"I dunno, boss." Mr Uniatz shifted from one foot to the other, grimacing with the heroic effort of trying to extract a constructive suggestion from the gummy interior of his skull. He hit upon one at last, with the trepidant amazement of another Newton grasping the law of gravity. "Maybe we could go some place an' get a drink," he suggested breathlessly.
Simon grinned at him and took him by the arm.
"For once in your life," he said, "I believe you've had an inspiration. Let us go to a pub and drown our sorrows."
On the way he bought another evening paper and turned wistfully to the story of the bank holdup; but it gave him very little more than Teal had told him. The bank was a branch of the City & Continental, which handled the accounts of two important factories on the outskirts of the town. That morning the routine consignment of cash in silver and small notes had been brought down from London in a guarded van to meet the weekly payrolls of the two plants; and after it had been placed in the strong-room the van and the guards had departed as usual, although the factory messengers would not call for it until the afternoon. There was no particular secrecy about the arrangements, and the possibility of a holdup of the bank itself had apparently never been taken seriously. During the lunch hour the local police, acting on an anonymous telephone call, had sent a hurried squad to the bank in time to interrupt the holdup; but the bandits had shot their way out, wounding two constables in the process; and approximately fifteen thousand pounds' worth of untraceable small change had vanished with them. Their car had been found abandoned only a few blocks from the bank premises, and there the trail ended; and the Saint knew that it was likely to stay ended there for all the clues contained in the printed story. England was a small country, but it contained plenty of room for two unidentified bank robbers to hide in.
Simon refolded the newspaper and dumped it resignedly on the bar; and as he did so it lay in such a way that the headlines summarizing the epochal utterance of Mr Ebenezer Hogsbotham stared up at him with a complacent prominence that added insult to injury.
The Saint stared malevolently back at them; and in the mood which circumstances had helped to thrust upon him their effect had an almost fateful inevitability. No other man on earth would have taken them in just that way; but there never had been another man in history so harebrained as the Saint could be when his rebellious instincts boiled over. The idea that was being born to him grew momentarily in depth and richness. He put down his glass, and went to the telephone booth to consult the directory. The action was rather like the mental tossing of a coin. And it came down heads. Mr Hogsbotham was on the telephone. And accordingly, decisively, his address was in the book. . . .
The fact seemed to leave no further excuse for hesitation. Simon went back to the bar, and his head sang carols with the blitheness of his own insanity.
"Put that poison away, Hoppy," he said. "We're going places."
Mr Uniatz gulped obediently, and looked up with a contented beam.
"Dijja t'ink of sump'n to do, boss?" he asked eagerly.
The Saint nodded. His smile was extravagantly radiant.
"I did. We're going to burgle the house of Hogsbotham."
II
IT WAS one of those lunatic ideas that any inmate of an asylum might have conceived, but only Simon Templar could be relied on to carry solemnly into execution. He didn't waste any more time on pondering over it, or even stop to consider any of its legal aspects. He drove his huge cream and red Hirondel snarling over the roads to Chertsey at an average speed that was a crime in itself, and which would probably have given a nervous breakdown to any passenger less impregnably phlegmatic than Mr Uniatz; but he brought it intact to the end of the trip without any elaborations on his original idea or any attempt to produce them. He was simply on his way to effect an unlawful entry into the domicile of Mr Hogsbotham, and there to do something or other that would annoy Mr Hogsbotham greatly and at the same time relieve his own mood of general annoyance; but what that something would be rested entirely with the inspiration of the moment. The only thing he was sure about was that the inspiration would be forthcoming.
The telephone directory had told him that Mr Hogsbotham lived at Chertsey. It also located Mr Hogsbotham's home on Greenleaf Road, which Simon found to be a narrow turning off Chertsey Lane running towards the river on the far side of the town. He drove the Hirondel into a field a hundred yards beyond the turning and left it under the broad shadow of a clump of elms, and returned to Greenleaf Road on foot. And there the telephone directory's information became vague. Following the ancient custom by which the Englishman strives to preserve the sanctity of his castle from strange visitors by refusing to give it a street number, hiding it instead under a name like 'Mon Repos', 'Sea View', 'The Birches', 'Dunrovin', 'Jusweetu', and other similar whimsies the demesne of Mr Hogsbotham was apparently known simply as 'The Snuggery'. Which might have conveyed volumes to a postman schooled in tracking self-effacing citizens to their lairs, but wasn't the hell of a lot of help to any layman who was trying to find the place for the first time on a dark night.
