Something crashed deafeningly behind him and left his ears singing, and then he was crouched low over the steering-wheel, swerving away up the road with the seat pressing forcefully into his back under the urge of the Hirondel’s terrific power. The open door slammed into latch in the slipstream: his ears caught the thin shred of another more vicious slam behind him that might have been an echo of the door and was not, and his teeth flashed in a Saintly smile before he whirled round the next corner and was out of range.
He was still smiling when he ran down the hill into Larkstone and cut his engine before swinging round to glide up to the garage beside the inn. Even after that minor miscalculation he remained the blithest of optimists—he hadn’t once caught sight of the face of the man to whom he had spoken, but he would know that dry pedantic voice anywhere, and he had found men before with less to identify them than that.
He had his next surprise when he turned his wheels towards the garage and prepared to repeat his earlier strenuous performance by manhandling the car back into its berth, for as his dimmed lights panned round he saw that he had an unobstructed run in. The lorry that had blocked his way before, which Jeffroll had told him was out of action with a broken propeller-shaft, had vanished.
7
So had Garthwait—he discovered that when he went indoors and opened the door of the manager’s office. The mere fact that the door opened without any manipulation reminded him that he had not turned the key from the outside when he left, and then he remembered that he had also left behind the pliers with which he had turned it in the first place—they were still lying on the floor where Garthwait had been, and he recollected that he had put them down when he loosened the gag and had forgotten to pick them up again. The pliers, like most similar instruments, were also wire-cutters, and there were four severed strands of wire lying near them to show how they had been used.
For a man who had made so many mistakes in one night, the Saint went to bed very lightheartedly. He heard the same queer subterranean rumbling twice more before he fell asleep, but he did not allow it to disturb his rest.
The faithful Mr Uniatz had been snoring serenely in his chair when Simon turned in, and he was still snoring on the same majestic note when the Saint woke up. He leapt up like a startled hippopotamus when the Saint shook him, and then he blinked sheepishly and lowered his gun.
“Sorry, boss…I guess I must of fell asleep.”
“After all, a brain like yours must rest sometimes,” said the Saint handsomely.
It was eight o’clock, and the morning was clear and bright. Sitting squeezed up in the diminutive bath of the hotel’s one rudimentary bathroom, he told the story of his night’s adventure in carelessly effervescent sentences—at least, the tale bubbled on exuberantly enough, in the flamboyant inconsequential idiom which was his own inimitable language, until he noticed that his audience was not following him with all the rapt breathlessness which he felt his narrative deserved. He stopped, and regarded Mr Uniatz speculatively. Mr. Uniatz coughed.
“Boss,” said Mr Uniatz, waking out of his reverie as if the whole tedious business of noises in the night, gagged men in locked rooms, pedagogues with pop-guns, and disappearing lorries had now been satisfactorily disposed of, and the meeting was free to pass on to more spiritual pursuits. “What rhymes wit ‘goil’?”
“‘Boil,’” suggested the Saint, after a moment’s poetic reflection.
Mr Uniatz pondered the idea for a while, his lips moving as if in silent prayer. Then he shook his head dubiously.
“I dunno, boss—it don’t sound quite right.”
“What doesn’t sound quite right?”
“Dis voice of mine.”
“I shouldn’t let that prey on my mind, Hoppy,” said the Saint encouragingly, although he was finding the train of thought more and more obscure. “After all, you can’t have everything. Maybe Caruso wasn’t so hot with a Roscoe.”
Hoppy Uniatz frowned.
“I don’t mean de verse I talk wit’, boss; I mean de voice I’m makin’ up when I fall asleep last night. It starts dis way:
“You’re so beautiful, you’re like a rose,
I’m tellin’ ya, an’ I’m a guy who knows:
Your eyes are like de shinin’ stars,
Dey remind me of my Ma’s:
I t’ink you are a swell kind of goil—”
He hesitated.
“I bet a neck like yours never had a berl.”
