“He is like dis ever since
he wakes up,” Hoppy explained,
edging
proudly in behind him.
The Saint
nodded. He did not feel any pity. Robert
Verdean was just
another man who had strayed unsuccess
fully into the paths of common crime;
and even though he
he had been deliberately led astray, the mess that he was
in now was directly traceable to nothing but his own weakness
and
cupidity. In such matters, Simon Templar saved his sympathy for more promising
cases.
“Put
his clothes back on him,” he said. “We’ll take him along too. Your
operation was miraculous, Hoppy, but the patient is somewhat liable to die; and
we don’t want to be
stuck with his body.”
Patricia
was sitting on the study desk when he emerged
again, and she looked
at him with sober consideration.
“I don’t
want to bore you with the subject,” she
said, “but are
you still sure you haven’t gone off your
rocker?”
“Perfectly
sure,” he said. “I was never rocking so
smoothly in my
life.”
“Well,
do you happen to remember anyone by the name
of Teal?”
He took her
arm and chuckled.
“No I
haven’t forgotten. But I don’t think he’ll be ready
for this. He may have
ideas about keeping an eye on me, but
he won’t be watching for Verdean, Not
here, anyway. Hell, he’s just searched the house from top to bottom and convinced
himself that we haven’t got Verdean here, however
much he may be
wondering what else we’ve done with him. And it’s getting dark already. By the
time we’re ready to go, it’ll be easy. There may be a patrol car or a motor
cycle cop
waiting down the road to get on our tail if we go out,
but
that’ll be all. We’ll drive around the country a bit first and lose them.
And then we will go into this matter of our old
age pensions.”
She might
have been going to say some more. But she
didn’t. Her mouth closed again, and a
little hopeless grimace
that was almost a
smile at the same time passed over her
lips.
Her blue eyes summed up a story that it has already
taken all the
volumes of the Saint Saga to tell in words. And
she kissed him.
“All
right, skipper,” she said quietly. “I must be as crazy
as you are,
or I shouldn’t be here. We’ll do that.”
He shook
his head, holding her.
“So we
shall. But not you.”
“But——
”
“I’m sorry, darling. I was talking about
two other guys.
You’re going to stay out of it, because we’re going to
need
you on the outside. Now, in a few minutes I’m going to call
Peter, and
then I’m going to try and locate Claud Eustace;
and if I can get hold
of both of them in time the campaign
will proceed as follows… .”
He told it
in quick cleancut detail, so easily and lucidly
that it seemed to be
put together with no more effort than it took to understand and remember it.
But that was only
one of the tricks that sometimes made the Saint’s triumphs
seem deceptively facile. Behind that apparently random
improvisation
there was the instant decision and almost supernatural foresightedness of a
strategic genius which in
another age might have conquered empires as
debonairly as
in this twentieth century it had conquered its own amazing
empire among thieves. And Patricia Holm was a listener
to whom
very few explanations had to be made more than
once.
Hoppy
Uniatz was a less gifted audience. The primitive
machinery of
conditioned reflexes which served him for some
of the simpler
functions of a brain had never been designed
for one-shot
lubrication. Simon had to go over the same
ground with him at
least three times before the scowl of
agony smoothed itself out of Mr
Uniatz’s rough-hewn fa
ç
ade,
indicating
that the torture of concentration was over and
the idea had finally taken root inside his
skull, where at least
it could be relied
upon to remain with the solidity of an
amalgam
filling in a well-excavated molar.
The evening
papers arrived before they left, after the
hectic preliminaries
of organization were completed, when
the Saint was relaxing briefly over a
parting glass of sherry,
and Mr Uniatz was placidly sluicing his arid
tonsils with a
fresh bottle of Scotch. Patricia glanced through the
Evening
Standard
and giggled.
“Your
friend Hogsbotham is still in the news,” she said.
“He’s
leading a deputation from the National Society for
the Preservation of
Public Morals to demonstrate outside
the London Casino this evening before
the dinnertime show.
So it looks as if the coast will be clear for
you at Chertsey.”
“Probably
he heard that Simon was thinking of paying
him another call, and
hustled himself out of the way like
a sensible peaceloving citizen,”
said Peter Quentin, who
had arrived shortly before that. “If I’d
known what I was going to be dragged into before I answered the telephone,
I’d have
gone off and led a demonstration somewhere myself.”
The Saint
grinned.
“We
must really do something about Hogsbotham, one of these days,” he said.
It was
curious that that adventure had begun with Mr
Hogsbotham, and had
just led back to Mr Hogsbotham;
and yet he still did not dream how
importantly Mr Hogsbotham was still to be concerned.
IX
T
HE HIRONDEL’S
headlights played briefly over the
swinging sign of the Three Horseshoes,
in Laleham, and
swung off to the left on a road that turned towards the
river.
In a few seconds they were lighting up the smooth grey
water and
striking dull reflections from a few cars parked
dose to the bank; and
then they blinked out as Simon
pulled the car close to the grass verge and set the handbrake.
“Get
him out, darling,” he said over his shoulder.
He stepped
briskly out from behind the wheel; and
Hoppy Uniatz, who had
been sitting beside him, slid into his
place. The Saint
waited a moment to assure himself that
Angela Lindsay was
having go trouble with the fourth
member of the party; and then he leaned
over the side and
spoke close to Hoppy’s ear.
“Well,”
he said, “do you remember it all?”
