The Saint Closes the Case (12 page)

“I am,” said the Saint.

Conway climbed in with an unhappy sigh. He
knew, from
bitter past experience, that the Saint had original and
hair-
raising notions of his own about the handling of high-pow
ered
automobiles.

They reached Brook Street at half-past four.

“Are you going to drive back as well?” asked Roger.

“I am,” said the Saint.

Mr. Conway covered his eyes.

“Put me on a nice slow train first, will
you?” he said. “Oh, and make a will leaving everything to me. Then
you can die
with my blessing.”

Simon laughed, and took him by the arm.

“Upstairs,” he said, “there is
beer. And then—work. Come
on, sonny boy!”

For three hours they worked. Part of that
time Conway
gave to helping the Saint; then he went on to attend to
his
own packing and Norman Kent’s. He returned towards eight
o’clock,
and dumped the luggage he brought with him directly
out of his taxi into
the Hirondel. The Saint’s completed
contribution—two steamer trunks on the
carrier, and a heavy
valise inside—was already there. The Hirondel
certainly had
the
air of assisting in a wholesale removal.

Conway found the Saint sinking a tankard of
ale with
phenomenal rapidity.

“Oil” said Conway, in alarm.

“Get yours down quickly,” advised
the Saint, indicating a
second mug, which stood, full and ready, on
the table. “We’re
off.”

“Off?” repeated Roger puzzledly.

Simon jerked his empty can in the direction of
the window.

“Outside,” he said, “are a
pair of prize beauties energetically
doing nothing. I don’t suppose you
noticed them as you came
in. I didn’t myself, until a moment ago. I’ll
swear they’ve only
just come on duty—I couldn’t have missed them when I was
loading up
the car. But they’ve seen too much. Much too
much.”

Conway went to the window and looked out.

Presently:

“I don’t see anyone suspicious.”

“That’s your innocent and guileless
mind, my pet,” said
the Saint, coming over to join him. “If
you were as old in sin
as I am, you’d … Well, I’ll be
b-b-blowed!”

Conway regarded him gravely.

“It’s the beer,” he said.
“Never mind. You’ll feel better
in a minute.”

“Damned if I will!” crisped the
Saint.

He slammed his tankard down on the
window-sill, and
caught Roger by both shoulders.

“Don’t be an old idiot, Roger!” he
cried. “You know me. I
tell you this place was being watched. Police
or Angel Face. We can’t say which, but almost certainly Angel Face. Teal
couldn’t
possibly have got as far as this in the time, I’ll bet
anything you like.
But Angel Face could. And the two sleuths
have beetled off with
the news about us. So, to save trouble,
we’ll beetle off
ourselves. Because, if I know anything about
Angel Face yet, Brook
Street is going to be rather less healthy
than a hot spot in
hell—inside an hour!”

“But Pat
——”

The Saint looked at his watch.

“We’ve got two hours to fill up somehow.
The Hirondel’ll
do it easy. Down to Maidenhead, park the luggage, and back
to Paddington Station in time to meet the train.”

“And suppose we have a breakdown?”

“Breakdown hell! … But you’re right.
… Correction,
then: I’ll drop you at the station, and make the return
trip
to Maidenhead alone. You can amuse yourself in the bar, and
I’ll meet
you there… . It’s a good idea to get rid of the lug
gage, too.
We don’t know that the world won’t have become rather sticky by half-past nine,
and it’d be on the safe side to
make the heavy journey while the going’s good. If I leave now
they won’t have had time to make any preparations
to follow
me; and later we’d be able
to slip them much more easily, if they happened to get after us, without all
the impedi
menta to pull our speed
down.”

Conway found himself being rushed down the
stairs as he
listened to the Saint’s last speech. The speech seemed to
begin
in Brook Street and finish at Paddington. Much of this im
pression,
of course, was solely the product of Conway’s over
wrought imagination;
but there was a certain foundation of
fact in it, and the impression built
thereon was truly symp
tomatic of Simon Templar’s appalling velocity
of transform
ing decision into action.

Roger Conway recovered coherent consciousness
in the station buffet and a kind of daze; and by that time Simon
Templar
was hustling the Hirondel westwards.

The Saint’s brain was in a ferment of
questions. Would Marius arrange a raid on the flat in Brook Street? Or would
he, finding that the loaded car which his spies had reported
had gone,
assume that the birds had flown? Either way, that
didn’t seem to
matter; but the point it raised was what Marius
would do next, after
he had either discovered or decided that
his birds had flown… . And, anyway, since Marius must
have known that the Saint had attended
the rough party at
Esher, why hadn’t Brook Street been raided before? …
Answer: Because (a) a show like that must take a bit of organis
ing, and
(b) it would be easier, anyhow, to wait until dark.
Which, at that time of
year, was fairly late at night. Thereby
making it possible to
do the return journey to and from Maid
enhead on good time… . But Marius would certainly be
doing something. Put yourself in the
enemy’s place… .

So the Saint reached Maidenhead in under an
hour, and
was on
the road again five minutes later.

It was not his fault that he was stopped
halfway back by a
choked carburettor jet which it took him fifteen minutes
to
locate and remedy.