He concluded, scratching his head. “It don’t sound right, somehow, but I never had no practice makin’ up pomes.”
Simon dried and dressed himself in stunned silence.
He strolled out into the road in the strengthening sunshine, and found his steps leading him almost automatically down towards the harbour, although he had no need of the walk to sharpen his appetite for breakfast. Down on the quay he found a blue-jerseyed old salt smoking his pipe on a bollard and gazing out to sea with the faraway bright-blue eye which is popularly supposed to express the sailor’s unquenchable yearning for the great open waters, but which can actually be quenched with the most perfunctory dilution of water. It was a very conventional politeness to exchange good mornings, easy enough to pass on to some more explicit appreciations of the weather, and from there to a broader discussion of life in those parts. The man had the easy garrulousness of his kind, and perhaps he also scented a future customer for fishing expeditions.
“Aye, there was more life here when I wurr a boy. Fordy ships there wurr in the fishing fleet then—now, there ain’t ’aardly a dozen. What with the ’aarbour fillin’ up now an’ everything, it do zeem as if we’ll all have to take up vaarming afore long.” He poked the stem of his pipe towards the horizon. “That dredger out yonder, she been workin’ here for three months gone tryin’ to keep us open, but it keeps fillin’ up.”
Simon gazed out at the thread of smoke rising from the dredger’s funnel against the pale blue sky.
“You mean the sea’s going back on you?”
“Aye, it do zeem that way zometimes. You zee that channel down there where the boats lay—down there by the causeway? That’s where she’s woorst. Seems to come up with the tide, like every night, an’ it gets caught there like it would by a breakwater, or else the river brings it down an’ the tide catches it an’ throws it back. It’s all we can do to keep ’er clear.” The man’s voice held a certain personal pride, as if he himself had gone out with a spade and established the enormity of the disaster at first hand. “It’s due to the world goin’ round the sun, that’s what it is—just as you could walk across on dry land once from here to Fraance…”
He grumbled on into a startlingly abstruse geological theory which was apparently designed to prove that such things did not happen when the earth was flat—only returning from his flights of imagination when the time came to point out, as the Saint had suspected, that he was the owner of the best boat for fishing on the coast, and that his services could be secured at any time for a purely nominal fee.
Simon made vague promises, and went thoughtfully back up the hill. Nestling into the bank of a cool green, with the stippled shadows of the overhanging trees stirring lazily across it, the rambling black-timbered inn looked more than ever like the sort of place where the most sensational mystery should be a polite and courtly, seventeenth-century ghost with a clanking chain and a head under its arm, and he wondered if that was one reason why it had been so ideally chosen.
He did not go indoors at once, but continued his stroll round to the garage. The lorry was back in its place, exactly as if it had never been moved, and it would not have required much self-deception to persuade him that he had dreamed its absence. But the Saint did very little dreaming of that kind, and he touched the radiator and felt that it was warm. He put his foot on one of the rear wheels and pulled himself up to inspect the interior of the truck. There was a dusty layer of red earth on the bottom, and particles of the same soil clung to the sides: he smeared one between his finger and t
humb, and it was damp.
“All very interesting,” said the Saint to himself.
He squeezed in between the lorry and the wall, and saw other sprinklings of earth on the concrete floor. The wall against which the truck was parked was an exterior wall of the hotel itself—the bare oak beams and timbering and the rough yellowish plaster seemed to stare out miserably at the cheap modern brickwork and corrugated iron which had been stuck on to them to produce the garage. He spent some minutes in a minute examination of the wall, and used the blade of his penknife to make sure.
