The Saint Goes On (17 page)

VII
SIMON sprang forward and caught him before Teal’s lumbering movement in the same direction had more than started, but Irelock flung him off with demented energy and went staggering to the window. They heard him vomiting painfully outside.

“Get on the ‘phone for a doctor,” snapped the Saint, as he dashed after him.

Irelock reeled into his arms in the darkness.

“Get me back,” he panted huskily. “May be-all right.… Get … mustard and water”,
Simon brought him back into the room and laid him down on the sofa-he was curiously black about the eyes and the perspiration was streaming off him. Teal came in with the emetic almost at once, having gone out and found it on his own initiative; and there was a further period of unpleasantness… .

“All right-thanks.”

Irelock lay back at last with a groan. His breathing was still laboured, but the spasmodic twitching of his limbs was reduced to a faint trembling.

“I’m feeling—better… . Think we-got rid of it-in time… . That would have been-another mystery-for you!”

To Simon Templar there was no mystery. His glance flashed from the whisky decanter to the still open French door through which Teal had come in, and he looked up to find Mr. Teal’s somnolent eyes following the same route. His gaze crystallised thoughtfully.

“While you were outside posting your cop under the window, Claud Eustace! Is that organisation and is that nerve, or what is it?”

He took up the untouched glass which Mr. Teal had declined, and moistened his mouth from it, holding the liquid only for a moment. There was a distinctive sweet oily taste in it which might have passed unnoticed under the sharper bite of the spirit unless he had been looking for it, and he retained a definition of the savour in his memory after he had spat out the sip.

Teal’s eyes were wide open.

“Then they still can’t be far away,” he said.

The Saint’s lips stirred in an infinitesimal reckless smile.

“One day you’ll be a detective after all, Claud,” he murmured. Teal was starting to move ponderously towards the window, but Simon passed him with his long easy stride and stopped him. “But I’m afraid you’ll never be a night hunter. Let me go out.”

“What can you do?” asked Teal suspiciously.

“I can’t arrest him,” Simon admitted. “But I can be a good dog and bring you the bone. We missed a trick last time- crashing out like a mob of blasted red-faced fox-hunting squires after a poacher. You wouldn’t catch anyone but a damn fool that way, on a dark night like this. But I know the game. I’ll go out and be as invisible as a worm, and if anyone steps inside these grounds again I’ll get him. And I think somebody will be coming!”

The detective hesitated. His memories of the Assistant Commissioner floated bogeyly across his imagination; the memory of all the deceptions he had suffered from the Saint narrowed his eyes. But he knew as well as anyone what amazing things Simon Templar could do in the dark, and he knew his own limitations.

“If you do catch anyone, will you promise to bring him in?”

“He’s yours,” said the Saint tersely; but he made a mental reservation about the exact time at which that transfer of property would come into effect.

He went out alone, dissolving noiselessly into the night like a wandering shadow. From the blackness outside the window he watched Teal using the telephone, and presently saw the lights of a car drive up and stop outside the gate. The doctor walked up the short drive and was challenged on his way by the police guard; and Simon took that opportunity of introducing himself.

“This is a funny business, sir, isn’t it?” said the constable, when the doctor had gone on into the house.

He was a middle-aged beefy man who kept shaking himself down uncomfortably in his plain clothes, as if he had been wearing a uniform too long to feel thoroughly at home in any other garb. He would probably continue to wear a uniform for the rest of his life, but it was no less probable that he was quite contented with the prospect.

Simon strolled back with him to his post, and gave him a cigarette. He did not expect the man he was waiting for to enter the grounds for a little while.

“Kidnapped ‘is lordship’s son, too, didn’t they? said the policeman. “Now, why should they want to do that?”

The question was put more or less in rhetorical appeal to some unspecified oracle, rather than as one demanding a direct answer; and the Saint did not immediately attempt to answer it.

“I suppose you know Lord Ripwell fairly well,” he said,
“Well, so-and-so,” said the constable, puffing, “Must be about five year now, sir- ever since ‘e bought the house.” “I shouldn’t think he’d be an easy man to extort money from.”

