Interest
lighted the Saint’s eyes again as he saw her,
awakened instantly as he appreciated the
subtle perfection of
the sculptured cascade
of her brown hair, crystallized as he
approved the contours of her slim
yet mature figure revealed
by a simple
flowered cotton dress. Then he saw her face for
the first time, and held his tankard a shade tighter. Here,
indeed,
was something to call beautiful, something on which
the word could be used without hesitation even under his
most dispassionate scrutiny. She was
like—“Peaches in autumn,” he said to himself, seeing the fresh bloom
of her
cheeks against the russet
shades of her hair. She raised her
head with a smile, and his blood sang
carillons. Perhaps after all…
And then he
saw that she was smiling and speaking to an ordinarily good-looking young man
in a striped blazer who stood possessively over her; and inward laughter
overtook
him before he could feel the sourness of disappointment.
He loosened one elbow from the
bar to run a hand through
his dark hair, and
his eyes twinkled at Mr Uniatz.
“Oh,
well, Hoppy,” he said. “It looks as if we can still be taken for a
ride, even at our age.”
Mr Uniatz
blinked at him. Even in isolation, the face that
Nature had planted on
top of Mr Uniatz’s bull neck could
never have been mistaken for that of a
matinee idol with an
inclination towards intellectual pursuits and
the cultivation of the soul; but when viewed in exaggerating contrast with
the tanned piratical chiselling
of the Saint’s features it had a
grotesqueness
that was sometimes completely shattering to
those who beheld it for the
first time. To compare it with the
face of a
gorilla which had been in violent contact with a
variety of blunt instruments during its formative years would
be
risking the justifiable resentment of any gorilla which had
been in violent contact with a variety of blunt
instruments during its formative years. The best that can be said of it is that
it contained in mauled and primitive form all the usual
organs of sight, smell, hearing, and ingestion,
and prayerfully
let it go at that.
And yet it must also be said that Simon
Templar had come to regard it with a fondness which even its mother could
scarcely have shared. He watched it with
good-humoured patience, waiting for it to answer,
“I
dunno, boss,” said Mr Uniatz.
He had not
thought over the point very deeply. Simon
knew this, because
when Mr Uniatz was thinking his face
screwed itself into even more frightful contortions than
were
stamped on it in repose. Thinking of
any kind was an activity
which caused Mr Uniatz excruciating pain. On
this occasion he had clearly escaped much suffering because his mind—if
such a word can be used without blasphemy in
connection
with any of Mr Uniatz’s
cerebral processes—had been else
where.
“Something
is bothering you, Hoppy,” said the Saint.
“Don’t keep it to
yourself, or your head will start aching.”
“Boss,”
said Mr Uniatz gratefully, “do I have to drink dis
wit’ de
paper on ?”
He held up
the parcel he was nursing.
Simon
looked at him blankly for a moment, and then felt
weak in the middle.
“Of
course not,” he said. “They only wrapped it up because they thought
we were going to take it home. They
haven’t got to know you yet, that’s
all.”
An
expression of sublime relief spread over Mr Uniatz’s
homely countenance as
he pawed off the wrapping paper
from the bottle of Vat 69. He pulled out the
cork, placed the
neck
of the bottle in his mouth, and tilted his head back. The
soothing fluid flowed in a cooling stream down his
asbestos
gullet. All his anxieties were at rest.
For the
Saint, Consolation was not quite so easy. He
finished his tankard
and pushed it across the bar for a refill.
While he was waiting
for it to come back, he pulled out of
his pocket and read over again the note that had brought
him
there. It was on a plain sheet of good
notepaper, with no
address.
Dear
Saint,
I’m not going to write a long letter, because if you aren’t
going to
believe me it won’t make any difference how many pages I write.
I’m only
writing to you at all because I’m utterly desperate.
How can I put it in the baldest possible way ? I’m being forced into
making myself an accomplice in one of the most gigantic
frauds that
can ever have been attempted, and I can’t go to the
police for the same
reason that I’m being forced to help.
There you are. It’s no use writing any more. If you can be at
the Bell at
Hurley at eight o’clock on Sunday evening I’ll see
you and tell you
everything. If I can only talk to you for half an
hour, I know I can
make you believe me.
Please, for God’s sake, at least let me talk to you.
My name is
NORA PRESCOTT
Nothing
there to encourage too many hopes in the imagi
nation of any one whose mail was as
regularly cluttered with
crank letters as the
Saint’s; and yet the handwriting looked
neat and sensible, and the brief
blunt phrasing had somehow carried more conviction than a ream of
protestations. All the
rest had been
hunch—that supernatural affinity for the dark
trail of ungodliness which
had pitchforked him into the mid
dle of more
brews of mischief than any four other freebooters
of his day.
And for
once the hunch had been wrong. If only it hadn’t
been for that
humdrumly handsome excrescence in the
striped blazer…
Simon
looked up again for another tantalizing eyeful of the dark slender girl.
He was just in time to get a
parting glimpse of her back as
she made her
way to the door, with the striped blazer hovering
over her like a motherly hen. Then she was gone;
and everyone
else in the bar suddenly
looked nondescript and obnoxious.
The Saint
sighed.
He took a
deep draught of his beer, and turned back to
Hoppy Uniatz. The neck
of the bottle was still firmly
clamped in Hoppy’s mouth, and there was no
evidence to
show that it had ever been detached therefrom since it was
first inserted. His Adam’s apple throbbed up and down with the regularity of a
slow pulse. The angle of the bottle indicated that at least a pint of its
contents had already reached his interior.
