The Saint Goes On (9 page)

Simon acknowledged the truth of that. The list of men who would have paid drastically for the privilege of using him for ground-bait in the deepest and hungriest stretch of water at their disposal could have been conveniently added up in round dozens. But his brain was still far from clear, and for the moment he could not see the High Fence’s object in sending him to that attractive fate so quickly.

“If you feed me to the fishes, you feed them twenty-seven thousand six hundred and fifty pounds’ worth of stones as well -did you know that, brother?” he asked.

Quincey grinned.

“Oh, no, we don’t. We know where those are. They’re at the Harwich Post Office, addressed to Mr. Joshua Pond. You told us all about that. The High Fence has gone to Harwich to be Mr. Pond.”

The Saint’s eyes hardened into chips of flint. For an instant of actual physical paralysis, he felt exactly as if he had been kicked in the middle. The terse, accurate, effortless, unhesitating throwing back at him of an arrangement which he had not even told Patricia, as if his brain had been flung open and the very words read out of it, had a staggering calamitousness like nothing he had ever experienced before. It had an unearthly, inescapable completeness that blasted the foundations from under any thought of bluff, and left him staring at something that looked like a supernatural intervention of Doom itself.

His memory struggled muzzily back over the features of his broken dream. The taxi-he had taken it off the kerb right outside his door, without a thought. Ordinarily he would never have done such a thing; but the very positive presence of trouble in the shape of Junior Inspector Pryke had given him a temporary blind spot to the fact that trouble in another shape could still be waiting for him-and might logically be expected to wait in much the same place.

The sickly sweet perfume which he had accused Pryke of using. Pryke’s agitated face, gulping like a fish; and the labour of his own breathing. Gas, of course-pumped into the closed cab by some mechanism under the control of the driver, and quick enough in its action to put them out before they were sufficiently alarmed to break a window. Then the scrunch of gravel, and the grip of hands carrying him. He had been taken somewhere. Probably Pryke had been dumped out somewhere on the route. Unlike Mr. Teal, Simon hoped he had not been killed-he would have looked forward to experimenting with further variations on that form of badinage to which Desmond was so alluringly sensitive.

The prick of the needle, and the soft voice that asked him questions out of the darkness. Questions that he couldn’t remember, that dragged equally forgotten answers out of a drugged subconsciousness that was too stupefied to lie… . Understanding came to him out of that fuddled recollection with stunning clarity. There was nothing supernatural about it- only unexpected erudition and refinement. So much neater and surer than the old-fashioned and conventional systems of torture, which, even when they unlocked a man’s mouth, gave no guarantee that he spoke the truth. … He could even identify the drug that must have been used.

“Scopolamine?” he said, without any indication on his face of the shocks he had taken to reach that conclusion.

Quincey scratched the back of his ear.

“I think that’s the name. The High Fence thought of it. That’s what we are-scientific.”

Simon glanced steadily at the opposite port-hole. Something like a solid black screen cut off the procession of embankment lights, briefly, and slid by. It told him that they had not yet passed under all the bridges; but he found it impossible to identify their whereabouts any more particularly. Seen from the unfamiliar viewpoint of the water, the passing lights formed themselves into no patterns which he could positively recognise; and an occasional glimpse of a neon sign, high up on a building, was no more illuminating, except on the superlative merits of Bovril or Guinness. Somewhere below London Bridge, down past the Pool, probably, he would be dropped quietly over the side. There was a queer quiet inevitability about it, a dispassionate scientific precision, which seemed an incongruous end for such a stormy and impetuous life.

“May I have a cigarette?” he asked.

Quincey hesitated for a moment, and then took out a packet of Players. He put one between the Saint’s lips and lighted it for him, and then returned watchfully to his seat on the bunk.

“Thanks,” said the Saint.

His wrists were bound together in front of him, so that he was able to use one hand on the cigarette. He was also able to make an inconspicuous test of the efficiency of the knotting. It was well done; and the new cord would swell up tighter as soon as it got wet.

He got a view of his wrist-watch, and saw that it was a quarter-past ten.

