Conway had a full tankard of beer in each hand. He looked at the tankards as a man might look at a couple of dragons that have strayed into his drawing-room. It seemed to Roger, for some reason, that it was unaccountably ridiculous for him to be standing in the middle of the Saint's room with a tankard of beer in each hand. He cleared his throat.
He said: "Are you sure you aren't—making too much of it?"
And he knew, as he said it, that it was the fatuously useless kind of remark for which he would cheerfully have ordered anyone else's execution. He put down the tankards on the table and lighted a cigarette as if he hated it.
"That's not quiet and sane," said the Saint. "That's wasting time. Damn it, old boy, you know how it was between Pat and me! I always knew that if anything happened to her I'd know it at once—if she were a thousand miles away. I know."
The Saint's icy control broke for a moment. Only for a moment. Roger's arm was taken in a crushing grip. The Saint didn't know his strength. Roger could have cried out with pain; but he said nothing at all. He was in the presence of something that he could only understand dimly.
"I've seen the whole thing," said the Saint, with a cold devil in his voice. "I saw it while you were gaping at that clock. You'll see it, too, when you've got your brain on to it. But I don't have to think."
"But how could Marius——"
"Easy! He'd already tracked us here. He'd been watching the place. The man's thorough. He'd naturally have put other agents on to the people he saw visiting me. And how could he have missed Pat? . . . One of his men probably followed her down to Devonshire. Then, after the Esher show, Marius got in touch with that man. She could easily be got at on the train. They could take her off, say, at Reading—doped. . . . She wasn't on her guard. She didn't know there was any danger. That one man could have done it. ... With a car to meet him at Reading. . . . And Marius is going to hold Pat in the scales against me—against everything we've set out to do. Binding me hand and foot. Putting my dear one in the forefront of the battle, and daring me to fire. And laying the powder-train for his foul slaughter under the shield of her blessed body. And laughing at us. . . ."
Then Roger began to understand less dimly, and he stared at the Saint as he would have stared at a ghost.
He said, like a man waking from a dream: "If you're right, our show's finished."
"I am right," said the Saint. "Ask yourself the question."
He released Roger's arm as if he had only just become aware that he was holding it.
Then, in three strides, the Saint was at the window; and Conway had just started to realise his intention when the Saint justified, and at the same time smithereened, that realisation with one single word.
"Gone."
"You mean the——"
"Both of 'em. Of course, Marius kept up the watch on the house in case we were being tricky. The man who arrived at the same time as we did was the relief. Or a messenger to say that Marius had lifted the trump card, and the watch could pack up. Then they saw us arrive."
"But they can't have been gone a moment——"
The Saint was back by the table.
"Just that," snapped the Saint. "They've gone—but they can't have been gone a moment. The car's outside. Could you recognise either of them again?"
"I could recognise one."
"I could recognise the other. Foreign-looking birds, with ugly mugs. Easy again. Let's go!"
It was more than Roger could cope with. His brain hadn't settled down yet. He couldn't get away from a sane, reasonable, conventional conviction that the Saint was hurling up a solid mountain from the ghost of a molehill. He couldn't quite get away from it even while the clock on the mantelpiece was giving him the lie with every tick. But he got between the Saint and the door, somehow—he wasn't sure how. "
"Hadn't you better sit down and think it out before you do anything rash?"
"Hadn't you better go and hang yourself?" rapped the Saint impatiently.
Then his bitterness softened. His hands fell on Roger's shoulders.
"Don't you remember another time when we were in this room, you and I?" he said. "We were trying to get hold of Marius then—for other reasons. We could only find out his telephone number. And that's all we know to this day—unless we can make one of those birds who were outside tell us more than the man who gave us the telephone number. They're likely to know more than that—we're big enough now to have the bigger men after us. They're the one chance of a clue we've got, and I'm taking it. This way!"
He swept Conway aside, and burst out of the flat. Conway followed. When the Saint stopped in Brook Street, and turned to look, Roger was beside him.
"You drive."
He was opening the door of the car as he cracked the order. As Roger touched the self-starter, the Saint climbed in beside him.
Roger said hopelessly: "We've no idea which way they've gone."
"Get going! There aren't so many streets round here. Make this the centre of a circle. First into Regent Street, cut back through Conduit Street to New Bond Street—Oxford Street— back through Hanover Square. Burn it, son, haven't you any imagination?"
