Roger Conway shifted vaguely across the room as the hum of Norman Kent's Hirondel faded and was lost in the noises of Regent Street. He came upon the side table where the decanter lived, helped himself to a drink, and remembered that last cavalier wave of the Saint's hand and the pitiful torment in the Saint's eyes. Then he put down the drink and took a cigarette instead, suddenly aware that he might have to remain wide awake and alert all night.
He looked at Marius. The giant had sunk into an inscrutable apathy; but he spoke.
"If you would allow it, I should like to smoke a cigar."
Roger deliberated.
"It might be arranged—if you don't need your hands free."
"I can try. The case is in my breast pocket."
Conway found it, bit the end, and put it in Marius's mouth and lighted it. Marius thanked him.
"Will you join me?"
Roger smiled.
"Try something newer," he advised. "I never take smokes from strangers these days, on principle. Oh, and by the way, if I catch you trying to burn through your ropes with the end, I shall have much pleasure in grinding it into your face till it goes out."
Marius shrugged and made no reply; and Roger resumed his cigarette.
Coming upon the telephone, he hesitated, and then called a number. He was through in a few minutes.
"Can I speak to Mr. Kent, Orace? . . , Oh, hullo, Norman!"
"Who's that? Roger?"
"Yes. I rang up in case you were getting worried about us. Heaven knows what time we shall get down. . . . No, the car's all right—as far as I know. Simon's gone off in it. ... Brook Street. . . . Well—Marius has got Pat. . . . Yes, I'm afraid so. Got her on the train. But we've got Marius. . . . Yes, he's here. I'm standing guard. We've found out where Pat's been taken, and Simon's gone after her. . . . Somewhere in Suffolk."
"Shall I come up?"
"How? It's too late for a train, and you won't be able to hire anything worth calling a car at this hour. I don't see what you could do, anyway. . . . Look here, I can't talk any more now. I've got to keep both eyes on Marius and Co. . . . I'll leave it to you. . . . Right. So long, old boy."
He hooked up the receiver.
It occurred to him afterwards that there was something that Norman could have done. He could have tied up the fat man and the lean man, both of whom were now conscious and free to move as much as they dared. That ought to have been done before Simon left. They ought to have thought of it—or Simon ought to have thought of it. But the Saint couldn't, reasonably, have been expected to think of it, or anything else like it, at such a time. Roger knew both the Saint and Pat too well to be able to blame Simon for the omission. Simon had been mad when he left. The madness had been there all the time, since half-past nine, boiling up in fiercer and fiercer waves behind all the masks of calmness and flippancy and patience that the Saint had assumed at intervals, and it had been at its whitest heat behind that last gay smile and gesture from the door.
Half an hour passed.
Roger was beginning to feel hungry. He had had a snack in the station buffet while he was waiting, but the satisfaction of that was starting to wear off. If he had gone to the kitchen to forage, that would have meant compelling his three prisoners to precede him at the point of his gun. And the kitchen was small. . . . Ruefully Roger resigned himself to a hungry vigil. He looked unhappily at the clock. Four and a half hours before he could shoot the prisoners and dash to the pantry, if he obeyed the Saint's orders. But it would have to be endured. The Saint might have managed the cure, and got away with it; but then, the Saint was a fully qualified adventurer, and what he didn't know about the game was not knowledge. Conway was infinitely less experienced, and knew it. In the cramped space of the kitchen, while he was trying to locate food with one eye and one hand, he might easily be taken off his guard and overpowered. And, in the circumstances, the risk was too great to take.
If only Norman decided to come. ...
Roger Conway sat on the edge of the table, swinging the gun idly in his hand. Marius remained silent. His cigar had gone out, and he had not asked for it to be relighted. The fat man slouched in another chair, watching Roger with venomous eyes. The lean man stood awkwardly in one corner. He had not spoken since he recovered consciousness; but he also watched. The clock ticked monotonously. . . .
Roger started to whistle to himself. It was extraordinary how quickly the strain began to tell. He wished he were like the Saint. The Saint wouldn't have gone hungry, for one thing. The Saint would have made the prisoners cook him a four-course dinner, lay the table, and wait on him. The Saint would have kept them busy putting on the gramophone and generally running his errands. The Saint would probably have written a letter and composed a few limericks into the bargain. He certainly wouldn't have been oppressed by the silence and the concentrated malevolence of three pairs of eyes. He would have dismissed the silence and whiled away the time by indulging in airy persiflage at their expense.
