The Saint and the People Importers (9 page)

But for Simon the explosive crack still resounding in his head was a call to arms as clear as the blast of a trumpet. Unfortunately even his perfectly conditioned body was not immune to the effects of being thrown, encapsuled in steel, into a ditch at seventy miles an hour. It took him a few seconds to come fully back to awareness, and by that time the most prominent thing he became aware of was the long slender black snout of a rifle poking down through the car’s open window at the side of his head.

The lights had gone out, but the moon was bright, and when Simon’s eyes travelled up the barrel of the rifle to focus on the man who held it he had no trouble at all in recognising the face of none other than Mahmud the waiter, whose right arm was conspicuously free of splints, white bandages, or a sling.

“Are they d-d-d-dead?” inquired a rather thin male voice from offstage.

“No,” Mahmud answered with frank dissatisfaction.

“And the lame shall take up their guns and walk,” Simon said biblically.

The voice from the darkness of the car startled Mahmud, who jerked back, aiming the rifle more tensely.

“Go ahead-shoot them,” came the thin voice.

“No. Pull the girl out. And you come out, Mr. Templar, with your hands in front of you.”

The car had run into the shallow ditch at an angle, and it had come to rest with its right side higher than its left side. Simon was on the lower side. When he turned to look at Tammy she was already being half dragged, half helped out of the driver’s seat. Too dazed to comprehend what was happening, she put up no resistance. Simon might have tried some resistance of his own except for the fact that she was in the hands of the opposition before he had been able to fully collect his own resources.

“Out!” Mahmud repeated.

His voice was more frightened than menacing which Simon took to be a dangerous state of affairs. He would much rather have faced a calm professional killer than a scared amateur who might pull the trigger without even knowing it.

The Saint, accordingly, opened his door the short distance that the car’s inclined position allowed and squeezed himself out on to the soft damp cushion of leaves that filled the ditch. Mahmud moved back above the rim of the ditch, keeping the rifle pointed straight at Simon’s chest. Around the front of the car came Tammy, pushed by a man almost a head shorter than she was-the same man Simon had seen in the alley behind the Golden Crescent with the giant wrestler.

“What’s happening?” she asked groggily.

“Our friend Mahmud here has experienced a miraculous recovery and couldn’t wait for us to share his joy with him-so he shot out one of your front tyres and precipitated us into this pleasant glen.” He smiled at the tense Pakistani. “Good shooting, Mahmud, and how about introducing me to your faith healer?”

“Well, go on and do something!” squeaked the little man who was holding Tammy in accents that had more of Chicago than London in them. “They didn’t get killed, so you gotta kill ‘em!”

“If I shoot, the police will know why it was done,” Mahmud said. “It must look like an accident, Kalki said.”

“Beat ‘em on the head, then!” his partner pleaded. “Do something! Bash ‘em with your gun butt! Just hurry up. I see lights! I see lights coming!”

“Through the hedge, quick!” Mahmud said. “Everybody, or I do shoot. This way.”

Tammy gave a faint yelp as her captor doubled one of her arms behind her back and shoved her stumbling up the side of the ditch. Simon followed at a more leisurely pace, looking over his shoulder to confirm for himself that the headlights of a car were flickering through the trees from a nearby bend in the road. If it had not been for Tammy he would have pitted his own speed and agility against Mahmud’s nervous marksmanship, but as it was all he could do was follow her through a gap in the straggly quickset and reflect on the instinctive wisdom which had led sailors through the centuries to regard a woman on shipboard as an infallible omen of disaster.

“Get your hands off me, you ape!” the female herself was protesting dizzily. “Where do you think we’re going?”

Nobody, including the Saint, bothered to answer her. They had hurried some distance into the field when Mahmud had ordered them all down on their knees. On the road, the lights of the approaching car zipped past without slowing. Mahmud started to stand up and then he squatted again as the sound of suddenly applied brakes squealed through the trees.

“They’ve seen it,” said Tammy’s diminutive escort. “Let’s beat it out of here!”

Mahmud did not argue.

“Hurry!” he said. “Run! That way.”

The Pakistani brought up the rear of the unevenly hasty procession, urging them on until Tammy almost collapsed for lack of breath.

