The Saint couldn't laugh. That would come later… perhaps.
If there were any laughing afterwards.
He couldn't think of that at the instant. The simple fact and its connections backwards and forwards, and the thin incredible wisp of hope that came with them, struck into his mind with the complete breadth of a single chord. He found that he was gripping Andrea almost brutally by the shoulders.
"Where is your father now?"
"He went out with Mr. Devan and that other man. That's why I was worried, because they'd said you'd had a phone call and had to go out, but you were hoping to get back so you hadn't stopped to say goodbye to me; but I thought if you'd just passed out why should they bring you out here, and then why should they go away and leave you—"
"How long ago was this?"
She winced under the steel of his fingers, and he hardly noticed it.
"About fifteen minutes ago "
"Show me where to find a car."
He thrust her towards the door, and flung it open, and was outside before her. He found himself in a narrow concrete corridor. At one end of it there was a flight of steps running upwards. He raced up them, and came out through an open iron door at the top, and almost tripped over the figure that lay outside.
Simon turned him over as he saved himself with one hand on the ground; and enough light came through the opening for him to recognise the chunky individual who had been Karl Morgen's companion in Washington.
He showed no signs of activity, and it seemed very possible that he had a fractured skull; but just to be on the safe side Simon gave his head another vigorous thump on the ground as he straightened himself up.
Then he was feeling his way along the paved walk that led away from the shelter, accustoming his eyes to the light of the stars and half a moon, while he heard the two girls stumbling up behind him.
Suddenly ahead of him there was a quickened heavy movement, and he had a fleeting glimpse of a tall angular silhouette against the infinitesimally lighter tint of the sky, only a scrap of a second before the beam of a flashlight stabbed at him like a spear and barely missed him as he reeled off into the shrubbery that bordered the path. The tall man came running down the wedge of his own light, not making much sound, and switched it off a moment before he came level with the Saint; and at that point Simon moved in on him without any sound at all, his left arm sliding around the man's neck from behind and locking his larynx in the crook of his elbow, cutting off voice and breath together while he spoke in the man's ear.
"You can save this for me too, bud," he said; and then he turned the man deftly around and hit him with the blade of his hand just at the base of the septum, and threw him aside into the bushes as the girls reached him.
They threaded through winding walks, down into a sunken garden and across it and out again, and then they came around a clump of trees and the house was there, looming large and sedate in the dark and seeming aloof and asleep with the heavy blackout curtains drawn. They ran around it; and on the drive in front, gleaming faintly in the dim moonlight, Simon saw Madeline Gray's car where he had parked it when he arrived.
He opened the door and she almost fell in; and then Andrea Quennel was beside him.
Her face was a pale blur in the darkness close to him.
"You must tell me," she said with a kind of blank desperation. "What is this all about?"
He was glad that she couldn't see the involuntary mask that hardened over his face. There were so many things that perhaps ought to have been said, so many things that it was impossible to say.
"I'm going to try like hell to let your father tell you himself," he said.
Then he slid in behind the wheel and slammed the door before she could ask any more, and touched the starter and whipped the car away like a racehorse from the gate, leaving her where she stood.
It was a help that he had driven himself there, and that he had a memory for landmarks and a sense of direction that a homing pigeon could have envied. In a matter of seconds he was on to the coastal road, past Compo Beach and winding along the edge of the marshes at the estuary of the Saugatuck. Then inland a little way, and then wrenching the car around to the left to speed over the bridge across the wider part of the inlet; then to the right again, northwards, to slow down a little, reluctantly, as they skimmed the edge of the town of Westport, and catch a green light and speed up again on the road that follows the west bank of the river and comes in a mile and a half to the Merritt Parkway.
They were nearly at the Parkway when Madeline said: "Wouldn't it have been better to have phoned?"
"They'd have been standing right over him when he answered the phone — if they let him answer at all. And they may be only just arriving now."
"But the police—"
He shook his head.
"With all the things I'd have to explain and convince them of, and then to get them moving fast enough? No. It's the same as our trip from Washington. Only worse. But this time perhaps we won't be too late."
She sat tense and still, leaning forward a little, as if by that she could help the car to make more speed.
"Have we any chance?"
"We're trying."
And they were on the Parkway, the speedometer needle climbing to eighty and eight-five and creeping on, yet with the Saint's fingers effortless and almost caressing on the wheel, driving with one hand only while the other pressed the electric lighter and shook a cigarette out of Devan's pack and set it between his lips.
Presently she said, as if because any kind of conversation was better than listening to the same ceaseless clock-tick of terror: "How much does Andrea know?"
"I think she's fairly dumb," he said in the same way. "Devan said she was dumb. They just used her. And so did I. As I told you, in Washington I eventually tried to let her think she'd taken me in, because she might be a useful contact. And she was."
"But now you know why she asked you over there tonight."
"I know why she asked me in the first place. They had a story for her, and they must have known from past experience that she shouldn't be hard to sell. Maybe she never has been quite so monumentally dumb, but she knew how to leave her brain alone. It was the easiest defence of her own kind of Social Stability… Only, as it worked out this evening, I invited myself."
"And she let you walk into it."
"She knew that I knew what I was walking into. She tried to stop me last night, when I didn't know. She may have figured that I had all the right cards up my sleeve, or else I wouldn't want to walk in. She may have changed sides again, and been glad to see me sticking my neck out. It might have been vengeance, or it might have been her kind of help; or she might have just put her brain to sleep again. I wouldn't know. She must have done a lot of odd things in her life that you couldn't explain in ten-year-old language."
"Only she fell in love with you," Madeline said. "I've heard all your story, and I've seen her."
The Saint let cigarette smoke trail away from his lips, and kept his eyes on the unfolding road.
"I didn't make her do that." He was cold and apart in a way that she had never felt from him before. "She saved our lives tonight, whether she knew it or not, and whatever she meant to do. Don't ever forget that." There were some things that it was almost impossible to put together in words. "I'm afraid nothing is going to be easy for her now."
And they were past Talmadge Hill, swooping down and up long easy switchbacks, the engine humming to the perfection of its power, the tires hissing on the roadbed and the wind ruffling at the windows, almost as if they were flying, the sense of speed lulled by the smoothness of his driving and the isolation of the darkness around them, with only the road to see ahead and the tail lights of other cars being overtaken like crawling glowworms and fluttering angrily for an instant as they were passed and then being lost in silence behind.