Introducing The Toff Read Free Page A

latter, he fancied, but for the moment it did not count two peas. When the danger was past he could reason it out. Meanwhile, would the gunman in the Daimler take another blinder, or . . .
    The sudden, fierce whirr of the Daimler’s engine answered him. The big car leapt into life, and the black roof, all that Rollison permitted himself to see, slid along the hedges.
    ‘They’re off,’ muttered the Toff, and his fingers tightened round the handle of his gun. A mad thought was scurrying through his mind, tempting, enticing. If he stood up from his cover and emptied his gun after the Daimler there was a sound chance of sending the big car into the hedge; what happened after that would be in the hands of the gods.
    It was a beautiful thought. The Toff licked his lips over it, and his eyes sparkled. Nine times out of ten he would have taken the chance, and been coolly confident of getting away with it. But this time . . .
    He had a hunch that there was something farther along the road, something from which the Daimler was flying hell for leather, and which the gunman was very anxious to hide for a while. It occurred to the Toff that it would be better to let the Daimler go, to hurry along the road as quickly as he could, and find what there was to find. So for once he played for safety.
    Still crouching, he saw that flying roof twist with a bend in the road out of shooting range. The Daimler was a hundred yards away, still gathering speed, weird and ghostly beneath the moon. Watching it, the Toff felt a queer intuition that he was only on the fringe of trouble; and a question thudded into his head, urgent and worrying.
    What would he find when he went on?
    One thing was certain. The attack had much more behind it than the attempted annihilation of the Hon. Richard Rollison. Otherwise the shooting would have had a more personal note from the outset.
    With which comforting thought the Toff stepped quickly into the road and surveyed the damage. A wing of his car was badly dented, a piece was chipped from the number-plate; but that, apart from the punctured tyre, was the extent of the trouble.
    ‘It might have been a lot worse,’ he consoled himself, dipping into the tool-box for the jack. He had a habit, when alone, of talking aloud, usually in the plural. It fortified him, he said.
    He started to get the wheel off. ‘We ought to have the spare wheel on inside ten minutes,’ he told the world at large, ‘and then we shall see what they wanted to stop us from seeing. And it looks very much as though we shall be very busy in the not too distant future.’
    And again, as he spoke, his eyes were like flints, and his shapely lips were pressed together in a thin line. Many things were passing through his mind as he worked, but he told the world nothing about them.
    A fraction over the ten minutes later, Rollison straightened his back and sighed thankfully. He tossed the tools back in the box, flung the busted wheel into the rear seat, and swung himself into the driving position.
    The engine hummed to a touch on the switch. He let in his clutch gently, switched on the headlights, and as the car nosed ahead, looked right and left on the shimmering surface of the road. He did not propose to miss a thing.
    A quarter of a mile dropped behind, and the gentle hum of his engine harmonized again with the quiet of the night. The moon was so bright that he switched off the headlights; the ribbon of road unwinding in front of him seemed as empty of trouble as the blue-grey sky.
    And then, taking a bend slowly, Rollison caught his first glimpse of the night’s dreadful secret.
    Black and grim at the side of the road were the shattered remains of a big car.
    The Toff stared at it for a moment; then he tightened his grip round the steering-wheel.
    ‘I had a hunch,’ he reminded himself softly, ‘that there was trouble – big trouble – and I fancy I was right.’
    He drew close to the wreckage. Nothing else moved; no sound came. The hush