“I wouldn’t like to be the man to try it. Mind you, ‘is lordship’s known to be a generous gentleman-do anything for a fellow oo’s out of luck, if he’s asked properly. But not the kind you could force anything out of. No, sir. Why I remember in my time what ‘appened to a chap oo tried to blackmail ‘im.”

The stillness of the Saint’s eyes could not be seen in the dark.

“Somebody tried to blackmail him once, did they?” he said quietly
“Yes, sir. It wasn’t nothing much they ‘ad to blackmail ‘im with, but you can see for yourself ‘is lordship must’ve been quite a lad in ‘is time, and some people are that narrow-minded they don’t expect a man to be even ‘uman.” There was a sympathetic note in the constable’s voice which hinted that he himself could modestly claim, in his own time to have been Quite A Lad. “Anyway, all ‘is lordship did was to get the Inspector up and ‘ave him listen to some of this talk. And then, when he could ‘ave ‘ad the fellow sent to prison, he wouldn’t even prosecute ‘im.”

“No?”

“Wouldn’t even make a charge. ‘I don’t want to, be vindictive,’ he says. ‘The silly ass ‘as had a good fright,’ he says, ‘and now you let him go. You can see he’s just some down-and-out idiot oo thought ‘e could make some easy money.’ And in the end I believe ‘e gave the chap ‘is fare back to London.”

“Who was this fellow?” Simon asked.

“I dunno. Said ‘is name was Smith, like most of ‘em do when they’re first caught. We never had no chance to find out oo he really was, on account of Ms lordship not prosecuting him, but ‘e did look pretty down and out. Seedy little chap with a great red nose on ‘im like a stop light.”

The doctor came out and returned to his car-Simon heard his parting conversation with Teal at the door, and gathered that Martin Irelock was in no danger. The hum of the car died away; and Simon gave the talkative guard another cigarette and faded back into the dark to resume his own prowling.

His brain was becoming congested with new things to think about. So an attempt had been made to extort money from Ripwell. He was confirmed in his own estimate of the prospects of the hopeful extorter, but apparently the aspirant himself had required to be convinced by experience. There was something about the anecdote as he felt it which gave him a distinct impression of a trial balloon. Someone had wanted first-hand knowledge of Lord Ripwell’s reaction to such an attempt; and the constable’s brief description of the aspiring blackmailer had one prominent feature in common with the elusive Mr. Ellshaw. Curiously enough, in spite of the increased congestion of ideas, the Saint felt that the mystery was gradually becoming less mysterious… .

He moved round the house as soundlessly as a hunting cat. As Chief Inspector Teal knew and admitted, queer things, almost incredible things, happened to Simon Templar when he got out in the dark-things which would never have been believed by the uninitiated observer who had only seen him in his sophisticated moods. He could leave his immaculately dressed, languidly bantering sophistication behind him in a room, and go out to become an integral part of the wild. He could go out and move through the night with the supple smoothness of a panther, without rustling a blade of grass under his feet, merging himself into minute scraps of shadow like a jungle animal, feeling his way uncannily between invisible obstructions, using strange faculties of scent and hearing with such weird certainty that those who knew him best, when they thought about it, sometimes wondered if the roots of all his amazing outlawry might not be found threading down into the deeps of this queer primitive instinct.

No living man could have seen or heard him as he passed on his silent tour, summarising the square lights of windows in the black cube of the house. Lord Ripwell’s lighted window, under which the police guard stood, was on one side. A bulb burned faintly in the hall, at the front, facing closely on to the road. The dully luminous colour of curtains on the other side marked the living-room which he had left not long ago. At the back of the house, where the Thames margined the grounds, he could see one red-shaded lamp in an upstairs window- presumably that was Irelock’s room, for he had gathered that the only domestic servant employed at the cottage was a daily woman who had gone home immediately after dinner. Chief Inspector Teal must have been keeping watch downstairs with a dwindling supply of spearmint; and Simon wondered whether he had been jarred enough out of his principles to take over Lord Ripwell’s revolver and the ammunition, to wait with him for the sudden death that would surely stalk through that place again before morning.

