Leslie Charteris - The Saint 49 Count On The Saint

Nyall continued to stare without speaking at the Saint, who, conscious that his one hope lay in playing for time, said: “Commodities are dangerous things. Buy or sell at a fixed price now for payment and delivery in a few months. If the price goes the way you’re betting, you make a packet. But if it doesn’t...”

“I was unlucky,” Nyall broke in.

“So you borrowed from the college funds to make up the difference,” said the Saint. “Easy enough for someone in your position. Until you heard about Sir Basil’s plans and the audit.”

“I had no alternative,” said Nyall defensively. “It would have meant ruin, prison. There was only one way out.”

“Good scheme, dressing as Father Christmas to kill them all,” Simon said. “But then I showed up and it began to go wrong.”

“Why didn’t you say anything before?” the bursar wanted to know.

“Because I needed some kind of proof, more than just the sort of clever theory that wraps up a storybook whodunit. The best way seemed to be to catch you red-handed on your next job. Which is what I’ve done.”

“And much good it’ll do you,” Nyall said, now very coldly.

The Saint watched him deliberately raise the revolver to heart level.

“That thing makes quite a noise when it goes off,” he ventured to remark.

“Nothing that’s likely to be heard from this part of the house, through these walls,” Nyall said.

Simon Templar stared death in the face and seemed to find it amusing. He brought his left hand up unhurriedly, his right hand pushing back his left cuff as if to give him a sight of his wrist watch. At the same time the fingers of his right hand slid into the sleeve to find the chased ivory hilt of the knife sheathed against his left forearm.

“I wonder if that fortune teller was right about the exact time I’d get it,” he murmured.

Nyall’s knuckle whitened on the trigger, and in that split instant the Saint dived aside. His knife flashed through the air in the same second as the pistol cracked.

He felt the bullet pass his ear as he went down. He hit the deck and rolled over, conscious only that he was still alive, that the gamble had paid off.

He heard Nyall curse and the gun thud to the floor. As he rolled over he could see why. The razor-sharp blade had slashed the tendons at the base of the bursar’s fingers. Which was not bad throwing, Simon told himself.

Nyall stared for a second at the blood that was dripping from his hand. And then he went after the gun. But that breathing spell had been all that the Saint needed. He flung himself across the floor and his fingertips touched the butt of the revolver first. Nyall, realising he could never pick it up before the Saint, did the only thing he could. He kicked out wildly. His toe caught the trigger guard, and the gun spun through the air to fall in the far corner of the room.

The Saint twisted around and his other hand cupped behind Nyall’s ankle and pulled. Nyall tottered for a moment, his arms flailing as he tried to keep his balance, before he fell backwards. Simon maintained his grip and began to rise, but Nyall lashed out with his other foot and the heel of his shoe caught the Saint on the side of the head.

The stark lighting of the room was suddenly enhanced by a shower of tumbling golden stars. But the Saint was the only one who saw them. Involuntarily his hold weakened, and Nyall tore his other ankle free.

With a reflex action the Saint threw himself in the direction of the revolver, trying desperately to clear his head and brush away the sparks that still danced before his eyes as he prepared to meet a follow-up attack. But the attack never came.

Perhaps Nyall panicked. Perhaps his spirit was broken by having one hand made useless. Perhaps he remembered what he had heard about the Saint and realised he would ultimately have no chance against him anyway in single unarmed combat. Perhaps it was a combination of all three. All he positively knew was that Nyall hesitated and then turned and fled.

Simon pulled himself upright, the action dispelling the worst of the kick’s after effects. Nyall had been unlucky. It had been a powerful blow but a glancing one. A few degrees different and the Saint might not have known what happened next.

He quickly gathered up the revolver and his knife before going out into the corridor.

Nyall had reached the far end. He turned, a grotesque silhouette in his costume against the light from a high arched window that ran from the floor almost to the ceiling at the end of the passage, and looked from the gun to the grim-set face of the man who held it.

“There’s no way out, Godfrey,” said the Saint softly.

Nyall shook his head slowly, making his false beard wag in an outlandish parody of the character whose disguise he had adopted.

“There’s always a way out,” he pronounced calmly and distinctly.

And before anyone could have stopped him, he turned and hurled himself at the glass.

Simon ran to the window and looked down. The red-coated figure of Santa Claus, sometime bursar of St. Enoch’s College, Cambridge, lay spread-eagled in the thin carpet of snow beside the house like a broken toy.

“You silly twit,” said the Saint. “You should have used the chimney.”

It might have been a scene straight out of a Hollywood production of A Christmas Carol. A bright, cloudless sky shivered to the ringing of a thousand bells from a hundred towers and spires. A glistening white shroud of freshly fallen snow lay across rooftops and streets. Along the pavements, overcoated and muffled in scarves, people trudged home from church.

The picture-postcard perfection of his surroundings failed to move Simon Templar as he steered the Hirondel slowly through Cambridge. After the events of the past week he felt a strong desire to leave both Cambridge and Christmas far behind. His imagination drifted towards a palm-fringed beach and a warm sea, and he found the prospect of overstuffed turkey and stodgy plum pudding distinctly unappealing. But when Chantek had offered to cook him a Christmas dinner, saying that otherwise she would have to spend the day all alone, he had not had the heart to refuse in the face of her almost childish eagerness.

His tiredness contributed to his mood. It had been another long night.

Godfrey Nyall had died before the ambulance arrived, without regaining consciousness. Had it been an attempt to escape, a last desperate gamble, or suicide? The Saint would never know. And Superintendent Nutkin would be content to let a coroner’s jury decide the answer.

Lord Grantchester’s title and personality had awed the police into doing what they had to do so discreetly and unobtrusively that his guests would be quite unaware of what had happened until they read about it in their morning papers. He had insisted that the Saint must stay for the party, kitted out as an Arab in robes easily improvised from a couple of bed sheets, and welcome to shelter behind any alias he chose.

“Damn decent of you to take all that trouble to save my life, as if it had more than just a few more years to go anyway.”

It would be untrue to say that the Saint had not enjoyed his privileged anonymity, but he had slipped away before midnight when it had been announced that all true identities must be disclosed.

Now as he eased the Hirondel into a parking space at his destination and cut the engine, he wondered if this afternoon dinner à deux would be an anticlimax or perhaps only a relaxing but banal denouement.

He was wrong in both guesses.

Chantek answered his knock, and his pessimism began to be undermined by her artless delight at seeing him. She was wearing a sarong patterned with pink and blue flowers, and a pearl necklace glowed against the gold of her skin.