There was always the risk that his limpet-like attachment would attract the attention of the driver of the taxi, but it was a risk that had to be ignored. Fortunately it was growing dark rapidly after a dull and rainy afternoon; they raced up the Finchley Road in a swiftly deepening dusk, and as they passed Swiss Cottage Underground the Saint took the first chance of the chase—fell far behind the taxi, switched on his lights, tore after it again, and picked up the red glow-worm eye of its tail light after thirty breathless seconds. That device might have done something to allay any possible suspicions, and the lights of one car look very much like the lights of any other when the distinctive features of its coachwork are hidden behind the diffused rays of a few statutory candlepower.
So far the procession had led him through familiar highways, but a little while after switching on his lights he was practically lost. His bump of locality told him that they were somewhere to the east of the Finchley Road and heading roughly north, but the taxi in front of him whizzed round one corner after another until his bearings were boxed all round the compass, and the names of streets which occasionally flashed past the tail of his eye were unknown to him.
Presently they were running down a broad avenue of large houses set well back from the road, and the taxi ahead was slowing up. In a moment of intuitive understanding, the Saint held his own speed and shot past it; keeping the cab in his driving mirror, he saw it turning in through a pair of gates set in a high garden wall twenty yards behind him.
Simon locked his wheels round the next corner and pulled up dead. In a second he was out of the car and walking quickly back towards the driveway into which the taxi had disappeared.
He strolled quietly past the gates and took in as much of the lie of the land as he could in one searching survey under the slanted brim of his hat. The house was a massively gloomy three-storeyed edifice in the most pompous Georgian style, reminiscent of a fat archdeacon suffering an attack of liver with rhinoscerine fortitude, and the only light visible on that side of it was a pale pink bulb that hung in the drab portico like a forlorn plum in an orchard that the pickers have finished with. The neglected front garden was dappled with the shadows of a few laurel bushes and unkempt flower-beds. Of the taxi there was no sign, but a dim nimbus of light was discernible beyond the shrubbery on the right.
The Saint’s leisured step eased up gradually and reached a standstill. After all, Mr Jones was the man he wanted to meet; this appeared to be Mr Jones’s headquarters, and there were no counter-attractions in the way of night life to be seen in that part of Hampstead. The main idea suffered no competition, and a shrewd glance up and down the road revealed no other evening prowlers to notice what happened.
Simon dropped his hands into his pockets and grinned gently at the stars.
“Here goes,” he murmured.
The dense shadows inside the garden swallowed him up like a ghost. A faint scraping of gears came to him as he skirted a clump of laurels and padded warily along the grass border of a part of the drive which circled round towards the regions where he had seen the light, and he rounded the corner of the house in time to see the taxi’s stern gliding through the doors of a garage that was built on to the side of Mr Jones’s manor. Simon halted again, and stood like a statue while he watched a vague figure scrunch out of the darkness and pull the doors shut behind the cab—from the inside. He surmised that there was a direct communication from the garage through into the house, but he heard a heavy bolt grating into its socket as he drew nearer to investigate.
The Saint sidled on past the garage to the back of the house and waited. After a time he saw two parallel slits of subdued radiance blink out around the edges of a drawn blind in a first-floor window; they were no more than hair-lines of almost imperceptible luminance etched in the blackness of the wall, but they were enough to give him the information he needed.
Down on the ground level, almost opposite where he stood, he made out another door—obviously a kitchen entrance for the convenience of servants, tradesmen, and policemen with ten minutes to spare and a sheik-like style with cooks. He moved forward and ran his fingers over it cautiously. A gentle pressure here and there told him that it was not bolted and he felt in his pocket for a slim pack of skeleton keys. At the third attempt the heavy wards turned solidly over and Simon replaced the keys in his pocket and pushed the door inwards by fractions of an inch, with the blade of his penknife pressing against the point where it would first be able to slip through. He checked the movement of the door at the instant when his knife slid into the gap, and ran the blade delicately up and down the minute opening. At the very base of the door it encountered an obstruction, and the Saint flicked the burglar alarm aside with a neat twist and an inaudible sigh of satisfaction, and stepped in.
Standing on the mat, with his back to the closed door, he put away the knife and snapped a tiny electric flashlight from its clip in his breast pocket. It was no longer than a fountain pen, and a scrap of tinfoil with a two-millimetre puncture in it was gummed over the bulb so that the beam it sent out was as fine as a needle. A three-inch ellipse of concentrated light whisked along the wall beside him, and rounded itself off into a perfect circle as it came to rest on another door facing the one by which he had entered.
Simon Templar’s experience as a burglar was strictly limited. On the rare occasions when he had unlawfully introduced himself into the houses of his victims, it had nearly always been in quest of information rather than booty. And he set out to explore the abode of the man called Jones with the untainted zest of a man to whom the crime was still an adventure.
