He turned round as Hoppy Uniatz lowered himself clumsily to the ground.
"How much have you soaked up?" he enquired patiently.
"I just had two-t'ree sips, boss, I t'ought I'd make sure de booze was jake. Say, dijja know I could yodel? I just loin de trick comin' along here—"
The Saint turned to Peter with a shrug.
"I'm sorry, old son," he said. "It looks as if you'll have to take the truck on, after all. I've never seen Hoppy break down yet, but all the same it might be awkward if he met a policeman."
"Couldn't that wait till tomorrow?"
"I'd rather not risk it. The sooner the truck's cleared and out of the way, the better."
"Okay, chief."
"Hoppy," said the Saint restrainedly, "stop that god-awful noise and take your boy friend inside."
Peter handed over the prisoner, and they walked back towards the front of the van. A last plaintive layee-O, like the sob of a lovesick cat, squealed through the stilly night before Peter climbed back into the driving seat and restarted the engine. Simon helped him to turn the truck round, and then Peter leaned out of the window.
"What happens next?"
"I'll call you in the morning when I know something," Simon answered. "Happy landings!"
He watched the lorry start on its clattering descent of the hill, and then he turned and went towards the house. In the bright spacious living room the lorry driver was lolling in a chair under Hoppy's watchful eye. Simon went straight up to him.
"Get up," he said. "I haven't told you to make yourself at home yet. You're here to answer some questions."
IV
The man looked up from under his heavy brows without moving. His mouth was clinched up so that his underlip was the only one visible, and his big frame looked lumpy, as if all the muscles in it were knotted. He went on sitting there stolidly and didn't answer.
"Get up," said the Saint quietly.
The man crossed his legs and turned away to gaze into a far corner of the room.
Simon's hand moved quicker than a striking snake. It took hold of the driver and yanked him up onto his feet as if the chair had exploded under him. The man must have been expecting something to happen, but the response he had produced was so swift and unanswerable that for a moment his eyes were blank with stupefaction. Then he drew back his fist.
The Saint didn't stir or flinch. He didn't even seem to take any steps to meet that crudely telegraphed blow. From the slight tilt of his head and the infinitesimal lift of one eyebrow he might almost have been vaguely amused. But his eyes held mockery rather than amusement — a curious cold glitter of devilish derision that had a bite like steel sword points. There was something about it that matched the easy and untroubled and yet perfectly balanced way he was standing, something that seemed an essential offshoot of the supple width of his shoulders and the sardonic curve of his lips and the driver's disturbing memory of an apparently incredible incident only a short time before; something that belonged unarguably to the whiplash quality that had crackled under the quietness of his voice when he spoke… And somehow, for no other reasons, the blow didn't materialize. The driver's fist sank stiffly down to his side.
The Saint smiled.
"Have a cigarette," he said genially.
The driver stared at the packet suspiciously.
"Wot's this all abaht?" he demanded.
"Nothing, Algernon. Nothing at all. Hoppy and I are just a couple of humble philosophers looking for pearls of knowledge. By the way, is your name Algernon?"
"Wot's my name got to do with you?"
"It would help us to talk about you, Algernon. We can't just point at you all the time — it looks so rude. And then there's the blonde you didn't introduce us to. We want to know who she was, so we can give the vicar her phone number. What's her name?"
"Wouldn't you like to know?" snarled the driver belligerently.
Simon nodded with unaltered cordiality.
"You're asking as many questions as I am, Algernon," he remarked. "Which isn't what I brought you here for. But I don't mind letting you into the secret. I would like to know all these things. Go on — have a cigarette."
As the man's mouth opened for another retort the Saint flipped a cigarette neatly into it. The driver choked and snatched it out furiously. The Saint kindled his lighter. He held it out, and his cool blue eyes met the driver's reddening gaze over the flame. There was no hint of a threat in them, no offer of a challenge, nothing but the same lazy glimmer of half-humorous expectancy as they had held before, and yet once again they baffled the driver's wrath with a nonchalance that his brain was not capable of understanding. He put the cigarette back in his mouth and bent his head sulkily to accept the light.
Mr Uniatz, reclining in an abandoned attitude on the settee, had been taking advantage of being temporarily relieved of his duties to sluice his parched throat with the contents of the bottle he had brought in with him. Now after having remained for some minutes with his head tilted back and the bottle upended towards the ceiling he came reluctantly to the conclusion that no more liquid was flowing into the desert and simultaneously returned to a sense of his responsibilities.
"Lemme give him a rubdown, boss," he suggested. "He'll come t'ru fast enough."
Simon glanced at him thoughtfully.
"Do you think you could make him talk, Hoppy?"
"Sure I could, boss. I know dese tough guys. All ya gotta do is boin deir feet wit' a candle, an' dey melt. Lookit, I see a box of candles in de kitchen last night—"
Mr Uniatz struggled up from the couch, fired with ambition and a lingering recollection of having seen a case of whisky in the kitchen at the same time, but the Saint put out an arm and checked him.
"Wait a minute, Hoppy."
He turned back to the driver.
"Hoppy's so impulsive," he explained apologetically,
"and I don' really want to turn him loose on you. But I've got an appointment in an hour or so, and if we can't get together before then I'll have to leave Hoppy to carry on.And Hoppy has such dreadfully primitive ideas. The last time I had to leave him to ask a fellow a few questions, when I came back I found that he'd got the mincingmachine screwed on to our best table and he was feeding this guy's fingers into it. He got the right answers, of course, but it made such a mess of the table."
"I'm not afraid o' you—"
"Of course you aren't, Algernon. And we don't want you to be. But you've got to change your mind about answering questions, because it's getting late."
The man watched him stubbornly, but his fists were tightening and relaxing nervously, and there was a shining dampness of perspiration breaking out on his forehead. His eyes switched around the room and returned to the Saint's; face in a desperate search for escape. But there was no hope there of the kind he was looking for. The Saint's manner was light and genial, almost brotherly; it passed over unpleasant alternatives as remote and improbable contingencies that were hardly worth mentioning at all, and yet the idea of unpleasantness didn't seem to disturb it in any way. A blusterer himself, the driver would have answered bluster in its own language, but that dispassionate imperturbability chilled him with an unfamiliar sensation of fear…
And at that moment, with his uncanny genius for keeping his opponents in suspense, the Saint left the last word unsaid and strolled over to sit on the table, leaving the driver nothing but the threat of his own imagination.
"What's your name, Algernon?" he asked mildly.
"Jopley."
The word fell out after a tense pause, as if the man was fighting battles with himself.
"Been driving these trucks for long?"
"Wot's that got—"