When he came out again he was humming gently under his breath, and his blue eyes were twinkling with a quiet and profound delight. The yard straggled off into a long grass slope flimsily cut off by a staked wire fence. He ducked through the wire and sauntered up the hill until he reached a slight prominence from which he had a considerable view of the road which ran past the inn, and the upper country towards which it led. He could see where the straight march of the silver power pylons dropped over the main ridge of hill, stepped carelessly over the road three hundred yards away, and sent its glistening wires in a long sweep over the gladed valley to climb sedately over the rise on the other side. For some time he stood with his hands in his pockets and the dreamiest ghost of a smile on his lips, gazing out over the landscape. There was a ditch at the foot of the hill, beside the road, and it was this that he made for when he walked down again. The bottom of the ditch was overgrown with weed and couch-grass, but he felt about with his hand, and found what he had expected to find—a heavy insulated cable. He knew that he would find one end of the cable leading to the pylon nearest the road, if he cared to follow it. Walking slowly back to the inn, he came to a place where a slight hump in the road border indicated a comparatively recently filled excavation. It disappeared at the end of the concrete lane that led to the garage, and he knew that the insulated cable reached its destination somewhere very near.
At that moment he knew half the answer to the riddle of the Clevely Arms, and the solution staggered him.
Hoppy Uniatz was already in the dining-room, endeavouring to persuade a giggling waitress that a pound of fried steak garnished with three eggs and a half-dozen rashers of bacon was a very modest breakfast for a healthy man.
“Get him what he wants, Gladys,” said the Saint, sinking into the other chair. “And call yourself lucky he’s on a diet. If he was eating properly he’d spread you on a piece of toast and swallow you for an hors-d’œuvre.”
“Dat bale of straw is fifty in de deck,” growled Mr Uniatz cryptically, reaching for the solace of the bottle of whisky which he had foresightedly brought into the room with him. “Where ya been, boss?”
Simon lighted a cigarette.
“I’ve been exploring. We’ll go on and see some more when you’ve finished.”
“I dunno, boss.” Mr Uniatz stared vacantly at the pink floral motif on the opposite wall. “Dis ain’t such a bad flea-box. Whadda we have to pull de pin for?”
“We aren’t pulling the pin, Hoppy,” said the Saint. “This is just some local scenery we’re going to take a look at. We may be staying here a long time—I don’t know. Life has these uncertainties. But I think the trouble is coming fairly soon.”
How soon the trouble was to come he had no means of knowing.
He went up the hill again, with Hoppy, after breakfast, but not in the same direction as he had gone before. This time he climbed the steeper slope due west from the back of the hotel. They struggled through winding paths among the trees and undergrowth to a muttered accompaniment of strange East Side expletives from Mr Uniatz, who never took exercise out of doors, and presently broke clear of the patch of woodland into a broad bare tract of grass that rolled up to an undulating horizon against the blue sky. From the top of this rise he could see patches of the roof of the inn through the branches, but he was more interested in the view on the opposite side of the hill. He stood looking at this for a little while in silence while Mr Uniatz recovered his breath, and then he sat down on the grass and took out his cigarette-case.
“If you can take your mind off poetry for a while and concentrate on what I’m saying, it may be useful,” he said. “I want you to know what this is all about—just in case of accidents.”
And he went on talking for about half an hour, sorting out the facts and putting them together with infinite deference to the limitations of Mr Uniatz’s cerebral system, until he had made sure that even Hoppy had assimilated as much of the secret as he knew himself. He had never expected to produce any sensational reactions, but Mr Uniatz bit the end from a cigar and spat it out with a phlegmatic practicality which was equivalent to the flabbergasted incoherence of any lesser man.
“Whadda we do, boss?” he asked.
“We hang round,” said the Saint. “It may happen tonight or it may happen a month from now, but we can take it as written that a job like this isn’t planned and worked out on that scale without there’s something pretty worthwhile in it, and when the balloon goes up we’ll be round to inspect the boodle.”
He had a cool estimate of his own danger. The Garthwait outfit had acquired bigger and better reasons to dislike him, whatever part they had decided he was playing in the pageant. The Jeffroll fraternity might be equally puzzled about his status, but in the next ten minutes he had three separate indications of their esteem.
