Salvage for the Saint by Leslie Charteris

Traffic was virtually nonexistent—she recalled one car passing her, in the opposite direction—and there was no telephone in sight. She started walking towards a house a couple of hundred yards away, but had only covered a quarter of the distance when she heard a truck coming.
    Not being one to do things by halves, she ran into the road and waved her arms excitedly in a way that left her predicament in no doubt.
    The effort, as it turned out, was unnecessary. It was a breakdown truck—complete with winch. It stopped some way in front of the MG and then backed up close. Out of it jumped a short muscular blob of a man in mechanic’s overalls and a cap. He was munching a sandwich, which she took to be the reason for his failure to offer a cordial greeting, or indeed any greeting at all.
    Arabella’s French, while it might be just about up to the simpler transactions of life, was completely unequal to the task of describing the salient details of a mechanical breakdown. She resorted to sign language and a single, far from French, word.
    “Kaputt!”
    She operated the starter a few times to demonstrate the car’s recalcitrance. The mechanic said nothing; he simply attached the grappling-chains of his winch to the underside of her car and wound it up on to the back of the truck with Arabella still in the driver’s seat. Then the truck, painted with the name Garage Soustelle Freres, turned around and headed back towards the village.
    It went straight past the garage of that name, which she had noticed earlier, and left the village by the opposite route. After a moment’s unease, Arabella settled down to wait, supposing that there must be other premises belonging to the Soustelles. But when the breakdown truck pulled right off the main road, and began following a rough dirt-track across mixed pasture land and marshy, boggy ground, she became definitely and substantively uneasy.
    She leant on the horn. Nothing happened. She switched on the ignition and leant on it again. The penetrating paa-aa-aarp punctuated the calm of the countryside but produced no apparent effect on the breakdown driver. He continued to transport her, and her car, farther off the beaten track: through a farm gateway, along a still-rougher and less-beaten track than before; then between some trees to a stony yard between farm buildings.
    The truck stopped and the driver got out, wiping the remains of his meal from his blubbery lips with the back of an oily hand.
    “What the hell is this place?” Arabella began angrily. “Why have you brought me here?” She looked around at the timber fences, gates, corrals, horses; and back at the still-silent driver.
    He had taken off his cap, and now his lips parted in something like a sadistic smile, revealing unpleasant-looking yellow teeth to go with his unpleasant-looking putty-nose and squinting piggy-eyes. Arabella regarded him disgustedly.
    “My, but aren’t you an ugly one!” she declared, hoping to provoke some response. But he only beckoned her to follow as he set off for one of the adobe farm buildings.
    He opened the door and stood aside for her to enter; then he followed her inside, shut the door, and stood firmly against it.
    Arabella looked around. She was in a large farm office, well furnished in an old-fashioned heavy style, the walls liberally decorated with bullfight posters and photographs of horses—hefty brutes, many of them accoutred and padded for the bullring, some with picadors astride. At the far end was another closed door. Between Arabella and that other door, at a huge roll-top desk, sat a big man in a sombrero, with his back to her. Nearby sprawled a sallow-skinned man dressed all in black, who was picking at the strings of a guitar. His features were lizard-like, his shirt open halfway to the waist, revealing a black doormat of a torso decorated with a heavy gold chain.
    The man with the guitar struck a sudden sharp chord, and the large figure at the desk swivelled to face