"Or even the first string," said Peter Quentin thoughtfully.
The Saint put his cigarette to his mouth and drew it to a bright spark of light. For a few moments he was silent. It was a thought that had already occurred to him, long before; but he had been content to let the answer produce itself in its own good time. Even stranger things than that had happened in the cockeyed world of which Simon Templar had made himself the uncrowned king, and when they did occur they were usually the forerunners of even more trouble than he had set out to ask for, which was plenty. But complications like that had to take care of themselves.
"Who knows?" said the Saint vaguely. "It might just as well have been the secretary of the Women's Temperance League, who isn't nearly so good looking. On your way, Peter—"
"Hey!" bawled Mr Uniatz.
His voice, which could never at any time have rivalled the musical accents of a radio announcer, blared into the middle of the Saint's words with a bloodcurdling intensity of feeling that made even Simon Templar's iron nerves wince. For a moment the Saint was paralyzed, while he searched for some sign of the stimulus that was capable of drawing such a response from Mr Uniatz's phlegmatic throat.
And then he became aware that Hoppy was staring straight ahead with a frozen rigidity that was not even conscious of the sensation it had caused. A little to the Saint's left the driver of the lorry was looking in the same direction with a glitter of evil satisfaction in his small eyes.
Simon swung round the other way and saw that Peter Quentin also was gazing past him with the same petrified immobility. And as the Saint turned round further he had a feeling of dizzy unreality that made his scalp creep.
As he remembered it he had only taken a couple of steps away from his car when Peter Quentin and Hoppy Uniatz and the driver of the lorry had met him. But as he turned he couldn't see the car at all where it should have been. The road all around him looked empty in the dull gleam of their torches, apart from the black bulk of the van which overshadowed them. It was another second before he saw where his car was. It had swung off onto the heath in a wide arc in order to straighten up; and while he watched it, it bumped back onto the macadam and went skimming away up the road to the northeast with no more than a soft flutter of gas from the exhaust to announce its departure.
III
"One of the things I envy about you," said Peter Quentin with a certain relish, "is that magnetic power which makes you irresistible to women. Even if they've just been knocked unconscious the moment they open their eyes and see what's found them—"