But it was the silence and the watchfulness of the eyes. Roger began to understand why he had never felt an irresistible urge to become a lion-tamer. The feeling of being alone in a cage of wild beasts, he decided, must be very much like what he was experiencing at that moment. The same fragile dominance of the man, the same unresting watchfulness of the beasts, the same tension, the same snarling submission of the beasts, the same certainty that the beasts were only waiting, waiting, waiting. These human beasts were sizing him up, searching his soul, stripping him naked of all bluff, finding out all his weaknesses in silence, planning, scheming, considering, alert to pounce. It was getting on Roger's nerves. Presently, sooner or later, somehow, he knew, there would be a bid for liberty. But how would it happen?
And that uncertainty must go on for hours and hours, perhaps. Move and counter-move, threat and counter-threat, the snarl and the lash, the silence and the watchfulness and the eyes. How long? . . .
Then from the fat man's lips broke the first rattle of words, in his own language.
"Stop that!" rapped Conway, with his nerves all on edge. "If you've anything to say, say it in English. Any more of that, and you'll get a clip over the ear with the soft end of this gun."
And the man deliberately and defiantly spoke again, still in his own language.
Roger came off the table as though it had been redhot. He stood over the man with his hand raised, and the man stared back with sullen insolence.
Then it happened.
The plan was beautifully simple.
Roger had forgotten for the moment that only Marius's hands were tied. The giant's feet were free. And, standing over the fat man's chair, where he had been so easily lured by the bait that was also an explanation of the trap to the others, Roger's back was half turned to Marius.
Conway heard the movement behind him, but he had no time to spin round to meet it. The giant's foot crashed into the small of his back with a savage force that might well have broken the spine—if it had struck the spine. But it struck to one side of the spine, in a place almost as vulnerable, and Roger went to the floor with a gasp of agony.
Then both the fat man and the lean man leapt on him together.
The gun was wrenched out of Roger's hand. He could not have seen to shoot, anyway, for the pain had blinded him. He could not cry out—his throat was constricted with a horrible numbing nausea, and his lungs seemed to be paralysed. The lean man's fist smacked again and again into his defenceless jaw.
"Untie me quickly, fool!" hissed Marius, and the fat man obeyed, to the accompaniment of a babbling flood of excuses.
Marius cut him short.
"I will consider your punishment later, Otto. Perhaps this will atone for a little of your imbecility. Tie him up now with this rope——"
Roger lay still. Somehow—he did not know how—he retained his consciousness. There was no strength in any of his limbs; he could see nothing; his battered head sang and ached and throbbed horribly; the whole of his body was in the grip of a crushing, cramping agony that centered on the point in his back where he had taken the kick, and from that point spread iron tentacles of helplessness into every muscle; yet his mind hung aloof, high and clear above the roaring blackness, and he heard and remembered every word that was said.
"Look for more rope, Hermann," Marius was ordering.
The lean man went out and returned. Roger's feet were bound as his wrists had been.
Then Marius was at the telephone.
"A trunk call. . . . Bures. . . ."
An impatient pause. Then Marius cursed gutturally.
"The line is out of order? Tell me when it will be working again. It is a matter of life and death. . . . To-morrow? . . . God in heaven! A telegram—would a telegram be delivered in Bures to-night?"
"I'll put you through to——"
Pause again.
"Yes. I wish to ask if a telegram would be delivered in Bures to-night. . . . Bures, Suffolk. . . . You think not? . . . You are almost sure not? . . . Very well. Thank you. No, I will not send it now."
He replaced the receiver, and lifted it again immediately.
This time he spoke to Westminster 9999, and gave staccato instructions which Roger could not understand. They appeared to be detailed instructions, and they took some time. But at last Marius was satisfied.
He rang off, and turned and kicked Roger contemptuously.
"You stay here, pig. You are a security for your friend's behaviour."
Then again he spoke to the lean man in the language which was double-Dutch to Roger: "Hermann, you remain to guard him. I will leave you the gun. Wait—I find out the telephone number. . . ." He read it off the instrument. "If I have orders to give, I will telephone. You will not leave here without my permission. . . . Otto, you come with me. We go after Templar in my car. I have agents on the road, and I have ordered them to be instructed. If they are not all as incapable as you, he will never reach Bures alive. But we follow to make sure. . . . Wait again. That pig on the floor spoke to a friend at Maidenhead who may be coming to join him. You will capture him and tie him up also. Let there be no mistake, Hermann."
"There shall be no mistake."
"Good! Come, Otto."
Roger heard them go; and then the roaring blackness that lay all about him welled up and engulfed that lonely glitter of clarity in his mind.
