177150.fb2 The Saint Closes the Case - читать онлайн бесплатно полную версию книги . Страница 6

The Saint Closes the Case - читать онлайн бесплатно полную версию книги . Страница 6

3. How Simon Templar returned to Esher, and decided to go there again

This was on the 24th of June—about three weeks after the Saint's reply to the offer of a free pardon.

On the 25th, not a single morning paper gave more than an inconspicuous paragraph to the news which had filled the afternoon editions of the day before; and thereafter nothing more at all was said by the Press about the uninvited guests at Vargan's demonstration. Nor was there more than a passing reference to the special Cabinet meeting which followed.

The Saint, who now had only one thought day and night, saw in this unexpected reticence the hand of something dan­gerously like an official censorship, and Barney Malone, ap­pealed to, was so uncommunicative as to confirm the Saint in his forebodings.

To the Saint it seemed as if a strange tension had crept into the atmosphere of the season in London. This feeling was purely subjective, he knew; and yet he was unable to laugh it away. On one day he had walked through the streets in careless enjoyment of an air fresh and mild with the promise of summer, among people quickened and happy and alert; on the next day the clear skies had become heavy with the fear of an awful thunder, and a doomed generation went its way furtively and afraid.

"You ought to see Esher," he told Roger Conway. "A day away from your favourite bar would do you good,"

They drove down in a hired car; and there the Saint found further omens.

They lunched at the Bear, and afterwards walked over the Portsmouth Road. There were two men standing at the end of the lane in which Professor Vargan lived, and two men broke off their conversation abruptly as Conway and the Saint turned off the main road and strolled past them under the trees. Further down, a third man hung over the garden gate sucking a pipe.

Simon Templar led the way past the house without glancing at it, and continued his discourse on the morrow's probable runners; but a sixth sense told him that the eyes of the man at the gate followed them down the lane, as the eyes of the two men at the corner had done.

"Observe," he murmured, "how careful they are not to make any fuss. The last thing they want to do is to attract attention. Just quietly on the premises, that's what they are. But if we did anything suspicious we should find ourselves be­ing very quietly and carefully bounced towards the nearest clink. That's what we call Efficiency."

A couple of hundred yards further on, on the blind side of a convenient corner, the Saint stopped.

"Walk on for as long as it takes you to compose a limerick suitable for the kind of drawing-room to which you would never be admitted," he ordered. "And then walk back. I'll be here."

Conway obediently passed on, carrying in the tail of his eye a glimpse of the Saint sidling through a gap in the hedge into the fields on the right. Mr. Conway was no poet, but he accepted the Saint's suggestion, and toyed lazily with the lyrical possibilities of a young lady of Kent who whistled wherever she went. After wrestling for some minutes with the problem of bringing this masterpiece to a satisfactory conclusion, he gave it up and turned back; and the Saint returned through the hedge, a startlingly immaculate sight to be seen coming through a hedge, with a punctuality that suggested that his estimate of Mr. Conway's poetical talent was dreadfully accurate.

"For the first five holes I couldn't put down a single putt," said the Saint sadly, and he continued to describe an entirely imaginary round of golf until they were back on the main road and the watchers at the end of the lane were out of sight.

Then he came back to the point.

"I wanted to do some scouting round at the back of the house to see how sound the defences were. There was a sixteen-stone seraph in his shirtsleeves pretending to garden, and an­other little bit of fluff sitting in a deck chair under a tree read­ing a newspaper. Dear old Teal himself is probably sitting in the bathroom disguised as a clue. They aren't taking any more chances!"

"Meaning," said Conway, "that we shall either have to be very cunning or very violent."

"Something like that," said the Saint.

He was preoccupied and silent for the rest of the walk back to the Bear, turning over the proposition he had set himself to tackle.

He had cause to be—and yet the tackling of tough proposi­tions was nothing new to him. The fact of the ton or so of official majesty which lay between him and his immediate objective was not what bothered him; the Saint, had he chosen to turn his professional attention to the job, might easily have been middleweight champion of the world, and he had a poor opinion both of the speed and fighting science of police­men. In any case, as far as that obstacle went, he had a vast confidence in his own craft and ingenuity for circumventing mere massive force. Nor did the fact that he was meddling with the destiny of nations give him pause: he had once, in his quixotic adventuring, run a highly successful one-man revolution in South America, and could have been a fully ac­credited Excellency in a comic-opera uniform if he had chosen. But this problem, the immensity of it, the colossal forces that were involved, the millions of tragedies that might follow one slip in his enterprise . . . Something in the thought tightened tiny muscles around the Saint's jaw.

