Leslie Charteris - The Saint Closes the Case

He gave a graphic description of the encounter.

"But what's the use?" asked the Saint. "There won't be an­other war for hundreds of years."

"You think so?"

"I'm told so."

Malone's eyebrows lifted in that tolerantly supercilious way in which a journalist's eyebrows will sometimes lift when an ignorant outsider ventures an opinion on world affairs.

"If you live for another six months," he said, "I shall ex­pect to see you in uniform. Or will you conscientiously ob­ject?"

Simon tapped a cigarette deliberately on his thumbnail.

"You mean that?"

"I'm desperately serious. We're nearer to these things than the rest of the public, and we see them coming first. In an­other few months the rest of England will see it coming. A lot of funny things have been happening lately."

Simon waited, suddenly keyed up to interest; and Barney Malone sucked thoughtfully at his pipe, and presently went on:

"In the last month, three foreigners have been arrested, tried, and imprisoned for offences against the Official Secrets Act. In other words, espionage. During the same period, four Englishmen have been similarly dealt with in different parts of Europe. The foreign governments concerned have dis­owned the men we've pinched; but since a government always disowns its spies as soon as they get into trouble, on principle, no one ever believes it. Similarly, we have disclaimed the four Englishmen, and, naturally, nobody believes us, either—and yet I happen to know that it's true. If you appreciate really subtle jokes, you might think that one over, and laugh next time I see you."

The Saint went home in a thoughtful mood.

He had a genius that was all his own—an imaginative gen­ius that would take a number of ordinary facts, all of which seemed to be totally unconnected, and none of which, to the eye of anyone but himself, would have seemed very remark­able, and read them into a sign-post pointing to a mystery. Adventure came to him not so much because he sought it as because he brazenly expected it. He believed that life was full of adventure, and he went forward in the full blaze and surge of that belief. It has been said of a man very much like Simon Templar that he was "a man born with the sound of trumpets in his ears"; that saying might almost equally well have been said of the Saint, for he also, like Michael Paladin, had heard the sound of the trumpet, and had moved ever afterwards in the echoes of the sound of the trumpet, in such a mighty clamour of romance that at least one of his friends had been moved to call him the last hero, in desperately earnest jest.

"From battle, murder, and sudden death, Good Lord, de­liver us!' " he quoted once. "How can any live man ask for that? Why, they're meat and drink—they're the things that make life worth living! Into battle, murder, and sudden death, Good Lord, deliver me up to the neck! That's what I say. . . ."

Thus spoke the Saint, that man of superb recklessness and strange heroisms and impossible ideals; and went on to show, as few others of his age have shown, that a man inspired can swashbuckle as well with cloak and stick as any cavalier of history with cloak and sword, that there can be as much chiv­alry in the setting of a modern laugh as there can ever have been in the setting of a medieval lance, that a true valour and venture finds its way to fulfilment, not so much through the kind of world into which it happens to be born, as through the heart with which it lives.

But even he could never have guessed into what a strange story this genius and this faith of his were to bring him.

On what he had chanced to read, and what Barney Malone had told him, the Saint built in his mind a tower of possibilities whose magnitude, when it was completed, awed even himself. And then, because he had the priceless gift of taking the products of his vivid imagination at their practical worth, he filed the fancy away in his mind as an interesting curiosity, and thought no more about it.

Too much sanity is sometimes dangerous.

Simon Templar was self-conscious about his imagination. It was the one kind of self-consciousness he had, and certainly he kept it a secret which no one would have suspected. Those who knew him said that he was reckless to the point of vain bravado; but they were never more mistaken. If he had chosen to argue the point, he would have said that his style was, if anything, cramped by too much caution.

But in this case caution was swept away, and imagination triumphantly vindicated, by the second coincidence.

This came three days later, when the Saint awoke one morn­ing to find that the showery weather which had hung over England for a week had given place to cloudless blue skies and brilliant sunshine. He hung out of his bedroom window and sniffed the air suspiciously, but he could smell no rain. Forth­with he decided that the business of annoying criminals could be pardonably neglected while he took out his car and relaxed in the country.

"Darling Pat," said the Saint, "it'd be a crime to waste a day like this!"

"Darling Simon," wailed Patricia Holm, "you know we'd promised to have dinner with the Hannassays."

"Very darling Pat," said the Saint, "won't they be disap­pointed to hear that we've both been suddenly taken ill after last night's binge?"

So they went, and the Saint enjoyed his holiday with the comfortable conviction that he had earned it.

They eventually dined at Cobham, and afterwards sat for a long time over cigarettes and coffee and matters of intimate moment which have no place here. It was eleven o'clock when the Saint set the long nose of his Furillac on the homeward road.

Patricia was happily tired; but the Saint drove very well with one hand.

It was when they were still rather more than a mile from Esher that the Saint saw the light, and thoughtfully braked the car to a standstill.

Simon Templar was cursed, or blessed, with an insatiable inquisitiveness. If ever he saw anything that trespassed by half an inch over the boundaries of the purely normal and commonplace, he was immediately fired with the desire to find out the reason for such erratic behaviour. And it must be admit­ted that the light had been no ordinary light.

The average man would undoubtedly have driven on some­what puzzledly, would have been haunted for a few days by a vague and irritating perplexity, and would eventually have forgotten the incident altogether. Simon Templar has since considered, in all sober earnestness, what might have been the consequences of his being an average man at that moment, and has stopped appalled at the vista of horrors opened up by the thought.

But Simon Templar was not an average man, and the gift of minding his own business had been left out of his make-up. He slipped into reverse and sent the car gently back a matter of thirty yards to the end of a lane which opened off the main road.

A little way down this lane, between the trees, the silhouette of a gabled house loomed blackly against the star-powdered sky, and it was in an upper window of this house that the Saint had seen the light as he passed. Now he skilfully lighted a ciga­rette with one hand, and stared down the lane. The light was still there. The Saint contemplated it in silence, immobile as a watching Indian, till a fair, sleepy head roused on his shoul­der.

"What is it?" asked Patricia.

"That's what I'd like to know," answered the Saint, and pointed with the glowing end of his cigarette.

The blinds were drawn over that upper window, but the light could be clearly seen behind them—a light of astound­ing brilliance, a blindingly white light that came and went in regular, rhythmic flashes like intermittent flickers of lightning.

The night was as still as a dream, and at that moment there was no other traffic on that stretch of road. The Saint reached forward and switched off the engine of the Furillac. Then he listened—and the Saint had ears of abnormal sensitiveness— in a quiet so unbroken that he could hear the rustle of the girl's sleeve as she moved her arm.