Leslie Charteris The Saint 25 The Saint On Guard

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The lean gray man shook his head.
"I don't know about dying," he said. "Perhaps you've made a few
miscalculations yourself. I think you're banking rather a lot on the testimony
of Varetti and Walsh."
"I think they'll talk."
"I think you're forgetting what a good attorney could do to them on the
stand. But I don't even think they will talk. All those things have been tried
on them before. And they can't talk, if they want to get off with anything
less than life. But they can plead guilty to just trying to rob your room, and
get away with that, and wait for me to buy them a parole. Milton doesn't know
much, and he wouldn't even dare to say that."
"But you're admitting everything to me."
"Why not? The only people who could make it hard for me are Barbara and
yourself. And as you so rightly prophesied, I don't intend to allow either of
you to go that far. I hate to do it, but you put me in this position."
"Allen!"
Barbara Sinclair moved towards Uttershaw in a wild kind of rush. She held out
her arms as though she expected other arms to receive her; and the Saint's
eyes narrowed as he snapshot his distances. But even before he could have
stirred, Uttershaw's left hand reached flatly to meet her oncoming face, and
sent her spinning back. She landed on the floor, with one hand clinging to an
overturned chair.
"Allen," she said again, with a sort of incredulous tonelessness.
"Shut up," Uttershaw said coldly, and the snout of his gun was back on the
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Saint in the same instant, if it had ever wavered. "Keep still, please," he
said; but the Saint had not moved. Utter-j shaw glanced at the girl again. "Mr
Templar told you all about it," he said. "You should have believed him. But as
he seems to have discovered, you don't have enough brains."
The Saint memorised her blanched face with an expression that was too late
for sympathy.
"I did tell you," he said.
"Allen no!"
"Yes, my dear," Uttershaw said. "I'm afraid he was perfectly right."
Simon Templar took a deep breath.
"Speaking of being put in positions," he said clearly, "how will you like
your position on the broiler at Sing Sing if you do this?"
"I'm not very worried about that," Uttershaw said with the same unreal
removal from emotion. "You see, I was careful enough to take the elevator to
two floors above this, and I walked down here. I also found a fine little back
stairway, with an openable window that leads out on to a fire escape.
Apparently the management of this hotel trusts its guests. So I'll have plenty
of time for any other arrangements I may think of to account for what I've
been doing during this time. And I shall certainly take your lecture to heart,
and try not to be too brilliant. . . . I'm sorry, but it wouldn't be fair to
leave you any false hopes."
The Saint looked at him with a face of stone.
Out of the corner of his eye he could see Barbara Sinclair also, still
crouched on the floor, speechless and rigid and chalky in a trance of the real
horror that she had so immutably refused to see.
But those choices were over now, for her as they were for Uttershaw.
And as they might be over for him too, if he had been so preoccupied with
other excessive cleverness that he had overdone his own, after all.
He said: "This makes quite a curtain."
He turned abruptly on his heel, and walked in an aimless way towards the
bookcase.
And thought what an immortal laugh it would be if after so much staging the
clock in his mind had never been really right.
And what a picturesque finale it all was. . . .
" 'Our death is but a sleep and a forgetting'," Uttershaw said gently; and
the Saint stood still.
"I hope that will make you very happy," he said.
He thought that Inspector Fernack had delayed his entrance to the last
possible filament of suspense, doubtless with all conceivable malice
aforethought, and then chosen a peculiarly dangerous moment for it. But he
admitted to himself that he had helped to ask for that.
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And the temptation to repay the performance was almost more than he could
resist, but he knew at the same time that that filament was too fragile to
risk even with a breath.
He seemed to have no emotional feeling at all; but he had his own. quality of
mercy that was apart from all the other things.
As the door burst open, and Fernack lumbered in, and Utter-shaw whirled at
the sound, Simon Templar took his gun out of the vase of chrysanthemums and
fired as carefully as if he had been on a target range.
16The Saint said: "No."
"Why?" wheedled Titania Ourley.
"Because you don't have to try and pump me for information like you did at
the Algonquin, because I'm not investigating your personal nastiness or your
husband's sub-rosa activities. That's been taken over by the oh, Lord proper [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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