“Sure,
I remember it,” said Mr Uniatz confidently. He
paused to refresh
himself from the bottle he was still carrying,
and replaced the cork
with an air of reluctance. “It’s in de
bag,” he said,
with the pride of knowing what he was
talking about.
“Mind
you don’t miss the turning, like we did last night,
and for God’s sake try
not to have any kind of noise. You’ll have to manage without headlights,
too—someone might notice them… . Once you’ve got the Beef Trust there, Pat’ll
take care of keeping them busy. I don’t want you to pay any
attention
to anything except watching for the ungodly and
passing the tip to
her.”
“Okay,
boss.”
The Saint
looked round again. Verdean was out of the
car.
“On
your way, then.”
He stepped
back. The gears meshed, and the Hirondel
swung round in a tight semicircle and
streaked away towards
the main road.
Angela
Lindsay stared after it, and caught the Saint’s
sleeve with sudden
uncertainty. Her eyes were wide in the
gloom.
“What’s
that for? Where is he going?”
“To
look after our alibi,” Simon answered truthfully.
“Anything may
happen here tonight, and you don’t know
Teal’s nasty
suspicious mind as well as I do. I’m pretty sure
we shook off our
shadows in Walton, but there’s no need
to take any
chances.”
She was
looking about her uneasily.
“But
this isn’t Chertsey——
”
“This
is Laleham, on the opposite side of the river. We
came this way to make
it more confusing, and also because
it’ll make it a lot harder for our
shadows if they’re still
anywhere behind. Unless my calculations are
all wrong,
Hogsbotham’s sty ought to be right over there.” His
arm pointed diagonally over the stream, “Let’s find out.”
His hand
took Verdean’s arm close up under the shoulder.
The girl walked on the
bank manager’s other side. Verdean
was easy to lead. He seemed to have
no more will of his own.
His head kept rolling idiotically from side to
side, and his
voice
went on unceasingly with an incoherent and practically
unintelligible mumbling. His legs tried to fold intermittently
at the joints, as if they had turned into putty;
but the Saint’s
powerful grip held him
up.
They
crossed a short stretch of grass to the water’s edge.
The Saint also went
on talking, loudly and irrelevantly,
punctuating himself with squeals of
laughter at his own wit.
If any of the necking parties in the parked
cars had spared
them any attention at all, the darkness would have hidden
any details, and
the sound effects would infallibly have com
bined
to stamp them as nothing but a party of noisy drunks. It must have been
successful, for the trip was completed
without
a hitch. They came down to the river margin in
uneventful co-ordination; and any spectators who may have been there
continued to sublimate their biological urges
unconcerned.
There was
an empty punt moored to the bank at exactly
the point where they
reached the water. Why it should have been there so fortunately was something
that the girl had no
time to stop and ask; but the Saint showed no
surprise about it. He seemed to have been expecting it. He steered Verdean
on board
and lowered him on to the cushions, and cast off the
mooring chain and
settled himself in the stern as she
followed.
His paddle
dug into the water with long deep strokes,
driving the punt out
into the dark. The bank which they had just left fell away into blackness behind.
For a short while
there
was nothing near them but the running stream bounded
by nebulous masses of deep shadow on either side. Verdean’s
monotonous muttering went on, but it had become no
more
obtrusive than the murmur of
traffic heard from a closed room in a city building.
She said,
after a time: “I wonder why this all seems so different?”
He asked:
“Why?”
She was practically invisible
from where he sat. Her voice
came out of a
blurred emptiness.
“I’ve
done all sorts of things before—with Judd,” she
said. “But doing
this with you… You make it an adventure.
I always wanted it to
be an adventure, and yet it never was.”
“Adventure
is the way you look at it,” he said, and did
not feel that the
reply was trite when be was making it.
For the
second time since he had picked her up at the
Stag and Hounds he has wondering whether a
surprise might
still be in store for him that
night. All his planning was cut
and
dried, as far as any of it was under his control; but there
could still be surprises. In all his life nothing
had ever gone mechanically and unswervingly according to a rigid and
inviolable schedule: adventure would soon have
become
boring if it had. And tonight
he had a feeling of fine-drawn
liveness
and that was the reverse of boredom.
The feeling
stayed with him the rest of the way across
the water, and
through the disembarkation on the other side.
It stayed with him on the short walk up
Greenleaf Road from
the towpath to the gates
of Mr Hogsbotham’s house. It was keener and more intense as they went up the
drive, with Verdean keeping pace in his grasp with docile witlessness.
It
brought up all the undertones of the night in sharp relief—
the stillness everywhere around, the silence of
the garden,
the whisper of leaves,
the sensation of having stepped out of
the
inhabited world into a shrouded wilderness. Some of
that could have been due to the trees that shut
them in,
isolating them in a
tenebrous closeness in which there was no sight or sound of other life, so that
even Verdean’s own
house next door did
not intrude on their awareness by so
much
as a glimmer of light or the silhouette of a roof, and the
Saint could not tell whether a light would have
been visible
in it if there had been
a light to see. Some of the feeling was
still left unaccounted for even after that. The Saint stood on
the
porch and wondered if he was misunderstanding his own
intuition, while Verdean fumbled with keys at the door,
muttering fussily about his stolen fortune. And
his mind was
still divided when they
went into the hall, where a single
dim light was burning, and he saw the
bank manager stagger
drunkenly away and throw
himself shakily up the stairs.