The Saint Closes the Case (24 page)

Then wondering went by the board; for he
heard, through
the silence, faintly, very far off, but unmistakable, the
rising
and falling drone of a powerful car. And he had barely attuned
his hearing
to that sound when another sound slashed through
it like a sabrecut—the
scream of a girl in terror.

He knew it wasn’t the real thing. Hadn’t he
directed it him
self? Didn’t he know that Patricia Holm wasn’t the kind
that screamed? Of course… . But that made no difference to the
effect
that the sound had upon him. It struck deep-rooted
chords of fierce
protectiveness, violently reminding him that
the cause for the
scream might still be there, even if Pat would
never have released it
without his prompting. It froze something in him as a drench of icy water
might have done; and,
again as a drench of icy water might have
done, it braced and
stung and savaged something else into a fury of reaction,
some
thing primitive and homicidal and ruthless, something out
of an age
that had nothing to do with such clothes as he wore,
or such weapons as he
carried, or such a fortress as lay before
, his storming.

The Saint went mad.

There was neither sanity nor laughter in the
way he covered
the stretch of lawn that separated him from the house and
the
lighted ground-floor window which he had marked down as
his
objective directly he had cleared the gate. He was even unable to feel
astonished that no shots spat at him out of the
darkness, or to feel
that the silence might forebode a trap. For
Simon Templar had
seen red.

Eight men, Patricia’s note had told him, were
waiting to
oppose his entrance… . Well, let ‘em all come. The
more
the bloodier… .

He who had always been the laughing cavalier,
the man
who would always exchange a joke as he exchanged a blow,
who never
fought but he smiled, nor greeted peril without
a song in his heart,
was certainly not laughing at all.

He went through that window as surely no man
ever went
through a window before, except in a film studio. He went
through it
in one flying leap, with his right shoulder braced
to smash through the
flimsy obstacle of the glass, and his
left arm raised to shield his face
from the splinters.

That mad rush took him into the room without
a pause, to land on the floor inside with a jolt, stumbling for an instant,
which gave the six men who were playing cards around the
table time
to scramble to their feet.

Six of them—meaning that the other two were
probably
dealing with the scream. It ought to have been possible
to dis
tract more of their attention than that; but since it had so fallen out.
…

And where, anyway, were the defences that he
should have
to break through? As far as that window, he had an easy
course
to cover. And these men had none of the air of men prepared
to be
attacked.

These thoughts flashed through the Saint’s
mind in the split
second it took him to recover his balance; and then he was
concerned with further questions.

The gun was ready in his hand; and two who
were swift to
draw against him were not swift enough, and died in their
tracks before the captured automatic jammed and gave the
other four
their chance.

Never before had the Saint attacked with such
a fire of mur
derous hatred; for the cry from the upper room had not
been repeated, and that could only mean that it had been forcibly
stifled—somehow.
And the thought of Patricia fighting her
fight alone upstairs,
as she would have to go on fighting alone
unless Simon Templar
won his own fight against all the odds.
… The first hint
of a smile came to his lips when the first
man fell; and when the
gun froze useless in his hand he looked
at it and heard
someone laugh, and recognised the voice as his
own.

Then Anna flicked from her sheath and
whistled across half the room like a streak of living light, to bite deep of
the third man’s throat.

If the Saint had thought, perhaps he would
never have let
Anna go, since she could only have been thrown once
against
the many times she could have stabbed. But he had not thought.
He had
only one idea, clear and bright above the swirl of red,
murderous
mist that rimmed his vision, and that was to work the most deadly havoc he
could in the shortest possible space
of time.

And the first man he met with his bare hands
was cata
pulted back against the wall by a straight left that
packed all
the fiendish power of a sledge-hammer gone mad, a blow
that
shattered teeth in their sockets and smithereened a jawbone
as if it
had been made of glass.

And then the Saint laughed again—but this time
he knew that he did it The first outlet of his blind fury, the first taste
of blood,
that first primevally ferocious satisfaction in the bat
tering contact of
flesh- and bone, - had cleared his eyes and
steadied down his
nerves to their old fighting coolness.

“Come again, my beautifuls,” he
drawled breathlessly, and there was something more Saintly in the laugh in his
voice, but
his eyes were still as cold and bleak as two chips of blue
ice.
… “Come again!”

The remaining two came at him together.

Simon Templar would not have cared if they
had been
twenty-two. He was warmed up now, and through the glacial
implacability
of his purpose was creeping back some of the
heroic mirth and
magnificence that rarely forsook him for
long.

“Come again!”

They came abreast; but Simon, with one
lightning spring
sideways, made the formation tandem. The man who was left
nearest
swung round and lashed out a mule-kick of a punch
at the Saint’s mocking
smile; but the Saint swerved a matter
of a mere three inches, and the blow
whipped harmlessly past
his ear. Then, with another low laugh of
triumph, Simon
pivoted on his toes, his whole body seeming to uncoil in
one
smooth spasm of effort, and flashed in an uppercut that
snapped the
man’s head back as if it had been struck by a pneumatic riveter, and dropped
him like a poleaxed steer.

