He was bubbling with blissful idiocy, but his mind was cool. He had already diagnosed the effects of the Uniatz treatment so completely that his visit was really only intended to reassure himself that it had actually worked. He studied Verdean coldbloodedly. The bank manager's eyes were vacant and unrecognizing: he rolled his head monotonously from side to side and kept up a delirious mumble from which the main points of the summary that Hoppy Uniatz had made were absurdly easy to pick out. Over and over again he reiterated the story—how Mr Hogsbotham had asked him as a neighbour to keep an eye on the house during some of his absences, how he had been entrusted with a key which he had never remembered to return, and how when he was wondering what to do with the stolen money he had remembered the key and used it to find what should have been an unsuspectable hiding place for his booty. He went on talking about it. ...
"He is like dis ever since he wakes up," Hoppy explained, edging proudly in behind him.
The Saint nodded. He did not feel any pity. Robert Verdean was just another man who had strayed unsuccessfully into the paths of common crime; and even though he he had been deliberately led astray, the mess that he was in now was directly traceable to nothing but his own weakness and cupidity. In such matters, Simon Templar saved his sympathy for more promising cases.
"Put his clothes back on him," he said. "We'll take him along too. Your operation was miraculous, Hoppy, but the patient is somewhat liable to die; and we don't want to be stuck with his body."
Patricia was sitting on the study desk when he emerged again, and she looked at him with sober consideration.
"I don't want to bore you with the subject," she said, "but are you still sure you haven't gone off your rocker?"
"Perfectly sure," he said. "I was never rocking so smoothly in my life."
"Well, do you happen to remember anyone by the name of Teal?"
He took her arm and chuckled.
"No I haven't forgotten. But I don't think he'll be ready for this. He may have ideas about keeping an eye on me, but he won't be watching for Verdean, Not here, anyway. Hell, he's just searched the house from top to bottom and convinced himself that we haven't got Verdean here, however much he may be wondering what else we've done with him. And it's getting dark already. By the time we're ready to go, it'll be easy. There may be a patrol car or a motor cycle cop waiting down the road to get on our tail if we go out, but that'll be all. We'll drive around the country a bit first and lose them. And then we will go into this matter of our old age pensions."
She might have been going to say some more. But she didn't. Her mouth closed again, and a little hopeless grimace that was almost a smile at the same time passed over her lips. Her blue eyes summed up a story that it has already taken all the volumes of the Saint Saga to tell in words. And she kissed him.
"All right, skipper," she said quietly. "I must be as crazy as you are, or I shouldn't be here. We'll do that."
He shook his head, holding her.
"So we shall. But not you."
"But——"
"I'm sorry, darling. I was talking about two other guys. You're going to stay out of it, because we're going to need you on the outside. Now, in a few minutes I'm going to call Peter, and then I'm going to try and locate Claud Eustace; and if I can get hold of both of them in time the campaign will proceed as follows. . . ."
He told it in quick cleancut detail, so easily and lucidly that it seemed to be put together with no more effort than it took to understand and remember it. But that was only one of the tricks that sometimes made the Saint's triumphs seem deceptively facile. Behind that apparently random improvisation there was the instant decision and almost supernatural foresightedness of a strategic genius which in another age might have conquered empires as debonairly as in this twentieth century it had conquered its own amazing empire among thieves. And Patricia Holm was a listener to whom very few explanations had to be made more than once.
Hoppy Uniatz was a less gifted audience. The primitive machinery of conditioned reflexes which served him for some of the simpler functions of a brain had never been designed for one-shot lubrication. Simon had to go over the same ground with him at least three times before the scowl of agony smoothed itself out of Mr Uniatz's rough-hewn façade, indicating that the torture of concentration was over and the idea had finally taken root inside his skull, where at least it could be relied upon to remain with the solidity of an amalgam filling in a well-excavated molar.
The evening papers arrived before they left, after the hectic preliminaries of organization were completed, when the Saint was relaxing briefly over a parting glass of sherry, and Mr Uniatz was placidly sluicing his arid tonsils with a fresh bottle of Scotch. Patricia glanced through the Evening Standard and giggled.
"Your friend Hogsbotham is still in the news," she said. "He's leading a deputation from the National Society for the Preservation of Public Morals to demonstrate outside the London Casino this evening before the dinnertime show. So it looks as if the coast will be clear for you at Chertsey."
