'That ought to come like a ray of sunshine into Claud's dreary life,' said the Saint, surveying his handiwork.
He may have been right; for the postcard was delivered in error to an Assistant Commissioner who was gifted with a particularly acid tongue, and it is certain that Teal did not hear the last of it for many days.
PART II
Chapter 1
The scream pealed out at such point-blank range, and was strangled so swiftly and suddenly, that Simon Templar opened his eyes and wondered for a moment whether he had dreamed it.
The darkness inside the car was impenetrable; and outside, through the thin mist that a light frost had etched upon the windows, he could distinguish nothing but the dull shadows of a few trees silhouetted against the flat pallor of the sky. A glance at the luminous dial of his wrist-watch showed that it was a quarter to five; he had slept barely two hours.
A week-end visit to some friends who lived on the remote margin of Cornwall, about thirteen inches from Land's End, had terminated a little more than seven hours earlier, when the Saint, feeling slightly limp after three days in the company of two young souls who were convalescing from a recent honeymoon, had pulled out his car to make the best of a clear night road back to London. A few miles beyond Basingstoke he had backed into a side lane for a cigarette, a sandwich, and a nap. The cigarette and the sandwich he had had; but the nap should have lasted until the hands of his watch met at six-thirty and the sky was white and clear with the morning—he had fixed that time for himself, and had known that his eyes would not open one minute later.
And they hadn't. But they shouldn't have opened one minute earlier, either. . . . And the Saint sat for a second or two without moving, straining his ears into the stillness for the faintest whisper of sound that might answer the question in his mind, and driving his memory backwards into those last blank moments of sleep to recall the sound that had woken him. And then, with a quick stealthy movement, he turned the handle of the door and slipped out into the road.
Before that, he had realised that that scream could never have been shaped in his imagination. The sheer shrieking horror of it still rang between his eardrums and his brain; the hideous high-pitched sob on which it had died seemed still to be quivering on the air. And the muffled patter of running feet which had reached him as he listened had served only to confirm what he already knew.
He stood in the shadow of the car with the cold damp smell of the dawn in his nostrils, and heard the footsteps coming closer. They were coming towards him down the main road— now that he was outside the car, they tapped into his brain with an unmistakable clearness. He heard them so distinctly, in the utter silence that lay all around, that he felt he could almost see the man who had made them. And he knew that that was the man who had screamed. The same stark terror that had gone shuddering through the very core of the scream was beating out the wild tattoo of those running feet—the same stomach-sinking dread translated into terms of muscular reaction. For the feet were not running as a man ordinarily runs. They were kicking, blinding, stumbling, hammering along in the mad muscle-binding heart-bursting flight of a man whose reason has tottered and cracked before a vision of all the tortures of the Pit. ...
Simon felt the hairs on the nape of his neck prickling. In another instant he could hear the gasping agony of the man's breathing, but he stayed waiting where he was. He had moved a little way from the car, and now he was crouched right by the corner of the lane, less than a yard from the road, completely hidden in the blackness under the hedge.
The most elementary process of deduction told him that no man would run like that unless the terror that drove him on was close upon his heels—-and no man would have screamed like that unless he had felt cold upon his shoulder the clutching hand of an intolerable doom. Therefore the Saint waited.
And then the man reached the corner of the lane.
Simon got one glimpse of him—a man of middle height and build, coatless, with his head back and his fists working. Under the feebly lightening sky his face showed thin and hollow-cheeked, pointed at the chin by a small peaked beard, the eyes starting from their sockets.
He was done in—finished. He must have been finished two hundred yards back. But as he reached the corner the ultimate end came. His feet blundered again, and he plunged as if a trip-wire had caught
