The Saint Goes On (21 page)

Taking in the grace of her slim young suppleness as she turned away, Simon Templar was more than ever convinced that he was not wasting his time. He had been lured into no wild-goose chase. In that quiet inn at the foot of Larkstone Vale there was a man in whose eyes he had seen the fear of death, and a damsel in distress who was as beautiful as anything he had seen for many moons; that was more or less what he had been promised, and it was only right that the promise should have been so accurately fulfilled. The dreary cynics were everlastingly wrong; such joyously perfect and improbable things did happen-they were always happening to him. He knew that he was once more on the frontiers of adventure; but even then he did not dream of anything so amazing as the offer that Bellamy Wage had made on the day when he was sentenced to ten years, penal servitude after the Neovision Radio Company failed for nearly two million pounds.

II
“SAY,” blurted Hoppy Uniatz, broaching a subject which had clearly been harassing him for some time, “is anyt’ing de matter wit’ me?”

“I shouldn’t be surprised,” said the Saint pitilessly, from the basin where he was washing the dust of travel from his face. “All that whisky you sluice your system with must have its effect some day, even on a tin stomach like yours. What are the symptoms?”

Mr. Uniatz was not talking about ailments of that kind.

“De foist time I open my mout’ in dis jernt, de barman looks at me like he t’inks I’m gonna take him for a ride. When de goil comes in, she looks at me just de same way, like I was some kinda snake. I ain’t no Ronald Colman, boss, but I never fought my pan was dat bad. Have all dese guys here got de jitters, or is anyt’ing de matter wit’ me?” he asked, working back to his original problem.

The Saint finished drying his face with a chuckle, and slung the towel round his neck. He took a cigarette from a packet on the table and lighted it.

“I’m afraid I’ve rather led you up the garden, Hoppy,” he confessed.

“De garden?” repeated Mr. Uniatz dimly.

“I’ve been kidding you,” said the Saint, hastily abandoning metaphor, in which Mr. Uniatz was always liable to lose his way. “We aren’t stopping here just because I saw the place and thought we’d stay. I came here on purpose.”

Hoppy Uniatz digested this statement. Simon could watch the idea percolating gradually into his skull.

“Oah … I see … So when you says de name is Tombs
“That’s the name I’m using here, as long it takes in anybody. And don’t you forget it.”

“I get it, boss. An’ de room you booked”

Simon laughed.

“That requires a little more explanation,” he said.

He took up his coat from where he had thrown it over a chair, and slipped out an envelope from the breast pocket. The lamplight gleamed on a ripple of his bare biceps as he sprawled himself over the bed with it.

“Listen to this,” he commanded:

“Dear Saint,
I’ve no right to be writing this letter to you, and probably you’ll never even read it. I’ve never met you, and I don’t even know what you look like. But I’ve read about some of the things you’ve done, and if you’re the sort of man I think you are you might listen to me for a minute.

This is an old sixteenth century inn which belongs to my uncle, who’s a retired engineer. My father died in South Africa five months ago, and I came here to live because there was nowhere else for me to go.

Queer things have been happening here, Saint. I don’t know how to go on, because it sounds such utter nonsense. But I’ve heard people walking around the place at night, when I know perfectly well there’s nobody about; and sometimes there are sort of rumbling noises underground that I can’t account for. Lately there have been some horrible men here-I know you must be thinking I’m raving already, it sounds so childish and hysterical, but if only 1 could talk to you myself, I might be able to convince you.

I can’t go on writing like this, Saint. You’ll just think, ‘Oh, another neurotic female who wants a good smacking,’ and throw it into the wastepaper basket. But if you’re ever travelling this way, and you have a little time to spare, I’d give anything to see you drop in. You can stay here as an ordinary guest, and find out for yourself whether I’m crazy. My uncle says I am, but he’s frightened too. I can see he is, even though he won’t admit it.

Something’s growing up in this place that must mean trouble; and it might be in your line. I wish I could hope that you’d believe me.

JULIA TRAFFORD.”

The furrows of painful thought grooved themselves into Mr. Uniatz’s brow again.