“What day is this?” he said.

“The same day as it’s been all the time,” answered Quincey. “You didn’t think we’d keep you under for a week, did you? The sooner you’re out of the way, the better. You’ve given us too much trouble already.”

So it was less than five hours since he had gone to sleep in the taxi. Simon got a perspective on his dream. At that rate, there was a sound chance that the High Fence couldn’t have got him to wherever he had been taken, drugged and questioned him, and caught a train out of London in time to reach Harwich before the post-office closed. Therefore he might not be able to collect the package from the Poste Restante before morning. And if the Saint escaped …

Simon realised that he was building some beautiful castles in the air. A dog thrown into the river with a brick tied round its neck would have more or less the same chance of escape as he was offered.

And yet … there was a dim preposterous hope struggling in his mind that a miracle might happen-or had happened. Where had he felt the stab of that hypnotic needle? He felt sure that it had been in his right forearm; and there was a vague sort of ache in the same place to confirm the uncertain memory. In that case, was there any reason why his left forearm must have been touched? It was a wildly fantastic hope, an improbable possibility. And yet … such unlikely things had happened before, and their not wholly improbable possibility was part of the inspiration behind the more unconventional items of his armoury. It might seem incredible that anyone who knew anything of him could fail to credit him with having something up his sleeve in any emergency; and yet … Smoking his cigarette in long tranquil inhalations, he contrived to press his left forearm unobtrusively against his thigh; and what he felt put the dawn of a grim and far-fetched buoyancy into his heart.

Quincey got up and pressed his face against one of the port-holes.

“It’s about time for you to be goin’,” he said unemotionally.

He hauled out a heavy iron weight from under the bunk, and bent a short length of rope to a ring set in it. The other end of the rope he knotted to the cords that bound the Saint’s ankles. Then he tore a strip of canvas from the sack which he had been sitting on, and stood waiting with it.

“Finish that cigarette,” he said.

Simon drew a last leisured puff, and dropped it on the floor. He looked Quincey in the eyes.

“I hope you’ll ask for your last breakfast, on the day they hang you for this,” he said.

“I’ll do that for you,” said Quincey, knotting the canvas across his mouth in a rough but effective gag. “When they hang me. Stand up.”

He pulled the Saint across his shoulder in a fireman’s lift, picking up the weight in his left hand, and moved slowly across to the narrow steep companion which led up from the cabin. Mounting the steps awkwardly under his burden, he lifted the hatch with his head and climbed up till he could roll the Saint off on to the deck.

The craft was a small and shabby single-cabin motor boat.

A man muffled up in a dark overcoat, with a peaked cap pulled down over his eyes until it almost met the top of his turned-up collar, who was apparently the only other member of the crew, stood at the wheel beside the hatch; but he did not look round. Simon wondered if it was Mr. Enderby. The numbers of the gang who actually worked in direct contact with the High Fence would certainly be kept down to the irreducible minimum consistent with adequate functioning, and it might well be that by this time he knew all of them. It was not a racket which called for a large staff, given the original idea and the ingenious leader. His one regret was that he had not been able to make the acquaintance of that elusive quantity: it seemed a ridiculously commonplace problem to take out unanswered into eternity, after solving so many mysteries.

Quincey stepped out over him, picked up the weight again, and rolled him like a barrel towards the stern. As he turned over, the Saint saw the rusty counter of a tramp moored in midstream swing by over his head, punctured with an occasional yellow-lighted port. Over on the Surrey side, a freighter was discharging cargo in a floodlit splash of garish flarelight. He heard the rattle and clank of the tackle, the chuffing of steam winches, the intermittent rise of voices across the water. A tug hooted mournfully, feeling its way across the stream.

He lay on the very edge of the counter, with the wake churning and hissing under his side. Quincey bent over him.

“So long, Saint,” he said, without vindictiveness; and pushed outwards.

IX
Simon stocked his lungs to the last cubic millimeter of their capacity, and tensed his muscles involuntarily as he went down. He had a last flash of Quincey’s tough freckled face peering after him; and then the black waters closed over his head. The iron weight jerked at his ankles, and he went rolling over and upright into the cold crushing darkness.

