The Saint Goes On (24 page)

The dim beam of an electric flashlight in his hand, irised down to the thinnest useful pencil of luminance by a circle of tinfoil pasted over the lens, guided him about the ground floor. No creaking boards betrayed his movements, for he had a tread like a cat when he chose to use it, and an uncanny instinct for treacherous footings. He covered the rooms which he had seen before, hall and dining-room and lounge bar, and others which he had not seen but which were roughly what he would have expected to find. The kitchen was behind the dining-room, a big stone-flagged room like a barn, which must have served for a staff dining-room as well, and might well have held even more distinguished company in the days when eating was a heartier and more earnest business. Opening off the kitchen was a long paved passage which seemed to run the length of the building. He tried the different doors, each with the same care and silence, and reviewed a series of sculleries, pantries, lavatories, coal and wood cellars, wine and beer stores, and a small staff sitting-room. The last door, at the end, appeared to lead out into a yard at the back—it was locked on the inside, and when he turned the key he found himself in the open under the shadow of the garage.

He was retracing his steps when he heard the dull vibrant rumble under his feet again. It was much more distinct than it had sounded upstairs, with a definite metallic harshness, but even then it was not so loud that he could fix it clearly in his mind. If he had been there as an ordinary unsuspecting guest, it might not have attracted his attention at all-he would probably have put it down subconsciously to a heavy lorry passing on the road outside, and would never have felt urged to probe into it further. Also, the place being what it was, he would very soon have been in bed and asleep; and there was nothing sufficiently startling about the muffled noise to wake him. But he was not asleep and he was not unsuspecting, and he knew that the sound was not quite the same as that of a passing lorry.

He opened another door in the passage and found himself in another short length of corridor-it was scarcely large enough to be called an inner hall. On one side was a door carrying the painted word “Private”: it was locked, and he guessed that this was Jeffroll’s own sanctum. On the other side was a red curtain, and when he went through it he discovered himself back in the diminutive lounge, but on the serving side of the bar.

There was one obvious thing to do there, and the Saint was nerveless enough to do it. He paid the money scrupulously into the till and sat on the bar with his modest glass and a completely brazen cigarette, waiting and listening in silence. Twenty minutes later he heard the noise again.

This time it seemed to give birth to three faint echoes -they were about sixty seconds apart, and each of them was sharper and crisper in tone than the original sound. The effect was something like that of three slow spaced rollers of surf sweeping up a shingle beach. Again the noise was not startlingly loud, but it was closer and clearer.

Simon ran thoughtful fingers through his hair. The rumble passed again, seeming to recede into the distance; and then the stillness settled down again. His watch told him that it was nearly midnight, but he had no superstitions.

He slid down to the floor, broke up the stub of his cigarette and washed the fragments down the sink under the bar, dried his glass on a cloth and replaced it on its shelf, and picked up his torch. He was, for the moment, irritatingly stymied; but he felt that something ought to be done. He had verified the last fraction of Julia Trafford’s story, and he was baffled to find any natural explanation. On the other hand, up to that moment he had also failed to find an unlawful solution. Secret passages of some kind were manifestly indicated, but to measure every room and corridor and draw up plans of the building to locate discrepancies in the sum total was a lengthy job for which he had very little patience and, prosaically enough, no implements at all.

There remained the locked door of Jeffroll’s private office, and he thought he could cope with this. Curiously enough it gave him an unaccountable difficulty, and he had been working on it for a couple of minutes before he discovered that the thing that was obstructing his skeleton key was another key left in the lock on the inside.

He changed his instrument for a pair of thin-nosed pliers and turned the key quite easily, but with even greater caution. A key on the inside of a locked room, except in fictional murder mysteries, vouches for someone on the inside to turn it; and yet he could not see so much as a glimmer of light in the cracks between the old badly-fitting oak door and its frame.

Then, as he took up the pressure of the latch with delicately practised fingers, he heard a limp sort of dragging scuff of movement which no normal ambusher would have made, and a grunting moan of sterterously exhaled breath which removed the last of his hesitation.

