Send for the Saint (19 page)

“This evening,” he told her, “Rockham had some visitors. Chinese or Japs, I’d guess. Four of them. They got out of a black Daimler, registration number GRD 4711.”

Ruth delved into her bag for a notebook and jotted down the number. “Thanks. Pelton’ll be interested to hear that. Anything else?”

“Only that I didn’t see our friend Nobbins alias Argyle all day. He certainly wasn’t taking his meals.”

“He’s on leave again,” the girl said. “Just for a couple of days. He’s supposed to be having some dental work done. He reported to Pelton in London today.”

The Saint frowned.

“You mean he went to Pelton’s own office ? Isn’t that a bit crazy? Rockham’s thoroughness might easily stretch to having Argyle-Nobbins watched during his little off-duty jaunts.”

“It does,” she said matter-of-factly. “There’s a man on his tail the whole time. Bert’s had to shake him off to get to Pelton.”

The Saint looked at her from under dark brows that had arched into a questioning scepticism.

“And how does he manage that?”

She shrugged.

“There are various ways. You must know. Pelton gave him a few tips. There’s the flicks, for example — the movies. You can be through a side door and out while the watchdog’s eyes are still getting used to the dark.”

“Very clever,” said the Saint sardonically. “And if a suspect deliberately and cunningly sheds his tail, doesn’t that make him even more suspect?”

As he made his way silently back to his room, those words went oddly through his head again and again, like a refrain. “He reported to Pelton in London today.”

And David Pelton was supposed to be the guiding genius of a highly sensitive operation …

In the morning he was considerably less than astounded when Rockham sent for him and Lembick and Cawber after breakfast, and revealed that the so-called Mike Argyle was under heavy suspicion.

“He may or may not have joined us under false pretences,” Rockham said without emotion. “Some of the evidence points in that direction — and we can’t afford to give him the benefit of what doubt there may be. So, as of yesterday, although he doesn’t know it, Mister Argyle — ex-Captain Argyle, or whatever his real name may be — is no longer a member of The Squad. And as there is no such thing as an �-member of our organisation …”

That was when Simon Templar was assigned to the job of executing Albert Nobbins — and he was to do it that same afternoon.

“It’ll be your final test, and a decisive one,” Rockham told him, while the two trainers glowered. “A sort of end-of-course exam, if you like. And if you do a good job, there’s no limit to how far you can go with The Squad.”

Somehow the Saint had to get word to Pelton, who would presumably know how to contact Nobbins-Argyle. But the Saint hadn’t been given enough notice of his homicidal assignment to report this new development to Ruth Barnaby in the usual way.

On the schedule for the group of trainees that morning was the last and most punishing of their endurance tests — a six-mile cross-country race, with weighted packs, and with Cawber as whipper-in. When they were shown their course on the map beforehand, the Saint saw that they were due to pass right by the door of the Bull. And that might give him one slim chance of getting a warning to Ruth — and on to Nobbins.

When they set out there was a chill in the air that was exceptional even for that autumnal time of year. They were dressed in light track suits; yet Simon knew that before long, even in that amount of clothing, they would soon be steaming from their exertions. Each man carried thirty pounds of sand in the pack on his back. But the Saint knew that his own burden weighed substantially more. Cawber had seen to that, with a sly smirk of malevolence.

What he would have to do was to pull everything out of the bag — the bag labelled fitness and stamina and endurance and sheer determination — and despite the penalising, punishing weight on his back, he must take a lead that would leave the rest of the field out of sight by the time he reached the Bull.

Simon Templar ran as he had never run before.

Steadily, inexorably, he drew farther and farther ahead of the others. Only Cawber could have kept up with him, since Cawber was running without a pack — his leanings were towards sadism, not masochism. But Cawber stayed at the rear of the party where he could bully and chivvy the slowest with abuse or, if that failed, a well-aimed swipe of his swagger stick.