Even so, the time he made on the rest of the
trip amazed
even himself.

In the station entrance he actually cannoned
into Roger
Conway.

“Hullo,” said the Saint. “Where
are you off to? The train’s
just about due in.”

Conway stared at him.

Then he pointed dumbly at the clock in the
booking-hall.

Simon looked at it, and went white.

“But my watch,” he began stupidly, “my
watch——”

“You must have forgotten to wind it up
last night.”

“You met the train?”

Conway nodded.

“It’s just possible that I may have
missed her, but I’d swear
she wasn’t on it. Probably she didn’t catch
it——
”

“Then there’s a telegram at Brook Street
to say so. We’ll go
there—if all the armies of Europe are in the way!”

They went. Conway, afterwards, preferred not
to remem
ber that drive.

And yet peace seemed to reign in Brook
Street. The lamps were alight, and it was getting dark rapidly, for the sky had
clouded over in the evening. As was to be expected on a Sun
day, there
were few people about, and hardly any traffic.
There was nothing at
all like a crowd—no sign that there had been any disturbance at all. There was
a man leaning negli
gently against a lamp-post, smoking a pipe as though he
had
nothing else to do in the world. It happened that, as the
Hirondel
stopped, another man came up and spoke to him.
The Saint saw the
incident, and ignored it.

He went through the front door and up the
stairs like a
whirlwind.
Conway followed him.

Conway really believed that the Saint would
have gone
through a police garrison or a whole battalion of Angel
Faces; but
there were none there to go through. Nor had the
flat been entered, as
far as they could see. It was exactly as
they had left it.

But there was no telegram.

“I might have missed her,” said
Conway helplessly. “She
may be on her way now. The taxi may have
broken down—
or had a slight accident——
”

He stopped abruptly at the blaze in the
Saint’s eyes.

“Look at the clock,” said the Saint,
with a kind of curbed
savagery.

Roger looked at the clock. The clock said
that it was a
quarter to ten.

And he saw the terrible look on the Saint’s
face, and it
hypnotised him. The whole thing had come more suddenly
than
anything that had ever happened to Roger Conway be
fore, and it had
swirled him to the loss of his bearings in
the same way that a
man in a small boat in tropical seas may
be lost in a squall.
The blow had fallen too fiercely for him.
He could feel the
shock, and yet he was unable to determine
what manner of blow
had been struck, or even if a blow had
been struck at all,
in any comprehensible sense.

He could only look at the clock and say
helplessly: “It’s a
quarter to ten.”

The Saint was saying: “She’d have let me
know if she’d
missed the train——
”

“Or waited for the next one.”

“Oh, for the love of Mike!” snarled
the Saint. “Didn’t you
hear me ring her up from Maidenhead? I looked
out all the
trains then, and the only next one gets in at three
fifty-one
to-morrow morning. D’you think she’d have waited for that
one
without sending me a wire?”

“But if I didn’t see her at Paddington,
and anything had
happened to her taxi——
”

But the Saint had taken a cigarette, and was
lighting it
with a hand that could never have been steadier; and the
Saint’s
face was a frozen mask.

“More beer,” said the Saint.

Roger moved to obey.

“And talk to me,” said the Saint,
“talk to me quietly and
sanely, will you? Because fool suggestions
won’t help me. I
don’t have to ring up Terry and ask if Pat caught that
train,
because I know she did. I don’t have to ask if you’re quite
sure you
couldn’t have missed her at the station, because I know you didn’t.
…”

The Saint was deliberately breaking a
match-stick into tiny fragments and dropping them one by one into the ash-tray.

“And don’t tell me I’m getting excited
about nothing,” said
the Saint, “because I tell you I know. I
know that Pat was
coming on a slow train, which stops at other places
before it gets to London. I know that Marius has got Pat, and I know
that he’s
going to try to use her to force me to give up Vargan,
and I know that I’m
going to find Dr. Rayt Marius and kill
him. So talk to me very
quietly and sanely, Roger, because
if you don’t I think I shall go quite
mad.”

6. How Roger Conway
drove the Hirondel,

and the Saint took a
knife in his hand

Conway had a full tankard of beer in each
hand. He looked at the tankards as a man might look at a couple of dragons
that have
strayed into his drawing-room. It seemed to Roger, for some reason, that it was
unaccountably ridiculous for him
to be standing in the middle of the Saint’s
room with a
tankard of beer in each hand. He cleared his throat.

He said: “Are you sure you aren’t—making
too much of
it?”

And he knew, as he said it, that it was the
fatuously use
less kind of remark for which he would cheerfully have or
dered
anyone else’s execution. He put down the tankards
on the table and
lighted a cigarette as if he hated it.

“That’s not quiet and sane,” said
the Saint. “That’s wasting
time. Damn it, old boy, you know how it was
between Pat and
me! I always knew that if anything happened to her I’d
know it at
once—if she were a thousand miles away.
I know.”

The Saint’s icy control broke for a moment.
Only for a mo
ment. Roger’s arm was taken in a crushing grip. The Saint
didn’t know his strength. Roger could have cried out with
pain; but
he said nothing at all. He was in the presence of
something that he
could only understand dimly.