Alias the Saint (5 page)

Raxel went to the door.

“And finally,” Simon called after him, as a parting shot, “tell Basher not to put any more butyl in my beer. It kind of takes the edge off my thirst!”

The Saint breakfasted alone the next morning, but he waited about the inn for some time afterwards in the hope of seeing the girl. Crantor and Marring came down, and the cheerful “Good-morning” with which he greeted each of them was replied to in a surly mutter. Raxel followed, and remarked that it was a nice day. The Saint politely agreed. But the girl did not come down, and half an hour later he saw Basher bearing a tray upstairs, and gave it up and went out. His walk did not seem so satisfying to him that morning as it had the previous afternoon, for he was honestly worried about his first visitor of the night before. He made a point of being late for luncheon, but although the three men were sitting at their usual table (the Saint found that a separate table had been prepared for himself) the girl was not with them. He took his time over the meal, having for the moment no fear that his food might have been tampered with, and sat on for an hour after the other three had left, but Betty Tregarth failed to make an appearance.

When he had at last been compelled to conclude that she was lunching as well as breakfasting in her room, he went upstairs to his own room to think things out. There, as, soon as he opened the door, a scene of turmoil met his eye. The suitcase he had brought was open on the floor, empty, and all its contents were strewn about the place in disorder. The search had been very comprehensive—he noticed that even the lining of the bag had been ripped out.

“Life is certainly very strenuous these days,” sighed the Saint mildly, and began to clear up the mess.

When he had finished, he lighted the fire and sat down in a chair beside it to smoke a cigarette and review the situation.

He ended up exactly where he had started, for everything there was to say had been said at two o’clock that morning. His entry had been staged with a deliberate eye to its effect—it would have been practically impossible to pretend to be an entirely innocent tourist for long, in any case, even if the first man he met had not put into his head the old trick of posing as a detective. And if he had to introduce himself flatly as a detective, the obvious course was to do it with a splash, and the Saint was inclined to congratulate himself on having made a fairly useful splash, as splashes go. But there it ended. Having made his splash he could only sit tight and wait.

Simon Templar was prepared to back himself against all comers in a patient-waiting competition. That decided, he raked some magazines out of his bag and sat down to read.

At half-past seven he washed, brushed his hair carefully, and went down to dinner full of hope, But once again he was unrewarded by a glimpse of the mysterious Betty Tregarth.

He sat out the other three, but they rose and left the table at last, and the girl had not joined them. The Saint stopped Raxel as he passed on his way to the door.

“I hope you have not suffered a bereavement.” he said solicitously.

Raxel seemed puzzled,

“Miss Tregarth,” explained the Saint,

“You mean my secretary?” said Raxel. “No, she has not been with us today.”

A flicker of hope fired up deep down inside Simon Templar.

“Unfortunately,” volunteered Raxel smoothly, “she has been indisposed. Nothing serious—a severe cold, with a slight temperature—but in this weather I thought it advisable to keep her in bed.”

Simon watched the three men go with mixed feelings. The Professor had been just a little too aggressively plausible. His manner had indicated quite clearly that whether Simon Templar chose to believe that Betty Tregarth was indisposed or not, his interest in her was not appreciated and would be discouraged.

Not that that worried the Saint. When he went up to bed that night he made a careful search of the more obvious hiding places in his room, and found what he had expected to find, tucked into the pocket of his pajama-coat. It was a rough plan of the upper part of the house, and each room was marked to indicate the occupant. One room was marked with a cross, and against this was a scrawled note:

Kept locked. R., M., and C. go in occasionally. T. is there nearly all day.

The Saint studied the plan until all its details were indelibly photographed on his brain, and then dropped it on the fire and watched it burn. Then he went to bed.

He woke up at four o’clock, got up, and dressed. He slipped his automatic into his hip pocket, took his torch in his hand, opened the door silently, and stole out into the corridor.