Simon
gazed at him with reverence.
“You
know, Hoppy,” he remarked, “when you die we
shan’t even have to
embalm you. We’ll just put you straight
into a glass case,
and you’ll keep for years.”
The other
customers had finally returned to their own
business, except for a few who were
innocently watching for
Mr Uniatz to stiffen
and fall backwards; and the talkative
young
barman edged up again with a show of wiping off the bar.
“Nothing much here to
interest you tonight, sir, is there ?”
he
began chattily.
“There
was,” said the Saint ruefully. “But she went
home.”
“You
mean the dark young lady, sir?”
“Who
else?”
The man
nodded knowingly.
“You
ought to come here more often, sir. I’ve often seen
her in here alone. Miss Rosemary Chase,
that is. Her father’s
Mr Marvin Chase, the
millionaire. He just took the New Manor for the season. Had a nasty motor accident
only a
week ago …”
Simon let
him go on talking, without paying much atten
tion. The dark girl’s
name wasn’t Nora Prescott, anyhow.
That seemed to be the only important
item of information—
and with it went the last of his hopes. The clock over the bar
crept on to twenty minutes past eight. If the girl
who had
written to him had been as
desperate as she said, she wouldn’t
come as late as that—she’d have been
waiting there when he
arrived. The girl with
the strained blue eyes had probably
been
suffering from nothing worse than biliousness or
thwarted love. Rosemary Chase had happened merely by
accident. The real writer of the letter was almost
certainly
some fat and frowsy female among those he had passed over
without a second thought, who was doubtless still
gloating
over him from some obscure corner, gorging herself with the
spectacle of her inhibition’s hero in the flesh.
A hand
grasped his elbow, turning him round, and a
lightly accented voice
said: “Why, Mr Templar, what are you looking so sad about ?”
The
Saint’s smile kindled as he turned.
“Giulio,”
he said, “if I could be sure that keeping a pub
would make anyone as
cheerful as you, I’d go right out and
buy a pub.”
Giulio
Trapani beamed at him teasingly.
“Why
should you need anything to make you cheerful? You are young, strong, handsome,
rich—and famous. Or
perhaps you are only waiting for a new romance?”
“Giulio,”
said the Saint, “that’s a very sore point, at the
moment.”
“Ah!
Perhaps you are waiting for a love-letter which has
not arrived ?”
The Saint
straightened up with a jerk. All at once he la
ughed. Half
incredulous sunshine smashed through his
despondency, lighted
up his face. He extended his palm.
“You
old son-of-a-gun! Give!”
The
landlord brought his left hand from behind his back,
holding an envelope.
Simon grabbed it and ripped it open.
He recognized the handwriting at a
glance. The note was on a sheet of hotel paper.
Thank God you came. But I daren’t be seen speaking to you
after the
barman recognized you.
Go down to
the lock and walk up the towpath. Not very far
along on the left there’s a boathouse with green doors. I’ll wait
for you there. Hurry.
The Saint raised his eyes, and
sapphires danced in them.
“Who
gave you this, Giulio?”
“Nobody.
It was lying on the floor outside when I came
through. You saw the
envelope—
Deliver at once to Mr
Templar in the bar.
So that’s
what I do. Is it what you were
waiting for?”
Simon
stuffed the note into his pocket, and nodded. He drained his tankard.
“This
is the romance you were talking about—maybe,”
he said. “I’ll tell you about it
later. Save some dinner for me. I’ll be back.” He clapped Trapani on the
shoulder and swung
round newly awakened,
joyously alive again. Perhaps, in
spite
of everything, there was still adventure to come… .
“Let’s go, Hoppy!”
He took
hold of Mr Uniatz’s bottle and pulled it down.
Hoppy came upright
after it with a plaintive gasp.
“Chees,
boss——
”
“Have
you no soul?” demanded the Saint sternly, as he herded him out of the
door. “We have a date with a damsel
in distress. The moon
will be mirrored in her beautiful eyes,
and she will pant out
a story while we fan the gnats away
from her snowy brow. Sinister eggs
are being hatched behind
the scenes. There will be villains and mayhem
and perhaps
even moider …”
He went on talking lyrical
nonsense as he set a brisk pace
down the
lane towards the river; but when they reached the towpath even he had dried up.
Mr Uniatz was an unrespon
sive
audience, and Simon found that some of the things he
was saying in jest were oddly close to the truth
that he believed. After all, such fantastic things had happened to him
before… .
He didn’t
fully understand the change in himself as he
turned off along the
river bank beside the dark shimmering
sleekness of the water. The ingrained
flippancy was still with
him—he could feel it like a translucent film over his mind—
but underneath it he was all open and expectant, a
receptive
void in which anything
might take shape. And something
was
beginning to take shape there—something still so nebu
lous and formless that it eluded any conscious
survey, and
yet something as inescapably real as a promise of thunder in
the air. It was as if the hunch that had brought him out to the
Bell in the first place had leapt up from a
whisper to a great shout; and yet everything was silent. Far away, to his sensi
tive ears, there was the ghostly hum of cars on the
Maidenhead road; close by, the sibilant lap of the river, the lisp of leaves,
the stertorous breathing and elephantine footfalls of
Mr Uniatz; but
those things were only phases of the stillness
that was everywhere. Everything in the world was quiet,
even his own nerves, and they were almost too
quiet. And
ahead of him, presently,
loomed the shape of a building like
a
boathouse. His pencil flashlight stabbed out for a second
and caught the front of it. It had green doors.