He came down to the water’s edge and sat with his back to a tree, as motionless as if he had been one of its own roots. Surely, he knew, the death would come, but whether it would successfully claim a victim depended largely upon him. There was a smooth speed about every move of the case which appealed to him: it was cut and thrust, parry and riposte—a series of lightning adjustments and counter-moves which he could appreciate for its intrinsic qualities even while he was still fumbling for the connecting link that held it all together. The poison which had found its way into the whisky less than an hour ago belonged to the same scheme of things. He could recall its peculiar sweet oily taste on his tongue, and he thought he knew what it was. The symptoms which Martin Irelock had shown corroborated it. Very few men would have known that it was poisonous at all. How should an illiterate little race-train rat like Ellshaw have known it?
A mosquito zoomed into his ear with a vicious ping, and one of his thighs began to itch, but still he did not move. At other times in his life he had lain out like that, immobile as a carved outcrop of rock, combing the dark with keyed-up senses as delicate as those of any savage, when the first man whose nerves had cracked under the unearthly strain would have paid for the microscopic easing of a cramped muscle with his life. That utter relaxation of every expectant sinew, the supersensitive isolation of every faculty from all disturbances except those which he was waiting for, had become so automatic that he used no conscious effort to achieve it. And in that way, without even turning his head, he became aware of the black ghost of a canoe that was drifting soundlessly down the stream towards the place where he sat.
Still he did not move. A nightingale started to tune up in the branches over his head, and a frail wisp of cloud floated idly across the hazy stars which were the only light in the darkness. The canoe was only a dim black brush-stroke on the grey gloom, but he saw that there was only one man in it, and saw the ripple of tarnished-silver water as the unknown dipped his paddle and turned the craft in towards the bank. It seemed unlikely that any ordinary man would be cruising down the river at that hour alone, revelling in a dreamy romance with himself, and the Saint had an idea that the man who was coming towards him was not altogether ordinary. Unless a dead man creeping down the Thames in a canoe at midnight could be called ordinary.
The canoe slid under the bank, momentarily out of sight, but the Saint’s ears carried on the picture of what was happening. He heard the soft rustle of grasses as the side scraped the shore, the plip-plop of tiny drops of water as the wet paddle was lifted inboard, the faint grate of the wood as it was laid down. He sat on under his tree without a stir in his graven stillness, building sound upon sound into a construction of every movement that was as vividly clear to him as if he had watched it in broad daylight. He heard the scuff of a leather shoe-sole on the wood, quite different from the dull grate of the paddle; the rustle of creased clothing; the whisper of turf pressed underfoot. Then a soundless pause. He sensed that the man who had disembarked was probing the night clumsily, looking for some sign or signal, hesitating over his next move. Then he heard the frush of trodden grass again, and a sifflation of suppressed breathing that would have been quite inaudible to any hearing less uncannily acute than his.
A shadow loomed up against the stygian tarnish of the water, half the height of a man, and remained still. The prowler was sitting on the bank, waiting for something which Simon could not divine. There was a longer and more complicated rustling, a tentative scratch and an astonishingly loud sizzle of flame, and the man’s head and shoulders leapt up out of the dark for an instant in startlingly crisp silhouette against the glow of a match cupped in his hands.
The Saint moved for the first time. He rolled up silently and smoothly on to his feet, straightening his knees gradually until he came upright. The pulsing of his heart had settled down to a steady acceleration that did nothing to disturb the feline flow of any of his movements. It was only a level beat of excitement in his veins, a throbbing eagerness to complete his acquaintance with that elusive man around whose fanatical seclusion centred so much violence and sudden death.
Simon came up behind him very quietly. The man never knew he was coming, had no warning of danger before two sets of steel fingers closed on his throat. And then it was too late for him to do anything useful. He was not very strong, and he was almost paralysed with the heart-stopping horror of that silent attack out of the dark. The cry that burst involuntarily from his lungs was crushed by the choking grip of his neck before it could come to sound in his mouth, and a heavy knee settled snugly into the small of his back and pinned him helplessly to the ground in spite of all his frantic struggles. It was all over very quickly.
