Send for the Saint (15 page)

It was, technically, just a few minutes before opening time, so there was no one else in the bar when they came in.

“What can I get you?” she asked.

“A pint of Guinness for a start,” he said. “Just to rinse the dust off the tonsils.”

She went behind the bar and drew it. The Saint took a long and appreciative pull at the brimming tankard, and settled himself on a stool.

“Freedom,” he declared expansively to his audience of one, ” is a thing you never truly value till after you’ve been deprived of it. Which I suppose puts it squarely in the same bracket as just about anything else in the world that’s worth having.”

The girl set down a glass she had been vigorously drying — and so brought to an end, for the time being, an entertainment which owed a lot to her natural endowments and also something to the well-fitting sweater that inadequately concealed them.

“Prison seems to have brought out the philosopher in you,” she observed.

The Saint engulfed another vast draught of the rich velvet brew, while noting with approval that the vigorous drying-action and accompanying mammary vibrations had been resumed.

“I suppose,” he opined, “that to anyone who ever did a stretch in Buchenwald, or in an oldfashioned English public school — to paraphrase one of our more eminent literati, Brixton would have seemed like home from home.”

Ruth Barnaby reached down for a well-filled haversack which she had brought in with her, and put it on the counter in front of him.

She said: “Here’s the stuff you asked for.”

Simon picked it up. It was light for its size. He opened it and took out two bulging oilskin bags. In the bottom of the haversack he could see a lightweight nylon rope ladder of the special design he had stipulated.

He peered into one of the oilskin bags, poking around in it with a lean brown hand, and nodded approvingly.

“The other one’s the same?” he inquired.

“Identical. Everything you asked for.”

She dipped into her handbag and brought out a large manilla envelope. Rapidly she pointed to each item of the contents which she drew half-out of it.

“Local maps, aerial photo of Kyleham House Estate, details of guard patrols… and all Bert Nobbins’s reports. All two of them,” she added with a hint of malicious satisfaction.

The Saint looked at his watch and stood up.

“Thanks. I think I’ll take these as my cue to withdraw to your back room,” he said goodhumouredly. He finished his pint, and picked up the folder and haversack. “A public bar’s just a bit too public for serious study — and any minute now your regulars are going to be piling through the door in their droves, tongues hanging out. See you later.”

He had often had occasion to dilate satirically upon the parlous state of a nation whose idiotic nanny-like licensing laws frowned on the thirst of its citizens except within prescribed periods of the day. But just now he had more pressing matters to attend to, and he gave them his undivided concentration for the next two hours.

When the girl came through to the back room after that interval, he had already buttoned up his dark raincoat and shouldered the haversack.

“I’m on my way,” he said. “It’ll be dark enough by the time I get to the merry old health farm.”

“Good luck,” she said, almost perfunctorily.

“I’ll try to give you the first news about O-two-hundred hours,” he said. “Be outside the wall, about fifty yards east of the main gate. Okay?”

He picked up the single grip bag that was his luggage, went out by the back door, and melted into the dark.

There was a quarter-moon and a light mist, a blend of visibility and cover that suited the Saint’s immediate purpose very well. It took him less than twenty minutes to reach Kyleham House, and he smiled with a grim mirthless satisfaction as he saw the wall ten feet high, looming up blankly out of the mist.

This was what the weeks of preparation had been all about. Behind that wall, and three hundred yards beyond the electrified inner fence, he would find John Rockham and The Squad — just as Jack Randall must have found them, on the sortie that was to be the last he ever made.

The Saint’s jaw tightened as he swung the grip case in under the shadow of the wall and opened the haversack.

The rope ladder he had ordered was designed for maximum compactness and minimum weight. It was made of the thinnest possible parachute cord that would support a man’s weight; it was no more than six feet long, and had a big U-shaped claw of tempered steel attached to one end. He had to throw the grappling-iron up to hook over the top of the wall, in which he succeeded at the second attempt, and then to scale the ladder was only a matter of moments.

