Send for the Saint (16 page)

Rockham’s office might have been — perhaps had been — designed to make men like Lembick and Cawber feel acutely ill at ease. A luxurious thick-piled carpet in a dark classical design blended perfectly with quietly decorous furniture — the Saint guessed eighteenth century. Against this restrained background, the effect of a huge shock-colour abstract on one wall was electrifying.

Without being too fanciful or pseudo-psychologically analytical, he mused, you could see that room as symbolising two poles of civilisation. On the one hand, culture; and on the other, violence, or naked power. And they met and clashed in that room just as they met and clashed in the man himself.

Rockham was clearly a very deliberate sophisticate. The cultivated exterior was like a hard but semi-transparent coat of varnish that did little to hide the man’s essential ruthlessness of purpose. Simon Templar had broken a lance with most of the available varieties of assorted villains in his time; and his highly attuned antennae for the type told him beyond doubt that Rockham was as formidable as any of the species.

“Take a seat,” Rockham said, ignoring his two standing subordinates. “A glass of port?”

“Very civil of you.”

Rockham got up from his leather-trimmed roll-top desk and strolled over to a corner cabinet. He was wearing a perfectly cut dove-grey lounge suit.

“Congratulations on the break-out,” he said as he poured the two drinks. “You certainly didn’t waste much time.”

“I didn’t much care for the diet. Or the view.”

Rockham’s big square jaw creased momentarily in a mirthless smile as he handed Simon a glass.

“You came straight here.”

It was a calm statement, containing neither surprise nor enquiry; yet somehow it demanded an answer.

“As soon as I could.” Simon decided that he could afford to temper Gascott’s unpleasanter style for the moment, and he consciously blunted the sharp edge of arrogance in his manner. “After all,” he said, “I have to “hide out somewhere. And you were right — I need the spondulicks. Three thousand a month I think you said.”

“Two.” Rockham corrected him impassively; but even the lower figure had a discernible stiffening effect on Lembick and Cawber, and the Saint could practically hear their hostility crackling like static in the air.

He made a sour face, and then permitted himself a grin.

“A pity,” he said wistfully. “Still, I suppose one must try to put up with life’s small inconveniences. Man was born to suffer, so they say.” He held the glass up to the light and twirled it approvingly by its elegant spirated stem. “Unusual shape for Waterford.”

“Specially designed for De Valera,” Rockham confided, looking gratified at the appreciation. “What do you make of the port ?”

Simon wafted the glass contemplatively back and forth beneath his nostrils for a moment, and then sipped and savoured it.

“Taylor twelve,” he pronounced. “Quite a favourite of mine, as it happens.”

There was a sudden hiss of pent-up exasperation from Lembick.

“Aye,” he scowled. “That’s all very fine. But d’ye know a weapon like you know that stuff?”

He dragged a pistol from his pocket and sent it spinning hard at the Saint, who caught it adroitly with his left hand, putting his drink down at the same moment with his right.

“Walther PPK, 7.65 millimetres,” he commented with professional detachment. “A good general-purpose weapon.”

He seemed hardly to look at the gun, yet in a few deft movements he had extracted the magazine and cleared the breech, and proceeded with further dismantling. As he stripped down the gun he sent the parts, beginning with the magazine, flying in quick succession at Lembick, who fielded them awkwardly.

“As I say, a nice little weapon,” the Saint rasped in conclusion, as he flipped the last piece — the heavy butt section — at Lembick’s midriff.

Rockham smiled broadly at the exhibition.

“Satisfied, Lembick?”

“We’ll see,” grunted the lowering Lembick. “we’ll see how he makes out in training.”

To Simon, Rockham said: “I’m impressed with you, Gascott. But don’t get any ideas above your present station. You’ll be watched closely. You won’t be permitted to leave the premises unaccompanied — not until I’m personally satisfied of your bona fides.”

“Confined to barracks?” Simon shrugged unconcernedly. “Suits me, for the time being. I’m not exactly anxious to go on public parade just at the moment.”

The other nodded, toying thoughtfully with his glass.

