Simon Templar, in all his years of wandering and adventure, had only fallen for one woman, and that was Patricia Holm. Therefore, as might have been expected, he fell heavily. And yet—he was realising it dimly, as one might realise an unthinkable heresy—in the eighteen months that they had been together he had started to get used to her. He had, he realised, been growing out of the first ecstatic wonder; and the thing that had taken its place had been so quiet and insidious that it had enchanted him while he was still unaware of it. It had had to await this shock to be revealed.
And the revelation, when it came, carried with it a wonder that infinitely eclipsed the more blatant brilliance of the wonder that had slipped away. This was the kind of wild and awful wonder that might overtake a man who, having walked in the sunshine all the days of his life, sees the sun itself for the first time, with a dreadful and tremendous understanding, and sees at once a vision of the darkness that would lie over the world if the sun ceased from shining.
The Saint said, very softly, to file fat man: "Son of a pig to you, sweetheart. And now listen. I'm going to ask you some questions. You can either answer them, or die slowly and painfully, just as you like—but you'll do one or the other before you leave this room."
The fat man was in a different class from that of the wretched little weed in the pot hat from whom Simon Templar had extracted information before. There was a certain brute resolution in the fat man's beady eyes, a certain snarling defiance in the twist of the thin lips, like the desperate determination of a beast at bay. Simon took no count of that.
"Do you understand, you septic excrescence?" said the Saint gently.
And there was hatred in the Saint's heart, a hatred that was his very own, that no one else could have understood; but there was another kind of devilry in the Saint's eyes and in the purring gentleness of his voice, a kind of devilry that no one could have helped understanding, that the man in front of him understood with terror, an outward and visible and malignant hatred; and it was plainly centred upon the fat man; and the fat man recoiled slowly, step by step, as the Saint advanced, until he came up against the table and could not move backwards any farther.
"I hope you don't think I'm bluffing, dear little fat one," the Saint went on, in the same velvety voice. "Because that would be foolish of you. You've done, or had a hand in doing, something which I object to very much. I object to it in a general way, and always have; but this time I object to it even more, in a personal way, because this time it involves someone who means more to me than your gross mind will ever understand. Do you follow the argument, you miserable wart?"
The man was trying to edge away backwards round the table, but he could not break away, for the Saint moved sideways simultaneously. And he could not break away from the Saint's eyes—those clear blue eyes that were ordinarily so full of laughter and bubbling mischief that were then so bleak and pitiless.
And the Saint went on speaking.
"I'm not concerned with the fact that you're merely the agent of Dr. Rayt Marius—ah, that makes you jump! I know a little more than you thought I did, don't I? ... But we're not concerned with that, either. ... If you insist on mixing with people like that, you must be prepared to take the consequences. And if you think the game's worth the candle, you must also be prepared for an accident with the candle. That's fair, isn't it? ... So that the point we're going to disagree about is that you've had a share in annoying me—and I object very much to being annoyed. . . . No, you don't, sonny boy!" There was a gun in the fat man's hand, and then there was not a gun in the fat man's hand; for the Saint moved forwards and to one side with a swift, stealthy, cat-like movement, and this time the fat man could not help screaming as he dropped the gun.
"Ach! You would my wrist break——"
"Cheerfully, beloved," said Simon. "And your neck later on. But first ..."
Tightening instead of slackening that grip on the fat man's wrist, the Saint bent him backwards over the table, holding him easily with fingers of incredible strength; and the man saw the blade of the knife flash before his eyes.
"Once upon a time, when I was in Papua," said the Saint, in that dispassionately conversational way which was indescribably more terrifying than any loud-voiced anger, "a man came out of the jungle into the town where I was. He was a prospector, and a pig-headed prospector, and he had insisted on prospecting a piece of country that all the old hands had warned him against. And the natives had caught him at the time of the full moon. They're always very pleased to catch white men at that time, because they can be used in the scheme of festivities and entertainment. They have primitive forms of amusement—very. And one of their ways of amusing themselves with this man had been to cut off his eyelids. Before I start doing the same thing to you, will you consider for a moment the effect that that operation will probably have on your beauty sleep?"
"God!" babbled the man shrilly. "You cannot——"
The man tried to struggle, but he was held with a hand of iron. For a little while he could move his head, but then the Saint swung on to the table on top of him and clamped the head between his knees.
"Don't talk so loud," said the Saint, and his fingers left the wrist and sidled round the throat. "There are other people in this building, and I should hate you to alarm them. With regard to this other matter, now—did I hear you say I couldn't do it? I beg to differ. I could do it very well. I shall be very gentle, and you should not feel very much pain—just at the moment. It's the after-effects that will be so unpleasant. So think. If you talk, and generally behave like a good boy, I might be persuaded to let you off. I won't promise you anything, but it's possible."
