Simon stuffed the paper into his coat pocket, and with his other hand he took the Scorpion by the neck.
"Step!" repeated the Saint crisply.
And then his forebodings were fulfilled—simply and straightforwardly, as he had known they would be.
The Scorpion had never stopped the engine of his car—that was the infinitesimal yet sufficient fact that had been struggling ineffectively to register itself upon the Saint's brain. The sound was scarcely anything at all, even to the Saint's hypersensitive ears—scarcely more than a rhythmic pulsing disturbance of the stillness of the night. Yet all at once—too late—it seemed to rise and racket in his mind like the thunder of a hundred dynamos; and it was then that he saw his mistake.
But that was after the Scorpion had let in the clutch.
In the blackness, his left hand must have been stealthily engaging the gears; and then, as a pair of swiftly growing lights pin-pointed in his driving-mirror, he unleashed the car with a bang.
The Saint, with one foot in the road and the other on the running-board, was flung off his balance. As he stumbled, the jamb of the door crashed agonisingly into the elbow of the arm that reached out to the driver's collar, and something like a thousand red-hot needles prickled right down his forearm to the tip of his little finger and numbed every muscle through which it passed.
As he dropped back into the road, he heard the crack of Patricia's gun.
The side of the car slid past him, gathering speed, and he whipped out the Scorpion's own automatic. Quite casually, he plugged the off-side back tyre; and then a glare of light came into the tail of his eye, and he stepped quickly across to Patricia.
"Walk on," he said quietly.
They fell into step and sauntered slowly on, and the headlights of the car behind threw their shadows thirty yards ahead.
"That jerk," said Patricia ruefully, "my shot missed him by a yard. I'm sorry."
Simon nodded.
"I know. It was my fault. I should have switched his engine off."
The other car flashed past them, and Simon cursed it fluently.
"The real joy of having the country full of automobiles," he said, "is that it makes gunning so easy. You can shoot anyone up anywhere, and everyone except the victim will think it was only a backfire. But it's when people can see the gun that the deception kind of disintegrates." He gazed gloomily after the dwindling tail light of the unwelcome interruption. "If only that four-wheeled gas-crocodile had burst a blood-vessel two miles back, we mightn't have been on our way home yet."
"I heard you shoot once——"
"And he's still going—on the other three wheels. I'm not expecting he'll stop to mend that leak."
Patricia sighed.
"It was short and sweet, anyway," she said. "Couldn't you have stopped that other car and followed?"
He shook his head.
"Teal could have stopped it, but I'm not a policeman. I think this is a bit early for us to start gingering up our publicity campaign."
"I wish it had been a better show, boy," said Patricia wistfully, slipping her arm through his; and the Saint stopped to stare at her.
In the darkness, this was not very effective, but he did it.
"You bloodthirsty child!" he said.
And then he laughed.
"But that wasn't the final curtain," he said. "If you like to note it down, I'll make you a prophecy: the mortality among Scorpions is going to rise one unit, and for once it will not be my fault."
They were back in Hatfield before she had made up her mind to ask him if he was referring to Long Harry, and for once the Saint did not look innocently outraged at the suggestion.
"Long Harry is alive and well, to the best of my knowledge and belief," he said, "but I arranged the rough outline of his decease with Teal over the telephone. If we didn't kill Long Harry, the Scorpion would; and I figure our method will be less fatal. But as for the Scorpion himself—well, Pat, I'm dreadfully afraid I've promised to let them hang him according to the law. I'm getting so respectable these days that I feel I may be removed to Heaven in a fiery chariot at any moment."
He examined his souvenir of the evening in a corner of the deserted hotel smoking-room a little later, over a final and benedictory tankard of beer. It was an envelope, postmarked in the South-Western district at 11 a.m. that morning, and addressed to Wilfred Garniman, Esq., 28, Mallaby Road, Harrow. From it the Saint extracted a single sheet of paper, written in a feminine hand.
Dear Mr. Garniman,
Can you come round for dinner and a game of bridge on Tuesday next? Colonel Barnes will be making a fourth. Yours sincerely
(Mrs.) R. Venables.
For a space he contemplated the missive with an exasperated scowl darkening the beauty of his features; then he passed it to Patricia, and reached out for the consolation of draught Bass with one hand and for a cigarette with the other. The scowl continued to darken.
Patricia read, and looked at him perplexedly.
"It looks perfectly ordinary," she said.
"It looks a damned sight too ordinary!" exploded the Saint. "How the devil can you blackmail a man for being invited to play bridge?"
The girl frowned.
"But I don't see. Why should this be anyone else's letter?"
"And why shouldn't Mr. Wilfred Garniman be the man I want?"
"Of course. Didn't you get it from that man in the car?"
"I saw it on the seat beside him—it must have come out of his pocket when he pulled his gun."
"Well?" she prompted.
"Why shouldn't this be the beginning of the Scorpion's triumphal march towards the high jump?" asked the Saint.
"That's what I want to know."
Simon surveyed her in silence. And, as he did so, the scowl faded slowly from his face. Deep in his eyes a pair of little blue devils roused up, executed a tentative double-shuffle, and paused with their heads on one side.
"Why not?" insisted Patricia.
Slowly, gently, and with tremendous precision, the Saintly smile twitched at the corners of Simon's lips, expanded, grew, and irradiated his whole face.
"I'm blowed if I know why not," said the Saint seraphically. "It's just that I have a weakness for getting both feet on the bus before I tell the world I'm travelling. And the obvious deduction seemed too good to be true."
Chapter VII
Mallaby Road, Harrow, as the Saint discovered, was one of those jolly roads in which ladies and gentlemen live. Lords and ladies may be found in such places as Mayfair, Monte Carlo, and St. Moritz; men and women may be found almost anywhere; but Ladies and Gentlemen blossom in their full beauty only in such places as Mallaby Road, Harrow. This was a road about two hundred yards long, containing thirty of the stately homes of England, each of them a miraculously preserved specimen of Elizabethan architecture, each of them exactly the same as the other twenty-nine, and each of them surrounded by identical lawns, flower-beds, and atmospheres of overpowering gentility.
Simon Templar, entering Mallaby Road at nine o'clock—an hour of the morning at which his vitality was always rather low—felt slightly stunned.
There being no other visible distinguishing marks or peculiarities about it, he discovered No. 28 by the simple process of looking at the figures on the garden gates, and found it after inspecting thirteen other numbers which were not 28. He started on the wrong side of the road.
To the maid who opened the door he gave a card bearing the name of Mr. Andrew Herrick and the official imprint of the Daily Record. Simon Templar had no right whatever to either of these decorations, which were the exclusive property of a reporter whom he had once interviewed, but a little thing like that never bothered the Saint. He kept every visiting card that was ever given him and a few that had not been consciously donated, and drew appropriately upon his stock in time of need.