Now, in that district the inhabited streets are slashed across the map in a crazy tangle, and the two men might have taken almost any of them, according to the unknown destination for which they were making. The task of combing through that tangle, with so little qualification, struck Roger as being rather more hopeless than looking for one particular grain of sand in the Arizona Desert; but he couldn't tell the Saint that. The Saint wouldn't have admitted it, anyway, and Roger wouldn't have had the heart to try to convince him.
And yet Roger was wrong, for the Saint sat beside him and drove with Roger's hands. And the Saint knew that people in cities tend to move in the best-beaten tracks, particularly in a strange city, for fear of losing their way—exactly as a man lost in the bush will follow a tortuous trail rather than strike across open country in the direction which he feels he should take. And the men looked foreign and probably were foreign, and the foreigner is afraid of losing himself in any but the long, straight, bright roads, though they may take him to his objective by the most roundabout route.
Unless, of course, the foreigners had taken a native guide in the shape of a taxi. But Conway could not suggest that to the Saint, either.
"Keep on down here," Simon Templar was saying. "Never mind what I told you before. Now I should cut away to the right—down Vigo Street."
Roger spun the wheel, and the Hirondel skidded and swooped across the very nose of an omnibus. For one fleeting second, in the bottleneck of Vigo Street, a taxi-driver appeared to meditate, disputing their right of way; fortunately for all concerned, he abandoned that idea hurriedly.
Then Simon was speaking again.
"Right up Bond Street. That's the spirit."
Roger said: "You'll collect half a dozen summonses before you've finished with this. ..."
"Damn that," said the Saint; and they swept recklessly past a constable who had endeavoured to hold them up, and drowned his outraged shout in the stutter of their departing exhaust.
By Roger Conway that day's driving was afterwards to be remembered in nightmares, and that last drive more than any other journey.
He obeyed the Saint blindly. It wasn't Roger's car, anyway. But he would never have believed that such feats of murderous road-hogging could have been performed in a London street —if he had not been made to perform them himself.
And yet it seemed to be to no purpose; for although he was scanning, in every second of that drive in which he was able to take his eyes off the road, the faces of the pedestrians they passed, he did not see the face he sought. And suppose, after all, they did find the men they were after? What could be done about it in an open London street—except call for the police, whom they dared not appeal to?
But Roger Conway was alone in discouragement.
"We'll try some side streets now," said the Saint steadily. "Down there——"
And Roger, an automaton, lashed round the corner on two wheels.
And then, towards the bottom of George Street, Roger pointed, and the Saint saw two men walking side by side.
"Those two!"
"For Heaven's sake!" said the Saint softly, meaninglessly, desperately; and the car sprang forward like a spurred horse as Roger opened the throttle wide.
The Saint was looking about him and rising from his seat at the same moment. In Conduit Street there had been traffic; but in George Street, at that moment, there was nothing but a stray car parked empty by the kerb, and three pedestrians going the other way, and—the two.
Said the Saint: "I think so. . . ."
"I'm sure," said Roger; and, indeed, he was quite sure, because they had passed the two men by that time, and the Hirondel was swinging in to the kerb with a scream of brakes a dozen feet in front of them.
"Watch me!" said the Saint, and was out of the car before it had rocked to a standstill.
He walked straight into the path of the two men, and they glanced at him with curious but unsuspecting eyes.
He took the nearest man by the lapels of his coat with one hand, and the man was surprised. A moment later the man was not feeling surprise or any other emotion, for the Saint looked one way and saw Roger Conway following him, and then he looked the other way and hit the man under the jaw.
The man's head whipped back as if it had been struck by a cannon-ball; and, in fact, there was very little difference between the speed and force of the Saint's fist and the speed and force of a cannon-ball.
But the man never reached the ground. As his knees gave limply under him, and his companion sprang forward with a shout awakening on his lips, the Saint caught him about the waist and lifted him from his feet, and heaved him bodily across the pavement, so that he actually fell into Conway's anus.
"Home, James," said the Saint, and turned again on his heel.
On the lips of the second man there was that awakening of a shout, and in his eyes was the awakening of something that might have been taken for fear, or suspicion, or a kind of vague and startled perplexity; but these expressions were nebulous and half-formed, and they never came to maturity, for the Saint spun the man round by one shoulder and locked an arm about his neck in such a way that it was impossible for him to shout or register any other expression than that of a man about to suffocate.
