The Saint Closes the Case (20 page)

Thus the miles were eaten up, until more than
half the
journey must have been set behind him.

If only there was no engine failure… . He
had no fear
for fuel and oil, for he had filled up on the way back
from
Maidenhead.

Simon touched a switch, and all the
instruments on the
dashboard before him were illuminated from behind with a
queer
ghostly luminance. His eye flickered from the road and found one of them.

Seventy-two.

Seventy-four.

Seventy-five … six… .

“Patricia!
…”

“Battle, murder, and sudden death…
.”

“You know, Pat, we don’t have a chance
these days. There’s
no chance for magnificent loving. A man ought to fight
for
his lady. Preferably with dragons… .”

Seventy-eight.

Seventy-nine.

A corner loomed out of the dark, flung itself
at him, men
acing, murderous. The tyres, curbed with a cruel hand,
tore
at the road, shrieking. The car swung round the corner, on its haunches,
as it were … gathered itself, and found its stride
again… .

Ping!

Something like the crisp twang of the snapping
of an over
strained wire. The Saint, looking straight ahead,
blinking, saw
that the windscreen in front of him had given birth to a
star— a star of long slender points radiating from a neat round hole
drilled
through the glass. And a half-smile came to his lips.

Ping!

Bang!

Bang!

The first sound repeated; then, in quick
succession, two
other sounds, sharp and high, like the smack of two pieces
of
metal. In front of him they were. In the gleaming aluminum,
bonnet.

“Smoke!” breathed the Saint. “This is a wild
party!”

He
hadn’t time to adjust himself to
the interruption, to
parse and analyse it and extract its
philosophy. How he came
to be under fire at that stage of the
journey—that could wait.
Something had gone wrong. Someone had
blundered. Roger
must have been tricked, and Marius must have escaped—or
something.
But, meanwhile …

Fortunately the first shot had made him slow
up. Otherwise
he would have been killed.

The next sound he heard was neither the impact
of a bullet
nor the thin, distant rattle of the rifle that fired it.
It was loud
and close and explosive, under his feet it seemed; and
the
steering wheel was wrenched out of his hand—nearly.

He never knew how he kept his grip on it. An
instinct
swifter than thought must have made him tighten his hold
at
the sound of that explosion, and he was driving with both
hands on
the wheel. He tore the wheel round in the way it did
not want to go,
bracing his feet on clutch and brake pedals,
calling up the last
reserve of every sinew in his splendid body.

Death, sudden as anything he could have asked,
stared him
in the face. The strain was terrific. The Hirondel had
ceased
to be his creature. It was mad, runaway, the bit between its
tremendous
teeth, caracoling towards a demoniac plunge to
destruction. No normal
human power should have been able
to hold it. The Saint, strong as he
was, could never have done
it—normally. He must have found some
supernatural strength.

Somehow he kept the car out of the ditch for
as long as it
took to bring it to a standstill.

Then, almost without thinking, he switched out
the lights.

Dimly he wondered why, under that fearful
gruelling, the front axle hadn’t snapped like a dry stick, or why the steering
hadn’t come
to pieces under his hands.

“If I come out of this alive,”
thought the Saint, “the Hirondel Motor Company will get an unsolicited
testimonial from me.”

But that thought merely crossed his mind like
a swallow
swimming a quiet pool—and was lost. Then, in the same dim
way, he was wondering why he hadn’t brought a gun. Now he was likely to pay for
the reckless haste with which he had set
out. His little knife
was all very well—he could use it as ac
curately as any man
could use a gun, and as swiftly—but it was only good for one shot. He’d never
been able to train it
to function as a boomerang.

It was unlikely that he was being sniped by
one man alone.
And that one solitary knife, however expertly he used it,
would
be no use at all against a number of armed men besieging him
in a lamed
car.

“Obviously, therefore,” thought
Simon, “get out of the car.”

And he was out of it instantly, crouching in
the ditch beside
it. In the open, and the darkness, he would have a better
chance.

He wasn’t thinking for a moment of a getaway.
That would
have been fairly easy. But the Hirondel was the only car
he
had on him, and it had to be saved—or else he had to throw in
his hand.
Joke. The obvious object of the ambuscade was to
make him do just
that—to stop him, anyhow—and he wasn’t
being stopped… .

Now, with the switching off of the lights,
the darkness had
become less dark, and the road ran through it, beside the
black
bulk- of the flanking trees, like a ribbon of dull steel.
And,
looking back, the Saint could see shadows that moved. He
counted
four of them.

He went to meet them, creeping like a snake in
the dry
ditch. They were separated. Avoiding the dull gleam of that
strip of
road, as if afraid that a shot from the car in front
might greet their
approach, they slunk along in the gloom at
the sides of the road,
two on one side and two on the other.

