"Do we get sent to Canada too?"
"No, not to Canada. No. I think we shall just leave you here. This place is being burnt down tonight," Lasser explained calmly. "You may have noticed the smell of paraffin. Yes. It's rather antiquated, and I want to rebuild it — something modern, you know. It's quite well insured, so I thought it would be a good idea to have a fire. Yes, we'll just have to leave you here with a lighted candle on the floor and kill two birds with one stone if you known what I mean."
Simon had his knife in his hand, and he was working the point of it under the tapes on his wrists, but for a moment he almost stopped.
"You mean you'd leave us here to be burnt alive?" he said slowly.
"I'm afraid we'd have to. The place is supposed to be unoccupied, you know, and I sent the caretaker away this morning. It'd look as if you were tramps who'd broken in to sleep for the night, and you might have set fire to the house yourselves by accident. So it wouldn't look right if they found bullets in you or anything like that."
Lasser seemed to ponder over his reasoning again and shook his head with refreshed conviction.
"No, that would never do," he said, and then his sunny smile dawned again. "But don't let's meet our troubles halfway. After all, I've heard that in a real fire people are often suffocated by the smoke before they get burnt at all. But we could hurt you a lot first if you didn't tell us what happened to those vans."
The Saint's hands were free — behind his back he could move his wrists apart. But even so, he felt as if his stomach was emptied with a kind of sick revulsion. There was no doubt in his mind that Lasser would have done everything he spoke of with such a genial matter-of-factness — would still do it if the Saint failed in the only gamble he had left. That rich, unchangeably beaming smile was a better guarantee of it even than Jopley's lowering vindictiveness. And now the Saint seemed to read through it for the first time into something that explained it, something monstrous and gloating, something that smoothed Lasser's bald glistening forehead into a horrible vacantness of bland anticipation…
"Where are those vans, Templar?" he asked in a silky whisper.
Simon met his gaze with eyes of frosted sapphire.