He picked up his coat with a good-humoured smile.
“I’ll murder you later,” he promised Mr Uniatz kindly.
Leaving Hoppy to perform his own ablutions, he went downstairs again and strolled out into the road. He wanted a map from his car to gain a more detailed knowledge of the topography of the district, and on his way back he collected another item of information from the legend painted over the door in the traditional style: MARTIN JEFFROLL, Licensed to Sell Wines, Beer, Spirits, and Tobacco. The superscription was not new, but it revealed traces of an older name which had been blacked out. Presumably Mr Jeffroll was the grey-haired man who had been so strangely frightened by the sound of Hoppy Uniatz’s discordant voice.
Simon went back into the little bar off the hall and lighted a fresh cigarette. It was Jeffroll who came through the curtains and civilly declined the Saint’s invitation to join him in a drink. Simon ordered a pink gin, and was served with unobtrusive courtesy: the panic-stricken creature whom he had glimpsed in Jeffroll’s shoes a short while ago might never have existed, but the landlord had withdrawn behind a wall of indefinable reserve that was somewhat discouraging to idle conversation. Having served the drink, he retired again through the curtain, leaving the Saint alone.
Simon took up the glass and solemnly drank his own health in the mirror behind the bar, and he was setting the glass down again when the same mirror showed him a man who had just come into the hall. Quite spontaneously he turned round and scanned the newcomer as he came on under the low arch—it was purely the instinctive speculative scan of a lone man at a bar who considers the approach of another lone man with whom he may exchange some of the trivial conversation that ordinarily breaks out on these occasions, and he was unsuspectingly surprised to notice that the other was coming towards him with more than speculative directness.
There was hardly time in the short distance that the other had to cover for the Saint’s curiosity to grow beyond the vaguest neutrality, and then the man was standing in front of him.
“Is that your car outside?” he asked.
His voice was harsh and domineering, and the Saint did not like it. Studying the man more closely in the waning light, he decided that he didn’t care much for its owner, either. He had never been able to conceive an instant brotherly regard for ginger-headed men in loud-checked ginger plus fours, with puffy bags under their small eyes and mouths that turned down sulkily at the corners, particularly when they spoke with harsh domineering voices, but even then he was not actually suspicious.
“I have got a car outside,” he said coolly. “A cream-and-red Hirondel.”
“I see. So you’re the young swine who drove me into a ditch outside Sidmouth.”
The Saint ceased to be perplexed. A genial smile of complete comprehension lighted up his face.
“Good Lord!” he exclaimed happily. “Have you been all this time getting out?”
“What did you say?” snarled the man.
“I asked whether you’d been all this time getting out,” Simon repeated, with undiminished affability. “Or was that a rude question? Is your car still in and did you walk from there?”
The man took another step towards him. At those still closer quarters, he did not look any more attractive.
“Don’t give me any of your lip,” he rasped. “Do you know you nearly killed me with your dirty driving?”
“I rather hoped I had,” said the Saint calmly. “I like killing road-hogs—it makes the country so much more pleasant to move about in.”
“Say that again?”
Simon raised his eyebrows. The ginger-haired man, even without knowing the Saint, might have been warned by the imperturbable leisureliness of that gesture alone, but he was too close beside himself with rage to perceive his own foolishness.
“My dear hog,” said the Saint, “are you deaf or something? I said—”
It has already been mentioned that the ginger-haired man was incapable of perceiving his own foolishness. Otherwise he could not possibly have been tempted as he was by the half-glass of gin and angostura which Simon Templar was poising in his left hand while he talked. Even though he might have known the toughness of his own two-hundred-pound frame, and might have guessed that the debonair young man in front of him weighed no more than a hundred and seventy-five pounds, he need not have allowed his undisciplined temper to make him such a sempiternal sap. But he did.
His hand smacked up in an insolent swipe, and the glass of pink gin was knocked up through the Saint’s fingers to splash its contents over Simon’s face and the front of his coat.
Simon glanced at the mess, and started to take out his handkerchief. He was smiling again, and the Saint was as dangerous as a Turk when he smiled.
“That was rather rash of you,” he said, and suddenly his fist shot out like a bullet from a gun.
The ginger-haired man never even saw it coming. Something that was more like a lump of brown rock than a human fist leapt towards him through the intervening space and collided smashingly with his nose in a punch that sent him reeling back in a blind gush of agony to fetch up jarringly against the wall behind him. Hauling himself forward again with a strangled oath, he saw the Saint’s gentle smile again through a crimson mist, and launched a vicious swing at it that would have been worth all his trouble if it had connected. But in some unaccountable way the smile omitted to keep the appointment. It swayed unhurriedly aside at the very moment when the swing should have met it, and the violence with which his fist bludgeoned the empty air threw the ginger-haired man off his balance. In technical language, he led off for the next blow with his chin, and that same astonishingly hard fist was there in exactly the right place to meet his lead. The only difference was that on this encounter he felt no pain. His teeth scrunched shudderingly together under the impact, and then every raw and vengeful thought in his head was wiped out by a ringing of heavenly bells and a vast soothing darkness that merged indistinguishably into dreamless sleep…
Simon picked up his handkerchief again and quietly mopped the sticky dampness off his clothes. Jeffroll had come through into the bar again, and he realized that the girl Julia was standing in the low archway that connected with the hall. But it was not until he noticed how silently they were staring at the recumbent slumber of the ginger-haired man that he realized that the delightful episode which had just taken place had an implication for them that he would never have suspected.
