The Saint In Action

by Charteris Leslie

Mr Uniatz coughed, peering at him through the darkness with troubled intensity.

"I dunno, boss," he said anxiously. "I never hoid of dis invisible rye. Is dat what de guy has in de bottles in his—"

"Yes, that's it," said the Saint with magnificent presence of mind. "You go on an invisible jag on it and end up by seeing invisible pink elephants. It saves any amount of trouble. Now get hold of your Betsy and shut up, because there may be invisible ears."

The lane ran between almost vertical grass banks topped by stiff thorn hedges, and it was so narrow that a car driven down it would have had no more than a few inches clearance on either side. The car that came up it from the road must have been driven by someone who knew his margins with the accuracy of long experience, for it swooped out of the night so swiftly and suddenly that the Saint's hearing had scarcely made him aware of its approach when it was almost on top of them, its headlights turning the lane into a trench of blinding light. Simon had an instant of desperate indecision while he reckoned their chance of scaling the steep hedge-topped banks and realized that they could never do it in time; and then he wheeled to face the danger with his hand leaping to his gun, Hoppy's movement was even quicker, but it was still too late. Another light sprang up dazzlingly from behind the gates just ahead of them: they were trapped between the two opposing broadsides of eye-searing brilliance and the two high walls of the lane as if they had been caught in a box, and Simon knew without any possibility of self-deception that they were helplessly at the mercy of the men behind the lights.

"Put your hands up," ordered a new voice from the car, and the Saint acknowledged to himself how completely and beautifully he had been had.

X

"I might have known you'd be a great organizer, brother," murmured the Saint as he led the way obediently into the library of Gad Cliff House with his hands held high in the air. "But you were certainly in form tonight."

The compliment was perfectly sincere. When Simon Templar fell into traps he liked them to be good ones for the sake of his own self-esteem; and the one he had just walked into so docilely struck him as being a highly satisfactory specimen from every point of view.

It was all so neat and simple and psychologically watertight, once you were let into the secret. He had kept his first appointment with Brenda Marlow as anyone would have known he would. He had been duly suspicious of the second appointment at the crossroads in East Lulworth as he was meant to be. He had accepted it merely as a confirmation of those suspicions when Jopley arrived with the warning of the machine-gun party — exactly as he was meant to do. And with the memory of the proposition he had made to Jopley the night before still fresh in his mind, the rest of the machinery had run like clockwork. He had been so completely disarmed that even Jopley's well-simulated reluctance to lead him into the very trap he was meant to be led into was almost a superfluous finishing touch. A good trap was something that the Saint could always appreciate with professional interest; but a trap within a trap was a refinement to remember. He had announced himself as being in the market for bait, and verily he had swallowed everything that was offered him.

Simon admitted the fact and went on from there. They were in the soup, but even if it was good soup it was no place to stay in. He reckoned the odds dispassionately. Their guns had been taken away from them, but his knife had escaped the search. That was the only asset he could find on his own side — that, and whatever his own quickness of thought was worth, which on its recent showing didn't seem to be very much. And yet no one who looked at him would have seen a trace of the grim concentration that was driving his brain on a fierce, defiant search for the inspiration that would turn the tables again.