Follow the Saint (27 page)

Simon had
not walked very far down Greenleaf Road when
that fact was brought
home to him. Greenleaf Road pos
sessed no street lighting to make navigation
easier. It was
bordered
by hedges of varying heights and densities, behind
which lighted windows could sometimes be seen and some
times not. At intervals, the hedges yawned into
gaps from
which ran well-kept drives
and things that looked like cart-tracks in about equal proportions. Some of the
openings had
gates, and some hadn’t. Some of the gates had names painted
on them; and on those which had, the paint
varied in anti
quity from shining
newness to a state of weatherbeaten
decomposition
which made any name that had ever been
there completely illegible. When
the Saint realized that they
had already
passed at least a dozen anonymous entrances, any
one of which might have led to the threshold of Mr Hogsbotham’s
Snuggery, he stopped walking and spoke elo
quently on the subject of town planning for a full
minute
without raising his voice.

He could
have gone on for longer than that, warming to
his subject as he
developed the theme; but farther down the road the wobbling light of a lone
bicycle blinked into view,
and he stepped out from the side of the road
as it came
abreast of them and kept his hat down over his eyes and
his
face averted from the light while he asked the rider if he
knew the
home of Hogsbotham.

“Yes,
sir, it’s the fourth ‘ouse on yer right the way yer
goin’. Yer can’t miss it.” said the
wanderer cheerfully, with a
native’s slightly
patronizing simplicity, and rode on.

The Saint
paused to light a cigarette, and resumed his
stride. The lines of
his face dimly illumined in the glow of smouldering tobacco were sharp with
half humorous anticipation.

“Hogsbotham
may be in London investigating some more
nightclubs,” he
said. “But you’d better get a handkerchief
tied round your neck
so you can pull it up over your dial—
just in case. We don’t want to be
recognized, because it would
worry Claud Eustace Teal, and he’s
busy.”

He was
counting the breaks in the hedges as he walked.
He counted three, and
stopped at the fourth. A gate that
could have closed it stood open, and he
turned his pocket flashlight on it cautiously. It was one of the weatherbeaten
kind, and the words that had once been painted on it were
practically
indecipherable, but they looked vaguely as if they
might once had stood
for ‘The Snuggery’.

Simon killed his torch after
that brief glimpse. He dropped
his cigarette
and trod it out under his foot.

“We
seem to have arrived,” he said. “Try not to make too
much noise, Hoppy, because
maybe Hogsbotham isn’t deaf.”

He drifted
on up the drive as if his shoes had been soled
with cotton wool. Following behind him, Mr
Uniatz’s efforts to lighten his tread successfully reduced the total din of
their
advance to something less than would
have been made by a
small herd of
buffalo; but Simon knew that the average
citizen’s sense of hearing is mercifully unselective. His own silent
movements were more the result of habit than of any
conscious care.

The drive
curved around a dense mass of laurels, above
which the symmetrical
spires of cypress silhouetted against
the dark sky concealed the house until it loomed suddenly
in
front of him as if it had risen from the
ground. The angles of
its roof-line cut a serrated pattern out of the
gauzy backcloth
of half-hearted stars hung
behind it; the rest of the building
below that angled line was merely a
mass of solid blackness
in which one or two
knife edges of yellow light gleaming
between drawn curtains seemed to be
suspended disjointedly
in space. But they
came from ground-floor windows, and he concluded that Ebenezer Hogsbotham was
at home.

He did not
decide that Mr Hogsbotham was not only at
home, but at home with
visitors, until he nearly walked into a black closed car parked in the
driveway. The car’s lights
were out, and he was so intent on trying to
establish the
topography of the lighted windows that the dull sheen of
its
coachwork barely caught his eye in time for him to check
himself.
He steered Hoppy round it, and wondered what
sort of guests a man
with the name and temperament of
Ebenezer Hogsbotham would be likely to
entertain.

And then,
inside the house, a radio or gramophone began
to play.

It occurred
to Simon that he might have been unneces
sarily pessimistic in
suggesting that Mr Hogsbotham might not be deaf. From the muffled quality of
the noise which
reached
him, it was obvious that the windows of the room in
which the instrument was functioning were tightly closed; but even with
that obstruction, the volume of sound which boomed out into the night was
startling in its quantity. The
opus
under execution was the ‘Ride of the Valkyries’, which
is admittedly not rated among the most ethereal
melodies in
the musical
pharmacopoeia; but even so, it was being pro
duced with a vim which inside the room itself must have
been earsplitting. It roared out in a stunning
fortissimo that
made the Saint put
his heels back on the ground and disdain
even to moderate his voice.

“This
is easy,” he said. “We’ll just batter the door down and walk
in.”

He was not
quite as blatant as that, but very nearly. He
was careful enough to
circle the house to the back door; and
whether he would
actually have battered it down remained
an unanswered
question, for he had no need to use any
violence on it at
all. It opened when he touched the handle,
and he stepped in as easily as he had
entered the garden.

Perhaps it
was at that point that he first realized that the
unplanned embryo of his adventure was
taking a twist which
he had never expected of
it. It was difficult to pin down the
exact
moment of mutation, because it gathered force from a
series of shocks
that superimposed themselves on him with a
speed
that made the separate phases of the change seem
somewhat blurred. And
the first two or three of those shocks
chased
each other into his consciousness directly that un
latched back door swung inwards under the pressure
of his
hand.

