Send for the Saint (14 page)

“If you manage to get into this group,” she told him, “I’ll be your local contact down at Kyleham. That’s where they’re based. We’ll need to set up a communication system. You’ll be confined to camp for a while, till Rockham thinks you’re trustworthy enough to be let off the leash. I suppose you know about all that?”

Simon nodded, aware of the cool grey depths of her eyes.

“David did mention it,” he said, keeping his voice well down and maintaining the rasping Gascott tones.

Even though nobody could possibly have picked out what they were saying, it was conceivable that a sharp pair of ears would have registered a complete change in his voice quality and intonation.

The girl gave him a few details about the estate at Kyleham and then left, promising to come back the following week.

The second visitor arrived a couple of days later. Simon had never seen him before. He was a big wellgroomed man with a strong square face.

“Mr Gascott?” he said in a quiet cultured voice. “We haven’t met, but I’ve been reading about you in the newspapers. My name is Rockham — John Rockham.”

4
The Saint was completely and utterly taken aback. He simply hadn’t considered the possibility that Rockham might grab at the bait quite as early as that. Yet for all the reaction he showed, the name might have meant absolutely nothing to him.

Which, of course, was no less than Rockham would have expected it to mean to George Gascott.

That the Saint was able to slip naturally and without perceptible delay into the sort of response the real Gascott would have made, even though he had to conceal his excitement at such swift success for the stratagem that Pelton had arranged for him, was entirely to the credit of his acting abilities and to the hard work he had added to them.

“Who the hell are you?” he heard himself rasp at restrained volume, just as he had done with the girl. “I told them very distinctly that I could do without any blasted do-gooder namby-pamby professional visitors poking their sanctimonious snouts in.”

It gave him an eerie feeling to realise that already, at least as far as outward appearances went, he had all but shrugged himself into Gascott’s skin. But that feeling came as a mere fleeting background to the whirling of his brain. Neither he nor Pelton had given any close attention to the problem of how, after his escape, he was going to arrange to be “available” to Rockham. If necessary, in the end, he would simply have presented himself at The Squad’s base and played it by ear from then on. Rockham’s taking the initiative at this stage — before “Gascott” was actually in a position to be of any use to him — was something that needed thought, and for the moment his mind was racing like a motor out of gear as he tried to fit the new development into some kind of schema he could deal with.

One discomfiting result for the Saint was that he had been caught with half his boning up on the real Gascott’s military career still to be done. It was like being stopped in the middle of swotting for tomorrow’s exam and summoned to sit it at once; except that this particular test was a practical one that could all too easily, for him, come to resemble nothing so much as picking his way through a minefield …

Rockham said: “I’m no professional visitor” — for a moment the idea seemed to amuse him — “but I am a professional, and in a similar field to your own. I like what I’ve read about you. I think we’ve some interests in common.”

“I prefer women,” sneered the Saint — “sweetie!”

Rockham nodded.

“I’ve done some homework on you,” he said ambiguously. “But what I meant was that I want to offer you a job.”

Rockham had urbanely ignored the sneer and the facetious comment as though he simply hadn’t noticed them, but the Saint’s watchfulness hadn’t missed the tiny sparks of anger that flared up almost invisibly in Rockham’s pale blue eyes and then were snuffed out almost as soon as they had been ignited; and he knew then that there lay a temper to be reckoned with just beneath that calm and cultivated surface.

And the Saint laughed the cold metallic laugh he had copied with such uncanny accuracy from its original exponent.

“You’ve come to offer me a job, have you ? Well, that’s wonderful news! I suppose you’ve brought the rocks with you, that you want broken up? Or is it some private mailbags you’d like me to sew?”

Abruptly he dropped the bantering tone and spat out his next words with a bitter savagery, which was no less contemptuous for being restrained like the rest of the conversation to a level of decibels that insured against deliberate or unwitting eavesdroppers:
“I’m in prison, man, prison! Stir. Jug. Porridge. Detained at His Majesty’s. And when it comes to considering offers of employment, Mister Rockham, I’m just a trifle handicapped.”

