Following the guiding rails, he came at the end of the cavern to the beginning of the artificial tunnel. A mound of shining machinery abandoned close by he was able to identify as some kind of electric excavating drill which had made this terrific task possible to such a small number of workers: the heavily sheathed power cable, still left in place, beside the truck lines, confirmed all his guesses.
After a moment’s hesitation he started into the tunnel. It was barely six feet high, so that he had to stoop slightly to move along it. Throughout the length he saw, it was neatly and expertly buttressed, but all these things were possible with an experienced engineer, which he knew Jeffroll to be, in charge, and four intelligent confederates to help him, of whom two at least must be retired sapper officers. The same electric bulbs dangled at long intervals along the sap, so that in between them there were patches of deep gloom practically amounting to complete darkness. Even so, the technique that must have been required to bring out the far end of the tunnel exactly under a predetermined cell in Larkstone Prison was one of those astounding exercises of scientific ingenuity at which the Saint, as an uninitiated layman, would always have to gape in speechless awe.
As he moved deeper into the warren, he began to pick his steps more cautiously, until he was travelling almost noiselessly, a mere foot at a time. Then he heard a patter of scurrying feet somewhere ahead of him, and Portmore’s voice boomed hollowly down the echoes with eerie distinctness.
“Look out!”
Instinctively the Saint spun off the track and pressed himself against the wall, freezing into immobility in the middle of the deepest patch of darkness he could find. The running men came nearer, and then there was a sudden crash of sound that thundered down the tunnel like the crack of doom. A blast of air like a tornado struck him down the whole side of his body, lifted him, off his feet, and hurled him a dozen yards down the passage as if he had been hit by an express train.
He struggled up again, deafened and half stunned, and listened to the patter of falling stones loosened from the roof by the detonation. All the lights had been shattered by the explosion, and when he felt round for the truck lines to get his bearings he found them half buried in the debris. But the buttressing had been good, and the thousands of tons of earth which might have sunk down from overhead had not fallen.
He heard Jeffroll’s voice now, startlingly near.
“Are we all right?”
“I am,” said Voss, and one by one the others chimed in reassuringly.
There was a sixth voice among the responses, a voice which the Saint had not heard before. A moment later somebody switched on an electric torch, and the owner of the voice was picked up by the beam, scarcely three yards away—a fleshy sallow-faced man who still wore the drab uniform of His Majesty’s prisons.
Simon felt in his pocket and drew out one of his guns; his other hand slipped out a tiny flashlight from his breast pocket—it looked very much like a cheap fountain pen, and it had escaped observation when he was searched.
He drew a careful bead on the other torch, and at that range he was quite an accurate shot. The crisp smack of the report as he pressed the trigger synchronized with the sudden return of utter darkness, and then the beam of his own flashlight stabbed out and swept over the five men.
“I hope you will all say your prayers before you ask to die,” he murmured politely, and then he turned his light on the sixth stranger again. There might be a few minor gaps in his acquaintance with the underworld, but this man was not exactly of the underworld, and his photograph had appeared in every national newspaper in England for six consecutive days during a certain week eighteen months ago. “Mr Bellamy Wage, I believe?” said the Saint.
11
They were so stunned that he had the stage to himself, but the Saint had no complaint to make about this, for there were times when he liked talking.
“You were sentenced at the Old Bailey to fourteen years’ penal servitude on one charge of forgery and two charges of conspiracy to defraud. The Neovision Radio Company went down the drain to the tune of nearly two million quid, and about a million and a half of that was never accounted for except on the general theory that you must have hidden it away somewhere. Altogether you seem to have been pretty smooth at collecting potatoes, and if somebody had given you the wire to pull your freight a month earlier, I’m sure you’d have turned up later as the hell of a big shot somewhere in South America and had the whale of a time on your old age pension.”
His torchlight panned warningly over the rescuers again, and nobody moved.
