Simon opened his wallet and took out a folded wad of bank notes. Jopley took them in his thick fingers and glanced through them. His heavy, sulky eyes turned up again to the Saint's face.
"I won't do nothink else, mind. Yer can rush me along o' the other bloke, an' if yer can git inside that's orl right. But I didn't 'ave nothink ter do wiv it, see?"
"We'll take care of that," said the Saint confidently. "All we want is to know when you're going back, so that we can be ready. And it had better be soon because the time's getting on. I want to be in that house before the machine-gun squad gets back from Lulworth."
"I can start back naow," said the other grudgingly. "If you drive there in yer car yer'll 'ave ten minutes before I git there on me bike."
The Saint nodded.
"Okay," he said peacefully. "Then let's go!"
The steady drone of the Hirondel sank through his mind into silence as the long shining car swept up the winding road towards the crest of the downs. Instead of it, as if the words were being spoken again beside his ears, he heard Brenda Marlow's clear unfaltering voice saying, "You wouldn't have expected us to keep him after we knew he was selling us out to you, would you?" Lasser, Pargo, what had been done to Pargo, and what might be done at Gad Cliff House that night — those other thoughts were a vague jumble that was almost blotted out by the clearness of the words which he was hearing over again in memory. And he could feel again the chill of downright horror that had struck him like an icy wind when he heard them first.
Simon Templar had travelled too far in the iron highways of outlawry to be afflicted with empty sentimentality, and he had been flippant enough about death in his time — even about such ugly death as Pargo's. But about such an utter unrelenting callousness, coming without the flicker of an eyelash from a face like the one he had seen when it was being spoken, there was a quality of epic inhumanity to which even the Saint could not adjust himself. It made her look like something beside which a blend of Messalina and Lucrezia Borgia would have seemed like a playful schoolgirl — and yet he could recall just as clearly the edged contempt in her voice, after she had overheard the lurid bluff he had encouraged Hoppy to put over on Jopley, when she said "We'll leave things like that to gentlemen like Mr Templar." The contradiction fretted at the smooth surface of his reasoning with maddening persistence, and yet the one and only apparent way of reconciling it raised another question which it was too late now to track down to its possible conclusions…
A dull kind of tightness settled over the Saint's nerves as he brought the Hirondel to a stop just beyond the opening of the lane that led to the entrance of Gad Cliff House. He switched off the engine and climbed out without any visible sign of it, but his right hand felt instinctively for the hilt of the sharp throwing knife strapped to his left forearm under the sleeve and found it with an odd sense of comfort. At other times when he had made mistakes that hidden and unlooked-for weapon had brought rescue out of defeat, and the touch of it reassured him. He turned to meet the others without a change in his blithe serenity.
"You know what you have to do, boys and girls," he said. "Follow me, and let's make it snappy."