At first they followed a narrow rural lane, its yellowish unmetalled surface thumping to the tramp of their feet. Then after a little while they crossed a stile and struck off across rough pastureland; then up-hill; then down through a chill dankish coniferous wood; then out across more open land, boggier than before; then along another stretch of country road; then more fields, and woods, and hills …

Two miles ground past under his pumping legs. Three miles; three and a half. At which point he was fully a quarter of a mile ahead of the next man — so that he was only occasionally within sight of any of the runners when for a few moments no bends or other obstacles intervened.

He was drenched in sweat; his back felt as if not even a session on the rack would straighten it out again, and his muscles had the leaden stiffness that is close cousin to cramp. But still he ran, forcing himself on, straining for the last foot-second of speed; on, on, on, when every sinew and nerve and muscle and blood vessel in his pounding body cried for rest.

Now he was running along the road again — still keeping to the prescribed course, which was very roughly a circular tour of the district. And the pub which was his immediate goal was almost another mile along that winding road.

He heard a mechanical chugging sound behind him, and instinctively moved over to the grass verge, without slackening his pace, to let the tractor past. But then he looked, and saw that it was being driven by a girl. She had something of the summer sun in her hair, and of the mellower lights of autumn in her eyes; and not very optimistically, but because it was no time to let any straw drift by unclutched, he stuck out his thumb and made the directional gesture which is instantly understood anywhere in the world.

And the tractor stopped.

“There’s a pub,” he panted, climbing thankfully aboard, ” less than a mile along the road. How fast do you think you could get me there?”

She rose to the challenge and got him there in just under two minutes. Which gave him plenty of time to explain that fitness was a fine ideal, but working for it could generate a thirst which was more urgent — and barely enough time to coax her address out of her on the promise that he hoped one day to thank her properly.

He dropped the heavy rucksack in the pub forecourt and waved to her as the tractor chugged off. Then he made his way in by the back door, making enough noise about it to be sure of attracting Ruth out of the obviously busy bar.

She came through at once.

“The debonair Simon Gascott,” she observed, eyeing the sweat-soaked apparition; and with that minor departure from solemnity, just for once she cut a cheerier figure than the Saint himself.

“I’m in one hell of a rush,” he told her gently but rapidly. “If Cawber catches us here our covers’ll be royally blown. Like your friend Bert’s.”

In as few words as possible he told her that he would be shooting Nobbins in about four hours’ time, and told her the plan that he wanted relayed to Pelton.

She listened without any outward sign of alarm or surprise.

“It had to happen,” she said calmly when he had finished. “I knew his cover couldn’t last. It was shaky right from the beginning.”

The Saint nodded grimly. There were several things he might have said about Bert Nobbins’s involvement with The Squad, but this wasn’t the time or the place to say them.

He had been with Ruth only a very few minutes, and the clock that was running automatically in his head told him that the others must be getting close by now. He was already on his way through the back door when he heard the sound of a man running.

As he ducked back inside, the footsteps slowed down and stopped.

“Gascott!” he heard Cawber’s voice bellow. “Where in hell are you, Gascott?

10
Cawber must have run on ahead of the others, probably to make sure that the Saint wasn’t taking any short cuts. And he must have seen the rucksack outside the pub.

So he knew that the Saint had stopped there.

And he knew that the Saint should be somewhere around.

Of course, there was a simple and obvious line that the Saint could take — that he’d got so bored with running out ahead on his own that he’d decided to refresh himself in this oasis, which had suddenly popped providentially into view, while he waited for all the sluggardly rest of them to catch up with him. But somehow he didn’t think Cawber would buy that one.

At the very least, a suspicious mind would have something to start working on. And Cawber might even be bright enough to have a word with the customers who were just then in the bar, and discover that his track-suited quarry hadn’t been in there at all …

These thoughts flashed through Simon Templar’s mind in no more time than it took for the echoes of Cawber’s aggressively querulous shout to die away, and it was only another instant before the one possible alternative solution occurred to him — the one other possible way out, in the most literal sense.

He gripped the girl’s arm urgently.

“Ruth — I noticed a gent’s lavatory sign on an outside door. Now, is there a way I can get into it from here?”