3
Jeffroll was the first to look up. “What happened?” he asked.
The Saint shrugged.
“I haven’t the faintest idea,” he replied blandly. “The bloke seemed a bit excited, and I think he banged his head on something. It doesn’t look like a very exhilarating pastime, but I suppose there’s no accounting for tastes. Was he a pal of yours?”
Jeffroll let himself out from behind the bar and dropped on one knee beside the prostrate ginger-clad body, without answering. Simon’s coolly observant eyes noticed that his hands were trembling again, and that his actions contained an essence of something more than the natural solicitude of a conventional innkeeper whose premises have been desecrated by an ordinary breach of the peace. The Saint put away his sodden handkerchief and considered whether he had left anything undone that might improve the shining hour, and then he saw the startled face of Hoppy Uniatz peering over Julia Trafford’s shoulder, and went across to him.
Mr Uniatz’s mouth hung open—and, hanging open, it was an amazingly large mouth. The light of battle was peeping tentatively out of his eyes like spring sunshine through a cloud.
“What ya hit him wit’, boss?” he asked wistfully. And then, as the merest afterthought, “Who is dat guy?”
“The guy we ditched near Sidmouth,” explained the Saint under his breath. He grasped Hoppy firmly by the arm. “And now shut your face for a bit, will you? I guess I’m about ready to eat.”
The dining-room was a low raftered room looking out on to a tiny garden cut out of the sheer hillside. Sim
on steered Mr Uniatz briskly into it before that unrivalled maestro of tactlessness could drop any heavier bricks in the hearing of the chief protagonists, but when he reached his sanctuary he found that it was considerably less invulnerable than he had hoped it would be. The room only held four tables, and it was so small that the four of them might have been joined together in one communal board for all the privacy they afforded. Moreover, one of the tables was already occupied by a party of four men who fell curiously silent at the Saint’s entrance.
They were in their shirtsleeves, and their shapeless trousers had an air of grubby masculine comfort, as if they were placidly prepared to crawl about on their knees or sit down on a heap of loose earth without any qualms about its effect on their appearance. At first sight they might easily have been taken for a quartet of hikers, and yet, if that was what they were, they must have started on their pilgrimage very recently, for their bare forearms were practically untouched by the sun. Their hands, in contrast to that unexpected whiteness of arm, were coarsened with the unmistakable rough griminess of manual labour, which could hardly overtake the average holiday tramper before exposure had left its mark on his skin. It was that minor contradiction of make-up, perhaps, rather than their unfriendly silence, which made Simon Templar pay particular attention to them, but there was no outward and visible sign of his interest. He took them in at one casual glance, with all their individual oddities—a big black-haired man who had not shaved, a thin fair-haired man with a weak chin, a bald burly man with a vintage-port complexion, and an incongruously small and nondescript man with a grey moustache and pince-nez. And beyond that one sweeping survey there was nothing to show that he had taken any more notice of their existence than he had of the typical country-hotel wallpaper adorned with strips of pink ribbon and bouquets of unidentifiable vegetation with which some earlier landlord had endeavoured to improve his property. He dumped Mr Uniatz in a seat at a corner table, taking for himself the chair which commanded a full view of the room, and cast a pessimistic eye over the menu.
It offered one of those seductive bilingual repasts with which the traveller in England, whatever he may have to put up with during the day, is so richly compensated at eventide.
POTAGE BIRMINGHAM
—
BOILED COD AU BEURRE
—
LEG DE MOUTON RÔTI
POMMES CHIPS
SPINACH
—
SUET PUDDING
FROMAGE—BISCUITS
Simon put down the masterpiece with a faint sigh, and opened his cigarette-case.
“Did I ever tell you,” he asked, “about the extraordinary experience of a most respectable sheep I used to know, whose name was Percibald?”
It was plain from the expression on Mr Uniatz’s homely pan that he had never heard the story. It was equally plain that he was ready to try dutifully to discover its precise connexion with the shindig in hand. The convolutions of painful concentration carved themselves deeper into his dial.
“Boss—”
“Percibald,” said the Saint firmly, “was a sheep of exceptionally distinguished appearance, as you may judge from the fact that he was once the innocent cause of a libel action in which a famous Cabinet Minister sued the president and council of the Royal Academy for damages on the grounds that a picture exhibited in their galleries portrayed him in the act of sharing the embraces of a nearly nude wench with every evidence of enjoyment. On investigation it was found that the painting had only been intended for a harmless pastoral scene featuring a few classical nymphs and shepherds, and that the artist, feeling that shepherds without any sheep might look somewhat stupid, had induced Percibald to pose with one of the nymphs in the foreground. This, however, was merely an incident in Percibald’s varied career. The extraordinary experience I was going to tell you about…”
He burbled on, hardening his heart against the pathetic perplexity of his audience. It is one of the chronicler’s major regrets that the extraordinary experience of Percibald is not suitable for quotation in a volume which may fall into the hands of ladies and young children, but it is doubtful whether Mr Uniatz ever saw the point. Nor was the Saint greatly concerned about whether he did or not. His main object was to shut off the spate of questions with which Mr Uniatz’s hairy bosom was obviously overflowing.