“Over there,” Mahmud said. “Do not stop.”

Nowhere in that area is it possible to walk very far without coming to a road of some sort, and they soon reached the local limit of trackless wilderness. They came to a gate which let them out on to an unpaved lane. In a bay by the gate was a parked car. In the field opposite loomed the black shape of a barn. A gust of wind rattled branches overhead as the group stopped, and Mahmud peered anxiously through the darkness behind them. There were no sounds except the wind and Tammy’s almost sobbing gasps for breath.

“We’re okay now,” said the diminutive American. “Let’s finish with these characters and get out of here.”

Simon studied the man in the dim light of the moon. His face was skeletally thin, crowned with hair about an inch long which stood rigidly straight up on end.

“You must be Shortwave,” the Saint said cordially.

“You heard of me?” asked the little man with pleased surprise.

Simon nodded.

“What’s the latest from Radio Three?”

Shortwave grinned.

“You wanta know what I heard while we was running across here?”

He began to whistle.

“Quiet!” Mahmud snapped at him. “Everyone get into the car.”

“The finale of Beethoven’s Ninth,” Simon reflected on Shortwave’s performance.

“Yeah?” said Shortwave happily. “I been picking up a lot of stuff from the Heathrow control tower lately too.”

With his rifle, Mahmud was urging them into the parked Ford a few yards away. Shortwave produced a pistol from his baggy jacket.

“What’s the idea?” he objected. “Shoot ‘em here, an’ we don’t make a mess of the car.”

“Now that it cannot look like an accident,” Mahmud said impatiently, “it should be done where their bodies will not be found.”

“So don’t talk stupid,” Simon amplified, for Shortwave’s benefit.

A sharp stinging blow on the back of his neck knocked him forward. He blinked back the moisture that automatically flooded his eyes and turned to see Shortwave holding his pistol clublike and threatening on a level with his shoulder.

“We’re gonna kill you,” Shortwave said. “With pleasure.”

“That’s the method I’d prefer,” Simon said evenly. “I’m going to kill you with anything I can get my hands on.”

“Big deal!” said Shortwave scornfully. “You and what army?”

Mahmud prodded Simon into the front passenger seat, Tammy into the back, and directed Shortwave in beside her. It was a very different performance from anything he had ever put on at the Golden Crescent. He was still a nervous amateur, but he was finding reserves of competence which indicated a surprising affinity for his new vocation. He put the rifle in on the floor at Shortwave’s feet, went around and got in behind the wheel, swung and reversed the car around, and took off at a bouncing speed down the uneven road.

“Stop talking so much,” he said. “And believe me, Mr. Templar, if you try to interfere with what we do your woman will suffer.”

“I am not his woman,” Tammy protested weakly.

“You’ll be nothing if he starts acting up,” said Shortwave. His next words were aimed at Mahmud. “Where are you going?”

“To the boathouse-it is the only thing,” Mahmud answered. “But they should not be let to know where it is. Perhaps you will tie something across their eyes?”

Shortwave settled back comfortably in his corner of the back seat, cradling his pistol in both hands.

“Who cares if they know how to get to the boathouse?” he asked softly. “Once they get in there, they ain’t never coming out.”

3

Tammy Rowan, who had seemed partly dazed since her car had spun off the road, began to wake up completely to what was happening around her as Mahmud drove on a twisting route through the night.

“This is crazy!” she protested. “First somebody’s got a smashed arm and then he doesn’t. My car has a blowout and two goons with guns just happen to be waiting by the side of the road …”

Simon had contrived to turn sideways with his back to the door so that he could see Mahmud, Shortwave, and- without unduly twisting his neck-Tammy, who was directly behind him.

“I’m sure your feminine intuition and/or your nose for news can set you on the path to figuring it all out,” he said unindulgently.

She paused sullenly to think things over.

“Right,” she sighed. “And I suppose they were responsible for wrecking my car somehow too.”

“Mahmud did it with his little popgun,” Simon said. “Didn’t you, Mahmud? I heard the shot just as the tyre went. Did you develop your aim in the Khyber Pass or a shooting gallery in Blackpool, comrade?”

Mahmud stared silently ahead.