The Saint felt him go limp, and cautiously relaxed the pressure of his hands. Then he slipped his arms under the man’s unconscious body and lifted him up. The whole encounter had made very little noise, and Simon was no less attentive to silence than he had been before, while he carried the man down the bank and laid him out in the canoe. A couple of deft sweeps of the paddle sent the craft skimming out into the stream, but the Saint kept it moving until a bend in the river hid the lights of the house before he struck a match and inspected the face of his capture.
It was Ellshaw.
8
“Now you are going to talk, brother,” said the Saint. He sat facing his trophy over another flickering match, giving the other every facility to recognize him before the light went out. Ellshaw’s face was wet with the river water that had been slopped over him to help him back to unhappy consciousness, but there was something else on his face besides water—a pale clammy fright that made his oversized red nose stand out like a full-blown rose against the blanched sickliness of his cheeks.
The match spun from the Saint’s fingers into the water with an expiring hiss, dropping the curtain of blackness between them again, and the Cockney’s adenoidal voice croaked hysterically through the curtain.
“I carn’t tell yer nothing, guv’nor—strike me dead if I can!”
“I shouldn’t dream of striking you dead if you can,” said the Saint kindly. “But if you can’t…well, I really shouldn’t know what to do with you. I couldn’t just let you run away, because then you might begin to think you’d scored off me and get a swollen head, which would be very bad for you. I couldn’t adopt you as a pet and take you around with me on a lead, because I don’t like your face so much. I couldn’t put you in a cage and send you to the Zoo, because the other monkeys might object. And so the question would arise, brother, how would one get rid of you? And of course it would always be so easy to get hold of your skinny neck again for a while, and hold you under water while you blew bubbles.”
“Yer wouldn’t dare!” panted Ellshaw.
“No?” The Saint’s voice was just an infinitely gentle challenge lilting out of the darkness. “Did you get a good look at me when I struck that match, by any chance? You knew me well enough when I dropped in to see you in Duchess Place. And you talked as if you’d heard all about me, too. Did somebody ever tell you there was anything I didn’t dare?”
He could hear the racking harshness of the man’s breathing.
“Yer wouldn’t dare,” Ellshaw repeated as if he was only trying to convince himself. “That…that ’ud be murder!”
“Yeah?” drawled the Saint. “I’m not so sure. You tell me the answer, brother, out of that vast general-knowledge fund of yours—is it legally possible to kill a man who’s already dead? Because you are dead, aren’t you? You were murdered nearly a year ago.”
It was a shot literally in the dark, but the sharp catch of the other’s breath was as clear an answer to him as if he had had a searchlight focused down the boat. His thumb-nail gritted across another match, and the flame cut the pitiless buccaneering line of his face out of the gloom for as long as it took him to light a cigarette. And then there was only the red tip of the cigarette glowing in the intensified dark, and his voice coming from behind it: “So how on earth could I murde
r you again, brother? I could only make you stay dead, and I don’t think anybody’s ever laid down the law about a crime like that.”
“I don’t know nothing,” persisted Ellshaw hoarsely. “Honest I don’t.”
“Honest you do,” said the Saint persuasively. “But I didn’t even ask for your opinion. Just you come through with what’s on your mind, and I’ll let you know whether I think it was worth knowing.”
Ellshaw did not answer at once, and Simon went on quite calmly, with a matter-of-fact detachment that was more deadly than any bullying bluster: “Don’t kid yourself, sonny. If I had to toast your feet over a hot fire to make you talk, it wouldn’t be the first toasting party I’d been out on. If I ever felt like wiping you off the face of the earth, I’d do it and never have a sleepless night on account of it. But just for this one occasion, I’m liable to be as good as you’ll let me. When I came out here to catch a man, I told Chief Inspector Teal I’d bring him back with me, and I’d just as soon bring him back alive. What Teal will do to you when he gets you depends a whole lot on how you open your mouth first. Get wise to the spot you’re sitting in, Ellshaw. It isn’t everybody’s idea of a good time to get himself hanged, but nobody who did a good job of King’s Evidence has ever been strung up yet.”
