Simon whipped up his gun, but something like a hot iron ripped down his forearm before he could fire, and the automatic was brushed effortlessly out of his hand. He felt hot foetid breath on his face, and smashed his fist into something soft and damp, and then he went down under the clawing spitting weight of the brute with its shrill snarl of fury ringing in his ears.
More by luck than judgment he found the animal’s throat with his hands, and probably it was that fluke, and the second or two’s reprieve it gave him, which saved him from serious injury.
“Sheba!”
The lights had gone up in the hall, and he heard running footsteps. He had never been so breathlessly thankful to hear anything in his life. A whip lashed, and the huge black panther on top of him roared again and stepped back, turning its head with bared fangs. Simon took his chance and rolled clear—it was the fastest roll he had ever performed in his acrobatic career.
“Back!” shouted Nordsten furiously, and lashed at the panther again.
It was one of the most amazing demonstrations of brutal fearlessness which Simon had ever witnessed. Nordsten simply advanced step by step, swinging the wire-tipped rawhide back and forth in a steady rhythm of flailing punishment, and as he went forward, the panther went back. Quite obviously it had never been tamed, and no attempt had ever been made to tame it. Nordsten dominated it by nothing but his own savage courage. Its yellow eyes blazed with the most horrible intelligent hatred that the Saint had ever dreamed of seeing in the eyes of an animal; it clawed and bit at the slashing whip with deep growls of murderous rage, but it went back. Nordsten’s face was black with anger, and he had no more pity than fear. He drove the brute right across the hall into a corner, lashed it half a dozen times more when it could retreat no farther—and then turned his back on it. It crouched there, staring after him, with a steady rumbling of frightful viciousness burring in its throat.
“You’re lucky to be alive, Vickery,” Nordsten said harshly, curling his whip in his big white hands.
He was in his pyjamas and dressing-gown—Simon had known very few financiers who could be impressive in that costume, but Nordsten was.
The Saint nodded, dabbing his handkerchief over the deep claw-groove in his bare forearm.
“I was just coming to the same conclusion,” he remarked lightly. “Have you got any more docile pets like that around the place?”
“What were you doing down here?” answered Nordsten sharply, and Simon remembered that he was still supposed to be Tim Vickery.
“I wanted a drink,” he explained. “I thought all the servants would have been in bed by this time, so I didn’t like to ring for it. I just came down to see if I could find anything. I was half-way down the stairs when that thing started chasing me…”
Nordsten’s faded bright eyes looked away to the left, and Simon saw that the saturnine butler was standing on the stairs at a safe distance, with a revolver clutched in his hand.
“You forgot to lock the door, Trusaneff?” Nordsten said coldly.
The man licked his lips.
“No, sir—”
“It wasn’t locked, anyway,” said the Saint blankly.
Nordsten looked at the butler for a moment longer; then at the Saint. Simon met his gaze with an expression of honest perplexity, and Nordsten turned away abruptly and went past him into the library, switching on the lights. He saw the automatic lying in the middle of the carpet, and picked it up.
“Is this yours?”
“Yes.” Simon blinked, and shifted his eyes with an air of mild consternation. “I…I always carry it now, and—Well, when that animal started—”
“I see.” Nordsten’s genial nod of understanding was very quick. He glanced at the Saint’s gashed arm. “You’ll need a bandage on that. Trusaneff will attend to it. Excuse me.”
He spoke those few words as if with their utterance the episode was finally concluded. Somehow, the Saint found himself outside the library door while Nordsten closed it from the inside.
“This way, please, Mr Vickery,” said the butler, without moving from his safe position on the lower flight of stairs.
