Leslie Charteris - The Saint 49 Count On The Saint

Cautiously the Saint went on. With every sense alive to the movements and sounds that surrounded him, he dodged from one tree to another but saw and heard nothing except the furred and feathered inhabitants of the wood disturbed by his passing. He had gone only some three hundred yards when the trees suddenly thinned and he found himself unexpectedly at the outer edge of the wood. The ploughed fields that dipped away before him would not have offered cover to anything larger than a rabbit.

Keeping to the edge of the wood where the going was fastest, he skirted it around the top of the hill on the opposite side to the village. He went farther down the hillside as he approached the far end of the path, using the slope of the land to hide him from the riders who had ventured to the place where he had crossed.

He gained the spot where he had first entered the wood in pursuit of Darslow without further incident, and noted that the professor’s car was gone as he raced down the hillside towards his own. The sooner that Bucksberry and its immediate environs were several miles astern the happier he would feel.

Chantek was still standing on the grass verge where he had left her. She opened her mouth to speak but he bundled her unceremoniously into the Hirondel and threw himself behind the wheel. In one fluid movement he gunned the engine into life. Chantek was still closing her door when the big car leapt forward like a cheetah. He hurled it along the twisting lanes and neither spoke until the first mile was covered and Chantek got her voice back.

“I saw Professor Darslow drive away. What happened?”

In clipped sentences he told her, but his mind was roving far ahead of his words.

There was no clue this time to link the killing of the colonel to the murders of Wakeforth and Lazentree, no hooded Santa or diary reminder. But his instinct told him that it was a strand of the same web. Cambridge is a peaceful city where the majority of citizens are concerned with arguments rhetorical. A third murder in three days was too much of a coincidence. There had to be a common reason not only for the killings themselves but for why they all had to occur in such quick succession and thereby make life so much more difficult for the murderer.

The Saint considered the ingredients of each killing as he searched for a connecting link that would help to build up a picture of the murderer. Lazentree had been strangled, which had required strength or a certain technique. Wakeforth’s murder pointed to careful planning and a steady nerve. The shooting had called for a high degree of woodcraft and workmanship.

Chantek’s comment cut through his thoughts.

“At least it proves that Professor Darslow isn’t a murderer,” she said with an air of triumph.

“It proves nothing except that he didn’t kill the colonel,” he said meticulously.

A worried frown tried to spoil the natural gayety of her features.

“Shouldn’t you have stayed until the police arrived?”

The Saint chuckled at the vision the idea conjured up.

“Of course I should have, but I was thinking of Superintendent Nutkin’s blood pressure. If he’d found me on another murder scene, he might have had a stroke.”

“But what if he finds out you were there?” Chantek persisted.

“I may even have to tell him eventually, I don’t know yet. But it’s unlikely that anyone could identify me. Except Darslow — and I don’t think he’ll be so keen to admit that he was there himself.”

He did not mention the cartridge he had found, for no other reason than that it would have led to more questions which he was not ready to answer. He might have to hand it to the police at some time, but not before it had told him as much as it could without the full laboratory treatment.

Not wanting to catch up with Darslow and seem to be hounding him, he eased his throttle and took a slightly circuitous route back to Cambridge that would give the professor plenty of time to get home ahead of them.

The girl sensed his desire for silence and said little more until the Hirondel was parked outside St. Enoch’s and she had directed him to Darslow’s office.

“Is this the end of our day out together?” she pouted.

“I hope not, but you never know. Can I check with you in your rooms towards lunchtime?”

She nodded, and he left her with a light kiss on the cheek.

“Now let’s see what Brother Darslow has to say for himself,” the Saint speculated softly as he opened the professor’s door.

Professor Edwin Darslow looked like a man who has aged ten years in one morning. He sat behind his desk in the small tidy confines of his study and gazed out of the window at the courtyard below without seeing anything. He still wore the country clothes he had been out in. A bottle of whisky stood on the desk blotter with a half-full tumbler beside it. As Simon entered he turned reluctantly to face him.

Simon leant against a bookcase and eyed him coldly. Darslow shifted uneasily and tried to avoid looking directly at him.

“Let’s start with some explanations,” said the Saint. “Like what you were doing this morning.”

Darslow jerked his head.

“I told you, I wanted to sabotage the hunt,” he mumbled, his cheeks tingling with embarrassment at the confession.

“Go on,” Simon commanded.

Darslow’s voice was hoarse and faltering as he continued.

“I don’t hold with fox hunting, or any other blood sport. But a man in my position, well, I can’t take part in activist demonstrations. But I thought I ought to be doing something besides talking. So I thought I’d do this on my own. I left it too late or I would have been gone before the hunt arrived. I just meant to scatter the rags around and lead the hounds astray. It’s the smell of the aniseed mainly, it confuses them.”

He paused and shook his head as if to clear the memories it contained.

“I had no idea what was going to happen. It was horrible, horrible. Poor Colonel Harker. Shot. It’s almost unbelievable.”

His voice trailed away and the Saint allowed him a few moments to pull himself together before asking: “Did you see anyone else? Anyone in the other part of the wood?”

“No, no one. I was too busy with my own work. You have to believe me, I didn’t know what was going to happen.”

The Saint did believe him. His distress was too real to be simulated.

“Didn’t you see who it was?” Darslow asked.

“No. Our sniper was very cool. Whoever he is, he certainly knew what he was doing this morning,” Simon admitted with grudging respect. “He must have hid until I passed and then doubled back, or alternatively just laid low until I’d left altogether.”

“What will I tell the police?” Darslow asked.

“Nothing,” Simon replied crisply. “Why bother? They don’t know you were there. And if you keep quiet they probably won’t find out that I was around either. Tell me what you know about this Colonel Harker, Professor.”

Darslow shrugged.

“There isn’t much I can tell you, Mr. Templar. He has a farm near Bucksberry and he is also head of the family building business. Quite an important man locally, and very rich too, I understand. He is — that is, was the master of the hunt. Really that’s about all I know. We didn’t exactly move in the same circles.”

The professor paused, and his eyes kept shifting with their chronic evasiveness.

“Of course we can’t be sure that he is dead. He might just have been wounded,” he ventured.

The Saint considered the idea and dismissed it almost entirely.

“It’s in the realms of possibility, but I’ve a feeling it’s almost a certainty that our gunman was a sharpshooter, and it looked to me as if the colonel died right there in the saddle.”