"I will not——"
"Really not? . . . Are you going to be difficult, little one? Are you going to sacrifice your beautiful eyelids and go slowly blind? Are you going to force me to toast the soles of your feet at the gas-fire, and drive chips of wood under your fingernails, and do other crude things like that—before you come to your senses? Really, you'll be giving yourself a lot of unnecessary pain. ..."
And the Saint held the knife quite close to the man's eyes and brought it downwards very slowly. The point gleamed like a lonely star, and the man stared at it, hypnotised, mute with horror. And Roger Conway was also hypnotised, and stood like a man carved in ice.
"Do you talk?" asked the Saint caressingly.
Again the man tried to scream, and again the Saint's fingers choked the scream back into his windpipe. The Saint brought the knife down farther, and the point of it actually pricked the skin.
Roger Conway felt cold beads of perspiration breaking out on his forehead, but he could not find his voice. He knew that the Saint would do exactly what he had threatened to do, if he were forced to it. He knew the Saint. He had seen the Saint in a hundred strange situations and a hundred moods, but he had never seen the Saint's face chiselled into such an inexorable grimness as it wore then. It was like granite.
And Roger Conway knew then, in the blazing light of experience, what before then he had only understood mistily, in the twilight of theory—that the wrath of saints can be a far more dreadful thing than the wrath of sinners.
The man on the table must have understood it also—the fantastic fact that a man of Simon Templar's calibre, in such an icy rage, even in civilised England, would stop for nothing. And the breath that the Saint let him take came in a kind of shuddering groan.
"Do you talk, beautiful?" asked the Saint again, ever so gently.
"I talk."
It was not a voice—it was a whimper.
"I talk," whimpered the man. "I will do anything. Only take away that knife——"
For a moment the Saint did not move.
Then, very slowly, like a man in a trance, he took the knife away and looked at it as if he had never seen it before. And a queer little laugh trickled through his lips.
"Very dramatic," he remarked. "And almost horrible. I didn't know I had it in me."
And he gazed at the man curiously, as he might have gazed at a fly on a window-pane in an idle moment and remembered stories of schoolboys who were amused to pull off their wings.
Then he climbed slowly down from the table and took out his cigarette-case.
The man he had left did not so much raise himself off the table as roll off it; and, when his feet touched the floor, it was seen that he could scarcely stand.
Roger pushed him roughly into a chair, from which, fingering his throat, he could see the man who still lay where he had fallen.
"Don't look so surprised," said Roger. "The last man the Saint hit like that was out for half an hour, and your pal's only been out twenty minutes."
Simon flicked a match into the fireplace and returned to face the prisoner.
"Let's hear your little song, honeybunch," he said briefly.
"What do you want to know?"
"First thing of all, I want to know what's been done with the girl who was taken to-night."
"That I do not know."
The Saint's cigarette tilted up to a dangerous angle between his lips, and his hands went deep into his trousers pockets.
"You don't seem to have got the idea, beautiful," he remarked sweetly. "This isn't a game—as you'll find out if you don't wake yourself up in rather less time than it takes me to get my hands on you again. I'm quite ready to resume the surgical operation as soon as you like. So go on talking, because I just love your voice, and it helps me to forget all the unpleasant things I ought to be doing to your perfectly appalling face."
The man shuddered and cowered back into the depths of the chair. His hands flew to his eyes; it may have been to shut out a ghastly vision, or it may have been to try to escape from Saint's merciless blue stare.
"I do not know!" he almost screamed. "I swear it——"
"Then tell me what you do know, you rat," said Simon, "and then I'll make you remember some more."
Words came to the fat man in an incoherent, pelting stream, lashed on by fear.
He was acting on the instructions of Dr. Marius. That was true. The house in Brook Street had been closely watched for the last twenty-four hours, he himself being one of the watchers. He had seen the departure the previous night, but they had not had the means to follow a car. Two other men had been sent to inspect the premises that afternoon, had seen the loaded car outside, and had rushed away together to report.
"Both of them?" interrupted the Saint.
"Both of them. It was a criminal mistake. But they will be punished."
"How will you be rewarded, I wonder?" murmured Simon.
The fat man shivered, and went on.
"One was sent back immediately, but the car had gone. The Doctor then said that he had made other plans, and one man would be enough to keep the watch, in case you return. I was that man. Hermann"—he pointed to the inert figure on the floor—"had just come to relieve me when you came back. We were going to report it."
"Both of you?"
"Both of us."
"A criminal mistake," drawled the Saint sardonically. "But I expect you will be punished. Yes?"
The man winced.