Simon had not walked very far down Greenleaf Road when that fact was brought home to him. Greenleaf Road possessed no street lighting to make navigation easier. It was bordered by hedges of varying heights and densities, behind which lighted windows could sometimes be seen and sometimes not. At intervals, the hedges yawned into gaps from which ran well-kept drives and things that looked like cart-tracks in about equal proportions. Some of the openings had gates, and some hadn't. Some of the gates had names painted on them; and on those which had, the paint varied in antiquity from shining newness to a state of weatherbeaten decomposition which made any name that had ever been there completely illegible. When the Saint realized that they had already passed at least a dozen anonymous entrances, any one of which might have led to the threshold of Mr Hogsbotham's Snuggery, he stopped walking and spoke eloquently on the subject of town planning for a full minute without raising his voice.
He could have gone on for longer than that, warming to his subject as he developed the theme; but farther down the road the wobbling light of a lone bicycle blinked into view, and he stepped out from the side of the road as it came abreast of them and kept his hat down over his eyes and his face averted from the light while he asked the rider if he knew the home of Hogsbotham.
"Yes, sir, it's the fourth 'ouse on yer right the way yer goin'. Yer can't miss it." said the wanderer cheerfully, with a native's slightly patronizing simplicity, and rode on.
The Saint paused to light a cigarette, and resumed his stride. The lines of his face dimly illumined in the glow of smouldering tobacco were sharp with half humorous anticipation.
"Hogsbotham may be in London investigating some more nightclubs," he said. "But you'd better get a handkerchief tied round your neck so you can pull it up over your dial— just in case. We don't want to be recognized, because it would worry Claud Eustace Teal, and he's busy."
He was counting the breaks in the hedges as he walked. He counted three, and stopped at the fourth. A gate that could have closed it stood open, and he turned his pocket flashlight on it cautiously. It was one of the weatherbeaten kind, and the words that had once been painted on it were practically indecipherable, but they looked vaguely as if they might once had stood for 'The Snuggery'.
Simon killed his torch after that brief glimpse. He dropped his cigarette and trod it out under his foot.
"We seem to have arrived," he said. "Try not to make too much noise, Hoppy, because maybe Hogsbotham isn't deaf."
He drifted on up the drive as if his shoes had been soled with cotton wool. Following behind him, Mr Uniatz's efforts to lighten his tread successfully reduced the total din of their advance to something less than would have been made by a small herd of buffalo; but Simon knew that the average citizen's sense of hearing is mercifully unselective. His own silent movements were more the result of habit than of any conscious care.
The drive
curved around a dense mass of laurels, above which the symmetrical spires of cypress silhouetted against the dark sky concealed the house until it loomed suddenly in front of him as if it had risen from the ground. The angles of its roof-line cut a serrated pattern out of the gauzy backcloth of half-hearted stars hung behind it; the rest of the building below that angled line was merely a mass of solid blackness in which one or two knife edges of yellow light gleaming between drawn curtains seemed to be suspended disjointedly in space. But they came from ground-floor windows, and he concluded that Ebenezer Hogsbotham was at home.
He did not decide that Mr Hogsbotham was not only at home, but at home with visitors, until he nearly walked into a black closed car parked in the driveway. The car's lights were out, and he was so intent on trying to establish the topography of the lighted windows that the dull sheen of its coachwork barely caught his eye in time for him to check himself. He steered Hoppy round it, and wondered what sort of guests a man with the name and temperament of Ebenezer Hogsbotham would be likely to entertain.
And then, inside the house, a radio or gramophone began to play.
