Simon pulled himself upright, the action dispelling the worst of the kick’s after effects. Nyall had been unlucky. It had been a powerful blow but a glancing one. A few degrees different and the Saint might not have known what happened next.
He quickly gathered up the revolver and his knife before going out into the corridor.
Nyall had reached the far end. He turned, a grotesque silhouette in his costume against the light from a high arched window that ran from the floor almost to the ceiling at the end of the passage, and looked from the gun to the grim-set face of the man who held it.
“There’s no way out, Godfrey,” said the Saint softly.
Nyall shook his head slowly, making his false beard wag in an outlandish parody of the character whose disguise he had adopted.
“There’s always a way out,” he pronounced calmly and distinctly.
And before anyone could have stopped him, he turned and hurled himself at the glass.
Simon ran to the window and looked down. The red-coated figure of Santa Claus, sometime bursar of St. Enoch’s College, Cambridge, lay spread-eagled in the thin carpet of snow beside the house like a broken toy.
“You silly twit,” said the Saint. “You should have used the chimney.”
12
It might have been a scene straight out of a Hollywood production of A Christmas Carol. A bright, cloudless sky shivered to the ringing of a thousand bells from a hundred towers and spires. A glistening white shroud of freshly fallen snow lay across rooftops and streets. Along the pavements, overcoated and muffled in scarves, people trudged home from church.
The picture-postcard perfection of his surroundings failed to move Simon Templar as he steered the Hirondel slowly through Cambridge. After the events of the past week he felt a strong desire to leave both Cambridge and Christmas far behind. His imagination drifted towards a palm-fringed beach and a warm sea, and he found the prospect of overstuffed turkey and stodgy plum pudding distinctly unappealing. But when Chantek had offered to cook him a Christmas dinner, saying that otherwise she would have to spend the day all alone, he had not had the heart to refuse in the face of her almost childish eagerness.
His tiredness contributed to his mood. It had been another long night.
Godfrey Nyall had died before the ambulance arrived, without regaining consciousness. Had it been an attempt to escape, a last desperate gamble, or suicide? The Saint would never know. And Superintendent Nutkin would be content to let a coroner’s jury decide the answer.
Lord Grantchester’s title and personality had awed the police into doing what they had to do so discreetly and unobtrusively that his guests would be quite unaware of what had happened until they read about it in their morning papers. He had insisted that the Saint must stay for the party, kitted out as an Arab in robes easily improvised from a couple of bed sheets, and welcome to shelter behind any alias he chose.
“Damn decent of you to take all that trouble to save my life, as if it had more than just a few more years to go anyway.”
It would be untrue to say that the Saint had not enjoyed his privileged anonymity, but he had slipped away before midnight when it had been announced that all true identities must be disclosed.
Now as he eased the Hirondel into a parking space at his destination and cut the engine, he wondered if this afternoon dinner à deux would be an anticlimax or perhaps only a relaxing but banal denouement.
He was wrong in both guesses.
Chantek answered his knock, and his pessimism began to be undermined by her artless delight at seeing him. She was wearing a sarong patterned with pink and blue flowers, and a pearl necklace glowed against the gold of her skin.
“Slamat datang,” she said.
“Slamat, chantek,” he said, using her name as the compliment that she deserved.
There was nothing Dickensian about her perfume, which harmonised perfectly with the exotic cooking smells that came to his nostrils.
She ushered him into a large living room where the white walls were hung with brightly coloured paintings. On the table in small bowls and platters was set out a fascinating variety of mysterious preparations.
He turned to her and smiled.
“This is Christmas dinner?” he said.
Chantek returned his smile.
“That’s right,” she replied. “My kind of Christmas dinner. I hope you like rijsttafel.”
Her costume and the spicy aroma of the feast she had prepared matched his recent thoughts of warmer, lazier climes so perfectly that for a moment he was speechless. She looked at him anxiously, worried that he might be disappointed by the surprise.
The Saint’s smile broadened. He picked up a glass of wine from the table and raised it in a toast.
“Darling,” he said, “it’s the crowning touch to one Christmas I’ll never forget. Someday they’ll write a song about it. I can almost hear it — ‘Some En-Chantekd Evening...’ ”