He paused briefly astride the wall, assuring himself that all was clear on the other side, before repositioning the ladder for his descent and eventual return.

The fence was only three yards beyond; he could see it clearly in the subdued moonlight: the solid wooden posts at eight-foot intervals, and stretched between them the thick continuous copper wires running parallel, about nine inches apart — the top one a good seven feet high.

An Olympic high-jumper might have cleared it, with a good run and at some hazard to his marriageability; but it would have been impossible to climb over it or through it without touching the wires and absorbing whatever unpleasant voltage they carried.

The surgical operation which the Saint performed on this shocking obstacle was simple enough in principle, and he could easily have applied it to all the strands in the section of the fence which was his patient. But that would have taken quite a bit longer; and anyway with reasonable care he would be able to manage his subsequent excursions satisfactorily with just the bottom wire neutralised, leaving a safe eighteen-inch height to squirm under. Beside which, there would be less danger of his scalpel work being discovered.

That was one calculated risk.

He had to do his doctoring by the little natural light that happened to be available. This consisted of connecting a heavily insulated length of wire from his haversack to the lowest electrified strand, at the post, leading it across through the thick grass to the next post, and up that post again to re-connect with the same strand. Having thus bridged the distance between the posts — in case an alarm would have been set off if the original circuit had been crudely broken — he was able to excise the bypassed wire, using a special pair of insulated cutters which were included in the equipment he had requisitioned.

As a finishing touch, he fastened a length of string between the fence posts at the same level, to make the gap in the wire less obvious.

He knew that any really close scrutiny would be bound to reveal the substitution, but he just had to bank on the likelihood that a fence more than a mile long wouldn’t regularly get a yard-by-yard inspection.

By taking sight bearings on a couple of trips inside the grounds, he made sure of being able to locate his handiwork again without hesitation, and then returned to the road outside as he had come, after hiding the haversack and some of its equipment under a bush beside the fence.

A few minutes later he was outside the main entrance.

The gates were of heavy wrought iron, massively bolted and locked. Beside a small brass plate bearing the words
THE PHYSICAL EFFICIENCY CENTRE
there was a bell-push. He leant on it for a few seconds. He could see a light in the gate lodge, and presently two athletic-looking men emerged. They were dressed alike, in dark blue denims and black roll-neck pullovers. One man was carrying a powerful torch, which he shone full in the Saint’s face. The other man kept one hand behind his back, and it didn’t take a clairvoyant to guess what might be in it.

“Name?” demanded a surly voice from behind the lantern.

“Simon Templar,” said the Saint, in Gascott’s rasping voice.

6
It was an outrageous flourish of the kind he couldn’t resist. And as a variant of the effective technique of deception by the obvious, it had a potential practical function too. A George Gascott who had announced himself under another name, especially if by doing so he was making the ridiculous claim to be the Saint, was less likely to be suspected at some point of being actually a phoney.

The surly voice said: “Come again?”

“Simon Templar,” he repeated. “Tell Rockham I’ve come to sew him a few mailbags.”

There was silence for a few moments as the two guards absorbed this revelation. Their impulse, he knew, was to reject it outright — which might have been unfortunate for him, since their method of rejection would probably have contained no milk of human kindness. But he could see them wavering with uncertainty.

The spokesman spoke again.

“Wait there.”

He went back into the gate lodge, leaving his partner standing on silent watch, and Simon amused himself by imagining the exact course of the conversation on the phone with Rockham, who he was confident would add it up in two seconds flat.

And he was right. A minute later the character with the torch re-emerged. He had a jangling bunch of keys in the other hand.

“Mr Gascott, is it?” he said with rather less surliness and rather more respect in his voice.

Gascott had an arrogant way of half-inclining his head in a confirming gesture that was barely on the affirmative side of indifference. The Saint produced just that condescending wag of the head now, and to perfection, so that any impulse to amiable conversation that might have been about to burgeon in the guard’s tender breast was nipped firmly in the bud till after he had opened the heavy gates enough to let the Saint through, and had slammed the solid bolts and padlocks back into place.