Fate was busy with him in those days.

They were running into Kingston at the modest pace which was all the hired car permitted, when a yellow sedan purred effortlessly past them. Before it cut into the line of traffic ahead, Conway had had indelibly imprinted upon his mem­ory the bestial, ape-like face that stared back at them through the rear window with the fixity of a carved image.

"Ain't he sweet?" murmured the Saint.

"A sheik," agreed Conway.

A smile twitched at Simon Templar's lips.

"Known to us," he said, "as Angel Face or Tiny Tim—at the option of the orator. The world knows him as Rayt Marius. He recognised me, and he's got the number of the car. He'll trace us through the garage we hired it from, and in twenty-four hours he'll have our names and addresses and Y.M.C.A. records. I can't help thinking that life's going to be very crowded for us in the near future."

And the next day the Saint was walking back to Brook Street towards midnight, in the company of Roger Conway, when he stopped suddenly and gazed up into the sky with a reflective air, as if he had thought of something that had eluded his concentration for some time.

"Argue with me, Beautiful," he pleaded. "Argue violently, and wave your hands about, and look as fierce as your angelic dial will let you. But don't raise your voice."

They walked the few remaining yards to the door of the Saint's apartment with every appearance of angry dissension. Mr. Conway, keeping his voice low as directed, expatiated on the failings of the Ford car with impassioned eloquence. The Saint answered, with aggressive gesticulations:

"A small disease in a pot hat has been following me half the day. He's a dozen yards behind us now. I want to get hold of him, but if we chase him he'll run away. He's certain to be coming up now to try and overhear the quarrel and find out what it's about. If we start a fight we should draw him within range. Then you'll grab him while I get the front door open."

"The back axle——" snarled Mr.Conway.

They were now opposite the Saint's house; and the Saint halted and turned abruptly, placed his hand in the middle of Conway's chest, and pushed.

Conway recovered his balance and let fly. The Saint took the blow on his shoulder, and reeled back convincingly. Then he came whaling in and hit Mr. Conway on the jaw with great gentleness. Mr. Conway retaliated by banging the air two inches from the Saint's nose.

In the uncertain light it looked a most furious battle; and the Saint was satisfied to see Pot Hat sneaking up along the area railings only a few paces away, an interested spectator.

"Right behind you," said the Saint softly. "Stagger back four steps when I slosh you."

He applied his fist caressingly to Conway's solar plexus, and broke away without waiting to see the result; but he knew that his lieutenant was well trained. Simon had just time to find his key and open the front door. A second later he was closing the door again behind Conway and his burden.

"Neat work," drawled the Saint approvingly. "Up the stairs with the little darling, Roger."

As the Saint led the way into the sitting-room, Conway put Pot Hat down and removed his hand from the little man's mouth.

"Hush!" said Conway in a shocked voice, and covered his ears.

The Saint was peering down through the curtains.

"I don't think anyone saw us," he said. "We're in luck. If we'd planned it we might have had to wait years before we found Brook Street bare of souls."

He came back from the window and stood over their pri­soner, who was still shaking his fist under Conway's nose and burbling blasphemously.

"That'll be all for you, sweetheart," remarked the Saint frostily. "Run through his pockets, Roger."

"When I find a pleeceman," began Pot Hat quiveringly.

"Or when a policeman finds what's left of you," murmured Simon pleasantly. "Yes?"

But the search revealed nothing more interesting than three new five-pound notes—a fortune which such a seedy-looking little man would never have been suspected of possessing.

"So it will have to be the third degree," said the Saint mildly, and carefully closed both windows.

He came back with his hands in his pockets and a very Saintly look in his eyes.

"Do you talk, Rat Face?" he asked.

"Wotcher mean—talk? Yer big bullies——"

"Talk," repeated the Saint patiently. "Open your mouth, and emit sounds which you fondly believe to be English. You've been tailing me all day, and I don't like it."

"Wotcher mean?" demanded the little man again, indig­nantly. "Tailing yer?"

The Saint signed, and took the lapels of the little man's coat in his two hands. For half a hectic minute he bounced and shook the little man like a terrier shaking a rat.

"Talk," said the Saint monotonously.