The nape of his neck prickled, but he went in boldly-he had an intuitive certainty of what he would find there, and he did not gasp when the beam of his torch shone full into the dilated eyes of the man with ginger hair.

VI
SIMON swept his flashlight round in a quick survey of the rest of the room. There was no other visible exit than the door which he had just opened, unless the door of a large built-in safe in another wall concealed unconventional secrets. There was a desk with a swivel chair behind it, a typewriter on a side table, a filing cabinet, a shelf littered with books and papers, an armchair, and a few faded and nondescript prints on the walls-the conventional furnishings of a small country hotel office. He had no doubt that some of these superficially innocuous fittings might repay closer investigation, but he turned back to the ginger-haired man as a more obvious feature of interest.

“Do you do this for fun, or are you practising a vaudeville act?” he murmured pleasantly.

The other made no answer, for the very good reason that his mouth was blocked by an amateurish but effective gag. Nor, as he might well have been tempted to do, did he get up and make another attempt to destroy the symmetry of the Saint’s face, because the lengths of wire bound tightly about his wrists and ankles made any such hearty greeting impossible.

Simon enjoyed the sound of his own voice, but in those circumstances he was prepared to be generous. He squatted down and loosened the gag sufficiently to remove one of Gingerhead’s disadvantages, but not so thoroughly that it could not be speedily replaced if necessary. When the cloth was pulled down he saw that the man’s mouth was twitching with fear.

“What are you going to do?”

Simon tilted up his flashlight to show his own face.

“What would you do to a bloke who was very rude to you and spilt your drink?” he asked.

The man licked his lips.

“I didn’t mean to do that. I lost my temper. I didn’t know––-“

“What didn’t you know?”

“I didn’t know you were-one of them. You’ve got to let me out. You can’t do anything to me. There’s a law in this country––-“

Simon thought quickly, and came to a decision.

“Let you out, Ginger Whiskers? You’re a bit of an optimist, aren’t you?”

“I could make it worth your while,” said the other feverishly. His voice was not harsh and domineering now, but its quavering terror was perhaps more unpleasant. “I’ll give you anything you like-a thousand, two thousand––-“

“Go on.”

“Five thousand”

The Saint clicked his tongue reproachfully.

“Ten thousand pounds,” said the man shakily. “I’ll give you ten thousand pounds to let me go!”

“This is getting interesting,” drawled the Saint. “Have you got all this money in your pocket?”

“I can get it for you.” The man dropped his voice lower, although neither of them had spoken far above a whisper.

The Saint sighed.

“Sorry, brother, but this is a cash business.”

“You could have it first thing in the morning-before that, if you wanted it.”

“Where is it coming from?” asked the Saint, with calculated scepticism. “Will you do down into the village and hold out your hat, or are you going to burgle the bank?”

“I know where I can get it. I’ve got to meet a man- to-night!”

“Where are you going to meet him?”

The man glared at him silently, with narrowing eyes; but Simon stuck to his point.

“Let me go and meet this man,” he said slowly. “If hell pay ten thousand quid to save your life, I’ll come back and see about it.”

“How do I know you will?”

“You don’t,” Simon admitted sadly. “But you can take it from me that unless I do see this bird and his money I’m not going to do anything for you. And then the uncertainty would be so much more trying. Instead of wondering whether I was going to help you or not, you’d only be able to wonder whether you were going to be buried alive under the public bar or fed to the congers off Larkstone Point.”

He kept his light focused on the ginger-haired man’s blotched puffy face, and read everything that was going on in the mind behind it.

“He’ll be waiting on the road to Axminster, exactly three miles from Seaton,” came the reply at length. “He’ll do anything to get me out. For God’s sake, hurry!”

Simon doubted whether God would really be deeply concerned, but he allowed the invocation to pass unchallenged. He bent forward and replaced the gag as it had been when he came in, and switched out his light on the ginger-haired man’s mutely terrified eyes.

“If they have fed you to the congers when I get back, I’ll go fishing,” he murmured kindly.