The very
fact that the door opened so easily to his explor
ing touch may have
been one of them; but he could take
that in his stride. Many householders
were inclined to be absentminded about the uses of locks and bolts. But the
following
blows were harder to swallow. The door opened
to give him a clear
view of the kitchen and that was when the
rapid sequence of
impacts began to make an impression on his powers of absorption.

To put it
bluntly, which is about the only way anything of
that kind could be
put, the door opened to give him a full
view of what appeared
to be quite a personable young woman
tied to a chair.

There was a
subsidiary shock in the realization that she
appeared to be
personable. Without giving any thought to
the subject, Simon
had never expected Mr Hogsbotham to
have a servant who was personable. He
had automatically credited him with a housekeeper who had stringy
mouse-coloured hair, a long nose inclined to redness, and a forbidding lipless
mouth, a harridan in tightlaced corsets whose
egregiously obvious
virtue would suffice to strangle any gossip about Mr Hogsbotham’s bachelor
menage—Mr
Hogsbotham had to be a bachelor, because it was not plaus
ible that
any woman, unless moved by a passion which a man
of Mr Hogsbotham’s desiccated sanctity
could never hope to
inspire, would consent to
adopt a name like Mrs Hogsbotham. The girl in the chair appeared to be
moderately
young, moderately
well-shaped, and moderately inoffensive
to look at; although the dishcloth which was knotted across her mouth as
a gag made the last quality a little difficult to
estimate. Yet she wore a neat housemaid’s uniform,
and
therefore she presumably belonged
to Mr Hogsbotham’s
domestic staff.

That also
could be assimilated—with a slightly greater
effort. It was her
predicament that finally overtaxed his
swallowing reflexes.
It was possible that there might be some
self-abnegating soul
in the British Isles who was willing to
visit with Mr
Hogsbotham; it was possible that Mr Hogsbotham
might be deaf; it
was possible that he might be care
less about locking his back door; it
was possible, even, that
he might employ a servant who didn’t look
like the twin
sister of a Gorgon; but if he left her tied up and gagged
in
the kitchen while he entertained his guests with ear-shattering
excerpts
from Wagner, there was something irregular going
on under his
sanctimonious roof which Simon Templar wanted to know more about.

He stood
staring into the maid’s dilated eyes while a
galaxy of fantastic
queries and surmises skittered across his
brain like the grand
finale of a firework display. For one long
moment he couldn’t
have moved or spoken if there had been
a million-dollar bonus
for it.

Mr Uniatz
was the one who broke the silence, if any state
of affairs that was so numbingly blanketed
by the magnified
blast of a symphony
orchestra could properly be called a silence. He shifted his feet, and his
voice grated conspiratorially
in the
Saint’s ear.

“Is
dis de old bag, boss?” he inquired with sepulchral sangfroid; and the
interruption brought Simon’s reeling
imagination back to earth.

“What
old bag?” he demanded blankly.

“De
aunt of Patricia’s,” said Mr Uniatz, no less blank at
even being
asked such a question, “who we are goin’ to
bump off.”

The Saint
took a firmer grip of material things.

“Does
she look like an old bag ?” he retorted.

Hoppy
inspected the exhibit again, dispassionately.

“No,”
he admitted. He seemed mystified. Then a solution
dawned dazzlingly
upon him. “Maybe she has her face lifted,
boss,” he
suggested luminously.

“Or
maybe she isn’t anybody’s aunt,” Simon pointed out.

This kind
of extravagant speculation was too much for
Mr Uniatz. He was
unable to gape effectively on account of
the handkerchief over
his mouth,, but the exposed area
between the bridge of his nose and the brim of his hat hinted
that the rest of his face was gaping.

“And
maybe we’ve run into something,” said the Saint.

The rest
of his mind was paying no attention to Hoppy’s
problems. He was not
even taking much notice of the maid’s
panic-stricken eyes as they widened
still further in mute
terror at the conversation that was passing over her head. He
was listening intently to the music that still
racketed strid
ently in his eardrums,
three times louder now that he was
inside
the house. There had been a time in the history of his multitudinous interests
when he had had a spell of devotion
to grand opera, and his ears were as
analytically sensitive as
those of a trained
musician. And he was realizing, with a melodramatic suddenness that prickled
the hairs on the nape
of his neck,
that the multisonous shrillness of the ‘Ride of
the Valkyries’ had twice been mingled with a brief high-
pitched shriek that Wagner had never written into
the score.

His
fingers closed for an instant on Hoppy’s arm.

“Stay
here a minute,” he said.

He went on
past the trussed housemaid, out of the door
on the far side of
the kitchen. The screeching fanfares of
music battered at him
with redoubled savagery as he opened
the door and emerged into the cramped
over-furnished hall
beyond it. Aside from its clutter of fretwork
mirror-mount
ings, spindly umbrella stands and etceteras, and vapid
Victorian chromos, it contained only the lower end of a
narrow staircase and three
other doors, one of which was the
front
entrance. Simon had subconsciously observed a serving
hatch in the wall on his left as he opened the
kitchen door,
and on that evidence
he automatically attributed the left-hand
door in the hallway to the dining-room. He moved towards
the
right-hand door. And as he reached it the music stopped,
in the middle of a bar, as if it had been sheared
off with a
knife, leaving the whole house stunned with stillness.