Morris Dolf
pocketed his automatic and went out, with
a last cold stare over
the scene.
Kaskin went
to the bed, closed the bulging valise, and
picked it up. He put
his arm round the girl again and drew
her to the door.
“Have
a good time,” he said.
The Saint
looked out on to an empty landing. But what
he saw was the last
desperate glance that the girl flung at him as Kaskin led her out.
He tensed his arms for an
instant, and his wrists separated.
The scraps
of cord scuffed on the floor behind him. He took a better grip on his knife.
But he still made no other move
ment. He sat where he was, watching the
slowly smouldering
fuse, waiting and
listening for two sounds that all his
immobility
was tuned for. One of them he knew he would
hear, unless some disastrous
accident had happened to cheat
his
calculations; the other he was only hoping for, and yet
it was the one that his ears were most wishfully
strained to
catch.
Then he saw
Angela Lindsay’s bag lying on a corner of
the dresser, and all
his doubts were supremely set at rest.
He heard
her voice, down on the stairs, only a second
after his eyes had
told him that he must hear it.
And he
heard Kaskin’s growling answer.
“Well,
hurry up, you fool… The car’s out in front of the
house opposite.”
The Saint
felt queerly content.
Angela
Lindsay stood in the doorway again, looking at
him.
She did not
speak. She picked up her bag and tucked it
under her arm. Then
she went quickly over to the bed and
took hold of the trailing length of
fuse. She wound it round
her hand and tore it loose from the bomb, and
threw it still
smouldering into a far corner.
Then she
bent over the Saint and kissed him, very swiftly.
He did not
move for a moment. And then, even more
swiftly, his free
hands came from behind him and caught
her wrists.
She tried to
snatch herself back in sudden panic, but his
grip was too strong.
And he smiled at her.
“Don’t
go for a minute,” he said softly.
She stood
frozen.
Down on
the ground floor, all at once, there were many sounds. The sounds of heavy
feet, deep voices that were
neither Dolf’s nor Kaskin’s, quick violent
movements… .
Her eyes
grew wide, afraid, uncomprehending, questioning. But those were the sounds that
he had been sure of hearing.
His face was unlined and unstartled. He still
smiled. His
head moved fractionally in answer to the question she had
not found voice to ask.
“Yes,”
he said evenly. “It is the police. Do you still want
to
go?”
Her mouth
moved.
“You
knew they’d be here.”
“Of
course,” he said. “I arranged for it. I wanted them to catch Morrie
and Judd with the goods on them. I knew you
meant to double-cross
me, all the time. So I pulled a double doublecross. That was before you kissed
me—so you could
find out where I kept my gun… . Then I was only
hoping
you’d make some excuse to come back and do what you just
did. You
see, everything had to be in your own hands.”
Down below,
a gun barked. The sound came up the stairs
dulled and thickened.
Other guns answered it. A man
screamed shrilly, and was suddenly silent. The brief fusillade
rattled back into throbbing stillness. Gradually
the muffled voices droned in again.
The fear
and bewilderment died out of the girl’s face, and left a shadowy kind of peace.
“It’s
too late now,” she said. “But I’m still glad I did it.”
“Like
hell it’s too late,” said the Saint.
He let go
of her and put away his knife, and bent to untie
his legs. His fingers
worked like lightning. He did not need
to give any more time
to thought. Perhaps in those few
seconds after his hands were free and the
others had left the
room, when he had sat without moving and only listened,
wondering
whether the girl would come back, his sub
conscious mind had
raced on and worked out what his adaptation would be if she did come back.
However it had
come to him, the answer was clear in his mind now—as
clearly as
if he had known that it would be needed when
he planned for the
other events which had just come to pass.
And the
aspect of it that was doing its best to dissolve his
seriousness into a
spasm of ecstatic daftness was that it
would also do
something towards taking care of Mr Ebenezer
Hogsbotham. He had, he
realized, been almost criminally
neglectful about Mr Hogsbotham, having used
him as an
excuse
to start the adventure, having just borrowed his house
to bring it to a denouement, and yet having allowed himself
to be so led away by the intrusion of mere sordid
mercenary
objectives that he had had
no spare time to devote towards consummating the lofty and purely idealistic mission
that had taken him to Chertsey in the first place. Now he could
see an atonement for his remissness that would
invest the
conclusion of that story with a rich completeness which
would be something to remember.
“Listen,”
he said, and the rapture of supreme inspiration
was blaming in his
eyes.
In the
hall below, Chief Inspector Claud Eustace Teal
straightened up from his businesslike
examination of the
two still figures
sprawled close together on the floor. A knot
of uniformed local men, one of whom was twisting a handkerchief round a
bleeding wrist, made way for him as
he
stepped back.
“All
right,” Teal said grimly. “One of you phone for an ambulance to take
them away. Neither of them is going to
need a doctor.”
He moved
to the suitcase which had fallen from Judd
Kaskin’s hand when
three bullets hit him, and opened it. He
turned over some of the contents, and
closed it again.
