The Saint's Getaway

The Saint gazed at them merely because he happened to be looking in their direction. They were sixty or seventy yards up the street when he first noticed them, too far away for him to see them as anything but shadowy figures in the failing light; and they meant nothing more to him than any of the other figures that had passed and repassed since he had been sitting there. He watched them without seeing them, while his mind was wholly occupied with other things. The thread of his deduc­tions was still eluding him at the most vital knot, baffling him again in that murky whirlpool of disjointed ideas which per­sisted in deflecting the straight trajectory of his thoughts, and he was bullying himself back to the fence which his imagination steadily refused to take. If Marcovitch was waiting for Rudolf in Treuchtlingen . . . The figures came nearer: he made out that one of them was a woman, and somewhere beside her he seemed to catch a sheen of bright metal, but even then he thought nothing of it. The fog had balked him again. He glanced up at the police station—began speaking to Monty, giving no hint of the struggle within himself. . . .

And then the street lights went on suddenly, leaping into yellow orbs of incandescence that studded the dusk with moons. The rays of one of them fell clearly over the three figures less than twenty yards away, striking full on the pale, proud face of the girl in the middle; and Simon saw that it was Patricia Holm.

The Saint went numb. Dully he made out the features of the two men—the policeman on one side, holding her by the arm: Marcovitch on the other, viciously jubilant. The deadly unex­pectedness of it stunned him. He felt as if destiny had slammed a door in bis face and turned a key, and he was help­lessly watching the bolts sinking home into their sockets, one by one. It was the one thing that he had never even found a place for in his calculations. He tried stupidly to find a reason for it, as if only a logical interpretation could confirm the evidence of his eyes. The lost end of the thread that he had been pursuing whisked through his brain again like a streak of hot quicksilver: 'If Marcovitch was waiting for Rudolf in Treuchtlingen——' It snapped off there like an overstrained wire, splitting under the shock of a boiling inrush of realiza­tion. The facts were there. Patricia was caught, disarmed, locked in the iron clutch of the Law as surely as if the door of a cell had already been closed upon her; and Marcovitch was going with her to the station to clinch the charge. The machinery was in motion, clamping its bars round her, dragging her inexorably into the relentless mill. The bubble had burst.

Dimly Monty Hayward became aware of the terrible still­ness beside him, and raised his eyes. The Saint was rigid to his fingertips, staring across the road like a man in a nightmare. Turning to follow that stare, Monty Hayward also saw; and in the next searing instant he also understood.

Then the Saint came to life. A red mist drove across his eyes, and the pent-up desperation of his stillness smithereened into a reckless bloodlust. His right hand leapt to his hip pocket; and then Monty Hayward pulled himself together in a blaze of strength that he had not known he possessed and caught at the flying wrist.

'Simon—that won't help you!'

For a second he thought the Saint would shoot him while he spoke. The Saint's eyes drilled through him sightlessly, as if he had been a stranger, with those pin-points of red fire smoulder­ing behind brittle flakes of blue. There was no vestige of reason or humanity in them—nothing but the insensate flare of a bar­baric vengefulness that would have gone up against an army with its bare hands. For that second the Saint was mad— raving blind and deaf with a different madness from any that Monty had seen in him before. Monty looked death in the face, but he held his ground without flinching. He gripped the Saint's wrist like a vise, forcing his words through the dead walls of the Saint's stark insanity. And slowly, infinitely slowly, he saw them groping to their mark. The Saint's wrist relaxed, ounce by ounce, and the red glare sank deeper into his eyes. The eyes wavered from their blind stare for the first time.

'Maybe you're right.'

The Saint's voice was almost a whisper; but Monty saw his mouth frame the syllables, and watched a trace of colour creep­ing back into the lips which had been pressed up into thin ridges of white stone. He let go the Saint's wrist, and Simon picked up a wire and twisted it mechanically.

The street was undisturbed. In all those tense seconds there had only been two violent movements, and neither of those would have impressed any but the closest observer in that faint light. And the pavements were practically deserted, except for the three figures passing under another lamp-post, only half a dozen yards now from the doors of the police station. The curi­ous glances of the. few pedestrians in sight were centred ex­clusively on the girl: none of them had any attention to spare for the commonplace counter attraction of two workmen squatting over a hole in the road tinkering with wires. Mar­covitch never knew how near he had been to extinction. He was gloating over his triumph, oblivious of everything else around him, walking straight for the entrance of the police station without a glance to right or left. It was he who led the way up the steps; and then Simon had one more glimpse of the girl, a glimpse that