“Where’s the gun?” Simon demanded softly.
“I never had one,” Darslow gasped. “I only meant to sabotage the hunt. Someone else — I didn’t see—”
The denial had an unmistakeable ring of truth, and Simon relaxed his throttling grip.
Events had moved quicker than the time taken to relate them and it was still barely three minutes since the sniper had fired. But the Saint grimly acknowledged that the lapse was likely to be more than long enough.
He found no fault with his own reactions. Darslow had been the obvious suspect and the Saint had tackled him without considering an alternative. He had tracked the professor diagonally across the wood and felt confident that he would have spotted anyone else hiding there. But the path split the wood in two and the other half was unexplored territory.
He dragged Darslow down so that the undergrowth screened them as much as possible, and released him.
“Go back the way you came and go fast,” he whispered. “Try not to be spotted. I’ll see you later at the college.”
Without waiting to see if Darslow obeyed he covered the remaining few yards to the edge of the path, bent low, and then rose to sprint across the open glade. Someone shouted as the Saint reached the centre of the path, but he was moving fast with the line of his body turned away and, given the distance that separated them, he doubted that he would later be recognised. Meanwhile, that unavoidable glimpse of him would decoy any ambitious huntsman away from the direction that Darslow should have taken.
Once again hidden by the trees, he paused and looked back. The rider had made no attempt to follow up his sighting, but others who had been casting round at the sides of the path had now joined him, and the Saint guessed that their collective courage would be enough to prod them forward.
He glanced about him. This part of the wood was the same as the one he had just left, except that if anything the undergrowth was even wilder and the trees even closer together, offering the perfect cover for either a sniper or a fugitive.
He was aware of the recklessness of his actions. He was going unarmed in pursuit of a murderer who was not only packing a gun but knew how to use it, and use it well. And now his line of retreat was cut. But if Simon Templar had always bothered with such considerations there would have been very few stories to write about him.
He was about to move on when something glinting dully at his feet caught his eye. It was a spent cartridge, a .22 long rifle, and still not quite as cold as the ground when he picked it up. He slipped it into his pocket. The thick carpet of leaf mould was dented where the sniper had lain in wait. It was the perfect spot for an ambush, offering a clear view of anyone entering the wood from the direction of the village while at the same time providing the maximum amount of concealment.
Cautiously the Saint went on. With every sense alive to the movements and sounds that surrounded him, he dodged from one tree to another but saw and heard nothing except the furred and feathered inhabitants of the wood disturbed by his passing. He had gone only some three hundred yards when the trees suddenly thinned and he found himself unexpectedly at the outer edge of the wood. The ploughed fields that dipped away before him would not have offered cover to anything larger than a rabbit.
Keeping to the edge of the wood where the going was fastest, he skirted it around the top of the hill on the opposite side to the village. He went farther down the hillside as he approached the far end of the path, using the slope of the land to hide him from the riders who had ventured to the place where he had crossed.
He gained the spot where he had first entered the wood in pursuit of Darslow without further incident, and noted that the professor’s car was gone as he raced down the hillside towards his own. The sooner that Bucksberry and its immediate environs were several miles astern the happier he would feel.
Chantek was still standing on the grass verge where he had left her. She opened her mouth to speak but he bundled her unceremoniously into the Hirondel and threw himself behind the wheel. In one fluid movement he gunned the engine into life. Chantek was still closing her door when the big car leapt forward like a cheetah. He hurled it along the twisting lanes and neither spoke until the first mile was covered and Chantek got her voice back.
“I saw Professor Darslow drive away. What happened?”
In clipped sentences he told her, but his mind was roving far ahead of his words.
There was no clue this time to link the killing of the colonel to the murders of Wakeforth and Lazentree, no hooded Santa or diary reminder. But his instinct told him that it was a strand of the same web. Cambridge is a peaceful city where the majority of citizens are concerned with arguments rhetorical. A third murder in three days was too much of a coincidence. There had to be a common reason not only for the killings themselves but for why they all had to occur in such quick succession and thereby make life so much more difficult for the murderer.
The Saint considered the ingredients of each killing as he searched for a connecting link that would help to build up a picture of the murderer. Lazentree had been strangled, which had required strength or a certain technique. Wakeforth’s murder pointed to careful planning and a steady nerve. The shooting had called for a high degree of woodcraft and workmanship.
Chantek’s comment cut through his thoughts.
“At least it proves that Professor Darslow isn’t a murderer,” she said with an air of triumph.
“It proves nothing except that he didn’t kill the colonel,” he said meticulously.
A worried frown tried to spoil the natural gayety of her features.
“Shouldn’t you have stayed until the police arrived?”
The Saint chuckled at the vision the idea conjured up.
“Of course I should have, but I was thinking of Superintendent Nutkin’s blood pressure. If he’d found me on another murder scene, he might have had a stroke.”
“But what if he finds out you were there?” Chantek persisted.
“I may even have to tell him eventually, I don’t know yet. But it’s unlikely that anyone could identify me. Except Darslow — and I don’t think he’ll be so keen to admit that he was there himself.”
He did not mention the cartridge he had found, for no other reason than that it would have led to more questions which he was not ready to answer. He might have to hand it to the police at some time, but not before it had told him as much as it could without the full laboratory treatment.
Not wanting to catch up with Darslow and seem to be hounding him, he eased his throttle and took a slightly circuitous route back to Cambridge that would give the professor plenty of time to get home ahead of them.
The girl sensed his desire for silence and said little more until the Hirondel was parked outside St. Enoch’s and she had directed him to Darslow’s office.
“Is this the end of our day out together?” she pouted.
“I hope not, but you never know. Can I check with you in your rooms towards lunchtime?”
She nodded, and he left her with a light kiss on the cheek.
“Now let’s see what Brother Darslow has to say for himself,” the Saint speculated softly as he opened the professor’s door.
Professor Edwin Darslow looked like a man who has aged ten years in one morning. He sat behind his desk in the small tidy confines of his study and gazed out of the window at the courtyard below without seeing anything. He still wore the country clothes he had been out in. A bottle of whisky stood on the desk blotter with a half-full tumbler beside it. As Simon entered he turned reluctantly to face him.