“Julia?” he said. “Was dat de dame we spoke to downstairs?”

“I take it she was.”

“An’ she wrote you dat letter?”

“To which I replied saying that I should come here as soon as I could, armed to the teeth and probably masquerading under the suggestive name of Tombs.”

“So we come here today on poipose”

“To find out whether the girl really is nuts, or whether there are fun and games in the offing that might keep us out of mischief for a while.”

Mr. Uniatz nodded. The layout was becoming clearer. Only one major point remained obscure. “Whaddas it got to do,” he asked, “wit’ de garden?”

The Saint groaned helplessly, and rolled off the bed to rake out a clean shirt from his Oshkosh. Buttoning it at the open window, he looked out through a loose grille of trees, over the red and grey roofs of the village towards the sea. The tide was out, and the estuary was a tongue of glistening reddish mud, veined with tiny rivulets, that licked in between the hills and drank up the flow of the river. On either edge of it a narrow strip of shingle broke straight up into irregular red cliffs capped with velvet grass. The mud was littered with dinghies and stranded buoys, and the broad hulls of a half-dozen fishing boats lay canted over along the line of the deepest channel, with a man or two moving on the decks about the ordinary business of checking tackle and sorting nets. There was a sense of peace and patience about the place, an atmosphere of changeless simplicity and homeliness, that made him wonder once again what sinister racket could possibly find food in such surroundings. But that was what he had come there to discover.

He picked up his coat with a good-humoured smile.

“I’ll murder you later,” he promised Mr. Uniatz kindly.

Leaving Hoppy to perform his own ablutions, he went downstairs again and strolled out into the road. He wanted a map from his car to gain a more detailed knowledge of the topography of the district; and on his way back he collected another item of information from the legend painted over the door in the traditional style: MARTIN JEFFROLL, Licensed to Sell Wines, Beer, Spirits, and Tobacco. The superscription was not new, but it revealed traces of an older name which had been blacked out. Presumably Mr. Jeffroll was the grey-haired man who had been so strangely frightened by the sound of Hoppy Uniatz’s discordant voice.

Simon went back into the little bar off the hall and lighted a fresh cigarette. It was Jeffroll who came through the curtains and civilly declined the Saint’s invitation to join him in a drink. Simon ordered a pink gin, and was served with unobtrusive courtesy: the panic-stricken creature whom he had glimpsed in Jeffroll’s shoes a short while ago might never have existed, but the landlord had withdrawn behind a wall of indefinable reserve that was somewhat discouraging to idle conversation. Having served the drink, he retired again through the curtain, leaving the Saint alone.

Simon took up the glass and solemnly drank his own health in the mirror behind the bar; and he was setting the glass down again when the same mirror showed him a man who had just come into the hall. Quite spontaneously he turned round and scanned the newcomer as he came on under the low arch-it was purely the instinctive speculative scan of a lone man at a bar who considers the approach of another lone man with whom he may exchange some of the trivial conversation that ordinarily breaks out on these occasions, and he was unsuspectingly surprised to notice that the other was coming towards him with more than speculative directness.

There was hardly time in the short distance that the other had to cover for the Saint’s curiosity to grow beyond the vaguest neutrality; and then the man was standing in front of him.

“Is that your car outside?” he asked.

His voice was harsh and domineering; and the Saint did not like it. Studying the man more closely in the waning light, he decided that he didn’t care much for its owner, either. He had never been able to conceive an instant brotherly regard for ginger-headed men in loud-checked ginger plus fours, with puffy bags under their small eyes and mouths that turned down sulkily at the corners, particularly when they spoke with harsh domineering voices; but even then he was not actually suspicious.

“I have got a car outside,” he said coolly. “A cream and red Hirondel.”

“I see. So you’re the young swine who drove me into a ditch outside Sidmouth.”

The Saint ceased to be perplexed. A genial smile of complete comprehension lighted up his face.

“Good Lord!” he exclaimed happily. “Have you been all this time getting out?”

“What did you say?” snarled the man.

“I asked whether you’d been all this time getting out,” Simon repeated, with undiminished affability. “Or was that a rude question? Is your car still in and did you walk from there?”