While he sat talking on the hill his keen eyes had caught the stirring of a bush at the edge of the wooded patch below him, and he had seen the movement of a scrap of white behind it. Walking down again as casually as if he had noticed nothing, he let the path lead him towards the place where he had seen the watcher. It was Major Portmore, leaning against the bole of a tree where the shrubbery almost hid him from the hilltop—but for the flash of his white shirt, he might have been passed unobserved while he stood still. He had a pipe between his teeth and a shot-gun under his arm, and he nodded unconcernedly when the Saint greeted him.
“Thought I might get a rabbit,” he said amiably. “You often see them sunning themselves up there.”
Simon raised a faintly quizzical eyebrow.
“I should have thought tigers would have been more in your line,” he murmured.
“Tigers,” said the Major, taking out his pipe, “or rats. It’s all the same to me.”
The Saint let his eyes dwell gently on the other’s shepherd’s-warning complexion.
“If the rats are pink ones, on bicycles,” he said gravely, “don’t shoot.”
He left the gallant Major a shade darker in colour, and bore thoughtfully to the left, towards the garage. Slipping into his car, he adjusted the throttle and ignition, and pressed the starter. The engine turned over several times without firing, and he abandoned the effort to save his batteries. Doubtless an expert investigation would show what had been done to put it out of action, but it required no investigation to tell him that Major Portmore’s sudden transfer of interest from fishing to rabbiting had the same reason as the disabling of the Hirondel.
He wandered round to the front of the hotel, and found Captain Voss sitting on a bench beside the door with a newspaper on his knee, his face wrinkled up against the glare till he looked like a grey-haired lizard. He said “Good morning” briefly in answer to the Saint’s cheery nod, and returned to his paper, but the Saint knew that he did not read another line until they had passed on into the hall.
Simon Templar went into the lounge and sat on a window seat with his feet up, considering these three tributes with the aid of a cigarette. The change of attitude since last night was not lost on him. Then, the principal idea had been to persuade him to move on, and he had gathered that if he moved on without fuss everybody would have been quite happy and asked no questions. Now, even if the idea was not actually to keep him there, it was at least plain that he was not to go anywhere without being watched—the tampering with his car fitted in with that scheme equally well, for it was flagrantly a hopeless car for anyone to try to follow. Simon sat thinki
ng it over with profound interest, while Hoppy Uniatz sat beside and chewed one end of his cigar and smoked the other in a sublime complacency of unhelpfulness. He heard a small car grind fussily down the road and stop with a squeak outside, without letting it interrupt his meditations, and then, through the half-open window over his head, he heard something else that stiffened him into attention with a jerk.
“Morning, Voss—is Jeffroll inside?”
It was the thin desiccated voice of the man he had met on the Axminster Road in the small hours of that morning—the man who, according to Garthwait himself, might have paid ten thousand pounds for the rescue of that prodigious pimple on the cosmos.
8
There was no doubt that his bald use of Voss’s surname, without prefix, was not meant impertinently; equally beyond question was the implied acceptance of the familiarity in Voss’s pleasant reply:
“He’s in the office—sorry I can’t come in with you.”
“Not at all,” said the dry voice punctiliously.
Simon was peering between the curtains, trying to catch a glimpse of the owner of the voice, and then he heard footsteps in the hall and sank back hurriedly, snatching out a handkerchief to cover his face. Pretending to blow his nose vigorously, but not so noisily as to make himself the object of undesirable curiosity, he saw the man come through the archway which communicated the lounge and the hall. It was a small man, who walked easily under the low beams, and the chief impression it gave was one of studied and all-permeating greyness. Everything about him seemed to be grey—from the top of his baldish head and the parchment pallor of his face, down through his rusty swallowtail coat and striped trousers, to his incongruously foppish suède shoes. He carried a small black brief-case in a grey-gloved hand, and Simon searched for a moment for the one unmistakable thing that linked his whole appearance to his dry dusty voice. In another moment he got it. The Saint refused to believe that anyone who looked and dressed and spoke so exactly like a rather seedy lawyer could possibly have any other reason for existence.
The Saint Goes On (The Saint Series) Page 21