Simon felt for his cigarette-case and walked thoughtfully across the hall. Through another half-open door he caught a glimpse of the scared features of the battle-scarred warrior who had paraded under his window, peering out from an equally safe position. The black panther crouched in the corner where Nordsten had left it, lashing its tail in sullen silence…
Altogether a very exciting wind-up to a pleasant social evening, reflected the Saint; if it was the wind-up…He remembered that Nordsten had carelessly omitted to give him back his automatic when ushering him so smoothly out of the library, and realised that he would have felt a lot happier if the financier had been less pointedly forgetful. He also remembered that either Annette or Patricia should have telephoned him that night, and wondered why there had been no message. Teal might have been responsible—so far as Simon knew, that persistent detective had not been aware of his latest acquisition in the way of real estate, but there had been no secrecy about the transaction, and it would have been perfectly simple for Mr Teal to discover it after a certain amount of time. Or else they might have tried to telephone, and Nordsten or one of his servants might have been the barrier. That also was possible, since he had already been allowed to write a letter which had doubtless been read before it was posted. He was developing a profound respect for Ivar Nordsten’s thoroughness…
“Vickery.”
It was Nordsten’s voice, and the Saint stopped, and saw the financier standing at the foot of the stairs.
“I’d like to see you again for a moment, if your arm can wait.”
There was no real question of whether his arm could wait, and Simon turned with a smile.
“Of course.”
He went down the stairs again. Trusaneff halted on the last flight, and Simon crossed the hall alone.
Nordsten was standing by the desk when the Saint entered the library, and the panther was crouching at his feet. Simon saw that the carpet was rolled back from the trap-door, and the financier was holding his gun in his hand. He realised that he had been exceedingly careless, but he allowed nothing but a natural puzzlement to appear on his face.
“You tell me that Sheba started chasing you when you were on the stairs, and you tried to get in here to escape.” Nordsten said, with a curious flat timbre in his voice.
“That’s right,” Simon answered.
“Then can you explain this?”
Nordsten pointed his whip at the floor, and Simon looked down, and saw the stub of a cigarette lying beside the trap-door—that same cigarette which his tingling nerves had forced him to light when he got inside the room, and which he had unconsciously trodden out when the demoniac snarl of the panther disturbed him in his investigations—and a few little splashes of grey ash around it.
“I don’t understand,” he said, with a frown of perfect bewilderment.
The financier’s faded bright eyes were fixed on him steadily.
“None of my servants smoke, and I only smoke cigars.”
“I still don’t know why you should ask me,” Simon said.
“Is your name Vickery?”
“Of course it is.”
Nordsten stared at him for a few seconds longer.
“You’re a liar,” he said at length, with absolute calm.
Simon did not answer, and knew that there was no answer to make. He admitted nothing, continuing to gape at Nordsten with the same expression of helpless perplexity which the real Tim Vickery would have worn, but he knew that he was only carrying on mechanically with a bluff that had long since been called. It made no difference.
The thing that surprised him a little was Nordsten’s complete restraint. He would have expected some show of emotion, some manifestation of nerves, fear, anger, even insensate viciousness, but there was none of those. The financier was as rock-still as if he had been contemplating an ordinary obstacle which had arisen
in the course of a normal and respectable business campaign—almost as if he had already envisaged the obstacle and sketched out a rough plan of remedy, and was simply considering the remedy again in detail, to make sure that it contained no flaws. And Simon Templar, remembering the poor half-crazy wretch under the trap, had an eerie presentiment that perhaps this was only the barest truth.
Nordsten spoke only one revealing sentence.
“I didn’t think it would come so soon,” he said, speaking aloud but only to himself, and his voice was quiet and almost childlike.
Then he looked at the Saint again with his dispassionate and empty eyes, and the gun in his hand moved slightly.
“Lift up the trap, please…Vickery,” he said.
Simon hesitated momentarily, but the gun was aimed on him quite adequately, and Nordsten was too far away for a surprise attack. With a slight shrug he moved the square of parquet aside and locked his hands in the ring-bolt of the heavy stone door. He lifted it with a strong quiet heave, and laid it back on the floor.
“This is lots of fun,” he murmured. “What do we do now—wiggle our ears and pretend to be rabbits?”
The financier ignored him. He raised his voice slightly and called, “Erik!”