“But even when you were caught, you weren’t finished,” he went on chattily. “You had Yestering, a smart crook lawyer, and when he couldn’t find enough perjurers to lie you out of the dock you gave him another idea. Through him, you offered a reward of half a million pounds to anyone who could get you out of Larkstone, and you would pay all the expenses, signing the cheques he brought when he visited you. He got hold of these men—trained engineers, down on their luck, and willing to take a sporting risk for a fortune. They did this work, but Yestering was too greedy. He wanted more than his fee. When everything was nearly ready, he got hold of a gorilla named Garthwait to try and muscle the others out of here—the idea was that Garthwait should bring off the actual rescue, and claim to have done all the work from the start, and then the two of them would split the reward. Jeffroll and the others knew they were up against it, but Garthwait didn’t quite succeed in scaring them off, so Jeffroll’s niece was kidnapped last night and held for a hostage. She was to be returned in exchange for you, and Garthwait was still to go on and claim the beauty prize. Unfortunately for everybody except me, I butted in.”
Bellamy Wage clenched his fists. He was pale and trembling with fear.
“Who are you?” he asked shakily.
“I am Simon Templar, known as the Saint, and I expect it will be fun for you to meet an honest man after all these twisters you’ve had round you. I’ve done a lot of good work on this business myself,” said the Saint modestly, “and put up with a good deal of rudery and discomfort, for which someone is going to have to console me. Jeffroll has misunderstood me from the beginning. I suppose there was some excuse for him, but I don’t know.” He turned the ray of his torch slightly. “By the way, brother, Julia is back.”
The innkeeper stood looking at him with his mouth twitching mutely.
“That happens to be true,” said the Saint quietly. “My friend—the Yankee thug, I think you called him—rescued her and brought her back. You’ll be able to check up on that. And now let’s move on—there’s no scenery here, and I have an aunt somewhere round who is calling me in a loud voice.”
He shepherded the party back along the tunnel, after taking over Jeffroll’s revolver—the others were unarmed. At that stage of the proceedings he was making no foolish mistakes, and his flock had no chance whatever to dispute his orders. When the last of them had come up the ladder into the office, he sat down at the desk and laid out his armoury on the blotter.
“You can go and say hullo to Julia, Uncle Martin,” he said. “We’ll wait for your report.”
He waited, tranquilly smoking a cigarette. Weems sat down in another chair and stared at the carpet. Voss finicked with his moustache. Portmore breathed stertorously. Kane leaned against the wall, glowering at him in sulky silence.
Jeffroll came back, and the four men turned to look at him. The answer was in his face, before he nodded.
“It’s true,” he said. “Julia’s back. Mr Templar—”
“You owe me an apology,” said the Saint gently. “Isn’t that it? And another apology to Hoppy Uniatz.” He sighed. “But after all, what’s an apology? Will the Commissioners of Inland Revenue accept it in payment of our income tax? Can we pass a bit of it over the bar and get a drink? No. Therefore I’m afraid we must have more.”
“What are you going to do?” sobbed Bellamy Wage, in a kind of panic.
The Saint smiled.
“I’m going to ask you to do a little extra writing, dear old bird,” he said. “Here is the chequebook on your old age pension, removed from the custody of Comrade Yestering. In case your memory is getting dim, the account is in the name of Isledon. The reward you offered was five hundred thousand. According to plan it should have worked out at a hundred thousand each, but now it’ll have to be split seven ways. That is seventy-one thousand four hundred and twenty-eight pounds eleven shillings and fivepence each, but you can make my share payable to Hoppy Uniatz as well—he’s earned it. And you boys,” said the Saint, glancing over the other conspirators and shuffling his guns persuasively, “are going to take your loss and like it, being thankful that Hoppy and I aren’t naturally avaricious.”
Bellamy Wage wrote according to instructions, and Simon picked up one of the cheques and led him outside, to where Mr Uniatz was waiting patiently beside his carload of captives.
