The Saint in Action (16 page)

The stony earnestness of her face cut him off.

“This is serious,” she said. “Can’t you see that? If the others had had their way you wouldn’t be here now at all. If you’d been anything else but what you are you wouldn’t be here. But they’ve heard of you, and so it doesn’t seem so easy to get rid of you in the obvious way. That’s why I’m here to talk to you. If you’ll leave us alone it ‘11 be worth a hundred pounds a week to you, and you can draw the first hundred pounds this evening.”

“That’s interesting,” said the Saint thoughtfully. “And where are these hundred travel tickets?”

“There ‘11 be a man waiting in a car with a GB plate at the crossroads in East Lulworth at half past ten. He’ll be able to talk to you if you want to discuss it.”

The Saint took her arm.

“Let’s discuss it now,” he suggested. “There’s some very good beer inside–-“

“I can’t.” She glanced a little to his left. “That other car’s waiting for me—the one that just arrived. The man who brought it has gone out at the back of the pub, and he’s only waiting a little way up the road to see that you don’t keep me. It wouldn’t be very sensible of you to try because he can see us from where he is, and if I don’t pick him up at once there ‘11 be trouble.” Her hand rested on his sleeve for a moment as she disengaged herself. “Why don’t you go to Lulworth? It wouldn’t hurt you, and it ‘d be so much easier. After all, what are you doing this for?”

“I might ask what you’re doing it for.”

“Mostly for fun. And from what they’ve told me about you, you might just as easily have been on our side. It doesn’t do anyone any harm–-“

The Saint’s smile was as bright as an arctic noon.

“In fact,” he said, “you’re beginning to make me believe that it really did Pargo a lot of good.”

She shrugged.

“You wouldn’t have expected us to keep him after we knew he was selling us out to you, would you ?” she asked, and the casual way she said it almost took the Saint’s breath away.

“Of course not,” he answered after a pause in which his brain whirled stupidly.

The dusk had been deepening very quickly, so that he could not be quite sure of the expression in her eyes as she looked up at him.

“Talk it over with your friends,” she said in a quick low voice. “Try to go to Lulworth. I don’t want anything else to happen… . Good-bye. Here’s the key of your car.”

Her arm moved, and something tinkled along the road. As his eyes automatically turned to try and follow it she slipped aside and was out of his reach. The door of the black sedan slammed, its lights went on, and it rushed smoothly past him with the wave of a white glove. By the time he had found his own ignition key in the gloom where she had thrown it he knew that it was too late to think of trying to follow her.

The Saint’s mind was working under pressure as he waited for Peter and Hoppy to join him at the corner of the inn. There was something screwy about that interview—something that made him feel as if part of the foundations of his grasp of the case were slipping away from under him. But for the present his thoughts were too chaotic and nebulous to share with anyone else.

“We’ve got a date to be shot up at East Lulworth at half past ten,” he said cheerfully and gave them a literal account of the conversation.

“They’re making you travel a bit before they kill you,” said Peter. “Are you going on with this mad idea of yours?”

“It’s the only thing to do if we’re sticking to our plan of campaign. We’re fish on the rise tonight, and we’ll go on rising until we get a line if it–-“

He broke off with his hand whipping instinctively to his pocket again as a bicycle whirred out of the shadows towards them at racing speed. The brakes grated as it shot by, and a man almost threw himself off the machine and turned back towards them. A moment later the Saint saw that it was Jopley.

“Thank Gawd I caught yer,” he gasped. “I was afride it ‘ud be too late. Yer mustn’t go ter Lulworth tonight!”

“That’s a pity,” said the Saint tranquilly. “But I just made a date to go there.”

“Yer carn’t do it, sir! They’ll be wytin’ for yer wiv a machine gun. I ‘eard ‘im givin’ the orders an’ ‘ow the Jidy was ter meet yer ‘ere an’ tell yer the time an’ everythink–-“

Simon became suddenly alert.

“You heard who giving the orders?” he shot back.

“The boss ‘imself it was—‘e’s at Gad Cliff ‘Ouse naow!

IX

The saint’s LIGHTER flared in the darkness, catching the exultant glint in his eyes under impudently slanted brows. When the light went out and left only the glowworm point of his cigarette it was as if something vital and commanding had been abruptly snatched away, leaving an irreparable void; but out of the void his voice spoke with the gay lilt of approaching climax.

“That’s even better,” he said. “Then we don’t have to go to Lulworth.”

