The Saint Closes the Case

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 use­less kind of remark for which he would cheerfully have or­dered 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 mo­ment. 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.

'I've seen the whole thing,' said the Saint, with a cold devil in his voice. 'I saw it while you were gaping at that clock. You'll see it, too, when you've got your brain on to it. But I don't have to think.'

'But how could Marius——'

'Easy! He'd already tracked us here. He'd been watching the place. The man's thorough. He'd naturally have put other agents on to the people he saw visiting me. And how could he have missed Pat? . . . One of his men probably followed her down to Devonshire. Then, after the Esher show, Marius got in touch with that man. She could easily be got at on the train. They could take her off, say, at Reading—doped. . . . She wasn't on her guard. She didn't know there was any danger. That one man could have done it. ... With a car to meet him at Reading. . . . And Marius is going to hold Pat in the scales against me—against everything we've set out to do. Binding me hand and foot. Putting my dear one in the forefront of the battle, and daring me to fire. And laying the powder-train for his foul slaughter under the shield of her blessed body. And laughing at us. . . .'

Then Roger began to understand less dimly, and he stared at the Saint as he would have stared at a ghost.

He said, like a man waking from a dream: 'If you're right, our show's finished.'

'I am right,' said the Saint. 'Ask yourself the question.'

He released Roger's arm as if he had only just become aware that he was holding it.

Then, in three strides, the Saint was at the window; and Conway had just started to realise his intention when the Saint justified, and at the same time smithereened, that realisation with one single word.

'Gone.'

'You mean the——'

'Both of 'em. Of course, Marius kept up the watch on the house in case we were being tricky. The man who arrived at the same time as we did was the relief. Or a messenger to say that Marius had lifted the trump card, and the watch could pack up. Then they saw us arrive.'

'But they can't have been gone a moment——'

The Saint was back by the table.

'Just that,' snapped the Saint. 'They've gone—but they can't have been gone a moment. The car's outside. Could you recognise either of them again?'

'I could recognise one.'

'I could recognise the other. Foreign-looking birds, with ugly mugs. Easy again. Let's go!'

It was more than Roger could cope with. His brain hadn't settled down yet. He couldn't get away from a sane, reason­able, conventional conviction that the Saint was hurling up a solid mountain from the ghost of a molehill. He couldn't quite get away from it even while the clock on the mantelpiece was giving him the lie with every tick. But he got between the Saint and the door, somehow—he wasn't sure how. '

'Hadn't you better sit down and think it out before you do anything rash?'

'Hadn't you better go and hang yourself?' rapped the Saint impatiently.

Then his bitterness softened. His hands fell on Roger's shoul­ders.

'Don't you remember another time when we were in this room, you and I?' he said. 'We were trying to get hold of Marius then—for other reasons. We could only find out his telephone number. And that's all we know to this day—unless we can make one of those birds who were outside tell us more than the man who gave us the telephone number. They're likely to know more than that—we're big enough now to have the bigger men after us. They're the one chance of a clue we've got, and I'm taking it. This way!'

He swept Conway aside, and burst out of the flat. Conway followed. When the Saint stopped in Brook Street, and turned to look, Roger was beside him.

'You drive.'

He was opening the door of the car as he cracked the order. As Roger touched the self-starter, the Saint climbed in beside him.

Roger said hopelessly: 'We've no idea which way they've gone.'

'Get going! There aren't so many streets round here. Make this the centre of a circle. First into Regent Street, cut back through Conduit Street to New Bond Street—Oxford Street— back through Hanover Square. Burn it, son, haven't you any imagination?'

Now, in that district the inhabited streets are slashed across the map in a crazy tangle, and the two men might have taken almost any of them, according to the unknown destination for which they were making. The task of combing through that tangle, with so little qualification, struck Roger as being rather more hopeless than looking for one particular grain of sand in the Arizona Desert; but he couldn't tell the Saint that. The Saint wouldn't have admitted it, anyway, and Roger wouldn't have had the heart to try to convince him.

And yet Roger was wrong, for the Saint sat beside him and drove with Roger's hands. And the Saint knew that people in cities tend to move in the best-beaten tracks, particularly in a strange city, for fear of losing their way—exactly as a man lost in the bush will follow a tortuous trail rather than strike across open country in the direction which he feels he should take. And the men looked foreign and probably were foreign, and the foreigner is afraid of losing himself in any but the long, straight, bright roads, though they may take him to his objec­tive by the most roundabout route.

Unless, of course, the foreigners had taken a native guide in the shape of a taxi. But Conway could not suggest that to the Saint, either.

'Keep on down here,' Simon Templar was saying. 'Never mind what I told you before. Now I should cut away to the right—down Vigo Street.'

Roger spun the wheel, and the Hirondel skidded and swooped across the very nose of an omnibus. For one fleeting second, in the bottleneck of Vigo Street, a taxi-driver appeared to meditate, disputing their right of way; fortunately for all concerned, he abandoned that idea hurriedly.

Then Simon was speaking again.

'Right up Bond Street. That's the spirit.'

Roger said: 'You'll collect half a dozen summonses before you've finished with this. ...'

'Damn that,' said the Saint; and they swept recklessly past a constable who had endeavoured to hold them up, and drowned his outraged shout in the stutter of their departing exhaust.

By Roger Conway that day's driving was afterwards to be remembered in nightmares, and that last drive more than any other journey.

He obeyed the Saint blindly. It wasn't Roger's car, anyway. But he would never have believed that such feats of murderous road-hogging could have been performed in a London street —if he had not been made to perform them himself.

And yet it seemed to be to no purpose; for although he was scanning, in every second of that drive in which he was able to take his eyes off the road, the faces of the pedestrians they passed, he did not see the face he sought. And suppose, after all, they did find the men they were after? What could be done about it in an open London street—except call for the police, whom they dared not appeal to?

But Roger Conway was alone in discouragement.

'We'll try some side streets now,' said the Saint steadily. 'Down there——'

And Roger, an automaton, lashed round the corner on two wheels.

And then, towards the bottom of George Street, Roger pointed, and the Saint saw two men walking side by side.

'Those two!'

'For Heaven's sake!' said the Saint softly, meaninglessly, desperately; and the car sprang forward like a