The man took another step towards him. At those still closer quarters, he did not look any more attractive.

“Don’t give me any of your lip,” he rasped. “Do you know you nearly killed me with your dirty driving?”

“I rather hoped I had,” said the Saint calmly. “I like killing road-hogs-it makes the country so much more pleasant to move about in.”

“Say that again?”

Simon raised his eyebrows. The ginger-haired man, even without knowing the Saint, might have been warned by the imperturbable leisureliness of that gesture alone; but he was too close beside himself with rage to perceive his own foolishness.

“My dear hog,” said the Saint, “are you deaf or something?

I said”

It has already been mentioned that the ginger-haired man was incapable of perceiving his own foolishness. Otherwise he could not possibly have been tempted as he was by the half-glass of gin and angostura which Simon Templar was poising in his left hand while he talked. Even though he might have known the toughness of his own two-hundred-pound frame, and might have guessed that the debonair young man in front of him weighed no more than a hundred and seventy-five pounds, he need not have allowed his undisciplined temper to make him such a sempiternal sap. But he did.

His hand smacked up in an insolent swipe; and the glass of pink gin was knocked up through the Saint’s fingers to splash its contents over Simon’s face and the front of his coat.

Simon glanced at the mess, and started to take out his handkerchief. He was smiling again; and the Saint was as dangerous as a Turk when he smiled.

“That was rather rash of you,” he said; and suddenly his fist shot out like a bullet from a gun.

The ginger-haired man never even saw it coming. Something that was more like a lump of brown rock than a human fist leapt towards him through the intervening space and collided smashingly with his nose in a punch that sent him reeling back in a blind gush of agony to fetch up jarringly against the wall behind him. Hauling himself forward again with a strangled oath, he saw the Saint’s gentle smile again through a crimson mist, and launched a vicious swing at it that would have been worth all his trouble if it had connected. But in some unaccountable way the smile omitted to keep the appointment. It swayed unhurriedly aside at the very moment when the swing should have met it; and the violence with which his fish bludgeoned the empty air threw the ginger-haired man off his balance. In technical language, he led off for the next blow with his chin, and that same astonishingly hard fist was there in exactly the right place to meet his lead. The only difference was that on this encounter he felt no pain. His teeth scrunched shudderingly together under the impact; and then every raw and vengeful thought in his head was wiped out by a ringing of heavenly bells and a vast soothing darkness that merged indistinguishably into dreamless sleep… .

Simon picked up his handkerchief again and quietly mopped the sticky dampness off his clothes. Jeffroll had come through into the bar again, and he realised that the girl Mia was standing in the low archway that connected with the hall. But it was not until he noticed how silently they were staring at the recumbent slumber of the ginger-haired man that he realised that the delightful episode which had just taken place had an implication for them that he would never have suspected.

III
JEFFROLL was the first to look up.

“What happened?” he asked.

The Saint shrugged.

“I haven’t the faintest idea,” he replied blandly. “The bloke seemed a bit excited, and I think he banged his head on something. It doesn’t look like a very exhilarating pastime, but I suppose there’s no accounting for tastes. Was he a pal of yours?”

Jeffroll let himself out from behind the bar and dropped on one knee beside the prostrate ginger-clad body, without answering. Simon’s coolly observant eyes noticed that his hands were trembling again, and that his actions contained an essence of something more than the natural solicitude of a conventional innkeeper whose premises have been desecrated by an ordinary breach of the peace. The Saint put away his sodden handkerchief and considered whether he had left anything undone that might improve the shining hour; and then he saw that startled face of Hoppy Uniatz peering over Julia Trafford’s shoulder, and went across to him.

Mr. Uniatz’s mouth hung open-and, hanging open, it was an amazingly large mouth. The light of battle was peeping tentatively out of his eyes like spring sunshine through a cloud.

“What ya hit him wit’, boss?” he asked wistfully. And then, as the merest afterthought: “Who is dat guy?”

“The guy we ditched near Sidmouth,” explained the Saint under his breath. He grasped Hoppy firmly by the arm. “And now shut your face for a bit, will you? I guess I’m about ready to eat.”