There was also another person to think of — such a recent and secondary addition to his concerns that the Saint had momentarily forgotten him.
“Yakovitz!” Leila’s tensely anxious voice was his reminder.
“Yakovitz?” Simon echoed her mechanically.
There was certainly no trace of her subordinate in the shattered living room, which could have been a hopeful sign. And then a low moan, hardly above a whimper, came from the kitchen.
Yakovitz was lying face down on the kitchen floor in a litter of broken crockery and overturned utensils. As the Saint knelt down and felt for his pulse, he stirred and opened his eyes. He shook his head slowly and pulled himself up until he was half sitting, half kneeling.
“Take it easy,” said the Saint. “Keep still.”
His fingers gently probed the other’s body, but Yakovitz didn’t flinch. Satisfied that there was no serious injury, he soaked a towel and tried to wipe away the dust and stains from the man’s face, but Yakovitz took it away and did it himself.
“I am all right,” he growled. “I was only knocked-out.”
Apparently he had been brewing himself some coffee when the grenade smashed through the window, and enough of the blast had come through the open doorway to throw him across the kitchen, and he had hit his head as he fell. Aside from one or two scratches, he had suffered nothing worse than a mild concussion.
Simon helped him back to the living room and into one of the still serviceable armchairs.
“He’s a lucky lad, is your Yakovitz,” he told Leila. “A few minutes earlier or later, and we’d probably have been scraping bits of him off the walls.”
“Lucky,” Yakovitz said stoically, “I have a thick head.”
Most of the bottles and glasses on the hospitality table were in smithereens, but the Saint found a bottle of cognac and a glass that had miraculously survived, and poured Yakovitz a hefty tot.
“While that’s making your head thinner,” he said, “I’d better do something about making our drama less public.”
Outside the front windows there were brightly painted shutters hinged to the wall, ostensibly to give the house a pleasantly rustic air, but they were also functional. Simon had just closed and secured them when a blue-uniformed figure loomed up at his shoulder.
“Would this be where that explosion was?” enquired the Law.
“Oh, did you hear it, or did somebody phone in?” countered the Saint ingenuously, giving himself a moment in which to think.
“Must’ve been here,” returned the police sergeant, thoughtfully crunching some of the telltale shards of glass on the cobblestones under his feet.
He was clearly nearing retirement age, and the expression on his plump face as he tried ineffectually to peep through the shutter louvres suggested that he was more accustomed to feeling collars than coping with terrorists.
“Sounded quite like a bomb, it did,” he mentioned stolidly.
“I know,” said the Saint. “The theory is that I, being me, have a great many enemies who wish to enrol me in the celestial choir, and this was obviously the work of one of them. Sorry to disappoint you, but it was nothing so sensational. We must have had a small leak in the gas oven. A friend of mine who doesn’t have such a good sniffer went into the kitchen and struck a match, and it went off with a bang. Fortunately, he wasn’t hurt. Just a few broken dishes, and all this glass blown out.”
“I see,” said the sergeant, as if he rather regretted it. “But since there’ll have to be a report, now, would you mind coming around to the station and making a statement?”
“If I can be any help to the Metropolitan Police,” said the Saint resignedly, “nothing is too much trouble. Just let me make my excuses to my guests.”
It was almost two hours before he eventually arrived home again, to find Leila curled up on the settee asleep. Her slender figure was wrapped in his own silk dressing-gown, and she looked so innocent and vulnerable that he found it hard to credit that a little earlier she had been wielding a pistol with the cold professionalism of a seasoned commando.
She awoke with a start at the clink of glass on glass.
“Simon! Well? What happened?”
He settled on the arm of the chair opposite and sipped his brandy before replying.
“I believe the official phrase is ‘helping the police with their enquiries.’ I have been going through the charade of dictating a statement and waiting for it to be typed by some one-fingered truncheon wielder who was as meticulous as if he’d been bidding for a Nobel Prize. I have been signing same and answering a hundred and one questions arising therefrom, all designed to trap me into admitting some kind of guilt or of knowing some guilty person. Of course, I stuck by my gas-leak story, since you and Garvi want to keep the cops out of it.” He took another sip. “How’s Yakovitz?”
“All right. But I ordered him to bed.”
Simon glanced around the room again.
“While you did the housework,” he said. “Thanks for cleaning up the mess, Leila.”
“It was the least I could do. Your beautiful home, wrecked, because of us...”
She stood in front of him, and there was a mistiness in her eyes that he had not expected.
“Simon, I’m sorry about how I have spoken to you sometimes.” Her voice trembled slightly. “But when my work here is finished—”
He drew her close and smothered the rest of her words with a kiss. When their lips finally parted she made no move to leave his embrace.
“When your work here is finished, we’ll have time to talk of many things,” he said.
She was about to speak again, but he placed a finger against her lips.
“But not now,” he said. “And the business talk will keep till breakfast. Go on up to bed, and I’ll doss down here.”
Despite the strain of the long night, the Saint was still the first to rise. He had long ago cultivated the ability to keep firing with only a minimum of sleep. He had slumbered peacefully and awakened refreshed at the reveille of his own mental alarm clock, to shower and change his clothes before he roused the others.
Leila came down to the invigorating aroma of percolating coffee and sizzling bacon. Yakovitz followed more slowly, but his step was steady and his eyes clear.
“I hope my heathen habits won’t spoil your appetites,” Simon apologised as he seated them. “But you can still eat the eggs.”
Leila had changed back to the fawn tailored suit she had worn when they met, and its faintly military style helped her return to outward impersonality.
“I telephoned Colonel Garvi and told him everything that has happened,” she stated, as if making a formal report.
“And has he any jolly new ideas?” asked the Saint.
Leila nodded.
“Yes. As soon as we have Hakim we are to take him to another base, a house the embassy owns near Epping. I have written down the address.”
“Why?”
She looked surprised at the question.
“For interrogation,” she answered. “We can’t ask you to let us keep him here, and the embassy is not suitable.”
The Saint shrugged.
“What you do with him is your affair,” he said callously. “My job finishes when we catch him. After that, I’m going to have a few scalps of my own to collect.”