In the silence that followed, Simon listened to the sounds of stumbling movement in the cave under the floor, and presently he saw the head of the man who looked like Nordsten coming up out of the hole. The man was climbing up some sort of ladder which the Saint had not noticed, taking each rung with a shaky effort such as an old man might have made, as if his limbs had grown pitifully feeble from long disuse. As he appeared under the full open light, Simon was even more amazed at the resemblance between the two men. There were minor differences, it was true, but most of them could be accounted for by the unimaginably frightful years of imprisonment which Erik had endured in that lightless pit. Even in stature they were almost identical. Simon had a moment’s recollection of the man’s stiff husky voice saying, “I’m you. I know you…I’m you—Nordsten!” And he shivered in the sudden chill of understanding.
The man had climbed out at last. His glazed eyes, tensed painfully in the brilliant light, fell on the black panther, and he swayed weakly, clutching the collar of his ragged shirt with a trembling hand. And then he mastered himself.
“All right,” he said, with a shuddering gasp. “I’m not afraid. I didn’t mean you to see me afraid. But when you opened the door just now—and the thing yelled—I forgot. But I’m not afraid any more. I’m not afraid, damn you!”
Nordsten’s faded eyes, without pity, glanced at the Saint.
“So—you had opened the trap,” he remarked, almost casually.
“Maybe I had,” Simon responded calmly. He was not meeting Nordsten’s gaze, and he only answered perfunctorily. He was looking at the man Erik, and he went on speaking to him, very clearly and steadily, trying to strike a spark of recognition from that terribly injured brain. “I was the bloke who said hullo to you just now, Erik. It wasn’t Brother Ivar. It was me.”
The man stared at him sightlessly, and Nordsten moved nearer to the door. The great black panther rose and stretched itself. It padded after him, watching him with its oblique malignant eyes, and Nordsten took the whip in his right hand. His voice rang out suddenly.
“Sheba!”
The whip whistled through the air and curled over the animal’s sleek flanks in a terrific blow.
“Kill!”
The whip fell again. Growling, the panther started forward. A third and a fourth lash cracked over its body like the sound of pistol shots, and it stopped and turned its head.
Simon will never forget what followed.
It was not clear to him at the time, though the actual physical fact was as vivid as a nightmare. He knew that he faced certain death, but it had come on him so quickly that he had no chance to grasp the idea completely. The man Erik was standing beside him, white-faced, his body rigid and quivering, his lips stubbornly compressed and the breath hissing jerkily through his nostrils. He knew. But the Saint, with his eyes narrowed to slits of steel and his muscles flexed for the hopeless combat, only understood the threat of death instinctively. He saw what was happening long before reason and comprehension caught up with it.
The head of the beast turned, and again the cruel whip cut across its back. And then—it could only have been that the deep-sown hate of the beast conquered its fear, and its raging blood-lust burst into the deeper channel. The twist of its magnificent rippling body was too quick for the eye to follow. It sprang, a streak of burnished ebony flying through the air—not towards the Saint or Erik, but away from them. Nordsten’s gun banged once, and then the cry that broke from his lips as he went down was drowned in the rolling thunder of the panther’s hate.
8
“Say,” pleaded Mr Uniatz bashfully, plucking up the courage to seek illumination on a point which had been worrying him for some hours, “is a nightjar de t’ing—”
“No, it isn’t,” said Patricia Holm hurriedly. “It’s a kind of bird.”
“Oh, a boid I.” Hoppy’s mouth stretched horizontally in a broad grin of overwhelming relief. “I t’ought it couldn’t of been what I t’ought it was.”
Patricia sighed.
“Why on earth did you have to think about nightjars at all, anyway?”
“Well, it was dis way. Before de Saint scrammed, after he made me a pansy bootlegger, he said my accent reminded him of a nightjar callin’ to its mate…”
“He must have been thinking of a nightingale, Hoppy,” said the girl kindly.
