Salvage for the Saint (11 page)

The bull lumbered into the middle of the ring, stopped, and seemed to see Arabella for the first time. He put his head down to charge. She rattled frantically at the door, tried to wrench it open by the heavy iron ring. It was locked. She hammered on it frenziedly with both fists.

“Let me out! Let me out!”

Descartes’ voice carried across the ring again.

“The gold, Madame. For the last time, where is the gold?”

“For the last time,” she gasped, “I don’t know.”

The bull began his charge towards her, and with a shriek she started to run along the perimeter fence. The bull turned to follow, began to bear down. She reversed direction and managed to increase her distance from the snorting animal, but then he skidded, turned, and came after her with renewed interest. She just succeeded in reaching a solitary board partition—a burladero shelter set close against the perimeter fence and threw herself behind its meagre protection.

The bull thundered headlong into the partition, hitting it from an oblique angle. It shuddered and shook, but held. And the bull drew back, cantering around in a tight circle for another assault as Arabella crouched terrified behind the board, which she could now see was rotten in parts.

“You can still be saved,” came the voice of Descartes. “Quickly!”

Arabella saw that she had only one chance.

“All right, all right!” she gasped. “I’ll tell you!”

But the bull had already begun to charge the board again. This time it crashed into it with frontal force. Some of the wood splintered away and those horns at their nearest were less than a foot and a half from where she crouched.

She heard the sounds of the door being unlocked—the door to at least temporary freedom. That last time-gaining bluff had been her only hope; she had only to invent some plausible location for the gold, which would have bought her a day or two in which, possibly, to find some other way out of this whole mess. But she had left it too late. She was trapped behind the burladero, and there was no way she could get to that door past the bull, which was already beginning the charge that would surely now take him through the rotting board which was her only remaining protection. All of this was borne in upon her, not by any calm process of ratiocination, but by the directly experienced realities of that September morning in the bull-ring of Jacques Descartes. There was the sun, not yet hot, but already warm as it climbed in the east; the dust of the ring; the snorting of the bull as it thundered towards her; the flimsy board that would not, could not, hold out. And most of all, there was the painful physical reality of that door to freedom only yards away; of the infinitely tantalising noise it had made, a rusty metallic scraping noise; and of the fact that there was no way she would ever reach it.

And so she gave up the fight, stood up bravely, crossed her arms in front of her eyes, and waited for annihilation.

-4-

Arabella smelt the bull’s hot breath, and heard the final splintering of the board which was all that stood between her and those lethal horns.

And in the same instant, and abruptly, she felt herself gripped by some altogether miraculous force that hoisted her straight up into the air, and she heard, as in a dream, the horns of the bull smashing into the perimeter fence only inches below the point in space where her feet now seemed to be dangling. After which the same miraculous force performed a second-stage hoist and she found herself standing on the first tier of the bull-ring stand, blinking at the realisation that she had just not been battered to smithereens.

“May I interest you in living?” enquired the miraculous force—which wore the outward semblance of Simon Templar.

Arabella was far too shaken and shattered and dumb-struck and relieved to attempt a reply. Besides which, even as she began to make sense of what had happened, she became more definitely aware that her escape was as yet far from being a complete fait accompli. An outraged bellowing from the opposite side of the ring reminded her that Descartes and the others were only yards away. Arabella made a feeble, dazed gesture towards the bellowing voices, and the Saint nodded.

“I think that’s a very intelligent suggestion,” he said earnestly. “Shall we?”

He grabbed her hand and jumped down the eight-foot drop off the outside of the bull-ring, from the upper tier, pulling her after him and helping to ease her landing. As they began to run, the bellowing crystallised itself into two urgent syllables in Descartes’ voice.

“Get them!”

Simon and Arabella had only the few seconds’ start given to them by the element of surprise. Simon knew they had to exploit that slender advantage for all it was worth; Arabella herself was in no state to know anything, and was more than content to take her cue from him. He paused just long enough to face her for a moment, with his hands on her shoulders and the gaze of his level blue eyes holding hers.

