Follow the Saint (16 page)

Slowly
his fingers opened off the big Luger, and it plonked
on the boards at his
feet.

His hand
swept across and bent down the barrel of the
automatic which Mr
Uniatz had whipped out like lightning when the first shot crashed between them.

“You
too, Hoppy,” he said resignedly. “All that Scotch
will run
away if they make a hole in you now.”

“Back
away,” came the next order.

Simon
obeyed.

The voice
said: “Go on, Rosemary—pick up the guns. I’ll
keep ‘em
covered.”

A girl
came forward into the light. It was the dark slender
girl whose quiet loveliness had unsteadied
Simon’s breath
at the Bell.

III

S
HE BENT
over and
collected the two guns by the butts, holding them aimed at Simon and Hoppy, not
timidly,
but with a certain stiffness which told the Saint’s
expert eye
the feel of them was unfamiliar. She moved backwards and
disappeared
again behind the light.

“Do
you mind,” asked the Saint ceremoniously, “if I
smoke
?”

“I
don’t care.” The clipped voice, he realized now, could only have belonged
to the young man in the striped blazer. “But don’t try to start anything,
or I’ll let you have it. Go on
back in there.”

The Saint
didn’t move at once. He took out his cigarette
case first, opened
it, and selected a cigarette. The case came from his breast pocket, but he put
it back in the pocket at his hip, slowly and deliberately and holding it
lightly, so that his
hand was never completely out of sight and a
nervous man
would have no cause to be alarmed at the movement. He had
another gun in that pocket, a light but beautifully balanced Walther;
but for the time being he left it there, sliding the
cigarette case in
behind it and bringing his hand back empty
to get out his
lighter.

“I’m
afraid we weren’t expecting to be held up in a place
like this,” he
remarked apologetically. “So we left the family
jools at home. If
you’d only let us know——
”

“Don’t be funny. If you
don’t want to be turned over to
the police
you’d better let
me
know what you’re doing here.”

The
Saint’s brows shifted a fraction of an inch.

“I
don’t see what difference it makes to you, brother,” he
said
slowly. “But if you’re really interested, we were just
taking a
stroll in the moonlight to work up an appetite for dinner, and we happened to
see the door of this place open

“So
that’s why you both had to pull out guns when you
heard us.”

“My
dear bloke,” Simon argued reasonably, “what do you
expect
anyone to do when you creep up behind them and
start sending bullets
whistling round their heads ?”

There was a
moment’s silence.

The girl
gasped.

The man
spluttered: “Good God you’ve got a nerve!
After you blazed away
at us like that—why, you might have
killed one of us!”

The Saint’s
eyes strained uselessly to pierce beyond the
light. There was an
odd hollow feeling inside him, making
his frown unnaturally rigid.

Something
was going wrong. Something was going as
immortally cockeyed as
it was possible to go. It was taking
him a perceptible space of time to
grope for a bearing in the
reeling void. Somewhere the scenario had gone
as paralysingly off the rails as if a Wagnerian soprano had bounced
into a
hotcha dance routine in the middle of
Tristan.

“Look,”
he said. “Let’s be quite clear about this. Is
your story going to be
that you thought I took a shot at
you?”

“I
don’t have to think,” retorted the other. “I heard the
bullet
whizz past my head. Go on—get back in that boat-
house.”

Simon
dawdled back.

His brain
felt as if it was steaming. The voice behind the light, now that he was
analysing its undertones, had a tense
unsophistication that didn’t belong in
the script at all. And the answers it gave were all wrong. Simon had had it all
figured out one ghostly instant before it began to happen.
The
murderer hadn’t just killed Nora Prescott and faded
away, of course. He had killed her and
waited outside, know
ing that Simon Templar
must find her in a few minutes,
knowing
that that would be his best chance to kill the Saint as well and silence
whatever the Saint knew already and
recover
the letter. That much was so obvious that he must
have been asleep not to have seen it from the
moment when his eyes fell on the dead girl. Well, he had seen it now. And
yet it wasn’t clicking. The dialogue was all
there, and yet
every syllable was
striking a false note.

And he was
back inside the boathouse, as far as he could
go, with the square
bow of a punt against his calves and
Hoppy beside him.

The man’s
voice said: “Turn a light on, Rosemary.”

The girl
came round and found a switch. Light broke out
from a naked bulb
that hung by a length of flex from one of
the rafters, and the
young man in the striped blazer flicked
off his torch.

“Now,”
he started to say, “we’ll——
”

“Jim!”

The girl
didn’t quite scream, but her voice tightened and
rose to within a
semitone of it. She backed against the wall,
one hand to her
mouth, with her face and her eyes dilated
with horror. The man
began to turn towards her, and then
followed her wide and frozen stare.
The muzzle of the gun
he was holding swung slack from its aim on the Saint’s chest
as he did so, it was an error that in some
situations would have cost him his life, but Simon let him live. The Saint’s
head was whirling with too many questions, just
then, to
have any interest in the
opportunity. He was looking at the
gun
which the girl was still holding, and recognizing it as the
property of Mr Uniatz.

