The Saint Closes the Case

'Yes. I wish to ask if a telegram would be delivered in Bures to-night. . . . Bures, Suffolk. . . . You think not? . . . You are almost sure not? . . . Very well. Thank you. No, I will not send it now.'

He replaced the receiver, and lifted it again immediately.

This time he spoke to Westminster 9999, and gave staccato instructions which Roger could not understand. They ap­peared to be detailed instructions, and they took some time. But at last Marius was satisfied.

He rang off, and turned and kicked Roger contemptuously.

'You stay here, pig. You are a security for your friend's behaviour.'

Then again he spoke to the lean man in the language which was double-Dutch to Roger: 'Hermann, you remain to guard him. I will leave you the gun. Wait—I find out the tele­phone number. . . .' He read it off the instrument. 'If I have orders to give, I will telephone. You will not leave here with­out my permission. . . . Otto, you come with me. We go after Templar in my car. I have agents on the road, and I have or­dered them to be instructed. If they are not all as incapable as you, he will never reach Bures alive. But we follow to make sure. . . . Wait again. That pig on the floor spoke to a friend at Maidenhead who may be coming to join him. You will cap­ture him and tie him up also. Let there be no mistake, Her­mann.'

'There shall be no mistake.'

'Good! Come, Otto.'

Roger heard them go; and then the roaring blackness that lay all about him welled up and engulfed that lonely glitter of clarity in his mind.

He might have been unconscious for five minutes or five days; he had lost all idea of time. But the first thing he saw when he opened his eyes was the clock, and he knew that it must have been about twenty minutes.

The man Hermann sat in a chair opposite him, turning the pages of a magazine. Presently he looked up and saw that Roger was awake; and he put down the magazine and came over and spat in his face.

'Soon, English swine, you will be dead. And your country——'

Roger controlled his tongue with a tremendous effort.

He found that he could breathe. The iron bands about his chest had slackened, and the bodily anguish had lessened. There was still the throbbing pain in his back and the throb­bing pain in his head; but he was better. And he wasn't asking for any unnecessary aggravation of his troubles—not just then, anyway.

The man went on: 'The Doctor is a great man. He is the greatest man in the world. You should have seen how he arranged everything in two minutes. It was magnificent. He is Napoleon born again. He is going to make our country the greatest country in the world. And you fools try to fight him——'

The speech merged into an unintelligible outburst in the man's native tongue; but Roger understood enough. He un­derstood that a man who could delude his servants into such a fanatical loyalty was no small man. And he wondered what chance the Saint would ever have had of convincing anyone that Marius was concerned with no patriotism and no nation­alities, but only with his own gods of money and power.

The first flush of futile anger ebbed from Conway's face, and he lay in stolid silence as he was tied, revolving plot and counter-plot in his mind. Hermann, failing to rouse him with taunts, struck him twice across the face. Roger never moved. And the man spat at him again.

'It is as I thought. You have no courage, you dogs of Englishmen. It is only when you are many against one little one— then you are brave.'

'Oh, quite,' said Roger wearily.

Hermann glowered at him.

'Now, if you had been the one who hit me——'

The shrill scream of a bell wailed through the apartment with a suddenness that made the conventional sound electrify­ing. Hermann stopped, stiffening, in the middle of his sen­tence. And a sour leer came into his face.

'Now I welcome your friend, pig.'

Roger drew a deep breath.

He must have been careless, obvious about it, for Roger Conway's was not a mind much given to cunning. Or possibly Hermann had been expecting some such move, subconsciously, and had his ears pricked for the sound. But he stopped on his way to the door and turned.

'You would try to give warning, Englishman?' he purred.

His gun was in his hand. He reached Roger in three strides.

Roger knew he was up against it. If he didn't shout, his one chance of rescue, so far as he could see, was dished—and Norman Kent with it. If he looked like shouting, he'd be laid out again. And, if it came to that, since his intention of shouting had already been divined, he'd probably be laid out anyway. Hermann wasn't the sort of man to waste time gagging his prisoner. So——

'Go to blazes,' said Roger recklessly.

Then he yelled.

An instant later Hermann's gun-butt crashed into the side of his head.

Again he should have been stunned; but he wasn't. He de­cided afterwards that he must have a skull a couple of inches thick, and the constitution of an ox with it, to have stood up to as much as he had. But the fact remained that he was laid out without being stunned; and he lay still, trying to collect himself in time to loose a second yell as Hermann opened the door.

Hermann straightened up, turning his gun round again. He put it in his coat pocket, keeping his finger on the trigger; and then, with something like a panicking terror that the warn­ing might have been heard and accepted by the person outside the front door, he scrambled rather than ran out of the room, cursing under his breath.

But the ring was repeated as he reached the front door, and the sound reassured him. He could not believe that anyone who had heard and understood that one yell would have rung again so promptly after it. Whereby Hermann showed himself a less ingenious psychologist than the man out­side. . . .

He opened the door, keeping himself hidden behind it.

No one entered.

He waited, with a kind of superstitious fear trickling down his back like a tiny cascade of ice-cold water. Nothing hap­pened—and yet the second ring had sounded only a moment before he opened the door, and no one who had rung a second time would go away at once, without waiting to see if the re­newed summons would be answered.

Then Conway yelled again: 'Look out, Norman!'

Hermann swore in a whisper.

But now he had no choice. He had been given his orders. The man who came was to be taken. And certainly the man who had come, who must have heard Conway's second cry even if he had not heard the first, could not be allowed to escape and raise an alarm.

Incautiously, Hermann stepped to the door.

His feet were scarcely clear of the threshold, outside on the landing, when a hand like a ham caught his throat from behind, over his shoulder, and another enormous hand gripped his gun-wrist like a vice. He was as helpless as a child.

The hand at his throat twisted his face round to the light. He saw a ponderous red face with sleepy eyes, connected by a pillar of neck with shoulders worthy of a buffalo.

'Come along,' said Chief Inspector Claud Eustace Teal drowsily. 'Come along back to where you sprang from, and open your heart to Uncle!'

10. How Simon Templar drove to Bures, and two policemen jumped in time

The road out of London on the north-east is one of the less pleasant ways of finding the open country. For one thing, it is infested with miles of tramway, crawling, interminable, blocking the traffic, maddening to the man at the wheel of a fast car—especially maddening to the man in a hurry at the wheel of a fast car.

Late as it was, there was enough traffic on the road to balk the Saint of clear runs of more than a few hundred yards at a time. And every time he was forced to apply the brakes, pause, and reaccelerate, was pulling his average down.