"That's for last night," he said hoarsely, and turned to the others. "Let's get started."
Morris Dolf pocketed his automatic and went out, with a last cold stare over the scene.
Kaskin went to the bed, closed the bulging valise, and picked it up. He put his arm round the girl again and drew her to the door.
"Have a good time," he said.
The Saint looked out on to an empty landing. But what he saw was the last desperate glance that the girl flung at him as Kaskin led her out.
He tensed his arms for an instant, and his wrists separated. The scraps of cord scuffed on the floor behind him. He took a better grip on his knife. But he still made no other movement. He sat where he was, watching the slowly smouldering fuse, waiting and listening for two sounds that all his immobility was tuned for. One of them he knew he would hear, unless some disastrous accident had happened to cheat his calculations; the other he was only hoping for, and yet it was the one that his ears were most wishfully strained to catch.
Then he saw Angela Lindsay's bag lying on a corner of the dresser, and all his doubts were supremely set at rest.
He heard her voice, down on the stairs, only a second after his eyes had told him that he must hear it.
And he heard Kaskin's growling answer.
"Well, hurry up, you fool… The car's out in front of the house opposite."
The Saint felt queerly content.
Angela Lindsay stood in the doorway again, looking at him.
She did not speak. She picked up her bag and tucked it under her arm. Then she went quickly over to the bed and took hold of the trailing length of fuse. She wound it round her hand and tore it loose from the bomb, and threw it still smouldering into a far corner.
Then she bent over the Saint and kissed him, very swiftly.
He did not move for a moment. And then, even more swiftly, his free hands came from behind him and caught her wrists.
She tried to snatch herself back in sudden panic, but his grip was too strong. And he smiled at her.
"Don't go for a minute," he said softly.
She stood frozen.
Down on the ground floor, all at once, there were many sounds. The sounds of heavy feet, deep voices that were neither Dolf's nor Kaskin's, quick violent movements…
Her eyes grew wide, afraid, uncomprehending, questioning. But those were the sounds that he had been sure of hearing. His face was unlined and unstartled. He still smiled. His head moved fractionally in answer to the question she had not found voice to ask.
"Yes," he said evenly. "It is the police. Do you still want to go?"
Her mouth moved.
"You knew they'd be here."
"Of course," he said. "I arranged for it. I wanted them to catch Morrie and Judd with the goods on them. I knew you meant to double-cross me, all the time. So I pulled a double doublecross. That was before you kissed me — so you could find out where I kept my gun… Then I was only hoping you'd make some excuse to come back and do what you just did. You see, everything had to be in your own hands."
Down below, a gun barked. The sound came up the stairs dulled and thickened. Other guns answered it. A man screamed shrilly, and was suddenly silent. The brief fusillade rattled back into throbbing stillness. Gradually the muffled voices droned in again.
The fear and bewilderment died out of the girl's face, and left a shadowy kind of peace.
"It's too late now," she said. "But I'm still glad I did it."
"Like hell it's too late," said the Saint.
He let go of her and put away his knife, and bent to untie his legs. His fingers worked like lightning. He did not need to give any more time to thought. Perhaps in those few seconds after his hands were free and the others had left the room, when he had sat without moving and only listened, wondering whether the girl would come back, his subconscious mind had raced on and worked out what his adaptation would be if she did come back. However it had come to him, the answer was clear in his mind now — as clearly as if he had known that it would be needed when he planned for the other events which had just come to pass.
And the aspect of it that was doing its best to dissolve his seriousness into a spasm of ecstatic daftness was that it would also do something towards taking care of Mr Ebenezer Hogsbotham. He had, he realized, been almost criminally neglectful about Mr Hogsbotham, having used him as an excuse to start the adventure, having just borrowed his house to bring it to a denouement, and yet having allowed himself to be so led away by the intrusion of mere sordid mercenary objectives that he had had no spare time to devote towards consummating the lofty and purely idealistic mission that had taken him to Chertsey in the first place. Now he could see an atonement for his remissness that would invest the conclusion of that story with a rich completeness which would be something to remember.
"Listen," he said, and the rapture of supreme inspiration was blaming in his eyes.
In the hall below, Chief Inspector Claud Eustace Teal straightened up from his businesslike examination of the two still figures sprawled close together on the floor. A knot of uniformed local men, one of whom was twisting a handkerchief round a bleeding wrist, made way for him as he stepped back.
"All right," Teal said grimly. "One of you phone for an ambulance to take them away. Neither of them is going to need a doctor."
He moved to the suitcase which had fallen from Judd Kaskin's hand when three bullets hit him, and opened it. He turned over some of the contents, and closed it again.
A broad-shouldered young officer with a sergeant's stripes on his sleeve shifted up from behind him and said: "Shall I look after it, sir?"
Teal surrendered the bag.
"Put it in the safe at the station for tonight," he said. "I'll get somebody from the bank to check it over in the morning. It looks as if it was all there."
"Yes, sir."
The sergeant stepped back towards the door.
Chief Inspector Teal fumbled in an inner pocket, and drew out a small oblong package. From the package he extracted a thinner oblong of pink paper. Prom the paper he unwrapped a fresh crisp slice of spearmint. He slid the slice of spearmint into his mouth and champed purposefully on it. His salivary glands reacted exquisitely to succulent stimulus. He began to feel some of the deep spiritual contentment of a cow with a new cud.
Mr Teal, as we know, had had a trying day. But for once he seemed to have earned as satisfactory a reward for his tribulations as any reasonable man had a right to expect. It was true that he had been through one disastrously futile battle with the Saint. But to offset that, he had cleared up the case to which he had been assigned, with the criminals caught red-handed while still in possession of their booty and justifiably shot down after they had tried to shoot their way out, which would eliminate most of the tedious legal rigmaroles which so often formed a wearisome anticlimax to such dramatic victories; and he had recovered the booty itself apparently intact. All in all, he felt that this was one occasion when even his tyrannical superiors at Scotland Yard would be unable to withhold the commendation which was his due. There was something almost like human tolerance in his sleepy eyes as they glanced around and located Hoppy Uniatz leaning against the wall in the background.
"That was quick work," he said, making the advance with some difficulty. "We might have had a lot more trouble if you hadn't been with us."
Mr Uniatz had a jack-knife of fearsome dimensions in one hand. He appeared to be carving some kind of marks on the butt of his gun. He waved the knife without looking up from his work.
"Aw, nuts," he said modestly. "All youse guys need is a little practice."
Mr Teal swallowed.
Patricia Holm squeezed through between two burly constables and smiled at him.