Then the gatekeeper said: “There’ll be a jeep for you in a minute;” and in about that time Simon heard the note of an engine puttering through the mist, and saw the twin cones of light sweeping down the long curve of driveway from the main buildings.

He climbed into the jeep beside the driver; the man nodded to him and grunted a greeting. He was dressed like the two guards, and he had a revolver on the parcel shelf, within easy reach of his right hand.

As the jeep backed and turned, Simon automatically registered and memorised the layout of the front entrance and the gatehouse and driveway. Almost as soon as they had moved off again in forward gear, they passed through a gap which was probably the one single breach in the whole length of the engirdling electrified fence — or had been, until his preparatory foray over the wall.

The main buildings were an architectural hotchpotch spanning two and a half centuries. The original Kyleham House had been one of the county’s principal manor houses. Successive owners, presumably increasingly plutocratic and insensitive, had added wing after unbefitting wing, and piled annexe upon incongruous annexe; and during its days as a boarding college, still more extensions and new outbuildings had further compounded the desecration, so that the whole effect was almost of a random assemblage that a child might have made with a lot of dull-coloured playbricks of ill-assorted shapes and sizes.

At the centre of the sprawl of buildings, embedded in the larger structure that had grown by accretion, was the original manor house, preserved virtually unaltered. Its facade was elegant, white-painted, colonnaded. The jeep stopped in front of it, and the driver led Simon in through the main door and up a curved staircase that must have been designed with the house itself.

The driver opened a door leading off the landing and announced laconically: “This is him.”

He went away, and the Saint saw that he had been shown into a short of anteroom. There was a door at the far end — leading, he guessed, to Rockham’s office — and there were two men seated in the room. They were dressed like the others except that their pullovers were grey.

The two faces that turned towards him belonged to the men he would shortly know as Lembick and Cawber; and if those faces were lit up with open-hearted friendliness it must have been by bulbs of micro-wattage.

“Good evening, boys,” the Saint rasped. He held up a restraining hand to stem the non-existent flow of conversation. “Wait. Don’t tell me. Let me guess. That must be the Head’s office.” He pointed to the farther door. “And you” — he beamed at them — “you must be a couple of naughty boys waiting for six of the best. You really must stop this smoking in the lavatory, you know.”

He laughed in that hollow way; and the chunky transatlantic half of the welcoming party lumbered off his chair and looked at him aslant.

“So you’re Gascott, huh ? And you said you was Simon Templar — the Saint! A comedian. You notice that, Lembick?” He kept his eyes fixed on the Saint while addressing the other man. “You notice that? He’s a funny-man.”

Simon put a hand to his mouth, yawned elaborately, and gazed idly around at the ceiling, while the other half of the welcoming party, which rapidly established itself as Caledonian, said:
“We’ll have some fun with him then — won’t we, Cawber?” There was a hard edge of sadistic anticipation in the crag-faced Lembick’s voice. To Simon he said fiercely: “Ye’ll train under us!”

“Och, laddie!” Simon exclaimed in an apalling parody of Lembick’s accent. “I cannae wait! But what d’ye have in mind tae teach me ? Wuid it be tossing the caber ? Or wuid ye prefairrr tae instrrruct me in the proper care and feeding of the domestic sporrran?”

Abruptly he strode to Rockham’s door; he knocked once and was on his way in even before the monosyllable “Come!” had snapped its way through the air, and before Lembick and Cawber had realised what was happening. They followed indignantly in his wake. “Boss — he just barged right past us … ” Cawber trailed off, glaring malevolent fury at the Saint; and Rockham waved him down placatingly.

“Never mind, Cawber. Mister Gascott’s a very positive personality. That’s why I wanted him to join us.”

The pale blue eyes appraised the Saint in this new setting; and the Saint returned the compliment, looking at Rockham and Rockham’s office with a frank evaluative openness that betokened complete and calm self-confidence. Behind him, in contrast, Lembick and Cawber shifted awkwardly on their feet, exactly like the errant school-boys which he had twitted them for resembling.