It was no time for soft fighting. There was
that punctured
front wheel to be changed, and those four men in the way.
So the four
men had to be eliminated—as quickly and de
finitely as possible.
The Saint was having no fooling about.

The leader of the two men on Simon’s side of
the road almost stepped on the dark figure that seemed to rise suddenly
out of the
ground in front of him. He stopped, and tried to
draw back so that he
could use the rifle he carried, and his companion trod on his heels and cursed.

Then the first man screamed; and the scream
died in a choking gurgle.

The man behind him saw his leader sink to the
ground, but
there was another man beyond his leader—a man who had not
been there before, who laughed with a soft whisper of desper
ate
merriment. The second man tried to raise the automatic
he carried; but two
steely hands grasped his wrists, and he felt
himself flying
helplessly through the air. He seemed to fly a
long way—and then he
slept.

The Saint crossed the road.

A gun spoke from the hand of one of the two
men on the
other side, who had paused, irresolute, at the sound of
the first
scream.
But the Saint was lost again in the shadows.

They crouched down, waiting, watching, intent
for his next
move. But they were looking down along the ditch and the
grass
beside the road, where the Saint had vanished like a
ghost; but the Saint
was above them then, crouched like a
leopard under the hedge at the top of
the embankment beside
them, gathering himself stealthily.

He dropped on them out of the sky; and the
heels of both
his shoes impacted upon the back of the neck of one of
them
with all the Saint’s hurtling weight behind, so that the man lay
very still
where he was and did not stir again.

The other man, rising and bringing up his
rifle, saw a spinning sliver of bright steel whisking towards him like a
flying
fish over a dark sea, and struck to guard. By a miracle he suc
ceeded,
and the knife glanced from his gun-barrel and tinkled
away over the road.

Then he fought with the Saint for the rifle.

He was probably the strongest of the four, and
he did not
know fear; but there is a trick by which a man who knows
it
can always take a rifle or a stick from a man who does not
know it,
and the Saint had known that trick from his child
hood. He made the man
drop the rifle; but he had no chance
to pick it up for himself, for the man
was on him again in a
moment. Simon could only kick the gun away
into the ditch,
where it was lost.

An even break, then.

They fought hand to hand, two men on that
dark road, lion
and leopard.

This man had the advantage of strength and
weight, but the
Saint had the speed and fighting savagery. No man who was
not a Colossus,
or mad, would have attempted to stand in the
Saint’s way that
night: but this man, who may have been
something of both,
attempted it. He fought like a beast. But
Simon Templar was
berserk. The man was not only standing
in the way: he was
the servant and the symbol of all the pow
ers that the Saint
hated. He stood for Marius, and the men
behind Marius, and all
the conspiracy that the Saint had sworn
to break, and that
had caused it to come to pass that at that
moment the Saint
should have been riding recklessly to the
rescue of his lady.
Therefore the man had to go, as his three
companions had already
gone. And perhaps the man recog
nised his doom, for he let out one sobbing
cry before the Saint’s
fingers found an unshakable grip on his
throat.

It was to the death. Simon had no choice,
even if he would have taken it, for the man fought to the end; and even when
unconsciousness stilled his struggles Simon dared not let him
go, for he
might be only playing ‘possum, and the Saint could
not afford to take any
chances. There was only one way to make sure… .

So presently the Saint rose slowly to his
feet, breathing
deeply like a man who has been under water for a long
time,
and went to find Anna. And no one else moved on the road.

As an afterthought, he commandeered a loaded
automatic
from one of the men who had no further use for it.

Then he went to change the wheel.

It should only have taken him five minutes;
but he could
not have foreseen that the spare tyre would settle down to
a
futile flatness as he slipped the jack from under the dumb-iron and
lowered the wheel to the road.

There was only the one spare.

It was a very slight consolation to remember
that Norman
Kent, the ever-thoughtful, always carried an outfit of
tools
about twice as efficient as anything the ordinary motorist thinks
necessary.
And the wherewithal to mend punctures was in
cluded.

Even so, with only the spotlight to work by,
and no bucket
of water with which to find the site of the puncture, it
would
not be any easy job.

Simon stripped off his coat with a groan.

It was more than half an hour before the
Hirondel was ready to take the road again. Nearly three-quarters of an
hour wasted
altogether. Precious minutes squandered, that
he had gambled life
and limb to win… .

But it seemed like forty-five years, instead
of forty-five
minutes, before he was able to light a cigarette and climb
back into the driver’s seat.

He started the engine and moved his hand to
switch on the
headlights; but even as his hand touched the switch the
road
about him was flooded by lights that were not his.

As he engaged the gears, he looked back over
his shoulder,
and saw that the car behind was not overtaking. It
had
stopped.

Breathless with the reaction from the first
foretaste of bat
tle, he was not expecting another attack so soon. As he
moved
off, he was for an instant more surprised than hurt by the feel
of
something stabbing through his left shoulder like a hot
spear-point.