“Sorry, sweetheart,” he said. “I know you’ve just had the scare of a lifetime, but now you’re going to have to find the strength for the run of a lifetime.” And then the Saint’s long legs took him skimming across the stony courtyard with Arabella in tow, somewhat unsteadily on her shorter ones.

They made straight for the rough track leading to the main road. He had left his car about halfway along that track, well short of the haras itself, to be sure of making a discreet approach. Now, with several hundred yards between them and the Hirondel, he wished he had risked bringing it nearer.

As they sped past one side of a high-fenced corral, they caught a glimpse of Bernadotti and Pancho entering hurriedly by a gate on the other side. Within seconds they heard the sound of several sets of hooves giving chase behind them.

They glanced behind as they ran. Bernadotti, Pancho and another man, presumably one of the haras hands, were the pursuers. They were mounted on hefty picador horses; and they were armed with the murderous-looking eight-foot lances known as pics.

The Saint knew at once that they would not make it in a straight dash for the car. A lightning piece of strategic thinking was needed, and as usual when the chips were down, Simon Templar delivered.

He had three resources to work with, and he used them all to the full. The first was their lead, no more than thirty seconds, over the pursuers; the second was a godsent bend in the scrub-edged track; and the third was the rough mental map of the surrounding territory with which he had thoughtfully forearmed himself on his arrival.

As soon as they had rounded the bend and were out of sight, Simon ducked off into the narrow belt of scrub, still pulling Arabella by the hand.

“I’m afraid we’re going to have to separate for a while,” he told her in an urgent whisper, his mouth against her ear. “You’ll have to decoy long enough for me to get to the car, farther along.”

He pointed. She nodded her understanding, and he pointed again.

“Skirt the swamp, then strike back to the road.”

“Swamp?” She silently mouthed the word. Simon grinned and nodded. Then he picked up a large rock and lobbed it, in a high trajectory, into the undergrowth on the far side of the driveway. By now their mounted pursuers would have rounded the bend and realised that the fugitives had left the track.

They heard the horses take off after the sound of the falling rock, and Simon grinned again.

“The old tricks are sometimes the best.” He signalled her to go; and she saw in his eyes that steely light of battle which many had seen before her, and many had feared, and some had loved. And then he was gone, like a fluid shadow melting into the undergrowth, and she found herself doing, almost automatically, what he had told her. She ran as quickly and noisily as she could out into the open and marshy terrain that bordered the haras, following a line away from the buildings but at an oblique angle to the track.

They heard her at once. Bernadotti and Pancho and the other man came crashing through the bushes on their powerful mounts. Arabella glanced behind as she ran. She had perhaps a fifty-yard advantage. She saw those great horses with their lanced riders thundering after her like some unarmoured jousters of a longpast age; and she ran as she had never run before.

The ground was rankly swampy with patches of somewhat higher grassy ground at intervals, and she found she could mostly judge her paces to land on these higher stepping-stones—whereas the horses were slowed somewhat by having to plunge and plop their way though the viscous ooze of the swamp. There were bushes and young trees at intervals, too, so that she followed a zigzag course in which pursuers and pursued lost sight of each other for a few seconds at a time.

But the snorting and splashing of the horses grew steadily louder, and she knew that they were inexorably catching her up. Then came the moment when she had to change direction and head for the track farther along, striking it, with luck, beyond the point where Simon should have rejoined his car.

If it had been only Bernadotti and Gomez pursuing, she would certainly have made it. But the other man was clearly a far better horseman; he was well ahead of them and now bearing down on her at speed.

She made the change of direction abruptly, taking advantage of the cover given by some bushes. Still she heard the horses coming after her. But she heard another sound, too—one that sang in her ears as no sound of that kind ever had before.

It was the engine of the Saint’s Hirondel springing into throbbing life.