Another of his comrades, he said, had been told off to follow the girl. It had been impressed upon the sleuths that no movement should be missed, and no habit overlooked, however trifling. Marius had not divulged the reason for this vigilance, but he had left them in no doubt of its importance. In that spirit Patricia had been followed to Devonshire.
"Your boss seems very unwilling to meet me again personally," observed the Saint grimly. "How wise of him!"
"We could afford to take no risks——"
" 'We'?"
Simon swooped on the pronoun like a hawk.
"I mean——"
"I know what you mean, sweetness," said the Saint silkily. "You mean that you didn't mean to let on that you knew more about this than you said. You're not just a hired crook, like the last specimen of your kind I had to tread on. You're a secret agent. We understand that. We understand also that, however much respect you may have for the continued wholeness of your own verminous hide, a most commendable patriotism for your misbegotten country will make you keep on fighting and lying as long as you can. Very good. I applaud. But I'm afraid my appreciation of your one solitary virtue will have to stop there—at just that one theoretical pat on the back. After which, we go back to our own private, practical quarrel. And what you've got to get jammed well into the misshapen lump of bone that keeps your unwashed ears apart, is that I'm a bit of a fighter myself, and I think—somehow, somehow, I think, dear one—I think I'm a better fighter than you are."
"I did not mean——"
"Don't lie," said the Saint, in a tone of mock reproach that held behind its superficial flippance a kind of glacial menace. "Don't lie to me. I don't like it."
Roger moved off the wall which he had been propping up.
"Put him back on the table, old boy," he suggested.
"I'm going to," said the Saint, "unless he spills the beans in less than two flaps of a duck's rudder."
He came a little closer to the fat man.
"Now, you loathsome monstrosity—listen to me. The game's up. You've put both feet in it with that little word 'we.' And I'm curious. Very, very curious and inquisitive. I want to know everything about you—the story of your life, and your favourite movie star, and your golf handicap, and whether you sleep with your pyjama trousers inside or outside the jacket. I want you to tell me all about yourself. For instance, when Marius told you that you could let up on the watch here, as he'd made other plans—didn't he say that there was a girl concerned in those plans?"
"No."
"That's two lies," said the Saint. "Next time you lie, you will be badly hurt. Second question: I know that Marius arranged for the girl to be drugged on the train, and taken off it before it reached London—but where was she to be taken to?"
"I do not——A-a-a-a-ah!"
"I warned you," said the Saint.
"Are you a devil?" sobbed the man, and the Saint showed his teeth.
"Not really. Just an ordinary man who objects to being molested. I thought I'd made that quite plain. Of course, I'm in a hurry this evening, so that may make me seem a little hasty. Now, are you going to remember things—truthful things—or shall we have some more unpleasantness?"
The man shrank back from him, quivering.
"I do not know any more," he blubbered. "I swear——"
"Where is Marius now?"
But the man did not answer immediately, for the sudden ringing of a bell sounded clearly through the apartment.
For a second the Saint was immobile.
Then he stepped round behind the prisoner's chair, and the little knife slid out of its sheath again. The prisoner saw the flash of it, and his eyes dilated with terror. A cry rose to his lips, and the Saint stifled it with a hand over his mouth. Then the point stung the man over the heart.
"Just one word," said the Saint—"just one word, and you'll say the rest of the sentence to the Recording Angel. Who d'you think it is, Roger?"
"Teal?"
"Having traced that motor agent to his Sunday lair, and got on our trail?"
"If we don't answer—"
"They'll break in. There's the car outside to tell them we're here. No, they'll have to come in——"
"Just when we're finding out things?"
Simon Templar's eyes glittered.
"Give me that gun!"
Conway picked up the automatic that the fat man had dropped, which had lain neglected on the floor ever since, and handed it over obediently.
"I'll tell you," said the Saint, "that no man born of woman is going to interfere with me. I'm going to finish getting everything I want out of this lump of refuse, and then I'm going on to act on it—to find Pat—and I'll shoot my way through the whole of Scotland Yard to do it, if I have to. Now go and open that door."
Conway nodded.
"I'm with you," he said, and went out.
The Saint waited calmly.
His left hand still held the slim blade of Anna over the fat man's heart, ready to drive it home, and his ears were alert for the faintest sound of a deeply drawn breath that might be the prelude to a shout. His right hand held the automatic, concealed behind the back of the chair.
But when Roger came back, and the Saint saw the man who came with him, he remained exactly as he was; and no one could have remarked the slightest change in the desolate impassivity of his face. Only his heart leapt sickeningly, and slithered back anyhow into its place, leaving a strange feeling of throbbing emptiness spreading across the track of that thudding somersault. "Pleased to meet you again, Marius," said the Saint.