He put his head down and sprinted those few yards; but someone must have been watching, because a bullet lifted the Tam o’shanter clean off his head and he felt the deadly passing breath of two more. Then he reached the lorry, and thankfully took cover on the side of it away from the shooting.
He knew Ruth was still in that truck with Cawber. Assuming Pelton’s reinforcements did eventually arrive, there was no telling how Cawber would react. He might try to use the girl as a shield or hostage to save his own skin; or he might panic and shoot her. And as there was something the Saint wanted to say to her before anything too final happened to her, the first task he had set himself now was to get her away from Cawber.
His guess was that Cawber would have moved right to the back of the truck when the shooting started, and would be craning his neck, peeping around the far side of the tailboard, to watch the action.
And the Saint’s guess was right, as he saw when he peered cautiously around the truck’s rear end from his own safe side. Cawber was sitting so that he could watch the battle without serious risk of getting his head blown off and still keep tabs on Ruth. He had her gripped by the arm, and the fingers of his other hand were curled loosely around the trigger of a Sten gun.
He glanced aside and, for one fragmentary instant, saw the man he knew as Gascott, and saw the automatic that was levelled at his own heart.
And the Saint shot him dead, without hesitation and without remorse, before he could even move.
“Thank you,” Ruth said calmly.
Simon had no time to compliment her on her sangfroid. He unhitched the tailgate of the truck and helped her down; and then he said:
“I’m making a run for the house. You’d better come along too. You know the layout.”
As an afterthought, he hauled himself up into the back of the truck. Cawber’s fingers had tightened on the Sten gun in his death spasm. Simon prised them open, wrenched the gun from that involuntary grip, and thrust it into the girl’s hands.
“You’d better have this — just in case. I’m sure you know how to use it.”
They took a roundabout route, skirting some trees, and zigzagging their way from one truck’s shelter to the next. The shots were still stuttering out, with the two sides having scattered rapidly behind the available cover.
When they stopped for a short breather, she said: “You’re thinking of Instrood?”
He nodded.
“Not that it’s likely that anyone’ll have harmed him. But that’s not a chance we should take. And I saw Rockham heading this way.”
They saw some fallen men, and once the Saint pointed savagely and gripped the girl’s arm.
“Look at those poor bastards! A couple of Yates’s men — and they look like goners. What the hell does Pelton think he’s playing at?” he blazed.
She shrugged, as if to say that Pelton’s ways were mysterious, and not for mere mortals to question; and the Saint’s mouth set in a still harder line as they ran on towards the gaunt grey structure that was the house.
Further on he pointed again at two more prone figures, this time in the Lowlanders’ uniform.
“The two men I detailed to relieve the guard on Instrood,” he said. “I wonder what happened to the two Paras they were relieving.”
They approached the house cautiously, from the rear. The Saint kicked open the back door while they stood as well clear as they could of anything that might come through it. Nothing did, and they were about to go in, when suddenly she clutched at his arm, dragging him aside a a split second before the crack of a shot.
But the bullet didn’t smash its way into the wall where the Saint had been; and neither did it dissipate its lethal energy by ploughing into the Saint himself. It ended up somewhere in the depths of Lembick’s skull.
They took in the scene, and understood it, in less than the blink of an eye, as a camera occasionally captures a moment of such graphically telling summary as to make comment totally superfluous.
They saw Lembick, with his gun pointing to where Simon Templar had been and with an unsightly hole in his forehead; and they saw Rockham, his own gun levelled in his hand. Rockham had dealt out his own ruthless punishment to Lembick for the mistake that had spiked the mission.
That was all; and after that one single snapshot instant the Saint and Ruth Barnaby dived into the house, and Rockham’s next bullet came spewing out of the gun to splinter harmlessly into the wood of the door as the Saint slammed it behind them.
“My turn to thank you,” he said gently; and after such a narrow escape as that, they would have been less than human if for a few seconds he hadn’t put his arms around her and felt her cling to him with an answering warmth, even while his eyes, and his gun, had to stay unwaveringly on the door.
She detached herself and said: “This is a business assignment, Simon.”
And her eyes were as cool and their expression as detached as ever.
He nodded briskly.
“You know where to look for Instrood?”
“Yes.”
“All right. I’ll stay here in case Rockham decides to come after us. And, Ruth — go carefully.”
“I’m a trained agent, remember?” she said, and moved off with the Sten gun held at the ready.
The Saint hadn’t the smallest doubt that Rockham would come after them. When she had gone he backed away from the door, in the same direction, and stationed himself in the big hallway, near the foot of the stairs, where he could watch for an approach from either front or back.
What he was not expecting was an approach from above.
Rockham must have climbed up a fire escape and gone in by an upstairs window, then crept to the staircase. He was halfway down before Simon whirled at the faint sound. But it was too late — Rockham already had the drop on him, and the hollow snout of Rockham’s gun could be seen from the receiving end to be pointed accurately enough to score on any standing target.
Therefore the only escape would be if, at the instant of explosion, the target was not standing where it had been.
If there had been time to think about it all, the Saint might well have had to conclude that the moment he had cheated so many times in his career of devil-may-care outlawry had come at last to claim him. But then, if he had had time to think, he would have taken too long to act, however hopelessly.
He had time for neither. He had only the eye-searing moment, the microcosmic instant of realisation, as he watched John Rockham’s knuckle whitening on the trigger.
In the only possible ultimate instant, he flung himself aside.
The crash of the shot was deafening, but he felt no impact.
Rolling away, however, and before he could get back on his feet, and while he was still bringing his own gun to bear, he saw that Rockham was already still in place and balanced for a follow-up shot, which now could hardly be made to miss completely.
14
Click.
It was odd, the way Simon Templar took a measurable fraction of time to grasp the simple reality of what had happened. The gun should have gone off with the loud bang which unsilenced examples of the species usually make. The old saw that the one which kills you is the one you never hear may be true if it kills you instantly, although there are no surviving witnesses to testify to it, but you may certainly hear the one that wounds you. Instead, this one had exploded into only this absurd, derisory little click. And there he was, alive and well, facing the man who had pulled the trigger.