“Here’s your transport,” he said, “and I believe there’s a motor-boat waiting for you in the harbour and your own yacht outside. And I hope you’ll be seasick…Get rid of these blisters, Hoppy, and come back for a celebration. You must be dying of thirst, but they’ve paid their passage and they’re entitled to the ride.”
When he returned to the office he found five philosophical men examining their cheques. Portmore was the spokesman.
“How about a drink?” he suggested gruffly, and the Saint was delighted.
“I’m glad we got things straightened out without bloodshed,” he said. “I like a good amateur, but there were moments when I thought you didn’t appreciate me.”
“What do you think Garthwait and Yestering will do?” asked Jeffroll.
He asked this some time later, after Hoppy had returned from his mission of speeding the ungodly on their way. Mr Uniatz, reclining in a corner with a bottle of Johnnie Walker all to himself, had been immersed in a sort of coma, with a scowl of hideous agony on his brow from which Simon deduced that he was thinking about something, but at the sound of Jeffroll’s question he awoke sufficiently to reply.
“Dey won’t do nut’n,” he said, closing the argument to his own satisfaction.
“I don’t know,” Jeffroll demurred. “They’re bound to be pretty vindictive. Ever since Garthwait first came here we’ve been ready to clear out at short notice, and now we can afford to go—”
Hoppy continued to shake his head.
“Dey won’t do nut’n,” he repeated emphatically. “Mr Templar tells me to get rid of ’em, an’ what de boss says goes.”
“What on earth do you mean?” demanded the Saint faintly.
“I mean I take ’em for a ride, like ya told me, boss. We take de motorboat, an’ when we’re outside de harbour I haul out my Betsy an’ give dem de woiks. Dey won’t do nut’n.” Mr Uniatz stretched himself complacently. “Say, juse guys mind if I take dis bottle upstairs an’ finish it? I just finished de last voice of pome I was makin’ up on de way back, an’ I gotta tell it to Julia before I forget.”
PUBLICATION HISTORY
As with many previous volumes, two of the stories in this book first appeared in the British magazine The Thriller. “The High Fence” appeared as “The Man Who Knew” in issue No. 280 published on 16 June 1934, whilst “The Elusive Ellshaw” appeared under the title of “The Race Train Crime” in No. 286 just a few weeks later. “The Case of the Frightened Innkeeper” was written specifically for this book.
The book itself was first published in November 1934 with an American edition following in May 1935. This book, almost uniquely amongst early Saint volumes, has never been retitled.
A Czech translation appeared in 1939 under the title of Tajemný pan Ellshaw—Kdo je pověstný Svatý? (Cechie), but it’s unclear as to whether this was the full book, or simply the first story. The German translation went by the name of Der Heilige macht weiter when it first appeared in 1957 whilst the Italian version went by the title of Il Santo non si arresta in 1972. A Norwegian edition Helgenen går på appeared in 1964 with a Portuguese version appearing that same year under the logical title of O Santo Continua.
“The Elusive Ellshaw” was adapted for the first season of The Saint television series with Roger Moore and was first broadcast on the 17 October 1963. “The High Fence” appeared toward the end of the season, airing on 20 February 1964, and “The Frightened Innkeeper,” as the final story was retitled, aired on 18 February 1965.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
“I’m mad enough to believe in romance. And I’m sick and tired of this age—tired of the miserable little mildewed things that people racked their brains about, and wrote books about, and called life. I wanted something more elementary and honest—battle, murder, sudden death, with plenty of good beer and damsels in distress, and a complete callousness about blipping the ungodly over the beezer. It mayn’t be life as we know it, but it ought to be.”
—Leslie Charteris in a 1935 BBC radio interview
Leslie Charteris was born Leslie Charles Bowyer-Yin in Singapore on 12 May 1907.
He was the son of a Chinese doctor and his English wife, who’d met in London a few years earlier. Young Leslie found friends hard to come by in colonial Singapore. The English children had been told not to play with Eurasians, and the Chinese children had been told not to play with Europeans. Leslie was caught in between and took refuge in reading.