She lighted a cigarette and strolled over to the window, watching the dusk deepening down the glade of bracken and trees. Annette Vickery gazed after her with a feeling that was oddly akin to awe. Annette herself couldn’t help knowing, frankly, that she was pretty, but this slim fair girl who seemed to be the Saint’s partner in outlawry had an enchanting beauty like nothing that she had ever seen before. That alone might have made her jealous after the fashion even of the nicest women, but in Patricia Holm it was only an incidental feature. She had a repose, a quiet understanding confidence, which was the only thing that made hours of waiting tolerable.
She had come in towards midday.
“I’m Patricia,” she said, and with that she was introduced.
She heard the story of the night before and the morning after, and laughed.
“I expect it seems like the end of the world to you,” she said, “but it isn’t very new to me. I wondered what had happened to Simon when I blew into the apartment this morning and found he hadn’t been in all night. But he always has been daft—I suppose you’ve had plenty of time to find that out. How about a spot of sherry, kid—d’you think that would do you good?”
“You talk like a man,” said Annette.
It was clearly meant for a compliment, and Patricia smiled.
“If I talk like a Saint,” she said softly, “it’s only natural.”
She had a serene faith in the Saint which removed the last excuse for anxiety. If she had doubts, she kept them to herself. Orace served an excellent cold lunch. They bathed in the swimming-pool, sunned themselves afterwards in deck-chairs, had tea brought out on the terrace. The time passed; until Patricia stood at the window and watched night creeping down over the garden.
“I’ll make some Old Fashioneds,” she said.
In the glow of that most insidiously potent of all aperitifs, it was not so difficult to keep anxiety at bay for another hour and more. Presently Orace announced dinner. It was quite dark when they left the table and went into the study.
“I suppose we might telephone now,” said Patricia at length.
She took up the telephone and gave the number calmly. It was then nearly nine o’clock. In a short while a man’s voice answered.
“Can I speak to Mr Vickery?” she asked.
“Who is that, please?”
“This is his sister speaking.”
“I will inquire, madam. Will
you hold on?”
She waited, and presently the man came back.
“Mr Vickery is engaged in a very important conference with Mr Nordsten, madam, and cannot be disturbed. Can I take a message?”
“When will the conference be over?” asked Patricia steadily.
“I don’t know, madam.”
“I’ll call up again later,” said Patricia, and replaced the microphone on its bracket.
She tilted herself back in the desk chair and blew smoke at the wall in front of her. It was Hoppy Uniatz, removing his mouth temporarily from a glass of whisky, who crashed in where angels might have feared to tread.
“Well,” he said cheerfully, “who’s been rubbed out?”
“I can’t get him just now,” said Patricia evenly. “We’ll call again before we go to bed. How about a game of poker?”
“I remember,” said Mr Uniatz wistfully, “one time I played strip poker wit’ a coupla broads on Toity-Toid Street. De blonde one had just drawn to a bob-tailed straight an’ raised me a pair of pants—”
The glances which turned in his direction would have withered any man whose hide had less in common with that of the African rhinoceros, but Hoppy’s disreputable reminiscence served to relieve the strain. Somehow, the time went on. The girls smoked and talked idly, and Mr Uniatz, finding his anecdotes disrespectfully received, relapsed into fluent silence and presently went out of the room. After a while he returned, bearing with him a fresh bottle of whisky which he had discovered somewhere and succeeded in abstracting from under Orace’s vigilant eye. At half-past-eleven Patricia telephoned Hawk Lodge again.
“Mr Vickery has gone to bed, madam,” said the butler suavely. “He was very tired, and left orders that he was not to be awakened. He wrote you a letter which I have just posted, madam. You should receive it in the morning.”
“Thank you,” said Patricia slowly, and rang off.
She turned round serenely to the others.
“We’re out of luck,” she reported. “Well, there’s nothing we can do about it. We’ll have some news in the morning—and I’m ready for bed.”
The Saint in London (The Saint Series) Page 14
