and there was darkness and a moment’s silence.

  “We’ve got ’em!” rapped the Saint exultantly.

  The bulky shadow had left the gate and was lumbering towards them up the lane. The Saint was over the hedge like a cat, landing lightly on his toes directly in Teal’s path, and the detective saw him too late.

  “Sorry!” murmured the Saint and really meant it, but he crowded every ounce of his one hundred and sixty pounds of dynamic fighting weight into the blow he jerked at the pit of Teal’s stomach.

  Ordinarily, the Saint entertained a sincere regard for the police force in general and Chief Inspector Teal in particular, but he had no time that night for more than the most laconic courtesies. Moreover, Inspector Teal had a gun, and, in the circumstances, would be liable to shoot first and ask questions afterwards. Finally, the Saint had his own ideas and plans on the subject of the rescue of Vargan from the raiding party, and they did not include either the co-operation or interference of the law. These three cogent arguments he summed up in that one pile-driving jolt to Teal’s third waistcoat button, and the detective dropped with a grunt of agony.

  Then the Saint turned and went flying up the lane after Roger Conway.

  He heard a shout behind him, and again a gun barked savagely in the night. The Saint felt the wind of the bullet actually stroke his cheek. Clearly, then, there was at least one more police survivor of Marius’s raid, but Simon judged that further disputes with the law could be momentarily postponed. He swerved like a hare and raced on, knowing that only the luckiest—or unluckiest—of blind shots could have come so near him in such a light, and having no fear that a second would have the same fortune.

  As it happened, the detective who had come out of the garden behind Teal must have realised the same thing, for he held his fire. But as the Saint stopped by the yellow sedan, now locked inextricably with the wreckage of the battered Furillac, he heard the man pounding on through the darkness towards him.

  Conway was opening the near-side door, and it was a miracle that his career was not cut short then and there by the shot from the interior of the car that went snarling past his ear. But there was no report—just the throaty plop! of an efficient silencer—and he understood that the only shooting they had heard had been done by the police guards. The raiders had not been so rowdy as the Saint had accused them of being.

  The next moment Simon Templar had opened a door on the other side of the sedan.

  “Naughty boy!” said Simon Templar reproachfully.

  His long arm shot over the gun artist’s shoulder, and his sinewy hand closed and twisted on the automatic in time to send the next shot through the roof of the car instead of through Conway’s brain.

  Then the Saint had the gun screwed round till it rammed into the man’s own ribs.

  “Now shoot, honeybunch,” encouraged the Saint, but the man sat quite still.

  He was in the back of the car, beside Vargan. There was no one in the driver’s seat, and the door on that side was open. The Saint wondered who the chauffeur had been, and where he had got to, and whether it had been Angel Face himself, but he had little time to give to that speculation, and any possibility of danger from the missing driver’s quarter would have to be faced if and when it materialised.

  Conway yanked Vargan out into the road on one side, and the Saint, taking a grip on the gun artist’s neck with his free hand, yanked him out into the road on the other side. One wrench disarmed the man, and then the Saint spun him smartly round by the neck.

  “Sleep, my pretty one,” said the Saint, and uppercut him with a masterly blend of science and brute strength.

  He turned, to lo
ok down the muzzle of an automatic, and put up his hands at once. He had slipped his own gun into his pocket in order to deal more comfortably with the man from the car, and he knew it would be dangerous to try to reach it.

  “Lovely weather we’ve been having, haven’t we?” drawled the Saint genially.

  This, he decided, must be the guard who had fired at him down the lane; the build, though hefty, was nothing like Angel Face’s gigantic proportions. Besides, Angel Face, or any of his men, would have touched off the trigger ten seconds ago.

  The automatic nosed into the Saint’s chest, and he felt his pocket deftly lightened of its gun. The man exhaled his satisfaction in a long breath.

  “That’s one of you, anyway,” he remarked grimly.

  “Pleased to meet you,” said the Saint.

  And there it was.

  The Saint’s voice was as unperturbed as if he had been conducting some trivial conversation in a smoke-room, instead of talking with his hands in the air and an unfriendly detective focusing a Smith-Wesson on his diaphragm. And the corner was undoubtedly tight. If the circumstances had been slightly different, the Saint might have dealt with this obstacle in the same way as he had dealt with Marius on their first encounter. Marius had had the drop on him just as effectively as this. But Marius had been expecting a walk-over, and had therefore been just the necessary fraction below concert pitch; whereas this man was obviously expecting trouble. In view of what he must have been through already that night, he would have been a born fool if he hadn’t. And something told Simon that the man wasn’t quite a born fool. Something in the businesslike steadiness of that automatic…

  But the obstacle had to be surmounted, all the same.

  “Get Vargan away, Roger,” sang out the Saint cheerfully, coolly. “See you again some time…”

  He took two paces sideways, keeping his hands well up.

  “Stop that!” cracked the detective, and the Saint promptly stopped it, but now he was in a position to see round the back of the sedan.

  The red tail-light of the Hirondel was moving—Norman Kent was backing the car up closer to save time.