'Orl right, guv'nor.'
The driver looked dejected.
Simon tucked a ten-shilling note into the front of his coat.
'On your way. And have a drink with me when they open.'
'That I will, guv'nor,' said the man less glumly. 'And I 'opes I see you again.'
The Saint stood on hot bricks until the cab turned the next corner and passed out of sight.
Then he got into the driving seat of the Daimler.
It was his own car, anyway, although the taxi driver might not have appreciated that. And by the grace of good angels it was a car that he had always used for various nefarious purposes, and therefore it had been registered in a number of different names but never in his own. It was one car whose number plates the mobile police would not be watching for. Perhaps more cogently than any of those things, it was the only car at his immediate disposal. It was not what he would have chosen for what he had to do, but he could not choose.
Lady Valerie had left the keys in the switch and the engine was nicely warm. The Saint was away in four seconds after his taxi disappeared.
And on a trip like he had to make every second was vital. And he had to waste precious scores of them, feeling his way westwards out of London by devious and unfrequented back streets. The same dogged efficiency that had covered the railway stations was sure to have stationed watchers on the main traffic arteries leading out of London, but the labyrinthine ways of London and its suburbs are so many that it would have been impossible to cover every outlet. And Simon Templar had an encyclopedic memory for maps that would have staggered a professional cartographer. It was a gift that he had developed and disciplined for years against just such contingencies as this. He drove through back streets and suburban avenues and afterwards through country lanes, and did not join a main road until he came into Bracknell.
Then he gave the Daimler its head to the last mile an hour that could be squeezed out of it.
He drove with one eye on the road and the other switching between the speedometer and the dashboard clock. To race an express train in the Hirondel was nothing, but to attempt it in that sedate and dowager-worthy limousine was something else. Mathematically it came out to be simply and flatly impossible. But Anford was a one-horse village on an antiquated single-track branch line over which trains shuttled back and forth with no great respect for timetables and never at even official intervals of less than an hour. The odds were all against Lady Valerie catching an immediate connection; and that uncertain margin of delay at Marlborough was all that the Saint could hope to race against.
A few days ago he had taken the Hirondel from Anford to London in an hour and twenty-five minutes. Risking his neck at least once in every two miles, he stopped the Daimler at Anford Station in three minutes under two hours.
He jumped out and went in.
It took him a little while to find a timetable. Eventually he located one, pasted to a board on the wall and smudged and roughened with the trails of many grubby fingers that had painstakingly traced routes across its closely printed acreage before him. With difficulty he analyzed the eye-aching maze of figures with which railway companies strive so nobly to preserve the secret of their schedules. The train which Lady Valerie had caught should have reached Marlborough thirty-five minutes ago; and there was a connection to Anford listed for three minutes later.
Simon searched the deserted premises and presently found the stationmaster weeding his garden.
'When does the next train from Marlborough get in?' he asked.