“You must be disappointed,” Peter said sympathetically. “After looking forward to being shot up with a machine gun–-“

“This is easier,” said the Saint. “This is the fish sneaking out of the river a little way downstream and wriggling along the bank to bite the fisherman in the pants. Peter, I have a feeling that this is going to be Comrade Lasser’s unlucky day.”

“It might just as well have been any other day,” Peter objected. “He isn’t any unknown quantity. He’s in the telephone book. Probably he’s in Who’s Who as well. You could find out everything about him and all his habits and choose your own time–-“

“You couldn’t choose any time like this! Just because he is supposed to be such a respectable citizen his pants would be a tough proposition to bite. Can you imagine us trying to hold him up in his own baronial halls or taking him for a ride from the Athenaeum Club ? Why, he could call on the whole of Scotland Yard, including Chief Inspector Teal, not to mention the Salvation Army and the Brigade of Guards, to rally round and look after him if we tried anything. But this is different. Now he isn’t a pillar of society and industry, surrounded by bishops and barons. He’s in bad company, with a machine-gun party waiting for us at East Lul-worth—and while he’s waiting for news from them he’s sitting up at Gad Cliff House on top of the biggest store of contraband that the revenue never set eyes on. We’ve got him with the goods on him, and this is where we take our chance !”

Peter Quentin shrugged.

“All right,” he said philosophically. “I’d just as soon take my chance at this house as take it with a machine gun. Lead on, damn you.”

Mr Uniatz cleared his throat, producing a sound like the eruption of a small volcano. The anxiety that was vexing his system could be felt even if it could not be seen. Ever a stickler for detail once he had assimilated it, Mr Uniatz felt that one important detail was being overlooked in the flood of ideas that had recently been passing over his head.

“Boss,” said Mr Uniatz lucidly, “de skoit.”

“What about her?” asked the Saint.

“She didn’t look to me like she had no bottles in her braseer.”

“She hadn’t.”

“Den why–-“

“We’re giving her a rest, Hoppy. This is another guy we’re going to see.”

“Oh, a guy,” said Mr Uniatz darkly. “Den how come he’s wearin’ a–-“

“He’s funny that way,” said the Saint hastily. “Now let’s have a look at the lie of the land.”

He led the way over to the Hirondel and spread out a large-scale ordnance map under the dashboard light. Gad Cliff House was plainly marked on it, standing in about three acres of ground bordered on one side by the cliff itself and approached by a narrow lane from the road that ran over the high ground parallel with the coast.

“That’s plain enough,” said the Saint after a brief examination of the plan. “But what arc the snags?”

He looked round and found Jopley’s face at his shoulder, seeming even more sullen and evil in the dim greenish glow of the light. The man shook his head.

“It’s ‘opeless, that’s wot the snag is,” he said bluntly. “There’s alarms orl rahnd the plice—them invisible rye things. A rabbit couldn’t get in wivout settin’ ‘em orf.”

“But you were able to get out.”

“Yus, I got aht.”

“Well, how did you manage it?”

“I said I ‘ad ter go aht an’ buy some fags.”

“I mean,” said the Saint with the almost supernatural self-control developed through long association with Hoppy Uniatz, “how did you get out through these alarms?”

Jopley said slowly: “I got aht fru the gates.”

“And how will you get back?”

“I’ll git back the sime wye. The man ooze watchin’ there, ‘e knows me, an’ ‘e phones up to the ‘ouse an’ ses ‘oo it is, an’ they ses it’s orl right, an’ ‘e opens the gates an’ lets me in.”

The Saint folded his map.

“Well,” he said deliberately, “suppose when this bird had the gates open to let you in, some other blokes who were waiting outside rushed the pair of you, laid him out and let themselves in—would anyone at the house know what had happened?”

The man thought it out laboriously.

“Not till ‘e came to an’ told ‘em.”

“Then–-“

“But yer carn’t git in that wye,” Jopley stated flatly. “Not letting me in for it, yer carn’t. Wot ‘appens when they find aht I done it? Jer fink I wanter git meself bashed over the ‘ead an’ frown to the muckin’ lobsters?”

Simon smiled.

“You don’t have to get thrown to the lobsters, Algernon,” he said. “I’m rather fond of lobsters, and I wouldn’t have that happen for anything. You don’t even have to get bashed over the head except in a friendly way for the sake of appearances. And ‘they’ don’t have to find out anything about it—although I don’t think they’ll be in a position to do you much damage anyway, when I’m through with them. But if it ‘11 make you any happier you don’t have to be compromised at all. You just happened to be there when we rushed in, and nobody could prove anything different. And it ‘d be worth a hundred pounds to you—on the nail.”