“They couldn’t do it,” said Ellshaw sobbingly. “They couldn’t ’ang me. I ain’t done nothing—”
“What about your wife?” said the Saint ruthlessly.
“She’s all right, guv’nor. I swear she is. Nobody’s done ’er no ’arm. I can tell you all abaht that.”
“Tell me.”
“Well, guv’nor, it was like this. When she spotted me in Duchess Plyce, an’ I ’ad to get rid of ’er, we thought afterwards she might go blabbin’ abaht ’aving seed me, so we ’ad to keep ’er quiet, see? But she ain’t dead. She just got took off to some other place an’ kep’ there so she couldn’t talk. We couldn’t ’ave people lookin’ for ’er, though, an’ kickin’ up a fuss, so we ’ad to give out she was dead, see?”
“Did you have to get the police to fish her dead body out of the Thames as well—just to make it more convincing?” asked the Saint coldly.
He was not quite sure what answer he expected—certainly he had not looked at the question as a vital thrust in the argument.
The reaction which it obtained startled him, and he was surprised to find that he could still be startled.
For some seconds Ellshaw did not speak at all, and then his voice was shockingly different from the defiant whine in which he had been talking before.
“Go on,” he said huskily. “Yer carn’t tike me in wiv a yarn like that.”
“My dear sap,” said the Saint slowly, “I don’t want to take you in with any yarn. I’m only telling you. Your wife’s body was taken out of the river last night. It was supposed to be suicide at first, but now they’re pretty sure it was murder.”
There was another silence at the opposite end of the canoe, and Simon Templar drew his cigarette to an instant’s bright gleam of red in which the lines of his mouth could be seen as intent and inexorable as a stone mask, and went on without a change in the purring level of his voice.
“If you keep your mouth shut I wouldn’t give you a bad penny for your chance. You can put a lot of things over on a jury, but somehow or other they never take a great shine to a fellow who kills his own wife. Of course, they say hanging isn’t such a bad death…”
Ellshaw was making queer noises in his throat, as if he was struggling to do something with his voice.
“Oh Gawd!”
His feet shuffled on the bottom. His breath was whistling through his teeth with a weird harshness that chilled something dormant in the Saint’s heart.
“You ain’t tryin’ to scare me, are yer? Yer just tellin’ me the tile to make me talk. She ain’t…dead?”
“I’m afraid she is.”
Ellshaw gulped.
“My Gawd…” His voice went shrill. “The dirty lyin’ swine! The rat! He told me—”
There was a sound as if he flopped over athwart. In another moment he was sprawled across the Saint’s feet, clutching aimlessly at Simon with crazy shaking hands.
“I didn’t do it,” he blubbered. “I swear I didn’t! I didn’t wish ’er dead. I believed wot I told yer. I thought she was just ’idden away somewhere, like I was. I ain’t never murdered nobody!”
“Didn’t you know that Lord Ripwell was to be murdered?” said the Saint relentlessly. “Didn’t you know that I was to be murdered?”
“Yes, I did!” shouted the other wildly. “But I wouldn’t ’ave murdered Florrie. I wouldn’t ’ave stood for killin’ me own missus. That filthy double-crossin’—”
Simon gripped him by the shoulders.
“Will you squeal, Ellshaw?”
He could feel the man’s stupefied eyes straining to find him in the darkness.
“Yes, I’ll squeal. My Gawd, I’ll squeal!”
“You’re a bright boy after all,” said the Saint.
He pushed the demented man away and took up his paddle again. Driving the canoe back up the stream with cool steady strokes, he felt a great ease of triumph. It was the same quiet thrill that a chess-player must feel on mastering an intricate problem. He realized with a touch of humour that it was one of the very few episodes in which success could not conceivably bring him one pennyworth of boodle, but it made no difference to his satisfaction. He had taken one of his impulsively wholehearted likings to Lord Ripwell.