“I think there’s a future for you in The Squad. I hope you’ll think so too, when you’ve seen how we operate. Tomorrow you’ll be shown our facilities.”

“For the … cultivation of physical efficiency?” The Saint’s infinitesimal lift of one interrogative eyebrow was only faintly mocking. Rockham chuckled.

“A neat cover, don’t you think?”

“Good enough to explain anything a visiting meter-reader might see, I guess.”

“Exactly. We have to let a few outsiders in. Deliveries, phone repairs, and so forth. The physical efficiency idea covers the lot: the fit men, the gunshots — we’ve got a pistol and a rifle range — the exercises, of one kind and another.”

Simon looked into the blue eyes that were almost transparently pale; and he saw that those eyes burned with a kind of cold fire of pride, and he knew then that John Rockham was separated by only a hair’s breadth from madness.

“What about passers-by who see your sign,” he inquired, “and feel an overpowering urge to get themselves physically efficient?”

“I simply turn them away,” Rockham said, smiling and spreading his hands in a gesture that conveys how effortlessly he was able to put prospective customers off. “We’re always full. We’re a very exclusive establishment.”

And Rockham laughed, and the Saint knew that there was no more mirth in that laugh than in the hollow one he himself had perfected for his role.

The laugh, the smile, faded. Rockham’s manner became instantly brisk and businesslike.

“We’re flexibly organised here,” he said. “No fixed ranks — except mine as C-in-C. I assign authority for the duration of each individual mission. Lembick and Cawber here, as you’ll have gathered, have special duties in training and generally keeping an eye on new recruits. They have my authority to drive you, and drive you hard.” Rockham stood up. “I’ll admit there have been one or two unfortunate errors of recruitment — men who couldn’t make the grade. It’s a pity about them. We’ve no room for slackers or failures in The Squad.” He shook Simon by the hand. “But somehow I don’t expect you to be among them. I expect great things of you, Gascott.” To Lembick and Cawber he said: “Show him his room.” And as they followed the Saint through the door, he added quietly: “You’ve got a week to bring him up to scratch.”

7
The Saint woke up from his light doze at one o’clock in the morning with that infallible cat-like faculty for instant alertness which had served him so well in his hazardous career.

But this time it was not that his ever-vigilant hearing had roused him in response to some faint intrusion of real sound. It was simply that his mental alarm clock, a wholly inaudible and discreet device which he had set a couple of hours earlier, had gone off exactly as intended. He had told it to wake him at one; and it had done so.

Timing was of some importance if he was to avoid risking an encounter with the guard patrols. Their concern was chiefly with any unauthorised visitors, but his own position if he were intercepted would be no more healthy.

The estate was roughly rectangular, with the conglomeration of buildings somewhat west of centre and with the main gate set in the middle of the long south wall. From the window of his room he could see the two man inner patrol during part of their continuous circuit around the buildings, and he knew that there was a similar patrol throughout the night on the much wider circuit just inside the wall. Pelton had mentioned guard dogs, but he had not yet seen any sign of them — perhaps they were kept in reserve, to be unleashed only in extreme emergency.

The three-storey block he was in stood a little apart from the monstrosity of a central building. It was a comparatively recent structure, built in the days of the college to house the privileged senior pupils in study-bedrooms. Simon’s was one of some fifty such rooms, identically small and opening identically off L-shaped corridors on each floor, along with the “usual offices”.

He was one floor up, and counted it a minor advantage that his room was next door to a “usual office”.

He got out of the narrow bed and arranged the clothing he had arrived with, and one of the two pillows, to make it look as though he might still be in it. He didn’t know how far Lembick and Cawber’s brief to keep an eye on him went, or whether it included making close checks in the middle of the night, but that was another chance he just had to take.

He put on the regulation denims, plimsolls, and black pullover he had been issued with earlier after his own things had been thoroughly searched, and went noiselessly into the corridor and into the bathroom on the other side, which overlooked the direction he wanted to take through the grounds. Outside its window was a convenient drainpipe, of obviously solid vintage, which combined with more ancient ivy to give him an easy ladder to the neglected flower bed below.

