Leslie Charteris - The Saint vs Scotland Yard

"Now there is just one thing more—"

"There is," agreed Patricia Holm crisply. "Don't move!"

The Scorpion heard, and the glacial concentration of dispassionate unfriendliness in her voice froze him where he sat. He had not heard the noiseless turning of the handle of the door behind him, nor noticed the draught of cooler air that trickled through the car; but he felt the chilly hardness of the circle of steel that pressed into the base of his skull, and for a second he was paralysed. And in that second his target vanished.

"Drop that gun — outside the car. And let me hear it go!"

Again that crisp, commanding voice, as inclemently smooth as an arctic sea, whisked into his eardrums like a thin cold needle. He hesitated for a moment, and then, as the muzzle of the gun behind his neck increased its pressure by one warning ounce, he moved his hand obediently and relaxed his fingers. His automatic rattled on to the runningboard, and almost immediately the figure that he had taken for Long Harry rose into view again, and was framed in the square space of window.

But the voice that acknowledged the receipt of item, Colts, automatic, scorpions, for the use of, one, was not the voice of Long Harry. It was the most cavalier, the most mocking, the most cheerful voice that the Scorpion had ever heard — he noted those qualities about it subconsciously, for he was not in a position to revel in the discovery with any hilariously wholehearted abandon.

"O.K… And how are you, my Scorpion?"

"Who are you?" asked the man in the car.

He still kept his head lowered, and under the brim of his hat his eyes were straining into the gloom for a glimpse of the man who had spoken; but the Saint's face was in shadow. Glancing away to one side, the Scorpion could focus the head of the girl whose gun continued to impress his cervical vertebrae with the sense of its rocklike steadiness; but a dark close-fitting hat covered the upper part of her head, and a scarf that was loosely knotted about her neck had been pulled up to veil her face from the eyes downwards.

The Saint's light laugh answered the question.

"I am the world's worst gunman, and the lady behind you is the next worst, but at this range we can say that we never miss. And that's all you need to worry about just now. The question that really arises is — who are you?"

"That is what you have still to discover," replied the man in the car impassively. "Where is Garrot?"

"Ah! That's what whole synods of experts are still trying to discover. Some would say that he was simply rotting, and others would say that that was simply rot. He might be floating around the glassy sea, clothed in white samite, mystic, wonderful, with his new regulation nightie flying in the breeze behind; or he might be attending to the central heating plant in the basement. I was never much of a theologian myself—"

"Is he dead?"

"Very," said the Saint cheerfully. "I organised the decease myself."

"You killed him?"

"Oh, no! Nothing like that about me. I merely arranged for him to die. If you survive to read your morning paper tomorrow, you may be informed that the body of an unknown man has been fished out of the Thames. That will be Long Harry. Now come out and take your curtain, sweetheart!"

The Saint stepped back and twitched open the door, pocketing the Scorpion's gun as he did so.

And at the same moment he had a queer feeling of futility. He knew that that was not the moment when he was destined to lay the Scorpion by the heels.

Once or twice before, in a life which had only lasted as long as it had by reason of a vigilance that never blinked for one split second, and a forethought that was accustomed to skid along half a dozen moves ahead of the opposition performers in every game with the agility of a startled streak of lightning zipping through space on ball bearings with the wind behind it, he had experienced the same sensation — of feeling as if an intangible shutter had guillotined down in front of one vitally receptive lens in his alertness. Something was going to happen — his trained intuition told him that beyond all possibility of argument, and an admixture of plain horse-sense told him what would be the general trend of that forthcoming event, equally beyond all possibility of argument — but exactly what shape that event would take was more than any faculty of his could divine.

A tingling stillness settled upon the scene, and in the stillness some fact that he should have been reckoning with seemed to hammer frantically upon that closed window in his mind. He knew that that was so, but his brain produced no other response. Just for that fractional instant of time a cog slipped one pinion, and the faultless machine was at fault. The blind spot that roams around somewhere in every human cerebral system suddenly broke its moorings, and drifted down over the one minute area of co-ordinating apparatus of which Simon Templar had most need; and no effort of his could dislodge it.

"Step out, Cuthbert," snapped the Saint, with a slight rasp in his voice.

In the darkness inside the car, a slight blur of white caught and interested Simon's eye. It lay on the seat beside the driver. With that premonition of failure dancing about in his subconscious and making faces at his helpless stupidity, the Saint grabbed at the straw. He got it away — a piece of paper — and the Scorpion, seeing it go, snatched wildly but not soon enough.

Simon stuffed the paper into his coat pocket, and with his other hand he took the Scorpion by the neck.

"Step!" repeated the Saint crisply.

And then his forebodings were fulfilled — simply and straightforwardly, as he had known they would be.

The Scorpion had never stopped the engine of his car — that was the infinitesimal yet sufficient fact that had been struggling ineffectively to register itself upon the Saint's brain. The sound was scarcely anything at all, even to the Saint's hypersensitive ears — scarcely more than a rhythmic pulsing disturbance of the stillness of the night. Yet all at once — too late — it seemed to rise and racket in his mind like the thunder of a hundred dynamos; and it was then that he saw his mistake.

But that was after the Scorpion had let in the clutch.

In the blackness, his left hand must have been stealthily engaging the gears; and then, as a pair of swiftly growing lights pin-pointed in his driving-mirror, he unleashed the car with a bang.

The Saint, with one foot in the road and the other on the running-board, was flung off his balance. As he stumbled, the jamb of the door crashed agonisingly into the elbow of the arm that reached out to the driver's collar, and something like a thousand red-hot needles prickled right down his forearm to the tip of his little finger and numbed every muscle through which it passed.

As he dropped back into the road, he heard the crack of Patricia's gun.

The side of the car slid past him, gathering speed, and he whipped out the Scorpion's own automatic. Quite casually, he plugged the off-side back tyre; and then a glare of light came into the tail of his eye, and he stepped quickly across to Patricia.

"Walk on," he said quietly.

They fell into step and sauntered slowly on, and the headlights of the car behind threw their shadows thirty yards ahead.

"That jerk," said Patricia ruefully, "my shot missed him by a yard. I'm sorry."

Simon nodded.

"I know. It was my fault. I should have switched his engine off."

The other car flashed past them, and Simon cursed it fluently.

"The real joy of having the country full of automobiles," he said, "is that it makes gunning so easy. You can shoot anyone up anywhere, and everyone except the victim will think it was only a backfire. But it's when people can see the gun that the deception kind of disintegrates." He gazed gloomily after the dwindling tail light of the unwelcome interruption. "If only that four-wheeled gas-crocodile had burst a blood-vessel two miles back, we mightn't have been on our way home yet."