It occurred to Simon that he might have been unnecessarily pessimistic in suggesting that Mr Hogsbotham might not be deaf. From the muffled quality of the noise which reached him, it was obvious that the windows of the room in which the instrument was functioning were tightly closed; but even with that obstruction, the volume of sound which boomed out into the night was startling in its quantity. The opus under execution was the 'Ride of the Valkyries', which is admittedly not rated among the most ethereal melodies in the musical pharmacopoeia; but even so, it was being produced with a vim which inside the room itself must have been earsplitting. It roared out in a stunning fortissimo that made the Saint put his heels back on the ground and disdain even to moderate his voice.
"This is easy," he said. "We'll just batter the door down and walk in."
He was not quite as blatant as that, but very nearly. He was careful enough to circle the house to the back door; and whether he would actually have battered it down remained an unanswered question, for he had no need to use any violence on it at all. It opened when he touched the handle, and he stepped in as easily as he had entered the garden.
Perhaps it was at that point that he first realized that the unplanned embryo of his adventure was taking a twist which he had never expected of it. It was difficult to pin down the exact moment of mutation, because it gathered force from a series of shocks that superimposed themselves on him with a speed that made the separate phases of the change seem somewhat blurred. And the first two or three of those shocks chased each other into his consciousness directly that unlatched back door swung inwards under the pressure of his hand.
The very fact that the door opened so easily to his exploring touch may have been one of them; but he could take that in his stride. Many householders were inclined to be absentminded about the uses of locks and bolts. But the following blows were harder to swallow. The door opened to give him a clear view of the kitchen and that was when the rapid sequence of impacts began to make an impression on his powers of absorption.
To put it bluntly, which is about the only way anything of that kind could be put, the door opened to give him a full view of what appeared to be quite a personable young woman tied to a chair.
There was a subsidiary shock in the realization that she appeared to be personable. Without giving any thought to the subject, Simon had never expected Mr Hogsbotham to have a servant who was personable. He had automatically credited him with a housekeeper who had stringy mouse-coloured hair, a long nose inclined to redness, and a forbidding lipless mouth, a harridan in tightlaced corsets whose egregiously obvious virtue would suffice to strangle any gossip about Mr Hogsbotham's bachelor menage—Mr Hogsbotham had to be a bachelor, because it was not plausible that any woman, unless moved by a passion which a man of Mr Hogsbotham's desiccated sanctity could never hope to inspire, would consent to adopt a name like Mrs Hogsbotham. The girl in the chair appeared to be moderately young, moderately well-shaped, and moderately inoffensive to look at; although the dishcloth which was knotted across her mouth as a gag made the last quality a little difficult to estimate. Yet she wore a neat housemaid's uniform, and therefore she presumably belonged to Mr Hogsbotham's domestic staff.
That also could be assimilated—with a slightly greater effort. It was her predicament that finally overtaxed his swallowing reflexes. It was possible that there might be some self-abnegating soul in the British Isles who was willing to visit with Mr Hogsbotham; it was possible that Mr Hogsbotham might be deaf; it was possible that he might be careless about locking his back door; it was possible, even, that he might employ a servant who didn't look like the twin sister of a Gorgon; but if he left her tied up and gagged in the kitchen while he entertained his guests with ear-shattering excerpts from Wagner, there was something irregular going on under his sanctimonious roof which Simon Templar wanted to know more about.
He stood staring into the maid's dilated eyes while a galaxy of fantastic queries and surmises skittered across his brain like the grand finale of a firework display. For one long moment he couldn't have moved or spoken if there had been a million-dollar bonus for it.
Mr Uniatz was the one who broke the silence, if any state of affairs that was so numbingly blanketed by the magnified blast of a symphony orchestra could properly be called a silence. He shifted his feet, and his voice grated conspiratorially in the Saint's ear.
"Is dis de old bag, boss?" he inquired with sepulchral sangfroid; and the interruption brought Simon's reeling imagination back to earth.
"What old bag?" he demanded blankly.
"De aunt of Patricia's," said Mr Uniatz, no less blank at even being asked such a question, "who we are goin' to bump off."