Approximately as a leopard glides through tangled jungle undergrowth with both speed and uncanny silence, so Simon Templar transferred himself from there to his chosen spot near the south-east corner of the wall. The analogy is only approximate, because admittedly he had no creeping lianas or other dense vegetative hindrances to contend with. Most of the estate was open land; though there were a few sparsely wooded areas and he had to pass through one of these in the course of his 25o-yard sortie.

Near the far edge of this spinney, he waited for two or three minutes till he heard the footsteps of the outer patrol as they turned to skirt the wall. They were on time to the minute; and if they kept to schedule it would be three-quarters of an hour before they came around again.

He emerged from the tenebrous dark just short of the section of fence, which thanks to his earlier preparatory work would hardly detain him at all. But first, after removing the piece of string with which he had replaced the bottom wire, he reached through and brought out the haversack from under the bush where had had hidden it, and took out a one-piece oversuit, which had been packed into a remarkably small space. He put it on. It was dark grey and made of a thin but tough canvas-like material, and it covered and protected every square inch of his clothing — and the leggings even terminated in overshoes, made out of extra thicknesses of the same tough material.

Then he crawled safely through the space he had previously created, under what had now become the lowest of the live wires.

Extracting his rope ladder from under his clothing, he succeeded this time in hooking it over the top of the wall at the first attempt. In a few seconds more, he landed lightly outside the wall and looked around. A few yards away, an unlit parked car faced him. He glided like a wraith towards it, keeping close in under the shadow of the wall until he was sure the car was Ruth Barnaby’s, and that it was Ruth Barnaby who was sitting behind the wheel.

He drummed a spirited tattoo on the roof and got in beside her.

“Doesn’t the romper suit make me look fetching?” he said. “I feel a bit like a truant from the nursery. Except that this playpen has twelve-foot walls, and nannies about as kindly and maternal and lovable as any rattlesnake with a sore tail.”

Faithful readers who have come to expect that the female lead will invariably be captivated by Simon Templar’s bantering charm and piratical good looks will now need to come to terms with harsh reality, which is that, incredible as it may seem, not every woman found the Saint irresistible. Just occasionally he encountered one who seemed peculiarly blind to his dazzling virtues, and almost deaf to his brilliant persiflage.

This might have been because of the mysterious chemistry of personality whereby two people, when mixed and shaken, sometimes precipitate an immediate curd of mutual antipathy. The Saint preferred to like people if he possibly could, but he had to admit that the psychic factor was real enough. Or it might be because the female in question was so besotted at the time with some other male that she was temporarily in a condition indistinguishable from imbecility. Simon Templar didn’t present the problem to himself in so many words, but he did notice.

Although he wasn’t aware of any actual antagonism on either side, it seemed like damned hard work to pierce through Ruth Barnaby’s professional singlemindedness to anything softer or lighter-hearted underneath.

“It does the job, though ?” she inquired dispassionately, indicating the oversuit.

“It does,” he said. “It keeps my clothes from getting dirty and scuffed or muddy on an outing like this and saves awkward questions about where I’ve been and what I’ve been doing.”

“I can tell Pelton that you’re well and truly installed, then?”

“Yes. Though I’ve nothing much to report as yet. But by the way, you never did explain how Nobbins has been reporting.”

“He didn’t — not till he became a trusty. Trusties are allowed odd days off. But that wasn’t till he’d been there a couple of weeks or so. And then he sent those reports you read.”

“And they weren’t too helpful. I suppose he wouldn’t have been up to climbing walls?”

“Neither physically nor psychologically,” she said. “He’s been scared stiff ever since he went in.”

“Then why did he go in?”

She shrugged.

“Pelton’s idea. Bert had been griping a bit about always being behind the scenes — you know, the poor grey anonymous little man. Pelton wanted someone else on the inside in a hurry. He didn’t want to risk sending in another front-line agent. The face just might have been recognised. And then this vacancy came up. Pelton found out that Rockham needed somebody to do his accounts, look after the men’s pay, keep records — all that sort of thing.”

“And Nobbins had the right qualifications?”

“For that, yes — he used to be in the Pay Corps. But for active service as an infiltrator, no — in my opinion.”