Free The Saint and the People Importers by Leslie Charteris Page B

are you implying there might be a bomb planted in the engine?” she asked uncertainly,
“The latter; but I don’t think your sparring partners are that technologically advanced. You’re much more likely to get a knife between your charmingly upholstered ribs, or a piano-wire collar around your neck.
    She swallowed audibly.
    “I’m going to start it,” she threatened, as if hoping that he would stop her.
    “Go ahead. Take a chance.”
    She turned the key with stabbing determination. The engine coughed and burbled to a steady rumble. There was, as Simon had expected, no explosion. Tammy took a deep breath and presented him with a triumphant look.
    “So there,” she said. “Satisfied?”
    “Alive,” he said. “And that’s good enough for me. Let’s go.”
    She backed the car out of the cul-de-sac and he directed her to circle the block to avoid passing in front of the building.
    “If the subjects of your biographical essays happen to be watching your front door, this may help us to give them the slip,” Simon explained. “On the other hand, unless they’re totally incompetent, they could be watching the back too, but there’s no harm in trying.”
    “Do you really think somebody might follow us?”
    Simon meditated on her snub-nosed, tense-lipped profile for a few seconds.
    “You always sound so surprised at these things,” he remarked. “Don’t you have any idea at all of what you’ve gotten yourself into?”
    “Of course I do!” she retorted. “Don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine.” She slowed down and then continued irritably. “What’s the best way to Datchet?”
    “The shortest way you know from here to the M4, for a start.”
    He kept a sharp lookout while she steered them southwards through a minimum of traffic to join the major westward motorway. The suburban commuters and shoppers were safely home, and it would be some time before the theatre goers started back.
    “At this hour, we should make it comfortably in thirty minutes,” he said.
    “There’s one thing neither one of us has mentioned,” Tammy said.
    She seemed less tense now that they were putting a good distance between themselves and her flat. The Saint, finally satisfied that nobody was following the red sports car, settled more comfortably in his own incapacious seat.
    “What’s that?” he asked.
    “The police,” she said in fateful tones.
    “There are lots of other things we haven’t mentioned either,” Simon said, stretching out his long arm across the back-rest behind her shoulders. “Popcorn, Mount Fujiyama, Ivan the Terrible …”
    “Oh you’re impossible!”
    He was smiling at her.
    “It’s true, I am,” he said modestly. “And I apologise for not mentioning the police. What would you like me to mention about them? Their social usefulness, their handsome uniforms, their unfailing graciousness, their marytrdom at the hands of bearded baboons breaking up park benches for holy causes?”
    “Why can’t you be serious? People are getting their arms broken and all you can do is make jokes.”
    “That’s not all I’m doing. I’m putting my life in the hands of a woman driver. Greater love hath no man. What about the police?”
    “Shouldn’t we tell them what’s going on?”
    “It’s their job to know what’s going on,” Simon said. “They have nothing else to do for twenty-four hours a day but poke around finding out what’s going on. If we know more than they do, it hardly makes me feel they’re deserving of our help. Besides, what could we tell them? We’ve got nothing they could take action on.”
    “But we might get in trouble.”
    The Saint nodded complacently.
    “We undoubtedly will.”
    “With the police, I mean.”
    “That too,” he concurred. “Especially considering how much they already love me for my past services.”
    He watched her face in the irregular play of lights that swept continuously through the car. She looked as if she was beginning to have doubts about the