“Did something go wrong?” she asked.
“Nothing that wasn’t taken care of.”
The car gathered speed into the blaze of its own headlights. Simon felt for a cigarette and lighted it from the dashboard gadget.
“Did you get everything?” she asked.
“I am the miracle man who never fails, Judith,” he said reproachfully. “Hadn’t I explained that?”
“But that noise—”
“There seems to have been some sort of alarm that goes off when the safe is opened, which you didn’t know about. Not that it mattered a lot. The ungodly were fatally slow in assembling, and if you’d seen their waist measurements you wouldn’t have been surprised.”
She caught his arm excitedly.
“Oh, I can’t quite believe it!..Everything’s all right now. And I’ve actually been on a raid with the Saint himself! Do you mind if I give way a bit?”
She reached across him to the button in the middle of the steering wheel. The horn blared a rhythmic peal of triumph and defiance into the night: “ Taaa ta-ta, taaa ta-ta, taaa ta-ta! ” Like a jubilant trumpet. Simon smiled. Nothing could have fitted better into the essential rightness of everything that had happened that evening. It was true that there had been a telephone in the library, and if there was an extension upstairs there might be gendarmes already watching the road, but they would be an interesting complication that could be dealt with in its proper turn.