Leslie Charteris - The Saint Goes On

"I forgot to — put down — the cigar," he said with a twisted mouth, when they had settled him on his bed.

The Saint understood. Ripwell had been running just behind him and a little to one side when the first shot that he saw was fired. Simon realised now that he had heard him gasp when the bullet struck, but in the excitement of the moment he had not recognised the sound.

"Where's the nearest doctor?" asked Teal, turning to Irelock.

It was only then, when they were all gathered in the same room, that Simon realised that they were still one short of their number.

"Where's Ke—"

He started the question without thinking, and could have bitten his tongue the next moment; but he broke off too late. Ripwell struggled up on his elbow and stared from face to face, finishing the name for him in his clear commanding voice.

"Kenneth! Where's Kenneth?"

There was an answer in Irelock's pale strained features, at least enough answer for the Saint to read, even before the secretary began to stammer: "He's — he's gone."

"Gone to see if he can catch Inspector Oldwood on his way here, hasn't he?" Simon caught him up in an instant, with cold blue eyes cutting off the truth with a flash of steel. "We'd better go and grab this doctor, and we may meet them."

He dragged Irelock out of the room and ran him down the stairs. In the hall he faced him, taking out a cigarette and straightening it between steady brown fingers.

"What has happened to Kenneth?" he asked.

"They got him." Irelock was trembling slightly, and his grown-up Kewpie face looked older and tensely hard. "We opened the front door, and somebody fired at us. Got me in the arm — only a graze." He pulled up his sleeve to show a raw straight furrow scored at an angle across his wrist. "I ran out and got hit in the stomach — not with a bullet that time, but it almost laid me out. I heard Ken yell for help, and then 1 heard people running away. I ran after them, and then I caught you. You remember. But they must have got Ken."

Simon flicked his thumb over his lighter, and drew his cigarette red in the flame.

"I only heard one shot before they started potting at me. Have you got a torch?"

They went out and searched the garden with an electric flashlight which Irelock produced from the kitchen. Inspector Oldwood arrived and challenged them while they were doing it, but relaxed when he recognised Ripwell's secretary. He had come from the opposite direction to that which the escaping car had taken, and he had seen no one on the road near the cottage. Certainly he had not seen Nulland.

One or two startled villagers and a handful of young people from adjacent bungalows, attracted by the noise and the shooting, were revealed at the gate in the fringe of the torchlight; and Oldwood pressed them into the search while Irelock went back into the house to telephone for a doctor. There was not a great deal of ground to cover, and two of the holiday bungalow party had torches. In twenty minutes the last of the searches had drifted back to the front drive.

"Perhaps he went for help," said Oldwood, who had not had time to learn more than the vaguest rudiments of the story.

"I don't think so," said the Saint.

He noticed something else, in the reflected glow of the hovering ovals of torchlight, and swept his own light over the drive again. The Hirondel showed up its gleaming lines of burnished metal, exactly where he had left it when he first drove in; but it was the only car there. Of Kenneth Nulland's noisy little roadster there was no trace but the tyre tracks in the gravel.

Simon whistled softly.

"In his own car, too, by God! That's hot stuff — or is it?"

He saw something else, which had been overlooked in the first search — a small dark shadow on the ground close to the place where Nulland's car had stood — and went over to it. It was a red silk handkerchief, and when he picked it up he felt that it was wet and sticky.

"We'd better see how badly Ripwell's hurt," he said.

The doctor had arrived while the search was going on, stopping his car outside the gates, but he was still busy upstairs when Teal came down and joined them.

"He ought to pull through," was Teal's unofficial report. "He's stopped a nasty packet, but the doctor says his constitution is as sound as a bell. What's this about Nulland?"

"What's this about anyhow?" asked Oldwood more comprehensively.

He was a red-faced grizzled man who looked more like a rather hard-bitten farmer than anything else, with an air of quiet self-contained confidence which was not to be flustered even by such sensational events as he had walked into. When his knowledge had been brought up to date he was still quiet and deliberate, stuffing his pipe with square unhurried fingers.

"I haven't anything for you." he said at the end. "I haven't been able to trace any suspicious characters hanging around here yet, but I'm still making inquiries."

"I wonder whether Nulland was kidnapped, or if he ran away," said Teal stolidly.

"The evidence doesn't show that he ran away," said the Saint.

He produced the silk handkerchief which he had picked up in the drive. There was an embroidered "K" in one corner, and the wet stickiness on it was blood.

Teal studied the relic and passed it over to the local man, who put it away in an envelope.

"What are the roads like around here, Oldwood? We can try to stop that car."

"They can't have gone Chertsey way," said Oldwood, striking a match. "Because that's the way I came from. They may have gone almost anywhere else. There's a road to Staines, another to Sunbury, and another to Walton — and half a dozen different routes they could take from any of those places."

"Added to which," murmured the Saint, "there must be at least fifty other baby sports cars exactly like his wandering about Surrey tonight."

"It'll have to be tried," said Teal doggedly. "Do you know the number, Mr. Irelock?"

The secretary hadn't noticed it. Apparently Nulland changed his cars at an average rate of about once a month, except when one of his frequent accidents compelled an even quicker change, and it was almost beyond anyone's power to keep track of the numbers. The instructions that Teal telephoned out were hardly more than a hopeless routine, and all of them knew it.

He had just finished when the doctor came downstairs to confirm the preliminary bulletin.

"He's fairly comfortable now, but he'll want looking after for the next couple of days — I don't think there's any need to move him to the hospital. I'll send a nurse along tonight if I can get hold of one — otherwise I'll bring her over with me tomorrow morning."

"I suppose you didn't find a bullet," said Teal.

The doctor shook his head.

"It went right through him. From the look of the wound I should say it must have been fired from a fairly large-calibre gun."

"That reminds me," said Oldwood, searching his jacket pockets. "I brought over those cartridges that he asked for. You may as well have them, but I don't know that they're much use now."

"They may be useful," said Irelock. "We'd better keep some sort of guard while all this is going on."

"I'll send a man over as soon as I get back to the station," said Oldwood, and stood up. "You might give me a lift, Doctor, if it isn't taking you out of your way. There's nothing more we can do tonight."

Irelock saw them out, and then went back up the stairs to look in on Ripwell; and the Saint lighted another cigarette and stretched out his legs under the table. There was a train of thought shunting about in the half-intuitive sidings of his mind, backing and puffing tentatively, feeling its way breathlessly over a dark maze of lines with only one dim signal to guide it; but something about the way it was moving sent that weird sixth-sense tingle coursing again over his thoracic vertebrae. Teal trudged about over a minute area of carpet with his jaws oscillating rhythmically, and his sleepy eyes kept returning to the inscrutable immobility of the Saint's brown face.