At the same time, without ever seeming to pay any attention to them, he was quietly watching the four men in the opposite corner. After their first silence they had put their heads together so briefly and casually that if he had actually taken his eyes off them for a moment he might not have noticed it. Then an exchange of whispered words opened out into an elaborately natural argument which he had no trouble to hear even while he was talking himself.
“Well, I know it’s on the road to Yeovil. I’ve been there often enough.”
“Damn it, I was born and brought up in Crewkerne, and I ought to know.”
“I’ll bet you a pound you don’t.”
“I’ll bet you five pounds you’re talking through your hat.”
“Well, you show it to me on a map.”
“All right, who’s got a map?”
It turned out that none of them had a map. The big unshaven man finished loading his pipe and got up.
“Perhaps the landlord’s got a map.”
“He hasn’t. I asked him yesterday.”
The extraordinary experience of Percibald reached its indelicate conclusion. Mr Uniatz looked as if he was going to cry. The Saint scanned his memory rapidly for another anecdote, and then the big man moved a little way down the mantelpiece and cleared his throat.
“Excuse me, sir—do you happen to have a map of the country around Yeovil?”
Simon put aside a plate containing a small piece of lukewarm blotting-paper which was apparently the translation of Boiled Cod au Beurre.
“I’ve got one in the car,” he said. “Are you in a hurry?”
“Oh, no. Not a bit. We just want to settle an argument. I don’t know if you know the district?”
“Vaguely.”
“Do you know Champney Castle? I say it’s between Crewkerne and Yeovil, and my friend says it’s in the other direction—on the way to Ilchester.”
The Saint had never heard of Champney Castle, and he was even inclined to doubt whether such a place existed, but it never occurred to him to interfere with anybody’s innocent amusements.
“I know it quite well,” he replied unblushingly. “There’s an entrance from the Ilchester Road and another from the Yeovil Road. So you’re both right.”
The man looked convincingly blank for a moment, and then a chuckle of laughter broke out from his companions, in which he joined. Cordial relations having thus been established, the other members of the party turned their chairs to an angle that subtly gathered up the Saint and Hoppy into their conversation. It was all very neatly and efficiently done, with a disarming geniality that would have melted the reserve of anyone less hoarily aged in sin.
“Are you staying here long?” inquired the fat man with the fruity face.
“I haven’t made any plans,” answered the Saint carelessly. “I expect we’ll hang around for a few days, if there’s anything interesting to do.”
“Do you like fishing?”
“Sometimes.”
“You get some pretty big conger off Larkstone Point.”
Simon nodded.
“I should think they’d be good sport.”
The small man with the grey moustache polished his pince-nez industriously on a napkin.
“Dangerous, of course, if you don’t know your business,” he remarked. “You don’t want to loop the gaff on your wrist—if you did that, and made a slip, I don’t suppose we’d ever see you again. But lots of things are much more dangerous.”
“I suppose so,” agreed the Saint gravely.
“Lots of things,” repeated the thin fair-haired man, apparently addressing the tablecloth.
“For instance,” said the fat frui
ty man thoughtfully, “I’ve never been able to make out why everybody in America seems to be so frightened of gangsters. If any of them tried to do their stuff over here, I’m sure that would be very dangerous…for them.”
The big unshaven man struck a match.
“Wouldn’t stand an earthly, would they, Major? I don’t know how the police would react to it, but personally I wouldn’t have any compunction about tying ’em to a rock at low tide and leaving ’em there.”
“Nor would I,” echoed the one with the fair hair, to his audience of bread-crumbs.
“Serve them right if we did it,” said the grey moustache clearly. “I haven’t any sympathy for common thugs who try to shove their noses into other people’s business.”
Not even Mr Uniatz’s most ardent admirers, if he ever had any, could fairly have flattered him on his lightning grasp of conversational trends, but he had a definite talent for assimilating a simple idea if it was pushed under his nose several times in a sufficient variety of ways. Even then, he was still far from knowing exactly what was going on, but it was dimly percolating into the misty twilight of what for want of a better word must be loosely termed his mind (a) that the four men at the other table were saying something uncomplimentary, and (b) that their attitude included some general disparagement of the manners and customs of his native land. It would be untrue to suggest that he knew the meaning of more than half of these words, but they would have served to convey a fairly accurate description of his psychic impressions if he had known them. It was also a matter of elementary knowledge to him that a guy does not get uncomplimentary to another guy without being prepared to shoot his best insults out of a rod, and that was a stage of the proceedings at which Mr Uniatz could make up a lot of lost ground in the way of repartee. He began to grope frowningly around his hip, but Simon kicked him under the table and smiled.
The Saint Goes On (The Saint Series) Page 18