Leslie Charteris - The Saint And The Fiction Makers

Sirens were wailing in the distance, growing louder. The police were on the road to Hermetico — or maybe they were reinforcements for police who had already arrived. Whatever the situation, Simon had no intention of saving his own skin by running — which he easily could have done — and leaving Amity to be slowly broiled by Galaxy Rose. He grasped the tommy gun in firing position and ran back through the wood towards the van.

There were several things in his favour. The Hermetico guards’ primary responsibility was the defence of the vault. By coming out of the building and giving chase to intruders they might play into the hands of a clever enemy.

The sounds of gunfire continuing to come from the wood had probably given them additional reason for caution, otherwise they could easily have been swarming around Warlock’s police car before this. The Saint could assume that they were still inside Hermetico, waiting for the police to search the surrounding area and give an all clear.

Simon had decided that his best weapon under the circumstances was sheer audacity. He did not hesitate as he approached the nose of the van, but bore down on it at a dead run. Smoke still hung in the air, but he could see clearly. So could the guards, no doubt, but he hoped to take them completely by surprise. There was nobody near the van, though flashlights were approaching around the side of Hermetico’s dome. Someone called out.

“Look! Over there!”

The Saint was already at the door of the van. He flung it open and leaped into the driver’s seat as the shouting increased.

“There’s one of them!”

“Stop him! Shoot if he won’t stop!”

Simon’s fingers gratefully closed on the ignition key. The engine chugged unenthusiastically and failed to start. He tried again. The three or four seconds that passed seemed as large and heavy as the columns of Stonehenge. Simon braced the tommy gun against the seat and aimed it into the air through the window.

The men near the building were running towards him, shouting.

“Stop! Come out of there or we’ll shoot!”

With one hand he fired his gun harmlessly at the sky as the van’s engine at last rumbled to life. The men who had been racing towards him reversed direction and raced back for cover, and there was answering fire from up in the dome. But by then the van had jumped forward and was disappearing into the trees.

Simon kept his head low, and within seconds he was out of danger of being hit by the fire from behind. A large number of very solid trees were acting as his rearguard. He drove around Warlock’s police car. Shortly he bounced out into the open field and headed in the direction of the hole in the fence. It was just three o’clock when he finally reached it. He might still get to Amity in time.

He swung out on to the paved road and started back towards Warlock’s house by the same route the group had followed on the way to Hermetico. There were much faster roads in the vicinity, but they would be thick with police cars by now, and even on a perfectly normal night the sight of a black van riddled with bullet holes would have been enough to arouse a law officer’s interest and cause fatal delays.

So Simon had to go through the agonizing process of travelling winding country lanes at twenty miles an hour when he urgently wanted and needed to be travelling at seventy. Then the process became even more agonizing. About two miles from Hermetico he caught up with a creeping Fiat with a large ‘L’ on its rear bumper. The road was too narrow to allow Simon’s van to pass even that minute vehicle, whose driver was apparently not only learner, as his ‘L’ testified, but also an arthritic octogenarian trying very hard to disguise the fact that he was purblind drunk.

Simon tried leaning on his horn, which only stirred the aged pilot of the Fiat to greater excesses of caution. By now the car and the van were moving a scant ten miles an hour... and they continued at that pace for five minutes. At last the Saint saw an opening and pushed his way past to the sound of indignant beeps from the Fiat. He then had to steer the van through a series of bends so sharp that having passed the other car proved to have done him almost no good at all.

It was quarter past three and he was not halfway to Warlock’s estate. He came at last on to a straight stretch, gathered speed, and swept around a broad curve, only to come face to face with two hundred sheep. The sheep were on a nocturnal stroll of obscure motivation which required that they cross the road en masse in order to get from one identical field to another. Simon tried to push his way through them without killing any, and soon was awash in a sea of angry baas. It was like riding a wave of sheep. For a while it seemed there were sheep in every direction as far as the eye could see. To run over them would soon have either capsized the van or brought it to a halt. There was nothing to do but press on with grimly slow persistence.

When Simon finally broke out of the mass of sheep and got up to speed again it was twenty-five minutes after three. There were no more delays, but even so he was doomed to be late. The hands of his watch indicated three-thirty when he was still a mile from Warlock’s house. He swerved around the last bend in the road and tore through the newly repaired gate of Warlock’s grounds without slowing down. Ignoring the driveway, he steered a direct path across the lawn to the front door and all but drove up the steps. A short blast from the tommy gun opened the locked door. He kicked it open and ran across the big reception room to the planning room, and then down the stairs to the cellar. To his horror, he could smell something like electricity in the air, then a high-pitched whine and hiss. He burst into the laboratory with his gun ready.

Amity Little turned from the control panel by the wall, where she had been standing adjusting some knobs.

“Oh, Simon!” she beamed, as if she were welcoming him to a cocktail party. “I’m so glad to see you!”

The whine from the electronic equipment dwindled to silence. The Saint’s powers of speech dwindled into the same state. He could only stare. Amity came towards him.

“And I was so glad to hear you’d messed things up for Warlock. I knew you would, of course.” She looked at him, pretending to be puzzled. “Aren’t you glad to see me?”

“Yes,” Simon managed. He pointed numbly to some ash on the metal slab to which Amity had been clamped when he left. “Is that...”

Amity frowned, then burst into laughter.

“Galaxy? Oh, no. I just used her sweater to try the thing out on. There she is.”

Simon looked. Galaxy Rose, looking as voluptuous as ever in spite of mussed hair, a gag in her mouth, and ropes binding her ankles and wrists, was sitting in the corner.

She said “Mump, mump,” and glared.

“I’ve been wanting to shut her up ever since we got here,” Amity said. “And I’ve been wanting to do this, too — right in front of her.” She had come up to Simon now, and she put her arms around his neck. “Well?” she murmured. “Aren’t you going to thank me for writing you into such lovely adventures?”

He kissed her somewhat hastily.

“And for all the loot we’re going to collect from Warlock’s safe before the police get here?” she persisted.

He kissed her again, thinking that to thank her properly just for being herself would take considerably more than that.

“But please,” said the Saint, with almost frantic restraint, “how did you get off that table?”

Her dazzlingly ingenuous smile would have been absolute justification for homicide.

“Oh, that,” she said carelessly. “Well, to find that out, I’m afraid you’ll just have to buy my next book.”