Chief Inspector Teal idly watched the car turn into Queen's Gate; and then he found Simon Templar beside him.
"Well?" prompted the detective.
"That was Basher Tope," said the Saint casually, jerking a thumb after the retreating car. "He's just killed me."
"What d'you mean-he's just killed you?" snapped the detective. "Why didn't you --"
"I mean, he thinks he has. As a matter of fact, he's pumped three bullets into a tailor's dummy with an old coat of mine on, and it fell over when Pat pulled a string. It's too bad about Basher."
Teal looked down towards the Saint's house and saw three splintery stars in the glass of the lighted window. It seemed as if he were about to say something, but he never said it. The crash of an explosion hit the left side of his face like a blow, and he turned quickly. Less than a hundred yards up Queen's Gate he saw the car that had carried the bearded man away swerving wildly across the road, and the whole of one shattered side of it seemed to be hanging loose.
The car jumped the curb, ran across the pavement, and piled itself up with a second crash against a strip of area railings that bent over like reeds under the impact. Passers-by began running towards it, but Teal stood where he was. His baby-blue eyes returned to the Saint's face.
"What does that mean?" he asked.
Simon slid out a cigarette case. His own eyes were just as steady as Teal's-perhaps even steadier-and he shook his head with a slow motion of great sorrow.
"The way I figure it out, Claud," he said, "I think you'll find he must have had some sort of bomb on board, in case the rifle didn't work. It must have short-circuited, or something, and gone off. It's just too bad about him."
CHAPTER V SIMON took Patricia back to the hotel where he had booked a suite. They went there with the comforting feeling that they were not being followed, since at that moment there was no one available to follow them, and had a cocktail in the lounge with the knowledge that it would be sheer bad luck if any of the ungodly happened to come upon them there. Temporarily they had disappeared into the wide world, so far as Tex Goldman's information was concerned.
This hotel was the Dorchester, where the Saint had taken two small but luxurious rooms, with bath, overlooking Hyde Park. They were commended by the fact that they were faced by no other buildings from which shots might be fired; and although they cost twelve pounds a day Simon was untroubled by the thought of what the Sunday-night orators a short distance away at Marble Arch might say about his extravagance if they knew. The accommodation satisfied that instinct in him which demanded the best of everything at any price; and he was not proposing to pay for it himself.
"It is a fascinating thought," said the Saint, nibbling a potato chip, "that there are well over forty million living souls in this great England. If every one of them gave me sixpence, none of them would really miss it, and I should be a millionaire."
''You'd better start collecting," said Patricia.
"I'm afraid it would take too long," said the Saint regretfully. "Especially when we got north of the Tweed. No-we shall have to muck along with what we can collect in lumps from just a few people. Which reminds me that it must be nearly three months since we last thought of Mr. Nilder."
It was quite true that Simon Templar's memory had almost lost hold of that natty and unsavoury little gentleman. Three months ago he had sent him through the post a polite intimation that a gift of about ten thousand pounds to the Actors' Orphanage would be in order, but that had been rather more of a derisive gesture to Mr. Teal than a proposal of serious dimensions. The other exciting things that had happened about that time had driven the idea out of his head, but now it came back to him out of the blue.
He felt that a brief interlude of change from the somewhat strenuous circumstances of his war with Tex Goldman would do him good. Ordinary gang wars, after all, were not strictly in his line. They provided a definite interest in life, and a plentiful supply of skylarking and song, but taken continuously they were a heavy diet. Simon Templar required his share of the lighter things as well.
No one knew better than the Saint that Scotland Yard was perfectly capable of taking care of the ordinary and open forms of law-breaking. In the Saint's various arguments with the Tex Goldman mob, he had done very little more than could have been done by any detective with an original turn of mind and an equal freedom from responsibility to the stolidly unimaginative Powers who draw princely salaries for encumbering with red tape and ballyhoo the perfectly simple process of locating ungodliness and smacking it on the nose. His self-appointed mission was far more concerned with those ugly twists of ungodliness which rarely come within the ken of Scotland Yard at all- and which, if they do come within that myopic ken, are usually found to be so studiously legal that officialdom can find nothing to do about them.
The profession of Mr. Nilder came very fairly into that category.
At that moment Simon Templar knew little about him. A word of information had come his way through one of the mysterious channels by which such words reached his ears. It was a word that would have meant nothing to Scotland Yard, but to the Saint it opened up an avenue of fascinating speculation which he knew he would have to explore some day. Three months ago he had seized on it blindly for a passing need, and now it seemed to him that the time was ripe for investigating it further.
"We ought to know more about Ronald," said the Saint.
It was quite natural for him to turn aside like that to such a comparatively trivial affair, though his life had been called for twice in the last few days and the Green Cross boys were still combing London for him with their message of death. Numbers of beefy men were drawing their weekly pay envelopes for looking after the Green Cross boys, but he was not included in the distribution.
Mr. Ronald Nilder left London the next morning, as a matter of history-alone, and driving the modest two-year-old Buick which was the limit of his ostentation on the road. Simon Templar, also as a matter of history, went with him-though Mr. Nilder did not know this.
The preparation of successful buccaneering raids on the aforesaid members of the ungodly requires an extensive knowledge of the victims' habits. The actual smacking of them on the nose is very spectacular and entertaining to behold; but although it is those high spots of privateering that the chronicler is happiest to record, it is still tediously true that if there were no dull periods of preparation there would be no high spots. You have to get to the top of the Eiffel Tower before you can dive off, and the elevator is often out of order.
Simon figured it was a nice day for a drive. London was in the grip of its brief summer. From Aldgate to the Brompton Road, locked lines of grumbling traffic edged along their routes in rackety crawls of a few feet at a time, and subsided again into jammed immobility with a ceaseless belching of blue smoke and mephitic fumes-an unforgettable procession of tribute to the singular genius of the authorities who had organized enormous gangs of workmen to dig up roads and excavate new and superfluous Underground stations at every point where their activities could set a capstone on the paralytic confusion. The slobbering sultans of Whitehall thought about the colossal tax on petrol, and rubbed their greasy hands gleefully at the idea of the tens of thousands of gallons that were being spewed out into space for the pleasure of keeping engines running between two-yard snail's-rushes; while the perspiring public stifled in the fetid atmosphere, and wondered dumbly what it was all about-being constitutionally incapable of asking why their money should be paid into the bank balances of traffic commissioners nominally employed to see that such conditions should not exist. London, in short, was just the same as it always was, except for the temperature; and the Saint felt almost kindly disposed towards Mr. Nilder as the dusty Buick picked up speed as they left Kingston, and he was led rapidly out into the cleaner air of Surrey.