Jopley looked from one face to the other while the idea seemed to establish itself in his mind. For a few seconds the Saint was afraid that fear would still make him refuse and wondered what other arguments would carry conviction. In mentioning a hundred pounds he had gone to the limits of bribery, and it was more or less an accident that he had as much money as that in his pockets… . He held his breath until Jopley answered.

“When do I get this ‘undred quid?”

Simon opened his wallet and took out a folded wad of bank notes. Jopley took them in his thick fingers and glanced through them. His heavy, sulky eyes turned up again to the Saint’s face.

“I won’t do nothink else, mind. Yer can rush me along o’ the other bloke, an’ if yer can git inside that’s orl right. But I didn’t ‘ave nothink ter do wiv it, see?”

“We’ll take care of that,” said the Saint confidently. “All we want is to know when you’re going back, so that we can be ready. And it had better be soon because the time’s getting on. I want to be in that house before the machine-gun squad gets back from Lulworth.”

“I can start back naow,” said the other grudgingly. “If you drive there in yer car yer’ll ‘ave ten minutes before I git there on me bike.”

The Saint nodded.

“Okay,” he said peacefully. “Then let’s go!”

The steady drone of the Hirondel sank through his mind into silence as the long shining car swept up the winding road towards the crest of the downs. Instead of it, as if the words were being spoken again beside his ears, he heard Brenda Marlow’s clear unfaltering voice saying, “You wouldn’t have expected us to keep him after we knew he was selling us out to you, would you?” Lasser, Pargo, what had been done to Pargo, and what might be done at Gad Cliff House that night —those other thoughts were a vague jumble that was almost blotted out by the clearness of the words which he was hearing over again in memory. And he could feel again the chill of downright horror that had struck him like an icy wind when he heard them first.

Simon Templar had travelled too far in the iron highways of outlawry to be afflicted with empty sentimentality, and he had been flippant enough about death in his time—even about such ugly death as Pargo’s. But about such an utter unrelenting callousness, coming without the flicker of an eyelash from a face like the one he had seen when it was being spoken, there was a quality of epic inhumanity to which even the Saint could not adjust himself. It made her look like something beside which a blend of Messalina and Lucrezia Borgia would have seemed like a playful schoolgirl—and yet he could recall just as clearly the edged contempt in her voice, after she had overheard the lurid bluff he had encouraged Hoppy to put over on Jopley, when she said “We’ll leave things like that to gentlemen like Mr Templar.” The contradiction fretted at the smooth surface of his reasoning with maddening persistence, and yet the one and only apparent way of reconciling it raised another question which it was too late now to track down to its possible conclusions… .

A dull kind of tightness settled over the Saint’s nerves as he brought the Hirondel to a stop just beyond the opening of the lane that led to the entrance of Gad Cliff House. He switched off the engine and climbed out without any visible sign of it, but his right hand felt instinctively for the hilt of the sharp throwing knife strapped to his left forearm under the sleeve and found it with an odd sense of comfort. At other times when he had made mistakes that hidden and unlooked-for weapon had brought rescue out of defeat, and the touch of it reassured him. He turned to meet the others without a change in his blithe serenity.

“You know what you have to do, boys and girls,” he said. “Follow me, and let’s make it snappy.”

Mr Uniatz coughed, peering at him through the darkness with troubled intensity.

“I dunno, boss,” he said anxiously. “I never hoid of dis invisible rye. Is dat what de guy has in de bottles in his–-“

“Yes, that’s it,” said the Saint with magnificent presence of mind. “You go on an invisible jag on it and end up by seeing invisible pink elephants. It saves any amount of trouble. Now get hold of your Betsy and shut up, because there may be invisible ears.”

The lane ran between almost vertical grass banks topped by stiff thorn hedges, and it was so narrow that a car driven down it would have had no more than a few inches clearance on either side. The car that came up it from the road must have been driven by someone who knew his margins with the accuracy of long experience, for it swooped out of the night so swiftly and suddenly that the Saint’s hearing had scarcely made him aware of its approach when it was almost on top of them, its headlights turning the lane into a trench of blinding light. Simon had an instant of desperate indecision while he reckoned their chance of scaling the steep hedge-topped banks and realized that they could never do it in time; and then he wheeled to face the danger with his hand leaping to his gun, Hoppy’s movement was even quicker, but it was still too late. Another light sprang up dazzlingly from behind the gates just ahead of them: they were trapped between the two opposing broadsides of eye-searing brilliance and the two high walls of the lane as if they had been caught in a box, and Simon knew without any possibility of self-deception that they were helplessly at the mercy of the men behind the lights.