Then the Saint turned to meet the second man’s
attack; and
at the same moment the door burst open and flopped the
odds
back again from evens to two to one against.

In theory. But actually this new arrival was
fresh life to the Saint. For this man must have been one of those who had been
busy
suppressing the scream, who had laid his hands on
Patricia… . And
against him and his fellow the Saint had a personal feud… .

As Simon saw him come, the chips of blue ice
under Simon’s
straight-lined brows glinted with an unholy light.

“Where have you been all my life, sonny
boy?” breathed the
Saint’s caressing undertone. “Why
haven’t you come down
before—so that I could knock your miscarriage
of a face
through the back of your monstrosity of a neck?”

He wove in towards the two in a slight
crouch, on his
toes, his fists stirring gently. And from the limit of
his reach
he snaked in a long, swerving left that only a champion
could
have guarded; and it split the man’s nose neatly, for the Saint was only
aiding to hurt—sufficiently—before he finished off
the job.

And he should have won the fight on his head,
according to plan, from that point onwards. Lithe, strong as a horse,
swift as a
rapier, schooled in the toughest schools of the fight
ing game ever since
the day when he first learned to put up
his hands, and always
in perfect training, the Saint would
never have hesitated to take on any
two ordinary men. And in
the mood in which they found him that night
he was super
man.

But he had forgotten his wound.

The nearest man was swinging a wild right at
him—the
kind of blow for which any trained, cool-headed boxer has a
supreme
contempt. And contemptuously, almost lazily, and certainly without thinking at
all about a guard which approxi
mated to a habit, Simon put up his shoulder.

The impact should have been nothing to a
bunched pad of
healthy muscle; but the Saint had forgotten. And it shot
a tear
ing twinge of agony through him which seemed to find out
every
nerve in his system.

Suddenly he felt very sick; and for a second
he could see
nothing through the haze which whirled over his eyes.

In that second’s blindness he took a
high-explosive left
cross to the side of the jaw from the man with the split
nose.

Simon reeled, crumpling, against the wall.

For some reason, perhaps because they could
not both con
veniently reach him at once, the two men held back for a
moment instead
of charging in at once to finish him off. And
for that moment’s
grace the Saint sagged where he leaned,
titanically scourging
numbed and tortured muscles to obey his
will, wrestling with
a brain that seemed to have gone to sleep.

And through the singing of a thousand
thrumming dyna
mos in his head, he heard again the song of the Hirondel:
“Patricia! … Patricia!
…”

Suddenly he realised how much he had been
exhausted by
loss of blood. The first excitement, the first thrill and
rap
ture of the fight, had masked his own weakness from him; but
now he felt
it all at once, in the dreadful slowness of his re
covery from a punch on
the jaw. And the blow he had taken
on the shoulder had re-opened his
wound. He could feel the
blood coursing down his back in a warm stream.
Only his will
seemed left to him, bright and clear and aloof in the
paralysing
darkness, a thing with the terrible power of a cornered
giant,
fighting as it had never fought before.

And then, through the mists that doped his
senses, he heard what all the time he had dreaded to hear—the sound of a car s
lowing up
outside.

Marius.

Through the Saint’s mind flashed again, like
a long, shining
spear, the brave, reckless, vain-glorious words that he
had
spoken, oh, infinite ages ago: “Let ‘em all come… .”

And perhaps that recollection, perhaps
anything else, p
erhaps the indomitable struggle of his fighting will,
snapped th
e slender fetters of weary dizziness that bound him, so
that
he felt a
little life stealing back into his limbs.

As the two men stepped in to end it, the Saint
held up one h
and in a gesture that could not be denied.

“Your master is here,” he said.
“Perhaps you’d better wait
till he’s seen me.”

They stopped, listening, for their hearing
would have had to be keen indeed to match the Saint’s; and for Simon that
extra
second’s breadier was the difference between life and
death.

He gathered himself, with a silent prayer,
for the mad
gamble. Then he launched himself off the wall like a
stone
from a sling, and in one desperate rush he had passed between
them.

They awoke too late; and he was at the door.

On the stairs he doubled his lead.

At the top of the stairs a corridor faced him,
with doors on
either side; but he would have had no excuse for
hesitation, for, as he set foot in the corridor, the eighth man looked out
of a door
halfway along it.

The eighth man, seeing the Saint, tried to
close the door
again
in his face; but he was too slow, or the Saint was too fast.
The Saint fell on the door like a tiger, and it
was the man in
side who had it slammed
in his face—literally slammed in his face, so that he was flung back across the
room as helplessly as
a scrap of thistledown might have been flung
before a cyclone.
And the Saint followed him
in and turned the key in the lock.