Leslie Charteris - Follow the Saint

Simon had his knife in his hand. He had twisted the blade back to saw it across the cords on his wrists, and it was keen enough to lance through them like butter. He could feel them loosening strand by strand, and stopped cutting just before they would have fallen away altogether; but one strong jerk of his arms would have been enough to set him free.

"So what?" he inquired coolly.

"So you get what's coming to you," Kaskin said.

He dug into a bulging coat pocket.

The Saint tensed himself momentarily. Death was still very near. His hands might be practically free, but his legs were still tied to the chair. And even though he could throw his knife faster than most men could pull a trigger, it could only be thrown once. But he had taken that risk from the beginning, with his eyes open. He could only die once, too; and all his life had been a gamble with death.

He saw Kaskin's hand come out. But it didn't come out with a gun. It came out with something that looked like an ordinary tin can with a length of smooth cord wound round it. Kaskin unwrapped the cord, and laid the can on the edge of the bed, where it was only a few inches both from the Saint's elbow arid Verdean's middle. He stretched out the cord, which terminated at one end in a hole in the top of the can, struck a match, and put it to the loose end. The end began to sizzle slowly.

"It's a slow fuse," he explained, with vindictive satisfaction. "It'll take about fifteen minutes to burn. Time enough for us to get a long way off before it goes off, and time enough for you to do plenty of thinking before you go skyhigh with Verdean. I'm going to enjoy thinking about you thinking."

Only the Saint's extraordinarily sensitive ears would have caught the tiny mouselike sound that came from somewhere in the depths of the house. And any other ears that had heard it might still have dismissed it as the creak of a dry board.

"The only thing that puzzles me," he said equably, "is what you think you're going to think with."

Kaskin stepped up and hit him unemotionally in the face.

"That's for last night," he said hoarsely, and turned to the others. "Let's get started."

Morris Dolf pocketed his automatic and went out, with a last cold stare over the scene.

Kaskin went to the bed, closed the bulging valise, and picked it up. He put his arm round the girl again and drew her to the door.

"Have a good time," he said.

The Saint looked out on to an empty landing. But what he saw was the last desperate glance that the girl flung at him as Kaskin led her out.

He tensed his arms for an instant, and his wrists separated. The scraps of cord scuffed on the floor behind him. He took a better grip on his knife. But he still made no other movement. He sat where he was, watching the slowly smouldering fuse, waiting and listening for two sounds that all his immobility was tuned for. One of them he knew he would hear, unless some disastrous accident had happened to cheat his calculations; the other he was only hoping for, and yet it was the one that his ears were most wishfully strained to catch.

Then he saw Angela Lindsay's bag lying on a corner of the dresser, and all his doubts were supremely set at rest.

He heard her voice, down on the stairs, only a second after his eyes had told him that he must hear it.

And he heard Kaskin's growling answer.

"Well, hurry up, you fool… The car's out in front of the house opposite."

The Saint felt queerly content.

Angela Lindsay stood in the doorway again, looking at him.

She did not speak. She picked up her bag and tucked it under her arm. Then she went quickly over to the bed and took hold of the trailing length of fuse. She wound it round her hand and tore it loose from the bomb, and threw it still smouldering into a far corner.

Then she bent over the Saint and kissed him, very swiftly.

He did not move for a moment. And then, even more swiftly, his free hands came from behind him and caught her wrists.

She tried to snatch herself back in sudden panic, but his grip was too strong. And he smiled at her.

"Don't go for a minute," he said softly.

She stood frozen.

Down on the ground floor, all at once, there were many sounds. The sounds of heavy feet, deep voices that were neither Dolf's nor Kaskin's, quick violent movements…

Her eyes grew wide, afraid, uncomprehending, questioning. But those were the sounds that he had been sure of hearing. His face was unlined and unstartled. He still smiled. His head moved fractionally in answer to the question she had not found voice to ask.

"Yes," he said evenly. "It is the police. Do you still want to go?"

Her mouth moved.

"You knew they'd be here."

"Of course," he said. "I arranged for it. I wanted them to catch Morrie and Judd with the goods on them. I knew you meant to double-cross me, all the time. So I pulled a double doublecross. That was before you kissed me — so you could find out where I kept my gun… Then I was only hoping you'd make some excuse to come back and do what you just did. You see, everything had to be in your own hands."

Down below, a gun barked. The sound came up the stairs dulled and thickened. Other guns answered it. A man screamed shrilly, and was suddenly silent. The brief fusillade rattled back into throbbing stillness. Gradually the muffled voices droned in again.

The fear and bewilderment died out of the girl's face, and left a shadowy kind of peace.

"It's too late now," she said. "But I'm still glad I did it."

"Like hell it's too late," said the Saint.

He let go of her and put away his knife, and bent to untie his legs. His fingers worked like lightning. He did not need to give any more time to thought. Perhaps in those few seconds after his hands were free and the others had left the room, when he had sat without moving and only listened, wondering whether the girl would come back, his subconscious mind had raced on and worked out what his adaptation would be if she did come back. However it had come to him, the answer was clear in his mind now — as clearly as if he had known that it would be needed when he planned for the other events which had just come to pass.

And the aspect of it that was doing its best to dissolve his seriousness into a spasm of ecstatic daftness was that it would also do something towards taking care of Mr Ebenezer Hogsbotham. He had, he realized, been almost criminally neglectful about Mr Hogsbotham, having used him as an excuse to start the adventure, having just borrowed his house to bring it to a denouement, and yet having allowed himself to be so led away by the intrusion of mere sordid mercenary objectives that he had had no spare time to devote towards consummating the lofty and purely idealistic mission that had taken him to Chertsey in the first place. Now he could see an atonement for his remissness that would invest the conclusion of that story with a rich completeness which would be something to remember.

"Listen," he said, and the rapture of supreme inspiration was blaming in his eyes.

In the hall below, Chief Inspector Claud Eustace Teal straightened up from his businesslike examination of the two still figures sprawled close together on the floor. A knot of uniformed local men, one of whom was twisting a handkerchief round a bleeding wrist, made way for him as he stepped back.

"All right," Teal said grimly. "One of you phone for an ambulance to take them away. Neither of them is going to need a doctor."

He moved to the suitcase which had fallen from Judd Kaskin's hand when three bullets hit him, and opened it. He turned over some of the contents, and closed it again.

A broad-shouldered young officer with a sergeant's stripes on his sleeve shifted up from behind him and said: "Shall I look after it, sir?"

Teal surrendered the bag.