Rockham waited imperturbably for the outburst to subside.

“You’d be worth to me.” he said calmly, “two thousand a month. I pay well if I want a man enough. And regarding your present inconvenient predicament” — he paused and flicked his gaze significantly around the visiting-room — “these matters can always be arranged, as you know. I might well be prepared to take a risk to get a man of your calibre on the strength.”

The implication was obvious; and it now seemed hardly credible to Simon Templar that he hadn’t seen at once, right from the beginning, that there was only the one single postulate on which Rockham’s visit could have made any kind of sense. He was offering to spring Gascott from jail.

In the circumstances the Saint found no difficulty at all in achieving a modest levitation of his eyebrows to express a convincingly surprised-looking realisation.

“You’ve got the muscle for that, have you?” he said, and the question was halfway to being a statement, a thought spoken aloud by a man busily turning over a proposition in his mind. ““I’ve got a hundred and three men,” said Rockham.

“That’s a big outfit.”

“And still growing.” Rockham’s hitherto impassive square features became faintly animated with something Simon assumed to be pride. “We call ourselves The Squad, and operate on military lines,” he explained. “But
we’re short of leaders — officer material, like yourself. That’s why I’m prepared to help you out of your difficulty. Besides which, the exercise’ll do the lads good.”

Simon appeared to reflect for a moment longer, and then he shook his head decisively.

“The answer’s no. I don’t want to take a job with anyone who’s got a debt to collect from me. It’d cramp my style in the wage negotiations. But how do you know I haven’t already made my own arrangements.”

Rockham’s cold blue eyes regarded him.

“You’ve friends on the outside?”

“That’s my business. I might have, or I might not. But either way, I’ve no intention of rotting in this hole for long.”

Rockham nodded thoughtfully.

“You did it before,” he mused. “Why not again?”

“I’m a clever boy,” agreed the Saint.

“I don’t doubt it. But you’re also a big spender, from what I hear. I’d bet there isn’t much left of the Hatton Garden haul, after your three years living it up in Rio. So … if and when you fly this coop, Gascott, you may be interested in earning some good money — with prospects of a lot more — for doing the kind of work you’d enjoy.”

Rockham stood up.

“You’ll find me at Petersfield nine-two-seven-four. But we’re in the phonebook. The Physical Efficiency Centre, at Kyleham.”

Simon Templar breathed a deep sigh of relief when his visitor had gone. Or to be strictly accurate, what he did was to say “phew!” without actually enunciating the sound; but either an audible phew or a sigh of relief of the regulation depth would have done equally well as a means of expressing his feelings at having survived that unexpected test.

He had been given what amounted to an entrance ticket to The Squad. All he had to do now was to get back to the job of giving himself a chance of surviving once he got there.

In his week-long interlude while the moustachioed Gascott was enjoying the CID’s maritime hospitality, the Saint had not channelled his energies exclusively into nurturing the dark bushy appurtenance that now flourished imitatively on his own upper lip. He had spent much of that week at a certain discreet training centre which is conspicuously absent from the publicly available lists of such government establishments, working harder than he could remember having worked in a very long time.

Into that week, by some wizardry of frantic compression he marvelled at ever after, was packed course after crash course. He learnt what it meant, in the practical essentials, to be a commando officer; he learnt how to handle the latest military weapons, the layout of current assault courses, how to read and send Morse and semaphore signals, how to change a guard … He learnt military regulations, he learnt practical regimental etiquette, he learnt to drive a tank, he learnt to inspect a company of men… Practical was the watchword; the emphasis was on the essential skills of his supposed background with which books wouldn’t be able to help him.

He had had just the one week; and at the end of it the expert instructors who had dealt with him had confessed themselves astounded to a man. Nobody at less than Simon Templar’s magnificent level of physical and mental fitness could have kept up the pace he did or come out of that week having accomplished so much.

But he knew he still had a long way to go.

