He tore round a bend, and thought he could recognize a clump of trees in the gloom ahead. If he was right, he must be getting near the cliff. The snarl of the Hirondel was louder. . . .
He must have covered the last hundred yards in a shade under evens. And then, as he rounded the last corner, he heard a splintering crash.
With a shout he flung himself forward. And yet he knew that it was hopeless. For one second he had a glimpse of the great car rearing like a stricken beast on the brink of the precipice, with its wide flaming eyes hurling a long white spear of light into the empty sky; and then the light went out, and down the cliff side went the roar of the beast and a racking, tearing thunder of breaking shrubs and battered rocks and shattering metal. . . . And then another crash. And a silence. . . .
The Saint covered the rest of the distance quite calmly; and the man who stood in the road did not try to turn. Perhaps he knew it would be useless.
"Mr. Prosser, I believe?" said the Saint caressingly.
The man stood mute, with his back to the gap which the Hirondel had torn through the flimsy rails at the side of the road. And Simon Templar faced him.
"You've wrecked my beautiful car," said the Saint, in the same caressing tone.
And suddenly his fist smashed into the man's face; and Mr. Prosser reeled back, and went down without a sound into the silence.
4
WHICH WAS CERTAINLY very nice and jolly, reflected the Saint, as he walked slowly back to the house. But not noticeably helpful. . . .
He walked slowly because it was his habit to move slowly when he was thinking. And he had a lot to think about. The cold rage that had possessed him a few minutes before had gone altogether: the prime cause of it had been duly dealt with, and the next thing was to weigh up the consequences and face the facts.
For all the threads were now in his hands, all ready to be wormed and parcelled and served and put away—all except one. And that one was now more important than all the others. And it was utterly out of his reach—not even the worst that he could do to Marius could recall it or change its course. . . .
"Did you get your dog, old boy?" Roger Conway's cheerful accents greeted him as he opened the door of the library; but the Saintly smile was unusually slow to respond.
"Yes and no." Simon answered after a short pause. "I got it, but not soon enough."
The smile had gone again; and Roger frowned puzzledly.
"What was the dog?" he asked.
"The late Mr. Prosser," said the Saint carefully, and Roger jumped to one half of the right conclusion.
"You mean he'd crashed the car?"
"He had crashed the car."
The affirmative came flatly, precisely, coldly— in a way that Roger could not understand.
And the Saint's eyes roved round the room without expression, taking in the three bound men in the corner, and Lessing in a chair, and Sonia Delmar beside Roger, and the telephone on the floor. The Saint's cigarette case lay on the desk where Marius had thrown it; and the Saint walked over in silence and picked it up.
"Well?" prompted Roger, and was surprised by the sound of his own voice.
The Saint had lighted a cigarette. He crossed the room again with the cigarette between his lips, and picked up the telephone. He looked once at the frayed ends of the flex; and then he held the instrument close to his ear and shook it gently.
And then he looked at Roger.
"Have you forgotten Hermann?" he asked quietly.
"I had forgotten him for the moment, Saint. But ——"
"And those boxes he took with him—had you guessed what they were?''
"I hadn't."
Simon Templar nodded. "Of course," he said. "You wouldn't know what it was all about. But I'm telling you now, just to break it gently to you, that the Hirondel's been crashed and the telephone's bust, and those two things together may very well mean the end of peace on earth for God knows how many years. But you were just thinking we'd won the game, weren't you?"
"What do you mean, Saint?"
The newspaper that Marius had consulted was in the waste-basket. Simon bent and took it out, and the paragraph that he knew he would find caught his eye almost at once.
"Come here, Roger," said the Saint, and Roger came beside him wonderingly.
Simon Templar did not explain. His thumb simply indicated the paragraph; and Conway read it through twice—three times—before he looked again at the Saint with a fearful comprehension dawning in his eyes.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
How Simon Templar entered a post office,
and a boob was blistered
"BUT IT couldn't be that!''
Roger's dry lips framed the same denial mechanically, and yet he knew that sanity made him a fool even as he spoke. And the Saint's answer made him a fool again.
"But it is that!"
The Saint's terrible calm snapped suddenly, as a brittle blade snaps at a turn of the hand. Sonia Delmar came over and took the paper out of Roger's hands, but Roger scarcely noticed it—he was gazing, fascinated, at the blaze in the Saint's eyes.
"That's what Hermann's gone to do: I tell you, I heard every word. It's Angel Face's second string. I don't know why it wasn't his first—unless because he figured it was too desperate to rely on except in the last emergency. But he was ready to put it into action if the need arose, and it just happened that there was a chance this very night—by the grace of the devil ——"
"But I don't see how it works," Roger said stupidly.
"Oh, for the love of Pete!" The Saint snatched his cigarette from his mouth, and his other hand crushed Roger's shoulder in a vise-like grip. "Does that count? There are a dozen ways he could have worked it. Hermann's a German. Marius could easily have fixed for him to be caught later, with the necessary papers on him—and there the fat would have been in the fire. But what the hell does it matter now, anyway?"
And Roger could see that it didn't matter; but he couldn't see anything else. He could only say: "What time does it happen?"
"About six-thirty," said the Saint; and Roger looked at the clock.
It was twenty-five minutes past three.
"There must be another telephone somewhere," said the girl.
Simon pointed to the desk.
"Look at that one," he said. "The number's on it—and it's a Saxmundham number. Probably it's the only private phone in the village."
"But there'll be a post office."
"I wonder."
The Saint was looking at Marius. There might have been a sneer somewhere behind the graven inscrutability of that evil face, but Simon could not be sure. Yet he had a premonition. . . .
"We might try," Roger Conway was saying logically; and the Saint turned.
"We might. Coming?"
"But these guys—and Sonia —"
"Right. Maybe I'd better go alone. Give me one of those guns!"
Roger obeyed.
And once again the Saint went flying down the drive. The automatic was heavy in his hip pocket, and it gave him a certain comfort to have it there, though he had no love for firearms in the ordinary way. They made so much noise. . , . But it was more than possible that the post office would look cross-eyed at him, and it might boil down to a hold-up. He realized that he wasn't quite such a paralyzingly respectable sight as he had been earlier in the evening, and that might be a solid disadvantage when bursting into a village post office staffed by startled females at that hour of the morning. His clothes were undamaged, it was true; but Hermann's affectionate farewell had left certain traces on his face. Chiefly, there was a long scratch across his forehead, and a thin trickle of blood running down one side of his face, as a souvenir of the diamond ring that Hermann affected. Nothing such as wounds went, but it must have been enough to make him look a pretty sanguinary desperado. . . . And if it did come to a holdup, how the hell did telegraph offices work? The Saint had a working knowledge of Morse, but the manipulation of the divers gadgets connected with the sordid mechanism of transmissions of the same was a bit beyond his education. . . .