“What’s going to happen?”
“We’ll talk about that on the road, shall we? I’d just as soon not stick around this house any longer than we have to now that it’s light.”
“Amen!” she said, and hurried out.
The Saint went downstairs to where he had left Shortwave tied and gagged. Because of the small filthy window panes, that room was still almost as dark as night. Simon skirted the human bundle on the floor, and threw open the side door, letting in some of the dim morning light. When he turned, he saw that Shortwave was no longer comatose but wide awake, staring up with glistening eyes, wriggling in his bonds like a netted fish.
“Good morning, Sunshine!” the Saint said to him cheerily. “I hope you had lovely nightmares.”
Shortwave could not say anything because of the handkerchief in his mouth, but he made incoherent and clearly unhappy sounds.
Simon gazed down at him benevolently. Using only one hand, he moved the rifle he carried from the casual angle at which he had allowed it to hang and placed its cold muzzle against Shortwave’s forehead directly between the eyes.
“Take a long look, chum,” he said, with the most ghoulish intonation he could command with a straight face. “Because when I start asking you to recite your lessons, and if you forget anything important, the zero I give for flunking is going to drill straight through your tinplated head...”
4
“But what are we going to do with him?” Tammy asked. “We might have been able to sneak him into one of our flats at night, but now we’d never get away with it.”
She referred to Shortwave, who was now neatly tucked away in the trunk of the late Mahmud’s car. Simon, at the wheel, had left the boathouse behind and was feeling his way from one crossroads to the next on his way to the main London highway.
“It’s just as well we can’t sneak him into one of our flats,” he said. “He’s not the kind of house guest I’d enjoy anyway.”
“What can we do with him, then?”
She had been tensing visibly whenever some workbound driver came into view in his dew-covered automobile, as if each car might harbour a whole troop of detectives specifically charged with rooting Shortwave out from under a blanket in the boot of a late-model Ford.
“We can do the same sort of things to him that he was going to do to us,” the Saint said nonchalantly. “Or at any rate we can threaten to. Until we get what we want out of him.”
“I’m starting to wish I’d stuck to plain reporting,” Tammy said. “Let’s just give ourselves and him up to the police.”
“Why should we give ourselves up to anybody?” the Saint asked. “We haven’t done anything wicked yet.”
Tammy looked at his innocent profile with surprise in her wide eyes, like one child witnessing another in some undreamed-of audacity. In the few minutes it had taken them to prepare to leave the boathouse the ravages of the strenuous night had disappeared from her face, leaving her as fresh as the approaching dawn.
“But back there,” she began, “you...”
Simon raised one finger to his lips.
“See no evil, speak no evil,” he said. “I have an excellent memory, and all I can remember about that place is that we were kidnapped and left there tied up, possibly to be murdered later, but we managed to untie ourselves and escape, because they were too silly to leave anyone to guard us. Isn’t that approximately what you remember?”
She sat back and shook her head. There was the suspicion of a smile on her lightly reddened lips.
“Approximately,” she murmured.
The Saint glanced at her with deep aesthetic appreciation.
“So,” he said, “we don’t have anything to give ourselves up for, do we? Our object, in fact, is to keep ourselves free and mobile so that we can track down Kalki the Corn-ball and his nautical buddy, and get your exclusive story. We aren’t going to the police yet because that would put all the other newspapers on the trail.”
“Lovely,” she said. “Except we don’t have the faintest idea where they are.”
“We will,” Simon replied, “as soon as we’ve had a heart-to-heart chat with our little friend in the trunk. We already know Fowler is making some kind of pick-up tonight, and I don’t think he means in Shepherd Market.”
Tammy gave a despairing sigh.
“Then we should have waited somewhere where we could watch the boathouse. You already guessed that he was planning to bring his immigrants there.”
“ ‘Planning’ is the operative word. From the look of the place, it’s still being prepared for that. Fowler mightn’t be planning to inaugurate it today. You could see, it’s still being worked on. And after last night, he might even feel more like postponing the grand opening. So we can’t afford to take the chance. Since it’s a fair bet that he’ll still use another old-established landing place tonight, I’d rather try to catch him even farther up the line. And that’s where fate allows Shortwave his moment of glory. Against a Wagnerian background transmitted direct to him from Radio Three, he will sing for us at the top of his miserable little lungs, in the course of which concert we shall learn just exactly where Commander Fowler is running his moonlight cruise this evening.”
They had finally come to a highway which a signpost identified as the A40, and Simon swung the car eastwards towards London. The misty pearl-grey of the sky was still barely tinged with pink, and the roads were almost deserted in the hush between the tardiest stragglers and the front-runners of the matutinal deluge.
“So,” he continued, “we’ll take Shortwave to a cosy spot where he can warm up for his command performance, and then I’ll be on my way to foul up Captain Fowler.”
“We’ll be on our way,” she corrected. “Don’t forget our bargain.”
“Sorry,” he said. “My memory is perfect but a bit selective.”
“So I gathered,” she said. “You’ve almost forgotten to tell me where this cosy spot is where we’re taking Shortwave.”
“The Golden Crescent,” Simon answered.
She stared at him.
“That restaurant? Why there?”
“Because neither of us wants him home, so that was the best place I could think of to park him. Do you know the owner?”
“I’ve seen him when I was poking around looking for leads on my story, that’s all.”
The Saint accelerated around a lumbering truck which was already making a heroic start on polluting the atmosphere of the new-borning day with the abominable fumes of the unlamentable Herr Rudolf Diesel’s contribution to the horrors of the internal combustion engine.
“Well,” he continued, “Mr. Haroon’s role in this immigrant game isn’t completely clear to me, and I’d like to get it straight. Obviously Fowler and his friends have felt chumsy enough with Haroon to make his restaurant a meeting place—”
“But Kalki said Haroon wasn’t part of the gang,” Tammy interrupted.
“Right. Which I could believe. On the other hand, they must have him pretty well under their thumbs, or they couldn’t risk working as close to him as they have.”
On the almost deserted roads, their speed was limited by practically nothing but his discretion, and in what seemed no time at all they were running into Kensington.
“They’ve probably just got him scared to death the way they have everybody else,” Tammy said.
“Probably,” Simon agreed. “I wouldn’t guess that our fat friendly restaurateur is the bravest or strongest man in the world. He’s got an imbalance of blubber over moral fibre. If we need him on the side of the angels, we’ll just have to scare him worse than the bad guys did. But we can’t afford to have an uncertain factor rattling around in the works at this stage, and Mr. Haroon is certainly an uncertain factor, so we’ll drop in for breakfast with Shortwave and see what we can do about battening them both down.”