“And where is the Saint?”
“On his way to the fort.”
“And Shortwave?”
“Still here, still tied.”
“I will be there in five minutes! Open the door for me!”
The line clicked dead at Kalki’s end.
Haroon hauled himself to his feet, muttered incoherently to himself, turned around three times, started off in one direction and then in another, and finally ran to the chest of drawers in his bedroom. He took out his wallet, stuffed it with what cash he had hidden in the flat, looped a tie around his bulging neck, jerked a knot into it, grabbed up a jacket and topcoat, and set off down the stairs. Halfway down he remembered some negotiable cheques, heaved his bulk up the steps again, retrieved them, and waddled down again.
Kalki lived so close by that he might easily have been in front of the restaurant already. Haroon opened the door and started to step into the dining room, but then considered the possibilities of entrapment if Kalki should arrive and come in after him.
“D-d-did you call?” Shortwave shouted anxiously from the depths of the basement. “Did you get him?”
“Yes!” Haroon answered shrilly.
Then he wondered why he had answered. He wondered why he was there at all. He could have been running. But he was afraid that by running he might anger Kalki even more. Instead he left the door slightly ajar, and stood outside it in the brightening sunlight, revelling in the safety pf the public pavement, where taxies and lorries flew this way and that, and people were everywhere.
He was all but dancing on his toes in front of his place of business when Kalki the Conqueror loomed into view around the corner, his whiskers swept by the breeze of his striding speed. He wore a red waistcoat and a plaid jacket, and his black ball-bearing eyes were so close together as to seem fused and inseparable.
Haroon kept himself at least ten feet away, backing off as Kalki approached.
Kalki did not say anything but “Where?”
Haroon pointed to the open door. The passers-by hurried around him in the sunshine, seeing nothing strange. Only when Kalki had stalked into the restaurant did Haroon venture nearer. Still standing well back from the threshold he peered inside and ascertained that Kalki had gone on towards the rear of the premises. Then he edged into the doorway, leaving most of his mass outside in the sun while he extended his neck in order to hear what was happening.
The strange thing was that he heard nothing. He had expected screams and roars. He had to sidle halfway across the dining room before he detected the sounds of voices. Before he could make out the words the voices abruptly stopped. The silence was then stranger than ever. Straining his senses, Haroon heard a sound like a gasp of air escaping briefly from a balloon, and then a noise like the crushing of an eggshell.
Abdul Haroon turned and fled, his coattails flapping, and did not stop running until he was in a taxi bound for Victoria Station and the next train from London to anywhere else.
6
How Kalki Took a Dive, and Simon Templar Made His Profit
1
Highway A13 out of London follows the northside curves of the widening Thames where the river opens its mouth to the North Sea. The Dartford Tunnel, on the eastern rim of the city, is the last man-made spanning of the estuary. From there on the water is free of all traffic except boats, fish, and seagulls, though its banks are burdened with the giant chimneys of power stations and the cranes of dockyards — skeletal forests like burnt-out woodlands with the smokey haze of their extinction still hanging over them.
Even though the river soon becomes so broad that it would be better called a gulf, and half an hour farther east expands so far as to become indistinguishable from the sea, the smokestacks of the power stations remained a constant landmark down to the Saint’s right as he drove along the highway. At first they dominated the landscape entirely. They were supplanted by their monstrous stepsons, great towers of steel which carried the high tension powerlines across the countryside on their shoulders.
But even those ventured only as occasional stragglers very far from the complex that spawned them. Huge lorries rolled on across Essex, but the countryside gradually turned less commercial. Oil storage tanks looked lost in open fields amongst signs offering NEW LAID EGGS and HOME GROWN POTATOES. There was a Donkey Derby at One Tree Hill, and a more hopeful signal in the form of a beat-up old boat in somebody’s front garden.
“How far do we have to go before we take to the water?” Tammy asked the Saint.
She sounded admirably calm, but he noticed that her fingers kept fiddling with the leather strap of the binoculars he had brought from his house in Upper Berkeley Mews before they left London.
“No farther than we have to,” he said. “But we’ve all day, and we might as well enjoy it. How are we looking on the chart?”
“There’s a picture of a sailboat at South Benfleet,” she told him, tracing their route on a map of southeast England. It’s not far off this road.”
“That’s probably where Fowler’s boat stops over on these runs,” Simon remarked. “But I don’t think he’ll be there himself as early as this. Keep your fingers crossed, though.”
“Turn right at Great Tarpots,” said Tammy.
They negotiated a roundabout south of Basildon and drove through an area heavily built up with houses. But down on the right they could see the marshy banks of the last official few miles of the Thames. The water even then no longer looked like a river: it was a broad expanse glaring in the light of the low sun.
The Saint slowed down. Great Tarpots might once have been conspicuous enough to merit its grandiose name, but now it appeared to have been lost in the general spread of dwellings and shops between Basildon and Thundersley. The turn to South Benfleet was marked not only by an appropriate roadsign, but also by the more ominous presence on the corner of ALDEN & SONS, FUNERALS AND MEMORIALS.
“That’s promising,” Tammy observed.
“Maybe we should make advance reservations for Fowler and Kalki,” was the Saint’s more optimistic reply. “But on second thoughts it’d be cheaper to give the fish a treat.”
It was the time of the mid-morning break now, and the residential streets were full of schoolgirls in uniform skirts and jackets and boy-style neckties. But within a mile or so the unwelcome dampness of the river’s tidal banks kept homes at a distance. The fenced premises of the Benfleet Yacht Club were an encouraging sight, even though its vessels were for members only.
Simon slowed down. Just ahead was a swing bridge, and the creek it crossed was lined with half-floating sail- and motor-boats. The tide was fairly low. Simon could only hope that it was coming in rather than going out. Otherwise the creek looked barely navigable.
He managed to find a place to park his car just off the road, and he and Tammy walked to the nearest of several establishments along the creek which dealt in boats. It was a barren place, with grassy mud flats crisscrossed with shallow reeking ditches where shellfish must have spent at least half their lives dying at low tide. The wooden building looked no friendlier, and neither did the boaty type who stepped out with a one-eyed mongrel dog at his side to meet the Saint and his companion.
“I’d like to hire a sailboat,” Simon told him after a cautious exchange of greetings.
The Saint stood with his hands in his pockets while the other man mulled over the question.
“It’s not easy to hire a boat around here.”
“There seem to be plenty of them,” Simon rejoined.