6

His first objective was the room which had been marked T on the plan. Trying the handle with elaborate precautions against noise, he found, as he had expected, that the door was locked. But the locks on the doors were old-fashioned and clumsy, as he had discovered by some preliminary experiments in his own room, and it only took him a moment to open the lock with a little instrument which he carried. He passed in, and closed the door softly behind him. The ray of his torch found the bed, and he stole across and roused the girl by shining the light close to her eyes. She stared, and the Saint switched out the light and clapped a hand swiftly over her mouth.

“Don’t scream!” he whispered urgently in her ear. “It’s only me—Smith.”

She lay still, and Simon took his hand from her lips and switched on the torch again.

“Talk in a whisper,” he breathed, and she nodded understandingly. “Listen—have you really been ill?”

She shook her head.

“No. They’re keeping me here—I was caught coming back from your room last night. How did you get in?”

Simon gave her a glimpse of the skeleton key which he had spent part of the afternoon twisting out of a length of stout wire.

“Have you thought of getting away?” he asked. “I”ll smuggle you out now, if you care to try it.”

“It’s no good,” she said.

Simon frowned.

“You’re being kept here a prisoner, and you don’t want to escape?” he demanded incredulously. ^ “I’m not a prisoner,” she replied. “It’s just that they found out I’d got enough humanity in me to risk something to save you. If you went away I’d be free again at once.”

“And you’d rather stay here?”

“Where could I go?” she asked dully.

Instantly he was moved to pity. She seemed s absurdly young, like a child, lying there.

“Haven’t you any—people?”

“None that I can go back to,” she said pitifully, desperately. “You don’t know how it is.”

“I guess I do,” said the Saint gently, even if he was wrong. “But maybe I could find you some friends who’d help you.”

She smiled a little.

“It wouldn’t help,” she said. “It’s nice of you, but I can’t tell you why it’s impossible. Go on with what you’ve got to do, if you’re too reckless to get out while there’s time. Don’t think anything more about me, Mr. Smith.”

“Simon.”

“Simon.”

“I never knew how revolting ‘Mr. Smith’ sounded until you said it just now,” he remarked lightly, but he was not thinking of trivialities.

Presently he said:

“There’s another room I was meaning to visit tonight, but maybe you can save me the trouble. I’m told it’s kept locked, but you spend the best part of the day there. What’s inside?”

Her eyes opened wide, and she shrank away from him.

“You can’t go in there!”

“I hope to be able to,” said the Saint. “The little gadget that let me in here—”

“You can’t! You mustn’t! If Raxel knew that you knew what’s in there he’d take the risk—he’d kill you!”

“Raxel need not know,” said the Saint. “I shall try not to advertise the fact that I’m going in there, and I shan’t talk to him about it afterwards—unless what I find in there is good enough to finish up this little excursion. Anyhow,” he added, watching her closely, “what can there be in that room that you can spend every day with, and yet it would be fatal for me to see it?”

“I can’t tell you … but you mustn’t go!”

Simon looked straight at her.

“Betty,” he said, “as I’ve told you before, you’re heading for trouble. I’ve heard of real tough women who looked like angels, but I’ve never really believed in them. If you’re that sort, I’ll eat the helmet off every policeman in London. I don’t know why you’re in this, but even if you are as free as you say, you don’t seem to be enjoying it. I’m giving you a chance. Tell me everything you know, help me all you can, and when the crash comes I’ll guarantee to see you through it. You can take that as official.”

She moved her head wearily.

“It’s useless.”

“You mean Raxel’s got some sort of hold over you?”

“If you like.”

“What is it?”

“I can’t tell you,” she said hopelessly.

The Saint’s mouth tightened.

“Very well,” he said. “On your own head be it. But remember my offer—it stays open till the very last moment.”

He rose, and found her hand clutching his wrist.

“Where are you going?” she asked frightenedly.

“To unlock that door, and find out what’s in this mysterious room,” said the Saint, a trifle grimly. “I Ji^think I told you that before,”

“You can’t. These locks are easy, but there’s a special lock on that door.”