Arabella made straight for it, the endurance of her legs and lungs now close to their limits. The car must be, from the sound, a good fifty yards away, and that horseman, with his pic poised, could be no more than a few paces behind her. And then, still running with a speed and surefootedness that astonished her, she was suddenly out of the swamp and back into that narrow strip of scrubby undergrowth bordering the track. She could feel her legs giving way as she ducked and swerved between the bushes in a last desperate endeavour to evade the thundering hooves and the murderous-looking lance. But the horseman crashed straight on through, simply flattening the bushes in his path.

Now she could see the car ahead, the engine still running …

And there was no one at the wheel.

The horseman was now so close behind that she could all but feel the point of the lance already impaling her through the small of her back. And then her legs buckled under her, and she tripped—exhausted, gasping, and covered in muddy slime. She must have passed out for a few moments; but through a kind of fog she heard a sharp crack, followed by the sort of heavy thud that might be made by a man falling off a horse.

The fog cleared, and she saw that a man had indeed fallen off a horse. And she saw Simon Templar standing in front of her, an automatic in his steady hand and a smile of admiration in his equally steady gaze.

Ten seconds later she found herself, somehow, in the passenger seat of the Hirondel and travelling rapidly towards the main road.

The Saint grinned at the pathetically dirty and dishevelled figure beside him, and wrinkled up his nose.

“Nice perfume,” he remarked.

“Ho bloody ho!” she snorted, between gasping breaths. “Just look at me. And look at you! No dirt, no gook, no gunge—you’re not even puffed!”

The Saint, cool and debonair, grinned again.

“Sorry. It was the only way. It was you they wanted. They were bound to take off after you once they spotted you.”

“But just look at me!” she repeated. She grabbed the driving mirror and turned it to gaze in horror at her face. “All my things, my bag—” She wailed: “—they’re back there somewhere in my car. You found me. You could at least have found my bag.”

“Oh, you’re quite welcome,” Simon said cheerfully. “Think nothing of it. I’m always saving people’s lives.”

She digested that for a while.

“I guess I am incredibly lucky you found me,” she said finally, with conciliation in her voice. “But come to think of it, how on earth did you find me? What are you even doing in France, anyway?”

“Oh, you know, this and that,” he told her. “I thought I’d see if I couldn’t look up your husband’s murderer.”

“My husband’s—murderer?” She looked at him aghast. “Are you mad? Is everybody mad?”

Simon recoiled fastidiously as she leaned rather too near. He waved her away.

“Uh … would you mind? I’m still fairly clean.”

Her eyes blazed with anger at that.

“Yes, I sure damn well would mind,” she exploded. “And what on earth makes you think Charles was murdered?”

The Saint said: “There was a third person on the boat with him and Fournier. One who survived.”

“And who was that third person?”

“That remains to be seen. But one thing we can be pretty certain of. Charles must have talked before he was killed. Otherwise he wouldn’t have been killed. So the survivor—the murderer—is at least one person who knows where the gold is.”

“But how can you be so sure—” She stopped short, now very thoughtful. “Now you’re talking about this ‘gold’. Simon, how do you know all this? If Charles had some gold, how come they, and you, know all about it and I don’t? And how come you were able to turn up back there, in the proverbial nick of time?” Arabella stopped again, with suspicion clouding her features. “What is all this, Simon? I can’t even be sure of your part in it any more. So where’s the nearest police station around here?”

The Saint sighed patiently.

“Dear lovely Arabella, you’re understandably overwrought and suspicious, especially as I’ve had all the clean and heroic bits of the action today and you’ve had all the dirty, dangerous and the strenuous ones. But wouldn’t you like to know where there’s several million dollars in gold bullion?”

“Several mill—” She sat back and thought for a minute, as they sped through the landscapes of southern France, now on the main road for Marseilles. Then, looking no less confused, she shrugged and said: “I could get used to bullion.”

“Then you see why we’re not going to the police just yet.”

“I’m working on it.”

“Plenty of time to think—while you’re bathing.”

After they had installed themselves in twin communicating suites in one of the better hotels of Marseille, Arabella lost no time in making the acquaintance of the bathroom, while Simon went out on a rapid shopping trip.