The red light in the back upper window swam into view again past a clump of trees, and he turned the canoe into the bank and drove the paddle-blade into the shallow river bed to hold it. Ellshaw was still moaning and muttering incoherently, and, for his own sake, Simon hauled him up out of the canoe and shook him vigorously.
“Snap out of it, brother. This is your chance to get even—and shift yourself off the high jump at the same time.”
“I’m going to squeal,” repeated Ellshaw dazedly.
The Saint kept hold of him.
“Okay. Then come up to the house and let Teal listen to it.”
He rushed the trembling man over the rough lawn and up the side of the house to the French window of the living-room. There was an exclamation somewhere in the middle distance, and heavy feet pounded after him. The beam of a bullseye lantern picked him up.
“Oh, it’s you, sir,” said the police guard, illuminatingly. “I thought—Gosh, what have you got there?”
“A tandem bicycle,” said the Saint shortly. “Get back to your post.”
Teal, startled by the noise, was on his feet when he thrust his prize into the room. The detective’s jaw hung open, and for a second or two he stopped chewing.
“Good Lord…is that—”
“Yes, it is, Claud. A new gadget for punching holes in Cellophane. If I could go on thinking up questions like that, I might be a policeman myself. Which God forbid. Don’t you know your boy-friend?”
For once in his life Chief Inspector Teal was incapable of being offended.
“Ellshaw! Was he outside?”
“No, he was baked into the middle of a sausage-roll in the pantry perfectly disguised as a new genius from Scotland Yard.”
“How did you know he’d be there?”
“Oh, my God!” Simon pushed the harvest of his brain work into a chair like a sack of beans, and subsided against the table. “Have I got to do everything for you? All right. It was only this morning that I crashed into Duchess Place. I ought to have been killed last night. Since that failed, they hoped to get me this morning when I went nosing around. When that fell through, they had to make a quick getaway. I assumed that they were so far from expecting trouble that they hadn’t got a spare bolt-hole waiting to move into. Therefore they had to do something temporary. The Grand Panjandrum couldn’t have been a Grand Panjandrum at all if he hadn’t known that Ellshaw was a bit of a dim bulb. Therefore he wouldn’t want to risk letting him far out of his reach. He knew he was coming d
own here this afternoon, so naturally he’d park Ellshaw somewhere locally where he could get in touch with him, while he figured out what they were going to do next. Having made up his mind, he’d have to tell Ellshaw. Therefore Ellshaw would have to come to him for instructions—it would probably be easier than him going to see Ellshaw, and at the time he’d think it was just as safe. Therefore Ellshaw had to come here. Therefore he probably had to come here soon. Therefore he’d probably come tonight. And even if he didn’t, I couldn’t do any harm by waiting. Therefore I waited. QED. Or do you want a dictionary to help you out with the two-syllable words?”
Teal swallowed.
“Then he was—”
His eyes travelled to a carefully corked bottle on a side table. Simon knew at once that it must be a sample of whisky corked for analysis, and smiled faintly.
“You needn’t bother with that,” he said. “I can tell you what’s in it. It’s nitroglycerine…as used in making the best bombs. If Irelock hasn’t coughed it all up you could drop him down the stairs and blow up the house, but it’s a deadly enough poison without that. No, I don’t think Ellshaw did it. He wouldn’t have known. But the man who made our two bombs might have.”
“Then do you mean it isn’t Ellshaw—”
“Of course not. It’s much too big for him. There he is. Look at him. There’s the guy that all the commotion’s about—the great million-pound mystery that people had to be killed to keep. But he isn’t the brains. He couldn’t do anything at all. He’s dead!”
Mr Teal blinked, staring at the red-nosed snivelling man who lay sprawling hot-eyed in a chair where Simon had thrown him. He looked alive. The low-pitched gasping noises that broke through his lips sounded alive.
“How is he dead?” Teal asked stupidly.
The Saint Goes On (The Saint Series) Page 15