He came down to the water’s edge and sat with his back to a tree, as motionless as if he had been one of its own roots. Surely, he knew, the death would come; but whether it would successfully claim a victim depended largely upon him. There was a smooth speed about every move of the case which appealed to him: it was cut and thrust, parry and riposte-a. series of lightning adjustments and counter-moves which he could appreciate for its intrinsic qualities even while he was still fumbling for the connecting link that held it all together. The poison which had found its way into the whisky less than an hour ago belonged to the same scheme of things. He could recall its peculiar sweet oily taste on his tongue, and he thought he knew what it was. The symptoms which Martin Irelock had shown corroborated it. Very few men would have known that it was poisonous at all. How should an illiterate little racetrain rat like Ellshaw have known it?

A mosquito zoomed into his ear with a vicious ping, and one of his thighs began to itch; but still he did not move. At other times in his life he had lain out like that, immobile as a carved outcrop of rock, combing the dark with keyed-up senses as delicate as those of any savage, when the first man whose nerves had cracked under the unearthly strain would have paid for the microscopic easing of a cramped muscle with his life. That utter relaxation of every expectant sinew, the supersensitive isolation of every faculty from all disturbances except those which he was waiting for, had become so automatic that he used no conscious effort to achieve it. And in that way, without even turning his head, he became aware of the black ghost of a canoe that was drifting soundlessly down the stream towards the place where he sat.

Still he did not move. A nightingale started to tune up in the branches over his head, and a frail wisp of cloud floated idly across the hazy stars which were the only light in the darkness. The canoe was only a dim black brush-stroke on the grey gloom, but he saw that there was only one man in it, and saw the ripple of tarnished-silver water as the unknown dipped his paddle and turned the craft in towards the bank. It seemed unlikely that any ordinary man would be cruising down the river at that hour alone, revelling in a dreamy romance with himself, and the Saint had an idea that the man who was coming towards him was not altogether ordinary. Unless a dead man creeping down the Thames in a canoe at midnight could be called ordinary.

The canoe slid under the bank, momentarily out of sight: but the Saint’s ears carried on the picture of what was happening. He heard the soft rustle of grasses as the side scraped the shore, the plip-plop of tiny drops of water as the wet paddle was lifted inboard, the faint grate of the wood as it was laid down. He sat on under his tree without a stir in his graven stillness, building sound upon sound into a construction of every movement that was as vividly clear to him as if he had watched it in broad daylight. He heard the scuff of a leather shoe-sole on the wood, quite different from the dull grate of the paddle; the rustle of creased clothing; the whisper of turf pressed underfoot. Then a soundless pause. He sensed that the man who had disembarked was probing the night clumsily, looking for some sign or signal, hesitating over his next move. Then he heard the frush of trodden grass again, and a sifflation of suppressed breathing that would have been quite inaudible to any hearing less uncannily acute than his.

A shadow loomed up against the stygian tarnish of the water, half the height of a man, and remained still. The prowler was sitting on the bank, waiting for something which Simon could not divine. There was a longer and more complicated rustling, a tentative scratch and an astonishingly loud sizzle of flame; and the man’s head and shoulders leapt up out of the dark for an instant in startlingly crisp silhouette against the glow of a match cupped in his hands.

The Saint moved for the first time. He rolled up silently and smoothly on to his feet, straightening his knees gradually until he came upright. The pulsing of his heart had settled down to a steady acceleration that did nothing to disturb the feline flow of any of his movements. It was only a level beat of excitement in his veins, a throbbing eagerness to complete his acquaintance with that elusive man around whose fanatical seclusion centred so much violence and sudden death.

Simon came up behind him very quietly. The man never knew he was coming, had no warning of danger before two sets of steel fingers closed on his throat. And then it was too late for him to do anything useful. He was not very strong, and he was almost paralysed with the heart-stopping horror of that silent attack out of the dark. The cry that burst involuntarily from his lungs was crushed by the choking grip on his neck before it could come to sound in his mouth, and a heavy knee settled snugly into the small of his back and pinned him helplessly to the ground in spite of all his frantic struggles. It was all over very quickly.