He might have been unconscious for five minutes or five days; he had lost all idea of time. But the first thing he saw when he opened his eyes was the clock, and he knew that it must have been about twenty minutes.
The man Hermann sat in a chair opposite him, turning the pages of a magazine. Presently he looked up and saw that Roger was awake; and he put down the magazine and came over and spat in his face.
"Soon, English swine, you will be dead. And your country——"
Roger controlled his tongue with a tremendous effort.
He found that he could breathe. The iron bands about his chest had slackened, and the bodily anguish had lessened. There was still the throbbing pain in his back and the throbbing pain in his head; but he was better. And he wasn't asking for any unnecessary aggravation of his troubles—not just then, anyway.
The man went on: "The Doctor is a great man. He is the greatest man in the world. You should have seen how he arranged everything in two minutes. It was magnificent. He is Napoleon born again. He is going to make our country the greatest country in the world. And you fools try to fight him——"
The speech merged into an unintelligible outburst in the man's native tongue; but Roger understood enough. He understood that a man who could delude his servants into such a fanatical loyalty was no small man. And he wondered what chance the Saint would ever have had of convincing anyone that Marius was concerned with no patriotism and no nationalities, but only with his own gods of money and power.
The first flush of futile anger ebbed from Conway's face, and he lay in stolid silence as he was tied, revolving plot and counter-plot in his mind. Hermann, failing to rouse him with taunts, struck him twice across the face. Roger never moved. And the man spat at him again.
"It is as I thought. You have no courage, you dogs of Englishmen. It is only when you are many against one little one— then you are brave."
"Oh, quite," said Roger wearily.
Hermann glowered at him.
"Now, if you had been the one who hit me——"
The shrill scream of a bell wailed through the apartment with a suddenness that made the conventional sound electrifying. Hermann stopped, stiffening, in the middle of his sentence. And a sour leer came into his face.
"Now I welcome your friend, pig."
Roger drew a deep breath.
He must have been careless, obvious about it, for Roger Conway's was not a mind much given to cunning. Or possibly Hermann had been expecting some such move, subconsciously, and had his ears pricked for the sound. But he stopped on his way to the door and turned.
"You would try to give warning, Englishman?" he purred.
His gun was in his hand. He reached Roger in three strides.
Roger knew he was up against it. If he didn't shout, his one chance of rescue, so far as he could see, was dished—and Norman Kent with it. If he looked like shouting, he'd be laid out again. And, if it came to that, since his intention of shouting had already been divined, he'd probably be laid out anyway. Hermann wasn't the sort of man to waste time gagging his prisoner. So——
"Go to blazes," said Roger recklessly.
Then he yelled.
An instant later Hermann's gun-butt crashed into the side of his head.
Again he should have been stunned; but he wasn't. He decided afterwards that he must have a skull a couple of inches thick, and the constitution of an ox with it, to have stood up to as much as he had. But the fact remained that he was laid out without being stunned; and he lay still, trying to collect himself in time to loose a second yell as Hermann opened the door.
Hermann straightened up, turning his gun round again. He put it in his coat pocket, keeping his finger on the trigger; and then, with something like a panicking terror that the warning might have been heard and accepted by the person outside the front door, he scrambled rather than ran out of the room, cursing under his breath.
But the ring was repeated as he reached the front door, and the sound reassured him. He could not believe that anyone who had heard and understood that one yell would have rung again so promptly after it. Whereby Hermann showed himself a less ingenious psychologist than the man outside. . . .
He opened the door, keeping himself hidden behind it.
No one entered.
He waited, with a kind of superstitious fear trickling down his back like a tiny cascade of ice-cold water. Nothing happened—and yet the second ring had sounded only a moment before he opened the door, and no one who had rung a second time would go away at once, without waiting to see if the renewed summons would be answered.
Then Conway yelled again: "Look out, Norman!"
Hermann swore in a whisper.
But now he had no choice. He had been given his orders. The man who came was to be taken. And certainly the man who had come, who must have heard Conway's second cry even if he had not heard the first, could not be allowed to escape and raise an alarm.
Incautiously, Hermann stepped to the door.
His feet were scarcely clear of the threshold, outside on the landing, when a hand like a ham caught his throat from behind, over his shoulder, and another enormous hand gripped his gun-wrist like a vice. He was as helpless as a child.
The hand at his throat twisted his face round to the light. He saw a ponderous red face with sleepy eyes, connected by a pillar of neck with shoulders worthy of a buffalo.
"Come along," said Chief Inspector Claud Eustace Teal drowsily. "Come along back to where you sprang from, and open your heart to Uncle!"