With one hand still resting lightly on the side pocket of his coat he opened the opposite door soundlessly and admitted himself to a large dimly illuminated central hall. A broad marble staircase wound up and around the sides of the hall, climbing from gallery to gallery up the three floors of the house until it was indistinguishable against the great shrouded emptiness of what was probably an ornate stained-glass skylight in the roof. Everything around was wrapped in the silence of death, and the atmosphere had the damply naked feel of air that has not been breathed for many months. A thin smear of dust came off on his fingers from everything he touched, and when he flashed his torch over the interior of one of the ground-floor rooms he found it bare and dilapidated, with the paint peeling off the walls and cobwebs festooning an enormous dingy gilt chandelier.
“Rented for the job,” he diagnosed. “They wouldn’t bother about the ground floor at all—not with kidnapped prisoners.”
He flitted up the staircase without so much as a tap from his feather-weight crepe-soled shoes. A strip of cheap carpet had been roughly laid round the gallery which admitted to the first-floor rooms, and the Saint walked softly over it, listening at door after door.
Then he heard with startling clarity a voice that he recognised.
“You have nothing to be afraid of, Miss Holm, so long as you behave yourself. I’m sorry to have had to take the liberty of abducting you, but you doubtless know one or two reasons why I must discourage your friend’s curiosity.”
He heard the girl’s calm reply:
“I think you could have invented a less roundabout way of committing suicide.”
The man’s bass chuckle answered her. Perhaps only the Saint’s ears could have detected the iron core of ruthless menace that hardened the overtones of its full-throated heartiness.
“I’m glad you’re not hysterical.” A brief pause. “If there’s anything within reason that you want, I hope you’ll ask for it. Are you feeling hungry?”
“Thanks,” said the girl coolly. “I should like a couple of sausages, some potatoes, and a cup of coffee.”
Simon darted along the gallery and whipped open the nearest door. Through the gap which he left open he saw a heavily-built grey-haired man emerge from the next room, lock the door after him, and go down the stairs. As the man bent to the key, the Saint had a photographic impression of a dark, large-featured, smooth-shaven face; then h
e could only see the broad well-tailored back passing downwards out of view.
The man’s footsteps died away, and Simon returned to the landing. He stood at the door of Patricia’s room and tapped softly on the wood with his fingernails.
“Hullo, Pat!”
Her dress rustled inside the room.
“Quick work, boy. How did you do it?”
“Easy. Are you all right?”
“Sure.”
“How’s the window in there?”
“There’s a sort of cage over it—I couldn’t reach the glass. The taxi was the same. There’s a divan bed and a couple of wicker arm-chairs. The table’s very low—the legs wouldn’t reach through the bars. He’s thought of everything. Wash basin and jug of water on the floor—some towels—cigarettes—”
“What happened to the taxi-driver?”
“That was Mr Jones.”
The Saint drew a thoughtful breath.
“Phew! And what a solo worker!…Can you hold on for a bit? I’d like to explore the rest of the establishment before I start any trouble.”
“Go ahead, old chap, I’m fine.”
“Still got your gun?”
“Sure.”
“So long, lass.”
The Saint tip-toed along the landing and prowled up the second flight of stairs.
6
There were no lights burning on the upper gallery, but a dull glimmer of twilight flittered up from the lamps below and relieved the darkness sufficiently for him to be able to move as quickly as he wanted to. With his slim electric flash in his hand he went around the storey from room to room, turning the door-handles with infinite care, and probing the apartments with the dancing beam of his torch. The first one he opened was plainly but comfortably furnished as a bedroom: it was evidently occupied, for the bed had not been made since it was last slept in, and a shaving brush crested with a mound of dried lather stood on the mantelpiece. The second room was another bedroom, tidier than the first, but showing the ends of a suit of silk pyjamas under the pillow as proof that it also was used. The door of the third room was locked, and Simon delved in his pocket again for a skeleton key. The lock was of the same type as that on the back door by which he had entered the house—one of those ponderously useless contraptions which any cracksman can open with a bent pin—and in a second or two it gave way.
Simon pushed the door ajar, and saw that the room was in darkness. He stepped boldly in, quartering the room with his weaving pencil of light. The flying disc of luminance danced along the walls and suddenly stopped, splashing itself in an irregular pool over the motionless form of a man who lay quietly on the floor as if asleep. But the Saint knew that he was dead.
He knelt down and made a rapid examination. The man had been dead about forty-eight hours—there was no trace of a wound but with his face close to the dead man’s mouth he detected the unmistakable scent of prussic acid. It was as he was rising to go that he accidentally turned over the lapel of the dead man’s coat, and saw the thin silver badge underneath—the silver greyhound of a King’s Messenger.
The Saint came to his feet again rather slowly. The waters were running deeper than he had ever expected, and he felt an odd sense of shock. That slight silver badge had transformed the adventure at one glance from a more or less ordinary if still mysterious criminal problem to an intrigue that might lead anywhere.