“It’s
Nora,” she gasped. “She’s——
”

He saw her
gather herself with an effort, force herself to
go forward and kneel
beside the body. Then he stopped
watching her. His eyes went to the gun that
was still
wavering in the young man’s hand—

“Jim,”
said the girl brokenly, “she’s dead!”

The man
took a half step towards the Saint.

“You
swine!” he grunted. “You killed her——
”

“Go
on,” said the Saint gently. “And then I took a pot at
you. So you fired back in
self-defence, and just happened to kill us. It’ll make a swell story even if it
isn’t a very new one,
and you’ll find
yourself quite a hero. But why all the play
acting for our benefit ? We know the gag.”

There was
complete blankness behind the anger in the
other’s eyes. And
all at once the Saint’s somersaulting cosmos
stabilized itself
with a jolt—upside down, but solid.

He was
looking at the gun which was pointing at his chest,
and realizing that it
was his own Luger.

And the
girl had got Hoppy’s gun. And there was no other artillery in sight.

The
arithmetic of it smacked him between the eyes and made him dizzy. Of course
there was an excuse for him, in
the shape of the first shot and the bullet
that had gone
snarling past his ear. But even with all that, for him
out of all
people in the world, at his time of life—

“Run
up to the house and call the police, Rosemary,” said
the striped blazer in a brittle
bark.

“Wait
a minute,” said the Saint.

His brain
was not fogged any longer. It was turning over
as swiftly and
smoothly as a hair-balanced flywheel, register
ing every item with the mechanical
infallibility of an adding
machine. His
nerves were tingling.

His glance
whipped from side to side. He was standing
again approximately
where he had been when the shot
cracked out, but facing the opposite way. On
his right
quarter was the window that had been broken, with the
shards of
glass scattered on the floor below it—he ought to
have understood
everything when he heard them hit the
floor. Turning the other way, he saw
that the line from the window to himself continued on through the open
door.

He took a
long drag on his cigarette.

“It
kind of spoils the scene,” he said quietly, “but I’m afraid we’ve
both been making the same mistake. You
thought I fired at you——”

“I
don’t have——
”

“All
right, you don’t have to think. You heard the bullet
whizz past your head.
You said that before. You’re certain
I shot at you. Okay. Well, I was just
as certain that you shot
at me. But I know now I was wrong. You never
had a gun
until you got mine. It was that shot that let you bluff
me. I’d heard the bullet go past
my
head, and so it never occurred to
me that
you were bluffing. But we were both wrong. The
shot came through that
window—it just missed me, went
on out through the door, and just missed you.
And some
body else fired it!”

The other’s
face was stupid with stubborn incredulity.

“Who
fired it?”

“The
murderer.”

“That
means you,” retorted the young man flatly. “Hell,
I don’t
want to listen to you. You see if you can make the police believe you. Go on
and call them, Rosemary. I can
take care of these two.”

The girl
hesitated.

“But,
Jim——
”

“Don’t
worry about me, darling. I’ll be all right. It either
of these two washouts
tries to get funny, I’ll give him plenty
to think about.”

The Saint’s
eyes were narrowing.

“You
lace-pantie’d bladder of hot air,” he said in a cold even voice that
seared like vitriol. “It isn’t your fault if God
didn’t give you a
brain, but he did give you eyes. Why don’t
you use them ? I say
the shot was fired from outside, and you
can see for yourself
where the broken window-pane fell.
Look at it. It’s all on the floor in here. If you can tell
me how
I could shoot at you in the doorway
and break a window
behind me, and make
the broken glass fall inwards, I’ll pay
for your next marcel wave. Look at it, nitwit ——
”

The young
man looked.

He had
been working closer to the Saint, with his free fist
clenched and his face
flushed with wrath, since the Saint’s first sizzling insult smoked under his
skin. But he looked.
Somehow, he had to do that. He was less than five feet away
when his eyes shifted. And it was then that Simon
jumped
him.

The
Saint’s lean body seemed to lengthen and swoop across the intervening space.
His left hand grabbed the
Luger, bent the wrist behind it agonizingly
inwards, while
the
heel of his open right hand settled under the other’s chin.
The gun came free; and the Saint’s right arm
straightened
jarringly and sent the
young man staggering back.

Simon
reversed the automatic with a deft flip and held it
on him. Even while he
was making his spring, out of the
corner of his eye he had seen Hoppy Uniatz flash away from
him with an electrifying acceleration that would
have stun
ned anyone who had
misguidedly judged Mr Uniatz on the speed of his intellectual reactions; now he
glanced briefly aside and saw that Hoppy was holding his gun again and
keeping the girl pinioned with one arm.

“Okay,
Hoppy,” he said. “Keep your Betsy and let her go. She’s going to call
the police for us.”

Hoppy
released her, but the girl did not move. She stood
against the wall,
rubbing slim wrists that had been bruised by Mr Uniatz’s untempered energy,
looking from Simon to
the striped blazer, with scared desperate eyes.