“Of course,” she said. “There’s just the one gents’ loo for the place — the outside door is locked at night. You won’t need to go through the bar, either. I’ll show you.”

It took him a mere twenty seconds from Ruth’s last words to the time when he emerged at the side of the building, to be sighted by Cawber, who was just coming out of the entrance to the public bar, beside which Simon had parked his rucksack.

That the Saint was still performing in the interests of verisimilitude an action of the kind euphemistically known as ‘adjusting the dress’ was a corroborative refinement which must have helped to make his alibi look convincing enough to Cawber.

Especially as Simon said blandly: “When you gotta go, you gotta go. What the hell are you squawking about? Where did you think I was — up a tree?”

Cawber glared at him sullenly.

“You ain’t supposed to take the pack off till you get back.” Then with a note of grudging approval he added “But I guess you’re runnin’ good enough. I ain’t got no real complaint. Even if I don’t like you, personal.”

The Saint sighed.

“Cawber,” he said pleasantly, as he heaved the weighty rucksack up onto his back. “If you did likeme, personal, then I’d be worried.”

And he jogged off down the readjust as the first of the other runners came plodding into sight.

Thereafter he exerted himself only enough to finish a comfortable first, to have a waiting Lembick tick off his name on the list of runners.

“Get showered and into your civvies,” Lembick ordered, with venomous restraint. “You’ve still got a job to do. And God help you if you muff it.”

A job of a different kind.

When he shot Albert Nobbins that afternoon with so professional a detachment, the bullets were real. And Nobbin’s death looked horribly convincing, right down to the blood that seeped slowly through his coat in a widening stain as he lay face down by that lake.

All the Saint could do for Nobbins was to aim the shots as far from the most certainly lethal target points as he dared — and pray that no thousand-to-one combination of improbable circumstances had intervened to stop Pelton contacting the victim in time.

Because if they had, Albert Nobbins might be a goner for real.

Rockham, at any rate, was pleased with the effect, when he viewed the film that evening. The screen had been set up in his office and the curtains drawn, and Lembick and Cawber and the Saint were with him.

“You were a shade too far off when you fired,” he observed ruminatively after sitting through the entertainment for the second time. “But all the same, a very creditable performance. A good clean hit.

The Saint said: “Then I’ve passed the final test, have I?”

“With flying colours. And I’ve decided to assign a leading role to you in a major job we’ll be doing on Friday — the day after tomorrow … What’s your trouble, Lembick?” Rockham inquired silkily, as the Scot’s features twisted themselves into a resentful scowl.

Lembick was bursting with it.

“It’s just that Cawber and me — we’ve been talking, and we both feel the same about this” — he seemed to have difficulty stifling a pejorative strong enough to convey their dislike and distrust — “this new man.”

“This new man who thrashed you in your own gym — yes, Lembick, what about him ?”

“It’s not that — not the fight.” Lembick twisted his big hands together as if he wished he had them around the Saint’s neck. “But he’s — it’s his attitude.” Again he scowled and seemed to be groping for a word extreme enough to express his condemnation. “He’s too goddam flip! “

“He’s a good man,” said Rockham, suddenly hard and inflexible.

“Better than us?” demanded Lembick.

“A different type,” Rockham said flatly.

“We’ve been with you from the start,” Cawber said sulkily.

“And you’ll stay to the end.”

Lembick said : “We just don’t want him promoted over our heads.”

Rockham eyed them coldly.

“This is a military formation,” he snapped, “not a labour union.” Anger blazed for a moment in those near-transparent eyes. “Now get out, both of you. And take the cine gear.”

When the two truculent trainers had gone, Rockham poured port for himself and Simon from the crystal decanter in the corner cabinet.

He brought the drinks and said: “You have a taste for the good life, Gascott.”

“Who hasn’t?”

Rockham shrugged.

“Lembick, Cawber. They only work for the money. And the chance it gives them to boss and bully a number of subordinates that I supply.”

The Saint saw the likely drift of Rockham’s thought, and decided that his best course was to play up to him.