He left the office on this encouraging note, and let himself out into the back yard by the door at the end of the kitchen passage. The garage doors had been left open, and after a second’s hesitation he began to manoeuvre his car out of its place by hand. It was a task that taxed all his strength, but he preferred the hard work to the risk of starting the engine where it might be heard by someone in the hotel. Fortunately the garage was built on a slight slope, and after a good deal of straining and perspiration he manhandled the big Hirondel into a position where he could get in behind the wheel and coast out of the yard and down the hill until it was safe to touch the self-starter. At the first corner he turned round, and sent the great purring monster droning back up the grade towards the Seaton Road. He was well on his way before he remembered that he had not even waited to tell Hoppy Uniatz where he was going.

There was something else which he had forgotten, but he did not recall that until much later.

He was conscious of a deep and solemn exhilaration. The sublime good fortune that was always spreading itself so prodigally over all his adventures showed no signs of shirking its responsibilities. Destiny was still doing its stuff. One got a letter, one went somewhere, one exchanged a few lines of affable badinage with a selection of mysterious blokes, one dotted an ugly sinner on the button, and forthwith the wheels began to go round. It might have been a coincidence that he had had cause to smite Ginger Whiskers so early in the proceedings; but from then on everything had unwound like clockwork. The presence of Ginger Whiskers, bound and gagged, in that locked office, was only part of the machinery -obviously, when Jeffroll had come out and seen him slumbering peacefully and harmlessly on the floor, the opportunity to put him away must have seemed far too good to miss. Simon would have grabbed at it himself, and he guessed that that decision was the cause of the message which had summoned the Four Horsemen from the dining-room and broken up their friendly exchange of compliments. Everything, up to that point, was clear: the mystery of what it was all about remained. But the eccentric philanthropist who was willing to pay ten thousand pounds for the life of a blister like Ginger-head might offer some more hints on that subject.

He understood the ginger-haired man’s psychology to three places of decimals. Whatever the outcome of this interview might be, the waiting accomplice would at least learn what had happened to his confederate; and Ginger Whiskers was doubtless banking far more heavily on the advantages of getting this message through than on the Saint’s desire to help him. If their positions had been reversed, the Saint would have gambled on the same horse. But before that bet was decided he hoped to become much wiser himself-he had forgotten that in certain circles he was one of the best-known men in England.

The trip meter on the dash was just turning over the third mile from Seaton when he picked up a red light stationary by the side of the road. As his headlights drew nearer to it he saw that it was the rear light of a small saloon of a popular make. He dimmed his lights and pulled in just in front of it; and a man came up, walking with quick jerky steps. “Is that you, Garthwait?”

Simon gathered that this was the name by which Ginger was known to the police. He hunched his shoulders and tried to remember Garthwait’s rasping voice. “Yes.”

The light of a powerful torch was flashed on his face, and he heard the unknown man’s hissing breath.

“At least,” he said quickly, “Garthwait sent me”

“Mr. Simon Templar, isn’t it?” said the other gently. “I know your face quite well.”

For a moment the Saint almost recanted his views on the lavish publicity which the newspapers had given to some of his exploits, although for many years that disreputable fame had been one of his most modest vanities. But he smiled.

“You do know your way around, don’t you, dear old bird?” he remarked.

“That is my business,” said the other dryly, as if he was making a very subtle joke. “Please keep your hands on the steering wheel, where I can see them. I’ve got you covered, my friend, and I could shoot you long before you could reach your gun.”

His voice had a dusty pedantic quality which was the last intonation Simon Templar would ever have expected from a man who spoke of unlawful armaments and sudden death with so much self-possession.

“You’re welcome,” said the Saint amiably. “My life is insured, and I’m considered to be an A. 1 risk. I wish I could say the same for Comrade Garthwait. There seems to be some sort of idea that he would be Good for Contented Congers; but he said you’d pay ten thousand pounds to keep him on dry land, and I thought it might be worth looking into. I suppose love is blind, but what you can see in a wall-eyed
wart like that”