'tell him I never want to speak to him again.'
Patricia threw herself at the instrument.
'Hullo. . . . Simon—where have you been? . . . Oh, don't play the fool, boy. We must know quickly. . . . Well, the police are here. . . . The police—the men you and Monty threw in the river. Keep quiet and let me tell you.'
V. HOW SIMON TEMPLAR CHASED HIMSELF,
AND MONTY HAYWARD DID HIS STUFF
SIMON TEMPLAR deposited himself neatly on the roof of the car as it flashed underneath him and settled himself down to wallow in the side-splitting aspects of the ride. The humour of the situation struck him as being definitely rich. To have first induced a wily old veteran like Prince Rudolph to transport you personally to his secret lair, and then, after you have butted violently into an up-and-coming conversazione, plugged his gentleman's gentleman in the lower abdomen, pulled His Elegant Elevation's leg, shot a hole in the air an inch from his elevated ear, snaffled a large can of boodle, and made yourself generally unpopular in divers similar ways, to be taking precisely the same route back to the long grass was an achievement of which any man might have been justly proud. And yet that was exactly what the Saint was doing.
The inspiration had come to Simon while he was listening to Patricia's story on the telephone, and he had put it into effect without a second's hesitation. Sprawling tenaciously on his unstable perch, he reviewed the dazzling casualness with which he had scattered all the necessary bait—the mythical car which he had waiting for him, and the rendezvous on the road to Jenbach—and marvelled at his own astounding brilliance. And after that had been done the elopement of Prince Rudolf mattered not at all. In fact, it saved a certain amount of trouble. The Saint had scarcely reached his point of vantage over the archway of the castle when he saw the prince's car pulling out for the pursuit; and one minute later he was being bowled along on the most hilarious getaway of his eventful life.
It was the very first time in his tempestuous career that he had ever tacked himself to the lid of an unfriendly limousine and helped enthusiastically to chase himself; and the overpowering Saintliness of the idea made him so weak with laughter that he was barely able to save himself from being bucked off into the surrounding panorama when the car jolted over the ridge that placed it on the mountain road.
If the voyage to the castle had been hectic, the return journey was the most delirious peregrination in which the Saint ever wanted to take part. How the car itself managed to hold the road at all was more than the Saint could account for by any natural laws. The only conclusion he could come to was that it had been born and bred in a circus and had subsequently been fitted with tires manufactured from a hitherto unknown form of everlasting glue. Half the time, it seemed to be running with two of its wheels skating about on the loose scree and the other two gyrating airily over the unfathomable abyss. The fact that it would probably have done the very same thing if the Saint had been driving it himself was a consolation that could be ignored. The difference between one's own masterly manoeuvres at the wheel and the hare-brained antics of a total stranger is one which no practical motorist has ever been able to misunderstand. Besides which, a comfortably upholstered seat inside a vehicle, however suicidally driven, is not and never can be quite so awe-inspiring as a smooth and slippery roof on which you have to maintain your crucified posture largely by the adhesive qualities of your eyelids. For Simon Templar there ensued an interval of fifteen or twenty minutes in which he had no further leisure to enjoy the gorgonzolan ripeness of the jest.
The only merit he could see in that breakneck pace was that it approximately halved the duration of the agony. And by some miracle he found himself still breathing and alive when the precipitous track began to level itself out for the run down to Schwaz.
With a wry grin of triumph, the Saint moistened his dry lips and eased the tension on his crippled thews.
The car was slowing up doubtfully. Simon squeezed his ear against the roof, and heard the prince speaking impatiently.
'Go on further, blockhead! He drives like the devil, but we must be close behind him. The road to Jenbach——'
Simon crooked his toes and fingers and clung on, and the car lurched round a corner and raced on towards the east.
On another furlong of straight road he convoluted himself round again to peep in at the prince, and what he saw made him flop limply down in a renewed paroxysm of mirth.
The prince was sitting tensely forward in his seat, staring fixedly along the road ahead. One hand was clutching something in his pocket, while the other beat a monotonous tattoo on his left knee. Apart from that regular tapping of his fingers he was as motionless as a painted statue, and his pale, finely modelled face was as expressionless as ever; and yet the contrast between him as he was sitting then, and the inscrutable exquisite whom the Saint knew so well, was as inconsistent a transfiguration
