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THEY WERE tying the Saint to a massive fake-antique wooden chair placed close to the bed. His ankles were corded to the legs, and Kaskin was knotting his wrists behind the back of it. Dolf kept him covered while it was being done, The gun in his thin hand was steady and impersonal: his weasel face and bright beady eyes held a cold-blooded sneer which made it plain that he would have welcomed an opportunity to demonstrate that he was not holding his finger off the trigger because he was afraid of the bang.
But the Saint was not watching him very intently. He was looking most of the time at Angela Lindsay. To either of the other two men his face would have seemed utterly impassive, his brow serene and amazingly unperturbed, the infinitesimal smile that lingered on his lips only adding to the enigma of his self-control. But that same inscrutable face talked to the girl as clearly as if it had used spoken words.
Her eyes stared at him in a blind stunned way that said: "I know. I know. You think I'm a heel. But what could I do ? I didn't have long enough to think. .. ."
And his own cool steady eyes, and that faintly lingering smile, all of his face so strangely free from hatred or contempt, answered in the same silent language: "I know, kid. I understand. You couldn't help it. What the hell?"
She looked at him with an incredulity that ached to believe.
Kaskin tightened his last knot and came round from behind the chair.
"Well, smart guy," he said gloatingly. "You weren't so smart, after all."
The Saint had no time to waste. Even with his wrists tied behind him, he could still reach the hilt of his knife with his fingertips. They hadn't thought of searching for a weapon like that, under his sleeve. He eased it out of its sheath until his ringers could close on the handle.
"You certainly did surprise me, Judd," he admitted mildly.
"Thought you were making a big hit with the little lady, didn't you ?" Kaskin sneered. "Well, that's what you were meant to think. I never knew a smart guy yet that wasn't a sucker for a jane. We had it all figured out. She tipped us off as soon as she left your house this afternoon. We could have hunted out the dough and got away with it then, but that would have still left you running around. It was worth waiting a bit to get you as well. We knew you'd be here. We just watched the house until you got here, and came in after you. Then we only had to wait until Angela got close enough to you to grab your gun. Directly we heard her say you hadn't got one, we walked in." His arm slid round the girl's waist. "Cute little actress, ain't she, Saint? I'll bet you thought you were in line for a big party."
Simon had his knife in his hand. He had twisted the blade back to saw it across the cords on his wrists, and it was keen enough to lance through them like butter. He could feel them loosening strand by strand, and stopped cutting just before they would have fallen away altogether; but one strong jerk of his arms would have been enough to set him free.
"So what ?" he inquired coolly.
"So you get what's coming to you," Kaskin said.
He dug into a bulging coat pocket.
The Saint tensed himself momentarily. Death was still very near. His hands might be practically free, but his legs were still tied to the chair. And even though he could throw his knife faster than most men could pull a trigger, it could only be thrown once. But he had taken that risk from the beginning, with his eyes open. He could only die once, too; and all his life had been a gamble with death.
He saw Kaskin's hand come out. But it didn't come out with a gun. It came out with something that looked like an ordinary tin can with a length of smooth cord wound round it. Kaskin unwrapped the cord, and laid the can on the edge of the bed, where it was only a few inches both from the Saint's elbow arid Verdean's middle. He stretched out the cord, which terminated at one end in a hole in the top of the can, struck a match, and put it to the loose end. The end began to sizzle slowly.
"It's a slow fuse," he explained, with vindictive satisfaction. "It'll take about fifteen minutes to burn. Time enough for us to get a long way off before it goes off, and time enough for you to do plenty of thinking before you go skyhigh with Verdean. I'm going to enjoy thinking about you thinking."
Only the Saint's extraordinarily sensitive ears would have caught the tiny mouselike sound that came from somewhere in the depths of the house. And any other ears that had heard it might still have dismissed it as the creak of a dry board.
"The only thing that puzzles me," he said equably, "is what you think you're going to think with."
Kaskin stepped up and hit him unemotionally in the face.
"That's for last night," he said hoarsely, and turned to the others. "Let's get started."
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 movement. 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 no
w," 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 subconscious 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.
But it was not the sight of the Saint that petrified Mr Teal into tottering stillness and bulged his china-blue eyes half out of their sockets, exactly as the eyes of all the other men in the hall were also bulged as they looked upwards with him. It was the sight of the girl who was coming down the stairs after the Saint.
It was Angela Lindsay.
The reader has already been made jerry to the fact that the clinging costumes which she ordinarily affected suggested that underneath them she possessed an assortment of curves and contours of exceptionally enticing pulchritude. This suggestion was now elevated to the realms of scientifically observable fact. There was no further doubt about it, for practically all of them were open
to inspection. The sheer and diaphanous underwear which was now their only covering left nothing worth mentioning to the imagination. And she seemed completely unconcerned about the exposure, as if she knew that she had a right to expect a good deal of admiration for what she had to display.
Mr Teal blinked groggily.
"Sorry to be so long," Simon was saying casually, "but our pals left a bomb upstairs, and I thought I'd better put it out of action. They left Verdean lying on top of it. But I'm afraid he didn't really need it. Somebody hit him once too often, and it looks as if he has kind of passed away.... What's the matter, Claud ? You look slightly boiled. The old turn-turn isn't going back on you again, is it?"
The detective found his voice.
"Who is that you've got with you ?" he asked in a hushed and quivering voice.
Simon glanced behind him.
"Oh, Miss Lindsay," he said airily. "She was tied up with the bomb, too. You see, it appears that Verdean used to look after this house when the owner was away—it belongs to a guy named Hogsbotham—so he had a key, and when he was looking for a place to cache the boodle, he thought this would be as safe as anywhere. Well, Miss Lindsay was in the bedroom when the boys got here, so they tied her up along with Verdean. I just cut her loose——"
"You found 'er in 'Ogsbotham's bedroom ?" repeated one of the local men hoarsely, with his traditional phelgm battered to limpness by the appalling thought.
The Saint raised his eyebrows.
"Why not?" he said innocently. "I should call her an ornament to anyone's bedroom."
"I should say so," flared the girl stridently. "I never had any complaints yet."
The silence was numbing to the ears.
Simon looked over the upturned faces, the open mouths, the protruding eyeballs, and read there everything that he wanted to read. One of the constables finally gave it voice. Gazing upwards with the stalk-eyed stare of a man hypnotized by the sight of a miracle beyond human expectation, he distilled the inarticulate emotions of his comrades into one reverent and pregnant ejaculation.
"Gor-blimy!" he said.
The Saint filled his lungs with a breath of inenarrable peace. Such moments of immortal bliss, so ripe, so full, so perfect, so superb, so flawless and unalloyed and exquisite, were beyond the range of any feeble words. They flooded every corner of the soul and every fibre of the body, so that the heart was filled to overflowing with a nectar of cosmic content. The very tone in which that one word had been spoken was a benediction. It gave indubitable promise that within a few hours the eyewitness evidence of Ebenezer Hogsbotham's depravity would have spread all over Chertsey, within a few hours more it would have reached London, before the next sunset it would have circulated over all England; and all the denials and protestations that Hogsbotham might make would never restore his self-made pedestal again.
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