"Perhaps he went for help," said Oldwood, who had not had time to learn more than the vaguest rudiments of the story.
"I don't think so," said the Saint.
He noticed something else, in the reflected glow of the hovering ovals of torchlight, and swept his own light over the drive again. The Hirondel showed up its gleaming lines of burnished metal, exactly where he had left it when he first drove in; but it was the only car there. Of Kenneth Nulland's noisy little roadster there was no trace but the tyre tracks in the gravel.
Simon whistled softly.
"In his own car, too, by God! That's hot stuff-or is it?"
He saw something else, which had been overlooked in the first search-a small dark shadow on the ground close to the place where Nulland's car had stood-and went over to it. It was a red silk handkerchief, and when he picked it up he felt that it was wet and sticky.
"We'd better see how badly Ripwell's hurt," he said.
The doctor had arrived while the search was going on, stopping his car outside the gates, but he was still busy upstairs when Teal came down and joined them.
"He ought to pull through," was Teal's unofficial report. "He's stopped a nasty packet, but the doctor says his constitution is as sound as a bell. What's this about Nulland?"
"What's this about anyhow?" asked Oldwood more comprehensively.
He was a red-faced grizzled man who looked more like a rather hard-bitten farmer than anything else, with an air of quiet self-contained confidence which was not to be flustered even by such sensational events as he had walked into. When his knowledge had been brought up to date he was still quiet and deliberate, stuffing his pipe with square unhurried fingers.
"I haven't anything for you." he said at the end. "I haven't been able to trace any suspicious characters hanging around here yet, but I'm still making inquiries."
"I wonder whether Nulland was kidnapped, or if he ran away," said Teal stolidly.
"The evidence doesn't show that he ran away," said the Saint.
He produced the silk handkerchief which he had picked up in the drive. There was an embroidered "K" in one corner, and the wet stickiness on it was blood.
Teal studied the relic and passed it over to the local man, who put it away in an envelope.
"What are the roads like around here, Oldwood? We can try to stop that car."
"They can't have gone Chertsey way," said Oldwood, striking a match. "Because that's the way I came from. They may have gone almost anywhere else. There's a road to Staines, another to Sunbury, and another to Walton-and half a dozen different routes they could take from any of those places."
"Added to which," murmured the Saint, "there must be at least fifty other baby sports cars exactly like his wandering about Surrey tonight."
"It'll have to be tried," said Teal doggedly. "Do you know the number, Mr. Irelock?"
The secretary hadn't noticed it. Apparently Nulland changed his cars at an average rate of about once a month, except when one of his frequent accidents compelled an even quicker change, and it was almost beyond anyone's power to keep track of the numbers. The instructions that Teal telephoned out were hardly more than a hopeless routine, and all of them knew it.
He had just finished when the doctor came downstairs to confirm the preliminary bulletin.
"He's fairly comfortable now, but he'll want looking after for the next couple of days-I don't think there's any need to move him to the hospital. I'll send a nurse along tonight if I can get hold of one-otherwise I'll bring her over with me tomorrow morning."
"I suppose you didn't find a bullet," said Teal.
The doctor shook his head.
"It went right through him. From the look of the wound I should say it must have been fired from a fairly large-calibre gun."
"That reminds me," said Oldwood, searching his jacket pockets. "I brought over those cartridges that he asked for. You may as well have them, but I don't know that they're much use now."
"They may be useful," said Irelock. "We'd better keep some sort of guard while all this is going on."
"I'll send a man over as soon as I get back to the station," said Oldwood, and stood up. "You might give me a lift, Doctor, if it isn't taking you out of your way. There's nothing more we can do tonight."
Irelock saw them out, and then went back up the stairs to look in on Ripwell; and the Saint lighted another cigarette and stretched out his legs under the table. There was a train of thought shunting about in the half-intuitive sidings of his mind, backing and puffing tentatively, feeling its way breathlessly over a dark maze of lines with only one dim signal to guide it; but something about the way it was moving sent that weird sixth-sense tingle coursing again over his thoracic vertebrae. Teal trudged about over a minute area of carpet with his jaws oscillating rhythmically, and his sleepy eyes kept returning to the inscrutable immobility of the Saint's brown face.
"Well, what do you make of it now?" he said at last.
Simon came far enough out of his trance to put his smouldering cigarette back between his lips.
"I think it was magnificently staged," he said.
"How do you mean-magnificently? To try something like this only an hour or two after we get here, and make a success of it---"
"I like the organisation," said the Saint dreamily. "Think it over, Claud. A bloke pushes his face against the window, and there's a first-class scare. The gathering breaks up and goes dashing out in the dark through three separate doors. There are five of us milling around in all directions, and yet it only takes a few seconds to sort out the right people and make a job of it. The bullet that hit Ripwell may have been meant for either him or me, but we were the two who got the bombs to begin with. Young Nulland is snatched off-a member of the same family-but nobody seems to have tried to grab Irelock when he was knocked out. And nobody tries to damage that beautiful stomach of yours."
"That may only be because they didn't have time."
"Or else because you don't know enough to be dangerous."
Mr. Teal scowled.
"Nulland's car was only a two-seater, wasn't it?" He stared at the curtained windows, working at the problem in his own slow methodical way. "We ought to have tried the river. . . . These people are clever."
"How many have you counted up to?"
"Ellshaw's the only one we know personally, but you saw another man in Duchess Place when you went there. I don't know how many more there are, but Ellshaw couldn't do it all alone. I know that man, and I'd swear he wasn't a killer."
The door opened and Irelock returned, bringing a bottle and glasses on a tray.
"What are the four motives that might make anyone a killer?" asked the Saint.
Teal's heavy lids settled more wearily over his eyes.
"Revenge? Nobody whom he's attacking ever seems to have met him before, except his wife. Jealousy?"
"Of what?"
"The fear of being found out?" suggested Irelock.
"We haven't anything against him," answered the detective. "And I don't know how to believe that he's done anything before that would be big enough to give him such a guilty conscience. He's the type that makes the usual whine about persecution when he's caught, but he always goes quietly."
Simon nodded.
"So that only leaves the best motive of all. Money. Big money."
"Extortion?" queried Teal sceptically.
"It has been done," said the Saint mildly. "But it doesn't meet all the facts this time. What's he going to extort from Mrs. Ellshaw and me? And how can we know anything that might spoil the racket before Nulland's even been kidnapped -much less before anyone's put in the bill for ransom? And how the hell could you get a ransom out of Lord Ripwell if he was dead? Don't forget that he was on the bumping-off list before tonight."
Chief Inspector Teal breathed audibly.
"Well, if you've got a theory of your own, I'd like to hear it. All you've done yet is to make it more complicated."