“Talkative lad,” the Saint commented. He regarded Mahmud with scientific interest as he continued. “I have a feeling that the bigger fish in his scummy little pond have got something on him, otherwise he’d be peacefully pushing brinjal pickle for Mr. Haroon. He doesn’t look like a criminal type to me. No nerve.”

“Be quiet,” Mahmud said ineffectually.

Shortwave, relaxed and confident with his gun clasped between his hands, giggled from the back seat.

“So this guy really is the Saint?” he chortled. “What a laugh. It was all too easy.”

“As easy as falling off a log,” Simon agreed. “But don’t laugh too much till after you’ve landed.”

Shortwave giggled appreciatively again and fondled his pistol. Tammy could not share the surface geniality.

“Mahmud!” she interrupted. “Or whatever your name is. Listen-if this lot is forcing you into something, we can help you. Take us back to town and we’ll see that you’re protected.” She glanced at Shortwave. “Both of you. You don’t run this gang. If you’ll help us catch them, we’ll back you up when the thing goes to court.”

Mahmud shook his head and told her again to stop talking. Shortwave merely tittered.

“There just one thing I’m curious about,” Simon said to Mahmud. “Why did you decide to stage that faked broken arm while I was at the Golden Crescent? Don’t tell me; let me guess. Because you panicked when I started asking questions and thought I was on to you-so you decided nothing could be more certain to throw me off the trail than making it look as if you were getting broken to bits for going against the gang. With you in the clear, the bigger boys could use you to steer Miss Rowan-or me-just where they wanted us. And a neat little ambush you made of it, for a rush job. There’s only one road we could take to the Grey Goose, and you had enough of a start to be there waiting for us.”

“He’s real bright, ain’t he?” Shortwave remarked. “So bright he’s about to get a hole blown in his head.”

Simon regarded him indulgently.

“What fun!” he drawled. “And when it’s been repaired like yours, we’ll be able to communicate, like satellites.”

As they cut across the town centre of Staines, Mahmud reiterated a warning.

“Please don’t try anything foolish, Mr. Templar, or Miss Rowan will receive the consequences from Shortwave.”

Simon did not need the reminder. A lively awareness of the risk to Tammy was what had forced him to let this pair of bush-league bandits get away with some manoeuvres which, if he had been on his own, might have brought an abrupt end to their careers.

They left Staines by the Laleham road, and continued on to Shepperton, but a mile or two beyond that Mahumud took a sharp fork into a complex of winding lanes that soon had the Saint straining his directional memory. It was an area which he might not have recognised even in daylight, for it had the unfinished air or recent development: still unpaved roads cut between glimpses of old houses abandoned before the spread of raw excavations. The mention of a “boathouse” meant the river, and this seemed to be one of those sections where the gravel pits which had not long destroyed it were being painfully salvaged as new residential waterfront and small-boat marinas.

The boathouse which they came to eventually, after bumping over a rutted track across a grassy field, had obviously once been an appendage of some gracious estate of which the main building was not to be seen, if it still stood. The boathouse, naturally, stood on the very edge of the river, and was big enough to contain an apartment on the upper floor, where lights showed in the windows.

“We’re here,” Mahmud said superfluously. “No one must move until I tell you.”

He steered the car around to the far side of the building, the headlights sweeping over dark bricks which could easily have been a hundred years old, and brought them on to the old driveway which had once served it, which now lost itself in weeds and bushes a few yards inland.

Another vehicle was already there: the van that Simon had seen in the alley behind the Golden Crescent that afternoon.

“What do you think-is this the headquarters of the whole Koo-Koo Klan?” Simon said to Tammy. “Or just a substation?”

Mahmud cut off the engine of the car and then the headlights. The light that came from the windows above was weak and yellow.

“Now,” he said. “Do what I tell you. Sit here and wait. I will go inside for a minute.”

“Let’s take ‘em on in,” Shortwave said. “What the hell do we need to wait for?”

“Scared of the dark?” the Saint sympathised. “We’ll be here to keep you company.”

“I must ask,” Mahmud told his accomplice. He jerked his head towards the house. “He does not know we bring them here.”

Shortwave looked slightly apprehensive.

“Yeah. It’s your fault. I told you we oughta conk ‘em and leave ‘em there like it was an accident.”