But Pot Hat opened his mouth for something that could only have been either a swear or a scream; and the Saint dis­approved of both. He tapped the little man briskly in the stomach, and he never knew which of the two possibilities had been the little man's intention, for whichever it was died in a choking gurgle. Then the Saint took hold of him again.

It was certainly very like bullying, but Simon Templar was not feeling sentimental. He had to do it, and he did it with cold efficiency. It lasted five minutes.

"Talk," said the Saint again, at the end of the five minutes; and the blubbering sleuth said he would talk.

Simon took him by the scruff of his neck and dropped him into a chair like a sack of peanuts.

The story, however, was not very helpful.

"I dunno wot 'is name is. I met 'im six months ago in a pub off Oxford Street, an' 'e gave me a job to do. I've worked for 'im on an' off ever since—followin' people an' findin' out things about 'em. 'E allus paid well, an' there wasn't no risk——"

"Not till you met me," said the Saint. "How do you keep in touch with him if he hasn't told you his name?"

"When 'e wants me, 'e writes to me, an' I meet 'im in a pub somewhere, an' 'e tells me wot I've got to do. Then I let 'im know wot's 'appening by telephone. I got 'is number."

"Which is?"

"Westminster double-nine double-nine."

"Thanks," said the Saint. "Good-looking man, isn't he?"

"Not 'arf! Fair gives me the creeps, 'e does. Fust time I sore 'im——"

The Saint shouldered himself off the mantelpiece and reached for the cigarette-box.

"Go home while the goin's good, Rat Face," he said. "You don't interest us any more. Door, Roger."

" 'Ere," whined Pot Hat, "I got a wife an' four children——"

"That," said the Saint gently, "must be frightfully bad luck on them. Give them my love, won't you?"

"I bin assaulted. Supposin' I went to a pleeceman——"

The Saint fixed him with a clear blue stare.

"You can either walk down the stairs," he remarked dispassionately, "or you can be kicked down by the gentleman who carried you up. Take your choice. But if you want any compensation for the grilling you've had, you'd better apply to your handsome friend for it. Tell him we tortured you with hot irons and couldn't make you open your mouth. He might believe you—though I shouldn't bet on it. And if you feel like calling a policeman, you'll find one just up the road. I know him quite well, and I'm sure he'd be interested to hear what you've got to say. Good-night."

"Callin' yerselves gentlemen!" sneered the sleuth viciously."You——"

"Get out," said the Saint quietly.

He was lighting his cigarette, and he did not even look up, but the next thing he heard was the closing of the door.

From the window he watched the man slouching up the street. He was at the telephone when Conway returned from supervising the departure, and he smiled lazily at his favourite lieutenant's question.

"Yes, I'm just going to give Tiny Tim my love. . . . Hullo —are you Westminster double-nine double-nine? . . . Splendid. How's life, Angel Face?"

"Who is that?" demanded the other end of the line.

"Simon Templar," said the Saint.  "You may have heard of me. I believe we—er—ran into each other recently." He grinned at the stifled exclamation that came faintly over the wire. "Yes, I suppose it is a pleasant surprise. Quite over­whelming. . . . The fact is, I've just had to give one of your amateur detectives a rough five minutes. He's walking home. . The next friend of yours I find walking on my shadow will be removed in an ambulance. That's a tip from the stable. Pleasant dreams, old dear!"

He hung up the receiver without waiting for a reply. Then he was speaking to Inquiry.

"Can you give me the name and address of Westminster double-nine double-nine? . . . what's that? . . . Well, is there no way of finding out? . . . Yes, I know that; but there are reasons why I can't ring up and ask. Fact is, my wife eloped yesterday with the plumber, and she said if I really wanted her back I could ring her up at that number; but one of the bathtaps is dripping, and . . . Oh, all right. Thanks very much. Love to the supervisors."

He put down the instrument and turned to shrug at Conway's interrogatively raised eyebrows.

" 'I'm sorry—we are not permitted to give subscribers' names and addresses,' " he mimicked. "I knew it, but it was worth trying. Not that it matters much."

"You might," suggested Conway, "have tried the directory."

"Of course. Knowing that Marius doesn't live in England, and that therefore Westminster double-nine  double-nine is unlikely to be in his name——Oh, of course."

Conway grimaced.

"Right. Then we sit down and try to think out what Tiny Tim'll do next."