The Saint took a firmer grip of material things.
"Does she look like an old bag ?" he retorted.
Hoppy inspected the exhibit again, dispassionately.
"No," he admitted. He seemed mystified. Then a solution dawned dazzlingly upon him. "Maybe she has her face lifted, boss," he suggested luminously.
"Or maybe she isn't anybody's aunt," Simon pointed out.
This kind of extravagant speculation was too much for Mr Uniatz. He was unable to gape effectively on account of the handkerchief over his mouth,, but the exposed area between the bridge of his nose and the brim of his hat hinted that the rest of his face was gaping.
"And maybe we've run into something," said the Saint.
The rest of his mind was paying no attention to Hoppy's problems. He was not even taking much notice of the maid's panic-stricken eyes as they widened still further in mute terror at the conversation that was passing over her head. He was listening intently to the music that still racketed stridently in his eardrums, three times louder now that he was inside the house. There had been a time in the history of his multitudinous interests when he had had a spell of devotion to grand opera, and his ears were as analytically sensitive as those of a trained musician. And he was realizing, with a melodramatic suddenness that prickled the hairs on the nape of his neck, that the multisonous shrillness of the 'Ride of the Valkyries' had twice been mingled with a brief high-pitched shriek that Wagner had never written into the score.
His fingers closed for an instant on Hoppy's arm.
"Stay here a minute," he said.
He went on past the trussed housemaid, out of the door on the far side of the kitchen. The screeching fanfares of music battered at him with redoubled savagery as he opened the door and emerged into the cramped over-furnished hall beyond it. Aside from its clutter of fretwork mirror-mountings, spindly umbrella stands and etceteras, and vapid Victorian chromos, it contained only the lower end of a narrow staircase and three other doors, one of which was the front entrance. Simon had subconsciously observed a serving hatch in the wall on his left as he opened the kitchen door, and on that evidence he automatically attributed the left-hand door in the h
allway to the dining-room. He moved towards the right-hand door. And as he reached it the music stopped, in the middle of a bar, as if it had been sheared off with a knife, leaving the whole house stunned with stillness.
The Saint checked on one foot, abruptly conscious even of his breathing in the sudden quiet. He was less than a yard from the door that must have belonged to the living-room. Standing there, he heard the harsh rumble of a thick brutal voice on the other side of the door, dulled in volume but perfectly distinct.
"All right," it said. "That's just a sample. Now will you tell us what you did with that dough, or shall we play some more music?"
III
SIMON LOWERED his spare foot to the carpet, and bent his leg over it until he was down on one knee. From that position he could peer through the keyhole and get a view of part of the room.
Directly across from him, a thin small weasel-faced man stood over a radiogram beside the fireplace. A cigarette dangled limply from the corner of his mouth, and the eyes that squinted through the smoke drifting past his face were beady and emotionless like a snake's. Simon placed the lean cruel face almost instantly in his encyclopedic mental records of the population of the underworld, and the recognition walloped into his already tottering awareness to register yet another item in the sequence of surprise punches that his phenomenal resilience was trying to stand up to. The weasel-faced man's name was Morris Dolf; and he was certainly no kind of guest for anyone with the reputation of Ebenezer Hogsbotham to entertain.
The Saint's survey slid off him on to the man who sat in front of the fireplace. This was someone whom the Saint did not recognize, and he knew he was not Mr Hogsbotham. He was a man with thin sandy hair and a soft plump face that would have fitted very nicely on somebody's pet rabbit. At the moment it was a very frightened rabbit. The man sat in a stiff-backed chair placed on the hearthrug, and pieces of clothesline had been used to keep him there. His arms had been stretched round behind him and tied at the back of the chair so that his shoulders were hunched slightly forward by the strain. His shirt had been ripped open to the waist, so that his chest was bare; and his skin was very white and insipid, as if it had never seen daylight since he was born. It was so white that two irregular patches of inflammation on it stood out like blotches of dull red paint. His lips were trembling, and his eyes bulged in wild orbs of dread.
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