"Yeah?" Simon's voice was suddenly so soft that it made Teal's laboured suaveness sound like the screech of a circular saw. "And I suppose he had a perfect right to know Manuel Enrique, and not say anything about it when he brought him into the police station at Horley?"
"Who says he knew Enrique?"
The Saint smiled.
"Not me, Claud. If I tell you he did, it'll just make you quite sure he didn't. This is what says so."
He put his hand in his pocket and took out the letter which he had found in the safe. "Or maybe I faked this, too?" he suggested mildly.
"You may have done," said Teal dispassionately; but his baby-blue eyes rested with a rather queer intensity on Simon's face.
"Come for a walk, Claud," said the Saint gently, "and tell me I faked this."
He turned aside quite calmly under the muzzle of Teal's gun and walked to the door. For no earthly reason that he could have given in logical terms, Mr. Teal followed him. And all the time he had a hot gnawing fear that he was making a fool of himself.
Sergeant Barrow followed Mr. Teal because that was his job. He was a fool anyway, and he knew it. Mr. Teal had often told him so.
In the billiard room, Simon pointed to the panel sagging loose on its hinges as he had torn it off — the hole he had chipped through the wall, the wooden stairway going steeply down into the chalk.
"That's where those six men have been living, so that the ordinary servants never knew there was anything going on. You'll find their beds and everything. That's where I was shut up when they got wise to who I was; and that's where I've just got out of."
Teal said nothing for several seconds. And then the most significant thing was, not what he said, but what he did.
He put his gun back in his pocket and looked at the Saint almost helplessly. No one will ever know what it cost him to be as natural as that. But whatever his other failings may have been, Chief Inspector Teal was a kind of sportsman. He could take it, even when it hurt.
"What else do you know?" he asked.
"That the submarine is out in the Channel now, waiting for the aeroplane to come down. That Renway's up over here in that Hawker ship, with loaded machine guns to shoot down the gold transport, and a packet of bombs to drop on any boat that tries to go to the rescue. That all the telephone lines to Croydon Aerodrome, and between the coast and London, have been cut. That there's a radio transmitter somewhere in this place — I haven't found it yet — which is just waiting to carry on signalling when the transport plane stops. That there isn't a hope in hell of getting a warning through to anywhere in time to stop the raid."
Teal's pink face had gone curiously pale.
"Isn't there anything we can do?" he said.
"There's only one thing," answered the Saint. "Down on the landing field you probably saw a Tiger Moth warming up. It's mine. It's the ship I came here in — but that's another story. With your permission, I can go up in it and try to keep Renway off. Don't tell me it's suicide, because I know all that. But it's murder for the crew of that transport plane if I don't try."
The detective did not answer for a moment. He stared at the floor, avoiding the Saint's straight blue gaze.
"I can't stop you," he said at last; and Simon smiled.
"You can forget about Hoppy hitting that policeman, if you're satisfied with the other evidence," he said. He had a sudden absurd thought of what would shortly be happening to a certain George Wynnis, and a shaft of the old mockery touched his smile like sunlight. "And next time I tell you that some low criminal is putting his stuff onto me, Claud," he said, "you mayn't be so nasty and disbelieving."
His forefinger prodded Mr. Teal's stomach in the old maddening way; but his smile was only reminiscent. And without another word he went out of the billiard room, down the long dark corridor to the open air.
As he climbed into the cockpit of his ship he looked back towards the house and saw Mr. Teal standing on the terrace, watching him. He waved a gay arm, while the mechanic dragged away the chocks from under the wheels; and then he settled down and opened the throttle. The stick slid forward between his knees, the tail lifted, and he went roaring down the field to curve upwards in a steep climbing turn over the trees.
He had left it late enough; and if the wind had been in the north instead of in the south he might have been too late. Winding up the sky in smoothly controlled spirals, he saw the single wide span of a big monoplane coming up from the northern horizon, and knew that it must be the transport plane for which Renway was waiting — no other ship of that build would have been flying south at that hour. He looked for Renway and saw a shape like a big square-tipped seagull swinging round in a wide circle over the Channel, six thousand feet up in the cloudless blue…
Renway! The Saint's steady fingers moved on the stick, steepening the angle of climb by a fraction; and his lips settled in a grim reckless line at the remainder that those fingers had no Bowden trips under them, as Renway's had. He looked ahead through the propeller between a double rank of dancing valve springs instead of between the foreshortened blued jackets of a pair of guns. He was taking on a duel in which nothing but his own skill of hand and eye could be matched against the spitting muzzles of Renway's guns — and whatever skill Renway could bring to the handling of them. And suddenly the Saint laughed — a devilish buccaneering laugh that bared his teeth and edged the chilled steel in his eyes, and was drowned to soundlessness in the smashing howl of his engine and whipped away in the tearing sting of the wind.
Renway! The man who had taken his name in vain. The man who had murdered Enrique and put the Saint's mark on him. The man who had stolen the very aeroplane which he was now going up to fight — and had put the Saint's mark on the theft. The overfed, mincing, nerve-ridden, gas-choked, splay-footed, priggish, yellow-bellied, pompous great official sausage who had had the everlasting gall to say that he himself — he — was the Saint!
Simon Templar glanced at the altimeter and edged the stick forward again along his right thigh. Five thousand feet… A gentle pressure of his right foot on the rudder, and the Tiger Moth swung round and levelled off. The country beneath him was flattened out like a painted map, the light green of fields, the darker green of woods, white ribbons of road, and a white ribbon of surf along the edge of the grey-green sea. The transport plane was slipping across the map half a mile under him, cruising at ninety miles an hour air-speed — a lumbering slow-motion cargo boat of the skies. His eagle's eyesight picked out the letters painted across the upper fabric of the wing: G-EZQX. His own air-speed indicator showed a hundred and eighty. It went through his mind that Renway must have watched him coming up. Renway must have seen the Tiger Moth warming up outside the barn and seen it take off. Renway must have guessed that something had gone wrong — must, even then, have been staring down with glazed eyes and twitching fingers, realizing that there was an obstacle in his path that must he blotted out.
Simon wondered when the attack would tonic.
And at that moment it came.
His machine quivered slightly, and he saw an irregular line of punctures sewing itself diagonally across his left wing. Even above the roar of his own engine he heard the Hawker's guns cackling their fierce challenge down the sky. He kicked the rudder and hauled the stick back into his groin, and grinned mirthlessly at the downward drag of his bowels as the nose of the Moth surged upwards, skew-eyed, like the prow of a ship in a terrific sea, and whipped over in a flick roll that twisted into the downward half of a tight loop.
XI
Renway came about in a skidding turn and plunged after him. Screwed round to watch him over the tail, Simon led him down in a shallow dive, weaving deftly from side to side against the efforts of the Hawker's nose to follow him. Little hiccoughs of orange flame danced on the muzzles of Renway's guns; gleaming squirts of tracer went rocketing past the Moth, now wide on the right, now wide on the left. The Saint went on smiling. Aiming an aeroplane is a fine art, and Renway hadn't had the practice — it was the only factor which Simon could count on his side.