Even as he struck the water he was wrenching his wrists round to seize the uttermost fraction of slack from the cords that bound them. The horror of that helpless plunging down to death, roped hand and foot and ballasted with fifty pounds of iron, was a nightmare that he remembered for the rest of his life; but it is a curious fact that while it lasted his mind was uncannily insulated from it. Perhaps he knew that to have let himself realise it fully, to have allowed his thoughts to dwell for any length of time on the stark hopelessness of his position, would have led inevitably to panic.

His mind held with a terrible intensity of concentration on nothing but the essentials of what he had to do. With his hand twisted round till the cords cut into his flesh, he could get the fingers of his right hand a little way up his left sleeve; and under their tips he could feel the carved shape of something that lay just above his left wrist. That was the one slender link that he had with life, the unconventional item of his armoury which the search that must have been made of his clothes had miraculously overlooked: the thin sharp ivory-hilted knife which he carried in a sheath strapped to his forearm, which had saved him from certain death before and might save him again. Somehow, slowly, clumsily, with infinite patience and agonising caution, he had to work it out and get it in his hand-moving it in split shavings of an inch, lest it should come loose too quickly and slip out of his grasp to lose itself in the black mud of the river bed, and yet not taking so long to shift it that his fingers would go numb and out of control from the cutting off of the circulation by the tightening ropes. His flesh crawled in the grip of that frightful restraint, and his forehead prickled as if the sweat was trying to break out on it even under the cold clutch of the water that was pressing in at his eardrums. He could feel his heart thudding hollowly in the aching tension of his chest, and a deadly blackness seemed to be swelling up in his brain and trying to overwhelm him in a burst of merciful unconsciousness: every nerve in his body shrieked its protest against the inhuman discipline, cried out for release, for action, for the frantic futile struggle that would anaesthetise the anguish just as surely as it would hasten on the end-for any relief and outlet, however suicidal, that would liberate them from the frightful tyranny of his will.

Perhaps it lasted for three minutes, from beginning to end, that nightmare eternity in which he was anchored to the bottom of the Thames, juggling finickily for life itself. If he had not been a trained underwater swimmer, he could never have survived it at all. There was a time when the impulse to let out his precious breath in a sob of sheer despair was almost more than flesh and blood could resist; but his self-control was like iron.

He won out, somehow. Trickling the air from his lungs in jealously niggard rations that were just sufficient to ease the strain on his chest, he worked the hilt of the knife up with his finger and thumb until he could get another finger on it … and another … and another … until the full haft was clutched in a hand which by that time had practically gone dead. But he was just able to hold it. He forced himself down, bending his knees and reaching forward, until his numbed fingers could feel the taut roughness of the rope by which he was held down to the weight. And then, giving way for the first time in that ghastly ordeal, he slashed at it wildly- slashed again and again, even when his knife met no resistance and he felt himself leaping up through the reluctant waters to the blessed air above….

For a long while he lay floating on the stream, with only his face above the surface, balancing himself with slight movements of his legs and arms, sawing in an ecstasy of leisure through the other ropes on his wrists and ankles, and drinking in the unforgettable glory of the night. Afterwards, he could never remember those moments clearly: they were a space out of his life that was cut off from everything in the past and everything in the future, when he thought of inconsequential things with an incomparably vivid rapture, and saw commonplace things with an exquisite sensuous delight that could not have been put into words. He couldn’t even recollect how long it lasted, that voluptuous realisation of the act of living; he only knew that at the end of it he saw the black bulk of a ship looming up towards him with a tiny white crest at her bows, and had to start swimming to save himself from being run down. Somehow the swim brought him close to the north bank of the river, and he cruised idly upstream until he found a flight of stone steps leading up into a narrow alley between two buildings. The alley led into a narrow dingy street, and somewhere along the street he found a taxi which, in an unlikely spot like that, could only have been planted there for his especial service by a guardian angel with a most commendable sense of responsibility.