And in the same hold the Saint lifted him off the ground, mostly by the neck, so that the man might well have thought that his neck was about to be broken; but the only thing that was broken was the spring of one of the cushions at the back of the car when the Saint heaved him on to it.
The Saint followed him into the back seat; and, when the man seemed ready to try another shout, Simon seized his wrists in a grip that might have changed the shout to a scream if the Saint had not uttered a warning.
"Don't scream, sweetheart," said the Saint coldly. "It might break both your arms."
The man did not scream. Nor did he shout. And on the floor of the car, at the Saint's feet, his companion lay like one dead.
In the cold light of sanity that came long afterwards, Simon Templar was to wonder how on earth they got away with it. Roger Conway, who was even then far too coldly sane for his own comfort, was wondering all the time how on earth they were getting away with it. But for the moment Simon Templar was mad—and the fact remained that they had got away with it.
The Saint's resourceful speed, and the entirely fortuitous desertedness of the street, had made it possible to carry out the abduction without a sound being made that might have attracted attention. And the few people there were whose attention might have been attracted had passed on, undisturbed, unconscious of the swift seconds of hectic melodrama that had whirled through George Street, Hanover Square, behind their peaceful backs.
That the Saint would have acted in exactly the same way if the street had been crowded with an equal mixture of panicky population, plain-clothes men, and uniformed policemen, was nothing whatever to do with anything at all. Once again the Saint had proved, to his own sufficient satisfaction, as he had proved many times in his life before, that desperate dilemmas are usually best solved by desperate measures, and that intelligent foolhardiness will often get by where too much discretion betrays valour into the mulligatawny. And the thought of the notice that must have been taken of the Hirondel during the first part of that wild chase (it was not an inconspicuous car at the best of times, even when sedately driven, that long, lean, silver-grey King of the Road) detracted nothing from the Saint's estimate of his success. One could not have one's cake and eat it. And certainly he had obtained the cake to eat. Two cakes. Ugly ones. . . .
Even then there might have been trouble in Brook Street when they returned with the cargo, but the Saint did not allow any trouble.
There were two men to be taken across the strip of pavement to the door of the flat. One man was long and lean, and the other man was short and fat; and the lean man slept. The Saint kept his grip on one wrist of the fat man, and half supported the lean man with his other arm. Roger placed himself on the other side of the lean man.
"Sing," commanded the Saint; and they crossed the pavement discordantly and drunkenly.
A man in evening dress passed them with a supercilious nose. A man in rags passed them with an envious nose. A patrolling policeman peered at them with an officious nose; but the Saint had opened the door, and they were reeling cacophonously into the house. So the officious nose went stolidly upon its way, after taking the number of the car from which they had disembarked, for the law has as yet no power to prevent men being as drunk and disorderly as they choose in their own homes. And, certainly, the performance, extempore as it was, had been most convincing. The lean man had clearly failed to last the course; the two tall and well-dressed young men who supported him between them were giving most circumstantial evidence of the thoroughness with which they had lubricated their withins; and if the sounds emitted by the fat man were too wild and shrill to be easily classified as song, and if he seemed somewhat unwilling to proceed with his companions into further dissipations, and if there was a strange, strained look in his eye—well, the state which he had apparently reached was regrettable, but nobody's business. . . .
And before the suspicious nose had reached the next corner, the men who had passed beneath it were in the first-floor apartment above it, and the lean one was being carelessly dropped spread-eagle on the sitting-room carpet.
"Fasten the door, Roger," said the Saint shortly.
Then he released his agonising hold on the fat man's wrist, and the fat man stopped yelping and began to talk.
"Son of a pig," began the fat man, rubbing his wrist tenderly; and then he stopped, appalled at what he saw.
There was a little knife in the Saint's hand—a toy with a six-inch leaf-shaped blade and a delicately chased ivory hilt. It appeared to have come from nowhere, but actually it had come from the neat leather sheath strapped to the Saint's forearm under the sleeve, where it always lived; and the name of the knife was Anna. There was a story to Anna, a savage and flamboyant story of the godless lands, which may be told one day: she had taken many lives. To the Saint she was almost human, that beautifully fashioned, beautifully balanced little creature of death; he could do tricks with her that would have made most circus knife-throwers look like amateurs. But at that moment he was not thinking of tricks.
As Roger switched on the light, the light glinted on the blade; but the light in the Saint's eyes was no less cold and inclement than the light on the steel.