Leslie Charteris - The Saint Steps In

Then it was all a balance of imponderables again.

How much would they think the Saint had told? How much, for that matter, did they believe the Saint knew?

Simon couldn't hazard the second question. It depended a little, perhaps not too much, on Andrea's version of the previous night. And that was something that it was impossible to guess, for many reasons.

But they would be afraid that the Saint knew something And he hoped that they would be good enough psychologists to figure that he would keep the best of it to himself. He thought they would. He was gambling more than he cared to measure on that.

They had to argue that if he knew too much he knew that they had Calvin Gray. Therefore his object would be to recover that hostage. He, on the other hand, had Madeline Gray, who was just as important. Each of them held one trump at par. It was a deadlock. The only difference was that they could threaten to do vicious things to Calvin Gray, and be wholly unmoved even if the Saint fantastically threatened reprisals on Madeline. But they could well doubt whether in the last extremity even the Saint would let himself be intimidated by that. Therefore, before the game could end, one side would have to hold both trumps. The difference there was that the Saint could wait; he had a minuscule advantage in time. They hadn't.

Simon hoped that was how it was.

He had nothing to do but play chords on that until the train stopped at Stamford.

He secured a taxi in company with a young sergeant on furlough and a stout woman with three Siamese cats in a wicker basket who must ineluctably have been some hapless individual's visiting aunt, and began to fume inwardly for the first time while they were dropped off at nearer destinations. After that, it seemed almost like another superfluous delay when he recognized Wayvern and another man in a dark sedan that met and passed them out on Long Ridge Road. But Wayvern recognized him at the same time, so the Saint stopped his driver, and the two cars slowed down a few yards past each other and backed up until they could talk.

"What goes?" Simon asked.

"I was just taking my man home," Wayvern told him. "Jerterick phoned me and said it was all clear now."

"And about time," said the collector of butterflies, yawning. "I ain't had a night's sleep since Christmas."

The Saint didn't know why the earth seemed to stand still.

"Where've you been?" Wayvern asked him.

"On a train coming back from New York."

"Then I guess he couldn't get in touch with you. Better phone him." Wayvern put his car in gear again and stirred the engine. "He said he might be coming over. If I see him first, I'll tell him you're back."

Simon nodded, and told his driver to go on.

He could give no reason for it, and certainly there was nothing he could have said to Wayvern, but his premonition was so sure that it was like extrasensory knowledge. It sat just below his ribs with a leaden dullness that made the plodding taxi seem even slower. He insulted himself in a quiet monotonous way; but that did no good except to pass the time. What had happened couldn't be altered. And he knew what had happened, so positively, so inevitably, that when he went into the house and called Madeline, and she didn't answer, it wasn't a shock or an impact at all, but only a sort of draining at his diaphragm, as if he had been hit in the solar plexus without feeling the actual blow.

It was Mrs. Cook who came out of the kitchen while he was calling, and said: "I think Miss Gray went out."

"What do you mean, you think she went out?" Simon asked with icy impassivity.

"Well, after Mr. Wayvern took his man away, I heard her saying goodbye to them, and presently there was another car drove up and I think she went out. I'd heard them saying that everything was all right, and she was very excited. I thought perhaps you'd come back for her."

"You didn't see this other car, or anyone else who came here?"

"No, sir." He had gathered that morning that she was an optimistic creature with a happily vacant mind, but even she must have felt something in his stillness and the coldness of his voice. "Why — is anything wrong?"

There was nothing that Simon could see any use in discussing with her.

"No."

He turned on his heel and went into the living-room, and for some minutes he stood rigidly there before he began to pace. He had exactly the same feeling, differently polarized, that an amateur criminal must have who has committed his first defalcation and then realized that he has made a fatal slip and that he must be found out and that it will only be a matter of time before they come for him, that he has changed the whole course of his life in a blithe moment and now the machinery has got him and there is nothing he can do about it. It wasn't like that for the Saint, but it felt the same.

He didn't even bother about calling Jetterick for a double check. He didn't need that melancholy confirmation. He knew.

As for calling Jetterick or Wayvern to make them do something — that was just dreamy thinking. That would mean starting all over again. And there was nothing more to start with than there had been before, when Calvin Gray vanished. You could have all the microscopes and all the organization on earth, but you couldn't do much If nobody had seen anyone and nothing was left behind and there was nothing to start with. Not for a long time, anyway. And that might be much too long.

And under the handicaps of democratic justice, you couldn't make inspirational forays in all directions in the hope of blasting out something that would justify them. You couldn't take the bare word and extravagant theories even of a Saint as a sound basis for hurling reckless charges against a man with the power and prominence of Hobart Quennel. Because if you were pulling a boner it would be just too damn bad about you.

Unless your name happened to be Simon Templar, the Saint, and you never had given a damn.

Simon thought all that out, and hammered the shape of it into his mind.

The Ungodly had thought it out, too. Just as he'd hoped they would. But sooner.

And now he was an outlaw again, nothing else; and any riposte he made could only be in his own way.

It was five o'clock when he called Westport.

He wondered if she would be there. But she was. Her voice answered the ring, as if she had been expecting it. She might have been expecting it, too. He could take that in his stride, now, with everything else. He was on his own now, regardless of Hamilton or anyone. And all the hell-for-leather brigand lilt of the old days was rousing in his voice and edging into the piratical hardening of his blue eyes as he greeted her.

"Andrea," he said. "Thanks. For everything. And I decided to take you up on that invitation. I'll be over for dinner."

Mr. Hobart Quennel looked no more like a millionaire than any other millionaire; and probably he was just as secretly proud of the fact as any other up-to-date millionaire. He was one of hundreds of modern refutations of the old crude Communist caricatures of a captialist, so that Simon Templar wondered whether there might be some congenital instinct of camouflage in the cosmogony of millionaires which caused them as a race to keep one jump ahead of their unpopular prototypes. It was, as if in these days of ruthless social consciousness a millionaire required some kind of protective coloration to enable him to succeed in his déclassé profession.

Mr. Quennel was physically a fairly big and well-built man, with his daughter's fair hair sprinkled with gray and balding back from his forehead, and the same pale blue inexpressive eyes. But he gave no impression of being either frightening or furtive, for in these days of higher education it is no longer so easy as it may once have been to bludgeon the crisp cabbage out of the public purse, and a man who looks either frightening or furtive has too many strikes against him when he bids for the big bullion. His face was smooth and bony without being cadaverous, so that its fundamental hardness was calm and without strain. His clothes were good when you noticed them, but it was just as easy not to notice them at all. He had no softening around the middle, for that mode is also out of fashion among millionaires, who are conspicuous among sedentary workers for being able to afford all the trainers and masseurs and golf clubs and other exercising appliances that can be prescribed to restrain the middle-aged equator. He was that new and fascinating evolution of the primitive tycoon who simply worked at the job of being a millionaire, as un-excitedly as other men worked at the job of being bricklayers, and probably with no more grandiose ideas of his place in the engine of civilisation. It was just a job in which you weighed different factors and did different things in different ways, and you had a different wage scale and standard of living; but then bricklayers were different again from cowboys, but they didn't confuse their personal reactions by thinking about cowboys.