As he left the room he heard the man called Jones coming up the stairs again. Peeping over the wooden balustrade, he saw that the man carried a tray—the catering arrangements in that house appeared to be highly commendable, even if nothing else was.
Simon slipped along the gallery without a sound. He opened two more rooms and found them both empty; then he paused outside another and saw a narrow line of light under the door.
He stood still for a few seconds, listening. He heard an occasional faint chink of glass or metal, and the shuffling of slippered feet over the carpet, but there were no voices. Almost mechanically he tried the door, and had one of the biggest surprises of his life when he felt it opening.
The Saint froze up motionless, with a dry electric tingle glissading over the surface of his skin. The way the door gave back under his light touch disintegrated the very ground from under his nebulous theory about the occupant of that room. In the space of four seconds his brain set up, surveyed, and bowled over a series of possible explanations that were chiefly notable for their complete uselessness. In the fifth second that ultimate fact impressed itself unanswerably on his consciousness, and he acknowledged it with a wry shrug and the decimal point of a smile. Theories were all very well in their place, but he had come to the house of Mr Jones on a quest for irrefutable knowledge, and an item of irrefutable knowledge was awaiting his attention inside that room. It remained for him to go in and get introduced—and that was what he had given up a peaceful evening in his own home to do.
He glanced downwards into the hall. There was no sound or movement from below. For a minute or two he might consider he had the field to himself—if he was quick and quiet about taking it over.
The door of the lighted room opened further, inch by inch, against the steady persuasion of his fingers, while his nerves were keyed up to check its swing at the first faint hint of a squeak out of the hinges. Gradually the strip of light at the edge widened until he could see part of the room. A grotesque confusion of metal and glass, tangled up with innumerable strands and coils of wire, was heaped over all the floor space that he could see like the scrap-heap of one of those nightmare laboratories of the future which appear in every magazine of pseudo-scientific fiction. The Saint’s unscientific mind could grasp nothing but the bare visual impression of it—an apparently aimless conglomeration of burnished steel spheres and shining crystal tubes that climbed in and out of each other like a futurist sculptor’s rendering of two all-in wrestlers getting acquainted. Back against the far wall ran a long work-bench of wood and porcelain surmounted by racks and shelves of glass vessels and bottles of multi-coloured mixtures. It was the most fantastic collection of incomprehensible apparatus that Simon Templar had ever seen, and yet in some ridiculously conventional way it seemed to have its perfect focus and presiding genius in the slender white-haired man in a stained and grimy white overall who stood at the bench with his back to the open door.
Simon Templar walked very quietly into the room and closed the door noiselessly behind him. He stood with his back leaning against it and his right hand circling comfortably round the butt of the automatic in his pocket, and cleared his throat apologetically.
“Hullo,” he said.
The figure at the bench turned round sharply. He was a mild-faced man with a pair of thick gold-rimmed pince-nez perched slantwise on the end of a long fleshy nose, and his response was pitched in the last key on earth that the Saint had expected to hear.
“What the devil do you want?” he demanded.
To say that the Saint was taken aback means nothing. The effect on his emotional system was much the same as it would have been if the aged scientist had uttered a shrill war-whoop and begun to turn cartwheels over the test-tubes. Even in these days of free thought and speech the greeting seemed singularly unusual. When you have been at considerable pains, without appreciable hope of reward, to hunt along the trail of a kidnapped professor—when, in the process, you have been warned off the course with a couple of bullets, and have found it necessary to let yourself in for a charge of vulgar burglary in the good cause—you are definitely entitled to expect a fairly cordial welcome from the object of your rescue expedition.
Once before the Saint had been greeted something like that in rather similar circumstances, and the memory of that adventure was still fresh with him. It cut short the involuntary upward jerk of his eye-brows, and when he found an answer his voice was absolutely level and natural. Only an ear that was listening for it would have sensed the rapier points that stroked in and out of its casual syllables.
“I just came to see how you were ge
tting on, Dr Quell.”
“Well, why can’t you leave me alone? How do you expect me to get any work done while I’m being pestered with your absurd questions every ten minutes?” The old man was gesticulating his disgust with everything from his feet to his forehead, till the glasses on his nose quivered with indignation. “What d’you think I am—a lazy schoolboy? Eh? Dammit, haven’t you any work of your own?”
“You see, we don’t want you to have a breakdown, professor,” said the Saint, soothingly. “If you took a little rest now and then—”
“I had seven hours’ rest last night. I’m not an invalid. And how would I get this done in time if I lay in bed all day? Think it would get done by itself? Eh?”
Simon took out a cigarette case and moved over to sit down on a conveniently shaped dome of metal.
“All the same, professor, if you wouldn’t mind—”
The old man leapt towards him with a kind of yelp. Simon drew back hurriedly, and the professor glared at him, breathing heavily.
The Saint and Mr. Teal (The Saint Series) Page 5
