Leslie Charteris - Send for the Saint

“Trust the Lowland Lights to be regimental about it,” Yates smiled. “We’re inclined to take things a bit more casually, I’m afraid.” He handed the Saint a millboard. “Send a couple of men to relieve the guard on the prisoner, sign here, and he’s all yours.”

The uniformed mercenaries of The Squad had already poured from the back of the truck and assembled loosely, facing the Paras across the drive. The Saint called to two of them.

“Ewan, McAnn — up to the house. Relieve the guard on the prisoner. Take the jeep.”

Simon searched Yates’ features, and thought he saw a flicker of uneasiness pass over that phlegmatic face. He wondered how much he knew.

As the Saint figured it, Ruth would have been in contact by radio either with Yates himself or, perhaps, with Pelton. But either way, she had been interrupted before the switch — so no one could be certain that a switch had been made yet. Unless the Paras had got together with the real Lowlanders earlier, so that they’d recognise them when the time came. But somehow he didn’t see that as very likely, knowing Pelton’s established preference for confiding as little as possible to as few people as possible. How much had he told Yates — if anything?

As the two men he had detailed to relieve the guard on Instrood jumped into the jeep and drove off up the short driveway, the Saint turned to Rockham.

“All right, Corporal. Fall in the men.”

The two squads came to attention under the orders of their respective NCo’s.

“Piper!” called the Saint, hiding his profound unenthusiasm for this act in the proceedings; and Lembick obediently appeared with the bagpipes.

Simon made his inspection of the outgoing guard as cursory as he could, while the pipes skirled out behind him in an ear-torturing dirge.

Yates crossed to inspect the new guard. He eyed the first man. Then his gaze swept along the rank, and back.

The men were lined up just as in their drills — trews and tunics immaculate, boots gleaming, rifles in perfect alignment, Tam o’shanters neatly aslant over the left ear.

Yates looked again at the man in front of him — at his hat. And then, with a furrow of puzzlement creasing his brow, he half-turned his head to look questioningly at the Saint.

At his headgear.

“The Tammies!” Yates shouted suddenly. “Lowland Lights slant ’em to the right! You’re phonies!”

So whether Yates had been tipped off or not, apparently Lembick, the reliable expert on Scottish military traditions, had goofed it.

And both of those were possible eventualities on which the Saint had not been tipped off. He had only his instincts and his reflexes to cue him.

Rockham had his revolver out and was swinging it around to point at Yates before the Paras Captain had finished speaking. The Saint hurled himself at Rockham just as his finger tightened in the trigger, knocking him sideways to the ground, and the bullet whistled by Yates’s ear.

“Yates — I’m Templar — with you!” Simon called to him, as the Squad men raised their rifles.

“Scatter, men!” Yates yelled. “Fire at will! But not at the Captain!”

Both groups of uniformed men scattered. Simon ducked behind the Paras’ jeep as the shots rang out from both sides; and then fluently cursing the tardiness of Pelton’s reinforcements, he worked his way around towards the back of their lorry. Between there and the Squad’s own lorry was a twenty-foot gap.

He put his head down and sprinted those few yards; but someone must have been watching, because a bullet lifted the Tam o’shanter clean off his head and he felt the deadly passing breath of two more. Then he reached the lorry, and thankfully took cover on the side of it away from the shooting.

He knew Ruth was still in that truck with Cawber. Assuming Pelton’s reinforcements did eventually arrive, there was no telling how Cawber would react. He might try to use the girl as a shield or hostage to save his own skin; or he might panic and shoot her. And as there was something the Saint wanted to say to her before anything too final happened to her, the first task he had set himself now was to get her away from Cawber.

His guess was that Cawber would have moved right to the back of the truck when the shooting started, and would be craning his neck, peeping around the far side of the tailboard, to watch the action.

And the Saint’s guess was right, as he saw when he peered cautiously around the truck’s rear end from his own safe side. Cawber was sitting so that he could watch the battle without serious risk of getting his head blown off and still keep tabs on Ruth. He had her gripped by the arm, and the fingers of his other hand were curled loosely around the trigger of a Sten gun.

He glanced aside and, for one fragmentary instant, saw the man he knew as Gascott, and saw the automatic that was levelled at his own heart.

And the Saint shot him dead, without hesitation and without remorse, before he could even move.

“Thank you,” Ruth said calmly.

Simon had no time to compliment her on her sangfroid. He unhitched the tailgate of the truck and helped her down; and then he said:

“I’m making a run for the house. You’d better come along too. You know the layout.”

As an afterthought, he hauled himself up into the back of the truck. Cawber’s fingers had tightened on the Sten gun in his death spasm. Simon prised them open, wrenched the gun from that involuntary grip, and thrust it into the girl’s hands.

“You’d better have this — just in case. I’m sure you know how to use it.”

They took a roundabout route, skirting some trees, and zigzagging their way from one truck’s shelter to the next. The shots were still stuttering out, with the two sides having scattered rapidly behind the available cover.

When they stopped for a short breather, she said: “You’re thinking of Instrood?”

He nodded.

“Not that it’s likely that anyone’ll have harmed him. But that’s not a chance we should take. And I saw Rockham heading this way.”

They saw some fallen men, and once the Saint pointed savagely and gripped the girl’s arm.

“Look at those poor bastards! A couple of Yates’s men — and they look like goners. What the hell does Pelton think he’s playing at?” he blazed.

She shrugged, as if to say that Pelton’s ways were mysterious, and not for mere mortals to question; and the Saint’s mouth set in a still harder line as they ran on towards the gaunt grey structure that was the house.

Further on he pointed again at two more prone figures, this time in the Lowlanders’ uniform.

“The two men I detailed to relieve the guard on Instrood,” he said. “I wonder what happened to the two Paras they were relieving.”

They approached the house cautiously, from the rear. The Saint kicked open the back door while they stood as well clear as they could of anything that might come through it. Nothing did, and they were about to go in, when suddenly she clutched at his arm, dragging him aside a a split second before the crack of a shot.

But the bullet didn’t smash its way into the wall where the Saint had been; and neither did it dissipate its lethal energy by ploughing into the Saint himself. It ended up somewhere in the depths of Lembick’s skull.

They took in the scene, and understood it, in less than the blink of an eye, as a camera occasionally captures a moment of such graphically telling summary as to make comment totally superfluous.

They saw Lembick, with his gun pointing to where Simon Templar had been and with an unsightly hole in his forehead; and they saw Rockham, his own gun levelled in his hand. Rockham had dealt out his own ruthless punishment to Lembick for the mistake that had spiked the mission.