A
broad-shouldered young officer with a sergeant’s
stripes on his
sleeve shifted up from behind him and said:
“Shall I look
after it, sir?”
Teal
surrendered the bag.
“Put
it in the safe at the station for tonight,” he said.
“I’ll get somebody from
the bank to check it over in the
morning. It
looks as if it was all there.”
“Yes,
sir.”
The
sergeant stepped back towards the door.
Chief
Inspector Teal fumbled in an inner pocket, and
drew out a small
oblong package. From the package he
extracted a thinner oblong of pink
paper. Prom the paper
he unwrapped a fresh crisp slice of
spearmint. He slid the
slice of spearmint into his mouth and
champed purposefully
on it. His salivary glands reacted
exquisitely to succulent
stimulus. He began to feel some of the deep
spiritual contentment of a cow with a new cud.
Mr Teal,
as we know, had had a trying day. But for once
he seemed to have
earned as satisfactory a reward for his
tribulations as any
reasonable man had a right to expect. It
was true that he had
been through one disastrously futile
battle with the Saint. But to offset
that, he had cleared up
the case to which he had been assigned, with
the criminals
caught red-handed while still in possession of their
booty
and justifiably shot down after they had tried to shoot their way out,
which would eliminate most of the tedious legal
rigmaroles which so
often formed a wearisome anticlimax
to such dramatic victories; and he had
recovered the booty
itself apparently intact. All in all, he felt that this
was one
occasion when even his tyrannical superiors at Scotland
Yard would
be unable to withhold the commendation which was his due. There was something
almost like human tolerance in his sleepy eyes as they glanced around and
located
Hoppy Uniatz leaning against the wall in the background.
“That
was quick work,” he said, making the advance with
some difficulty.
“We might have had a lot more trouble if
you hadn’t been with
us.”
Mr Uniatz had a jack-knife of
fearsome dimensions in one
hand. He appeared
to be carving some kind of marks on the
butt of his gun. He waved the knife without looking up
from his work.
“Aw,
nuts,” he said modestly. “All youse guys need is
a little
practice.”
Mr Teal
swallowed.
Patricia
Holm squeezed through between two burly
constables and smiled
at him.
“Well,”
she said sweetly, “don’t you owe us all some
thanks? I won’t say
anything about an apology.”
“I
suppose I do,” Teal said grudgingly. It wasn’t easy for
him to say
it, or even to convince himself that he meant it.
The sadly acquired
suspiciousness that had become an
integral part of his souring nature had
driven its roots too
deep for him to feel really comfortable in
any situation where
there was even a hint of the involvement of any member of
the Saint’s
entourage. But for once he was trying nobly to
be just. He grumbled
halfheartedly: “But you had us in the
wrong house, all the
same. If Uniatz hadn’t happened to
notice them coming in here——
”
“But
he did, didn’t he?”
“It
was a risk that none of you had any right to take,”
Teal said
starchily. “Why didn’t the Saint tell me what he
knew this morning
?”
“I’ve
told you,” she said. “He felt pretty hurt about the
way you were trying to pin
something on to him. Of course,
since he
knew he’d never been to Verdean’s house, he figured
out that the second
two men the maid saw were just a couple
of
other crooks trying to hijack the job. He guessed that
Kaskin and Dolf had scared them off and taken
Verdean away to go on working him over in their own time——
”
That
hypersensitive congenital suspicion stabbed Mr Teal
again like a needle
prodded into a tender boil.
“You
never told me he knew their names!” he barked.
“How did he know
that?”
“Didn’t
I ?” she said ingenuously. “Well, of course he knew. Or at any rate
he had a pretty good idea. He’d heard
a rumour weeks ago that Kaskin and
Dolf were planning
a bank holdup with an inside stooge. You know how these
rumours get around; only I suppose Scotland Yard doesn’t hear them. So
naturally he thought of them. He knew their favourite hideouts, so it wasn’t
hard to find them. And as
soon as he knew they’d broken Verdean down, he
had me
get hold of you while he went on following them. He sent
Hoppy to
fetch us directly he knew they were coming here.
Naturally he thought
they’d be going to Verdean’s house,
but of course Verdean might always
have hidden the money
somewhere else close by, so that’s why I had
Hoppy watching
outside. Simon just wanted to get even with you by
handing
you the whole thing on a platter; and you can’t really blame
him. After all, he was on the
side of the law all the time. And
it all
worked out, Now, why don’t you admit that he got
the best of you and did you a good turn at the same
time?”
Chief
Inspector Teal scowled at the toes of his official boots. He had heard it all
before, but it was hard for him to believe. And yet it indisputably fitted with
the facts as he
knew them … He hitched his gum stolidly across to the
other side
of his mouth.
“Well,
I’ll be glad to thank him,” he growled; and
then a twinge of
surprising alarm came suddenly into
his face. “Hey, where is he? If
they caught him following
them——”
“I
was wondering when you’d begin to worry about me,” said the Saint’s
injured voice.
Mr Teal
looked up.
Simon
Templar was coming down the stairs, lighting a cigarette, mocking and
immaculate and quite obviously
unharmed.