"Nope," contradicted the Saint cheerfully. "We know that one. It'll either be prussic acid in the milk to-morrow morn­ing, or a snap shot from a passing car next time I walk out of the front door. We can put our shirts on that, and sit tight and wait for the dividends. But suppose we didn't wait. . . ." The emphatic briskness of his first words had trailed away while he was speaking into the gentle dreamy intonation that Conway knew of old. It was the sign that the Saint's thoughts had raced miles ahead of his tongue, and he was only me­chanically completing a speech that had long since become unimportant.

Then for a little while he was silent, with his cigarette slanting up between his lips, and a kind of crouching immobility about his lean body, and a dancing blue light of recklessness kindling in his eyes. For a moment he was as still and taut as a leopard gathering itself for a spring. Then he relaxed, straightening, and smiled; and his right arm went out in one of those magnificently romantic gestures that only the Saint could make with such a superb lack of affectation.

"But why should we wait?" he challenged.

"Why, indeed?" echoed Conway vaguely. "But——"

Simon Templar was not listening. He was already back at the telephone, calling up Norman Kent.

"Get out your car, fill her up with gas, and come right round to Brook Street. And pack a gun. This is going to be a wild night!"

A few minutes later he was through to his bungalow at Maidenhead—to which, by the grace of all the Saint's gods, he had sent his man down only that very day to prepare the place for a summer tenancy that was never to materialise as Simon Templar had planned it.

"That you, Orace? . . . Good. I just phoned up to let you know that Mr. Kent will be arriving in the small hours with a visitor, I want you to get the cellar ready for him—for the visitor, I mean. Got me?"

"Yessir," said Orace unemotionally, and the Saint rang off.

There was only one Orace—late sergeant of Marines, and Simon Templar's most devoted servant. If Simon had said that the visitor would be a kidnapped President of the United States, Orace would still have answered no more than that gruff, unemotional "Yessir!"—and carried on according to his orders.

Said Roger Conway, climbing out of his chair and squashing his cigarette end into an ash-tray: "The idea being——"

"If we leave it any longer one of two things will happen. Either (a) Vargan will give his secret away to the Govern­ment experts, or (b) Marius will pinch it—or Vargan—or both. And then we'd be dished for ever. We've only got a chance for so long as Vargan is the one man in the wide world who carries that invention of the devil under his hat. And every hour we wait gives Tiny Tim a chance to get in before us!"

Conway frowned at a photograph of Patricia Holm on the mantelpiece. Then he nodded at it.

"Where is she?"

"Spending a couple of days in Devonshire with the Man­nerings. The coast's dead clear. I'm glad to have her out of it. She's due back to-morrow evening, which is just right for us. We take Vargan to Maidenhead to-night, sleep off our honest weariness to-morrow, and toddle back in time to meet her. Then we all go down to the bungalow—and we're sitting pretty. How's that?"

Conway nodded again slowly. He was still frowning, as if there was something troubling the back of his mind.

Presently it came out.

"I never was the bright boy of the class," he said, "but I'd like one thing plain. We agree that Vargan, on behalf of cer­tain financial interests, is out to start a war. If he brings it off we shall be in the thick of it. We always are. The poor blessed Britisher gets roped into everybody else's squabbles. . . . Well, we certainly don't want Vargan's bit of frightfulness used against us, but mightn't it save a lot of trouble if we could use it ourselves?"

The Saint shook his head.

"If Marius doesn't get Vargan," he said, "I don't think the war will come off. At least, we'll have said check to it—and a whole heap may happen before he can get the show started again. And as for using it ourselves—— No, Roger, I don't think so. We've argued that already. It wouldn't be kept to ourselves. And even if it could be—do you know, Roger?—I still think the world would be a little better and cleaner with­out it. There are foul things enough in the armoury without that. And I say that it shall not be. . . ."

Conway looked at him steadily for some seconds.

Then he said: "So Vargan will take a trip to Maidenhead. You won't kill him to-night?"

"Not unless it's forced on me," said the Saint quietly. "I've thought it out. I don't know how much hope there is of appealing to his humanity, but as long as that hope exists, he's got a right to live. What the hope is, is what we've got to find out. But if I find that he won't listen——"

"Quite."

The Saint gave the same explanation to the third musketeer when Norman Kent arrived ten minutes later, and Nor­man's reply was only a little less terse than Roger Conway's had been.

"We may have to do it," he said.

His dark face was even graver than usual, and he spoke very quietly, for although Norman Kent had once sent a bad man to his death, he was the only one of the three who had never seen a man die.