“Do you really think somebody might follow us?”
Simon meditated on her snub-nosed, tense-lipped profile for a few seconds.
“You always sound so surprised at these things,” he remarked. “Don’t you have any idea at all of what you’ve gotten yourself into?”
“Of course I do!” she retorted. “Don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine.” She slowed down and then continued irritably. “What’s the best way to Datchet?”
“The shortest way you know from here to the M4, for a start.”
He kept a sharp lookout while she steered them southwards through a minimum of traffic to join the major westward motorway. The suburban commuters and shoppers were safely home, and it would be some time before the theatre goers started back.
“At this hour, we should make it comfortably in thirty minutes,” he said.
“There’s one thing neither one of us has mentioned,” Tammy said.
She seemed less tense now that they were putting a good distance between themselves and her flat. The Saint, finally satisfied that nobody was following the red sports car, settled more comfortably in his own incapacious seat.
“What’s that?” he asked.
“The police,” she said in fateful tones.
“There are lots of other things we haven’t mentioned either,” Simon said, stretching out his long arm across the back-rest behind her shoulders. “Popcorn, Mount Fujiyama, Ivan the Terrible...”
“Oh you’re impossible!”
He was smiling at her.
“It’s true, I am,” he said modestly. “And I apologise for not mentioning the police. What would you like me to mention about them? Their social usefulness, their handsome uniforms, their unfailing graciousness, their marytrdom at the hands of bearded baboons breaking up park benches for holy causes?”
“Why can’t you be serious? People are getting their arms broken and all you can do is make jokes.”
“That’s not all I’m doing. I’m putting my life in the hands of a woman driver. Greater love hath no man. What about the police?”
“Shouldn’t we tell them what’s going on?”
“It’s their job to know what’s going on,” Simon said. “They have nothing else to do for twenty-four hours a day but poke around finding out what’s going on. If we know more than they do, it hardly makes me feel they’re deserving of our help. Besides, what could we tell them? We’ve got nothing they could take action on.”
“But we might get in trouble.”
The Saint nodded complacently.
“We undoubtedly will.”
“With the police, I mean.”
“That too,” he concurred. “Especially considering how much they already love me for my past services.”
He watched her face in the irregular play of lights that swept continuously through the car. She looked as if she was beginning to have doubts about the bargain she had made.
“You’ve been in trouble with them before, haven’t you?” she asked.
“Oh, yes.”
“You’ve stolen things, haven’t you... and killed people.”
“I have been known to supplement the efforts of the State to balance the distribution of wealth and do justice as it should be done.”
“And I had to get myself mixed up with you!”
“I shall try to prove that I’m not a total liability. Love, of course, may take a little longer to burgeon.”
That silenced her until they were past the exit to Heathrow Airport, and may have added some helpful weight to the pressure of her foot on the accelerator. The Saint was not alarmed, for by that time he had been able to rate her as a fast and proficient driver, and for a while he was satisfied to let her concentrate on that.
After he estimated that her blood-pressure should be close to normal again, he said: “Just to pass the time, I’d like to hear more about this Kalki the Kook who does the bone-breaking bit.”
“Kalki? What about him?”
“That’s my question. What else do you know?”
Tammy made a perceptible effort to meet him on the same impersonal plane.
“He came to England about ten years ago, before there were many restrictions on commonwealth immigration. He has no police record, but they say he used to pad his income as a wrestler and lorry driver by meeting new arrivals from Pakistan at the airport, offering to help them, and then charging them a small fortune for a ride to their destination, where he dumped them and disappeared.”
“Charming fellow,” said Simon. “And now he’s fishing in more troubled waters. Anything else?”
“That’s about it on Kalki.” Tammy pulled out to pass a convoy of three lumbering trucks. “Do you really know where we’re going?” she asked.
“Yes. We take the next exit — it’s marked ‘A331 Slough-Colnbrook.’ Meanwhile, what’s the dossier on Kalki’s sidekick? American, ex-jockey, what else?”
“Crazy as a loon, for a start,” Tammy replied. “He fell off a horse years ago and cracked his skull. The doctors took a piece of bone out of his cranium and roofed him over with a stainless steel plate. Ever since then he claims he can pick up wireless broadcasts, and that’s why they call him Shortwave.” She laughed. “You don’t believe me, do you?”
“Oh, I do. Fascinating. A human radio.”
“So he says, and it may even be true. I had a close-up look at him at a pub one afternoon when I first started prowling around Soho, and he was giving everybody the latest odds from Ascot.”
“Right off the top of his head, so to speak,” mused Simon. “A mobile betting shop. If we can bring him back alive maybe we can sell him to Ladbrooke’s. What are his other distinctions besides access to the radio waves?”
“He likes hurting people,” Tammy said flatly. “And he’ll do anything for money. But as far as I know, he’s just a tool.”
“I wonder if he needs to be plugged in before he operates,” Simon ruminated.
“Considering the kind of operations he’s supposed to perform on people, I’d just as soon not find out,” Tammy said. “In fact, I’m beginning to wonder if I won’t ask the editor to transfer me to the cookery page.”
The Saint chuckled.
“Don’t chicken out now,” he told her. “We’ve got some three-star thrills to look forward to. Just think of it: Super-thug and his marvellous electronic midget. That combination beats steak-and-kidney pie any day. Here’s our turn-off, coming up now.”
“I saw it,” Tammy said in a grim voice.
“You’re welcome to hitch a ride back to town if you feel a little nervous,” Simon said maliciously. “Just let me borrow your baby hot-rod, and I’ll give you an exclusive interview when the rough stuff’s over.”
The lights of an approaching car flared across the girl’s face as she came down to the roundabout at the bottom of the exit ramp. Her face was tense with the determination of a novice high-wire walker about to give her first performance without benefit of net.
“Never mind,” she said, between what Simon imagined were clenched teeth. “Just never mind the comical comments! I’ll be right with you through the Hallelujah Chorus.” She slowed the car. “What next?”
“Bear that way, where the little sign says Datchet. Then look out for another side marker that says Wraysbury... From here on, if you won’t let me take over, you’ll have to let me side-seat drive...”
He continued his coolly confident pilotage, even when an unlikely turning into which he had ordered her became a narrow track which dipped, twisted, and writhed through a thick coppice as if its original course had been charted by a drink-crazed Hottentot on the trail of a devious wart hog.
It bored its tortuous way under a tunnel-like covering of trees for a quarter of a mile before the tenuous strip of mud and gravel shook itself, straightened, and took off like an arrow between two open fields.