“And right next door is an empty room, and there’s nobody else but myself on that side of the house. Also, there’s plenty of ivy, and it looks pretty strong to me. I don’t think the window will keep me waiting outside for long,”

He disengaged her hand, and stepped away a little so that she could not grab him again.

“I’ll lock your door when I go out,” he said.

He went out, and she had not tried to call him back. It was the work of a few moments only to relock the door from the outside, and then he stole across the corridor to the door of the room which he had marked down because of its window, which was separated by no more than a couple of yards from the window of the locked room.

The ivy, as he had guessed, was strong; and as he had said, there was no one but himself sleeping on that side of the house, so that the noise he made was of no consequence. Better still, the Professor, when fitting the special lock to the door of the mystery room, had clearly overlooked the possibilities that the ivy-covered walls presented to an active young man, and the catch of the window was not even secured.

Simon slid up the sash cautiously and slithered over the sill. Then he switched on his torch, and his jaw dropped.

The centre of the room was occupied by a rough wooden bench, and on this was set up a complicated arrangement of retorts, condensers, aspirators, and burners. They seemed to form a connected chain, as if they were intended for the distillation of some subtle chemical substance which was submitted to various processes of blending and refinement during the course of its passage through the length of the apparatus. The chain terminated in a heavy cylinder such as oxygen is supplied in.

Simon studied the arrangement attentively; but he was no chemist, and he could make nothing of it. In his cautious way, he decided not to touch any of the components, for he appreciated that any chemical process which had to be surrounded with so much secrecy might possibly be pregnant with considerable danger for the ignorant meddler, and the association of Bernhard Raxel with the mystery would not have encouraged anyone to imagine that all those elaborate precautions had been taken to protect the secret of the manufacture of some new kind of parlour fireworks to amuse the children. But the Saint did take the liberty of peering closely at the apparatus, and the result was somewhat startling—so startling that it was some time before he was in a condition to pass on to the examination of the rest of the room.

On another bench, against one wall, was a row of glass bottles, unlabelled, containing an assortment of crystals, powders, and liquids, none of which had an appearance with which the Saint was familiar.

This, then, was the secret. A comprehensive tour revealed nothing more, and Simon, his objective accomplished, prepared to go. He lighted a cigarette and hesitated over his departure for a few moments, but he could think of nothing that a longer stay might achieve, and presently he accepted the inevitable with a shrug. Yet that delay had certain consequences—he was so absorbed with his problem that he did not visualize those consequences that night.

He returned to his own room as stealthily as he had left it, but the house remained shrouded in unbroken silence. The Saint’s careful and expert examination had revealed a neat and inconspicuous burglar alarm attached to the door of the locked room. This, he had divined immediately, worked a buzzer under Raxel’s own pillow, and therefore Raxel would have no fear that the Saint would be able to make an attempt to discover his secret without automatically calling the attention of the whole house to his nocturnal prowling. In which comfortable belief Professor Bernhard Raxel was beautifully and completely wrong.

Simon climbed into bed, and for the first time in his life failed to fall asleep immediately. He wanted to know what sinister secret lay behind the mysterious laboratory in that house, and most of all he wanted to know why Betty Tregarth should spend most of her time there. Betty Tregarth wasn’t likely to be a willing associate of a man like the Professor —he was ready to swear to that. Was it possible that she had some special knowledge of chemistry, and had been blackmailed or coerced into assisting the Professor? … And then Simon Templar suddenly remembered the curious feeling that had come over him when he was peering at the apparatus in the locked room, and gasped aloud in a blinding blaze of understanding.

7

He was up early next morning, and the first thing he did was to go down to the village post office. He got a call through to London, to a friend who could help to answer some of the questions that were bubbling through his brain. And what he heard fascinated him.

It was on his way back to the Beacon that he suddenly recalled a detail of his delay the previous night, and therefore the immediate development failed to surprise him.

He had just finished breakfast when Raxel, Marring, and Crantor entered the dining room, and Simon saw at once from their bearing that they had already made an interesting discovery. Raxel came straight over to his table and the other two followed.