He had slightly less of a long way to go by the time Ruth Barnaby came for her second visit. He told her about Rockham’s surprise appearance.

“For a moment,” he confessed, “I was almost tempted by his offer to get me out.”

“You should have agreed,” she said at once. “There’d certainly have been no doubt about his finding your escape convincing if he’d engineered it himself.”

Simon looked at her soberly.

“There would have been just one little problem with
that, though,” he pointed out. “What about the half dozen or so warders who might have been mown down as a by-product of Rocky-boy’s rescue swoop?”

Ruth made an impatient dismissive gesture.

“I’m sure that could have been avoided somehow.”

“But how?” he said practically. “He’d have no good reason to confide the details of the whole plan to me. In fact, he’d ‘ve been a fool if he did, since I just might have decided to earn myself some nice safe remission by doublecrossing him. And if he hadn’t given me all the dope, including exactly how and when I was to be spirited away, I wouldn’t have been in any position to get warnings to sundry people who’d otherwise be candidates for becoming sundry corpses.”

“But Bert Nobbins would probably have been in the picture,” the girl said “Or, at least, enough to give us some inkling of when-and how you’d be sprung.”

In the short silence that ensued, Simon Templar experienced a sinking sensation which was closely connected with a growing conviction that he was not entirely in command of the situation.

“And who the blue blazes,” he inquired in a voice heavy with restraint, “is Bert Nobbins?”

“Their Paymaster,” she said. “He’s also one of ours. Pelton put him in as a back-up for Randall. But he’s not the type to step into Randall’s place. Pelton says you’re to ignore him.”

5
Those last few days had certainly dragged. For a while, after Ruth’s second visit, Simon had fumed impotently at having been kept in the dark about Pelton’s opportunist catapulting of the hitherto desk-bound Nobbins into The Squad as Paymaster when the vacancy had providentially arisen only weeks before. But then he had given up fuming impotently, had sat down to do some thinking which at least began to encompass the new factor that now had to be reckoned with, revised his assessment of T~
Pelton again, and finally gone back to his books and notes. And slowly those last few days had ticked away … until three were left … then two …

Then one: and with the recurrence of Gascott’s convenient malaria he had been moved to the prison hospital wards.

Without digressing too far into the details of the plan that had been worked out, it may reasonably be disclosed that on the following day a certain vehicle arrived to make a delivery of medical supplies, and that when it was driven out through the prison gates again the dark moustached man at the wheel was not the same dark moustached man who had driven it in.

Within two hours Simon Templar was on his way to Petersfield, skimming his big cream and red Hirondel down the Portsmouth Road with even more inner zest than usual and only a shade less outward elan. He was still savouring the incomparable blessed wine of recovered freedom, and fighting a powerful impulse to scamper and frolic about manically in the sweet open air like a puppy let out for a run. But a degree of inconspicuousness seemed called for; and scampering, he judged, might have attracted some attention.

The hue and cry was out for Gascott — and genuinely. Rockham’s possible accomplices in the various arms of the official establishment being an unknown factor, only the absolutely essential minimum of reliable stalwarts among prison and police staff had been told the truth about their now-absquatulated detainee. The rest of them were playing it for real. And that was emphatically the way Simon Templar preferred it, even though it did mean that every village bobby in the land would be on the lookout for him.

Ruth Barnaby met him in the late afternoon at Petersfield, arranged garaging for his car, and drove him the last few miles in her own sporty two-seater.

The Bull at Kyleham was a comfortable inn, and handily placed just under a mile from the wall surrounding Rockham’s fifty-five acre base, which she pointed out to him as they passed it. The publican was a harmless soul whose co-operation had been easily enough ensured by a bit of official, not to say officious, finger-to-the-lips confidentiality. He had been told, in other words, only what he absolutely had to know; which was that for reasons having to do with national security he would kindly look no further for a relief barmaid than the attractive and competent-seeming young woman who was introduced to him as, simply, Ruth. As instructed, he provided her with a room and asked no questions; and in return she ably performed her duties behind the bar. It was as simple as that.