“I read a great many good books and enjoyed them because nobody had told me that they were classics. I also read a great many bad books which nobody told me not to read…I read a great many popular scientific articles and acquired from them an astonishing amount of general knowledge before I discovered that this acquisition was supposed to be a chore.”1
One of his favourite things to read was a magazine called Chums. “The Best and Brightest Paper for Boys” (if you believe the adverts) was a monthly paper full of swashbuckling adventure stories aimed at boys, encouraging them to be honourable and moral and perhaps even “upright citizens with furled umbrellas.”2 Undoubtedly these types of stories would influence his later work.
When his parents split up shortly after the end of World War I, Charteris accompanied his mother and brother back to England, where he was sent to Rossall School in Fleetwood, Lancashire. Rossall was then a very stereotypical English public school, and it struggled to cope with this multilingual mixed-race boy just into his teens who’d already seen more of the world than many of his peers would see in their lifetimes. He was an outsider.
He left Rossall in 1924. Keen to pursue a creative career, he decided to study art in Paris—after all, that was where the great artists went—but soon found that the life of a literally starving artist didn’t appeal. He continued writing, firing off speculative stories to magazines, and it was the sale of a short story to Windsor Magazine that saved him from penury.
He returned to London in 1925, as his parents—particularly his father—wanted him to become a lawyer, and he was sent to study law at Cambridge University. In the mid-1920s, Cambridge was full of Bright Young Things—aristocrats and bohemians somewhat typified in the Evelyn Waugh novel Vile Bodies—and again the mixed-race Bowyer-Yin found that he didn’t fit in. He was an outsider who preferred to make his own way in the world and wasn’t one of the privileged upper class. It didn’t help that he found his studies boring and decided it was more fun contemplating ways to circumvent the law. This inspired him to write a novel, and when publishers Ward Lock & Co. offered him a three-book deal on the strength of it, he abandoned his studies to pursue a writing career.
When his father learnt of this, he was not impressed, as he considered writers to be “rogues and vagabonds.” Charteris would later recall that “I wanted to be a writer, he wanted me to become a lawyer. I was stubborn, he said I would end up in the gutter. So I left home. Later on, when I had a little success, we were reconciled by letter, but I never saw him again.”3
X Esquire, his first novel, appeared in April 1927. The lead character, X Esquire, is a mysterious h
ero, hunting down and killing the businessmen trying to wipe out Britain by distributing quantities of free poisoned cigarettes. His second novel, The White Rider, was published the following spring, and in one memorable scene shows the hero chasing after his damsel in distress, only for him to overtake the villains, leap into their car…and promptly faint.
These two plot highlights may go some way to explaining Charteris’s comment on Meet—the Tiger!, published in September 1928, that “it was only the third book I’d written, and the best, I would say, for it was that the first two were even worse.”4
Twenty-one-year-old authors are naturally self-critical. Despite reasonably good reviews, the Saint didn’t set the world on fire, and Charteris moved on to a new hero for his next book. This was The Bandit, an adventure story featuring Ramon Francisco De Castilla y Espronceda Manrique, published in the summer of 1929 after its serialisation in the Empire News, a now long-forgotten Sunday newspaper. But sales of The Bandit were less than impressive, and Charteris began to question his choice of career. It was all very well writing—but if nobody wants to read what you write, what’s the point?
“I had to succeed, because before me loomed the only alternative, the dreadful penalty of failure…the routine office hours, the five-day week…the lethal assimilation into the ranks of honest, hard-working, conformist, God-fearing pillars of the community.”5
However his fortunes—and the Saint’s—were about to change. In late 1928, Leslie had met Monty Haydon, a London-based editor who was looking for writers to pen stories for his new paper, The Thriller—“The Paper with a Thousand Thrills.” Charteris later recalled that “he said he was starting a new magazine, had read one of my books and would like some stories from me. I couldn’t have been more grateful, both from the point of view of vanity and finance!”6
The Saint Goes On (The Saint Series) Page 24