"Probably he heard that Simon was thinking of paying him another call, and hustled himself out of the way like a sensible peaceloving citizen," said Peter Quentin, who had arrived shortly before that. "If I'd known what I was going to be dragged into before I answered the telephone, I'd have gone off and led a demonstration somewhere myself."
The Saint grinned.
"We must really do something about Hogsbotham, one of these days," he said.
It was curious that that adventure had begun with Mr Hogsbotham, and had just led back to Mr Hogsbotham; and yet he still did not dream how importantly Mr Hogsbotham was still to be concerned.
IX
THE HIRONDEL'S headlights played briefly over the swinging sign of the Three Horseshoes, in Laleham, and swung off to the left on a road that turned towards the river. In a few seconds they were lighting up the smooth grey water and striking dull reflections from a few cars parked dose to the bank; and then they blinked out as Simon pulled the car close to the grass verge and set the handbrake.
"Get him out, darling," he said over his shoulder.
He stepped briskly out from behind the wheel; and Hoppy Uniatz, who had been sitting beside him, slid into his place. The Saint waited a moment to assure himself that Angela Lindsay was having go trouble with the fourth member of the party; and then he leaned over the side and spoke close to Hoppy's ear.
"Well," he said, "do you remember it all?"
"Sure, I remember it," said Mr Uniatz confidently. He paused to refresh himself from the bottle he was still carrying, and replaced the cork with an air of reluctance. "It's in de bag," he said, with the pride of knowing what he was talking about.
"Mind you don't miss the turning, like we did last night, and for God's sake try not to have any kind of noise. You'll have to manage without headlights, too—someone might notice them... . Once you've got the Beef Trust there, Pat'll take care of keeping them busy. I don't want you to pay any attention to anything except watching for the ungodly and passing the tip to her."
"Okay, boss."
The Saint looked round again. Verdean was out of the car.
"On your way, then."
He stepped back. The gears meshed, and the Hirondel swung round in a tight semicircle and streaked away towards the main road.
Angela Lindsay stared after it, and caught the Saint's sleeve with sudden uncertainty. Her eyes were wide in the gloom.
"What's that for? Where is he going?"
"To look after our alibi," Simon answered truthfully. "Anything may happen here tonight, and you don't know Teal's nasty suspicious mind as well as I do. I'm pretty sure we shook off our shadows in Walton, but there's no need to take any chances."
She was looking about her uneasily.
"But this isn't Chertsey——"
"This is Laleham, on the opposite side of the river. We came this way to make it more confusing, and also because it'll make it a lot harder for our shadows if they're still a
nywhere behind. Unless my calculations are all wrong, Hogsbotham's sty ought to be right over there." His arm pointed diagonally over the stream, "Let's find out."
His hand took Verdean's arm close up under the shoulder. The girl walked on the bank manager's other side. Verdean was easy to lead. He seemed to have no more will of his own. His head kept rolling idiotically from side to side, and his voice went on unceasingly with an incoherent and practically unintelligible mumbling. His legs tried to fold intermittently at the joints, as if they had turned into putty; but the Saint's powerful grip held him up.
They crossed a short stretch of grass to the water's edge. The Saint also went on talking, loudly and irrelevantly, punctuating himself with squeals of laughter at his own wit. If any of the necking parties in the parked cars had spared them any attention at all, the darkness would have hidden any details, and the sound effects would infallibly have combined to stamp them as nothing but a party of noisy drunks. It must have been successful, for the trip was completed without a hitch. They came down to the river margin in uneventful co-ordination; and any spectators who may have been there continued to sublimate their biological urges unconcerned.
There was an empty punt moored to the bank at exactly the point where they reached the water. Why it should have been there so fortunately was something that the girl had no time to stop and ask; but the Saint showed no surprise about it. He seemed to have been expecting it. He steered Verdean on board and lowered him on to the cushions, and cast off the mooring chain and settled himself in the stern as she followed.
His paddle dug into the water with long deep strokes, driving the punt out into the dark. The bank which they had just left fell away into blackness behind. For a short while there was nothing near them but the running stream bounded by nebulous masses of deep shadow on either side. Verdean's monotonous muttering went on, but it had become no more obtrusive than the murmur of traffic heard from a closed room in a city building.
She said, after a time: "I wonder why this all seems so different?"
He asked: "Why?"
She was practically invisible from where he sat. Her voice came out of a blurred emptiness.
"I've done all sorts of things before—with Judd," she said. "But doing this with you... You make it an adventure. I always wanted it to be an adventure, and yet it never was."
"Adventure is the way you look at it," he said, and did not feel that the reply was trite when be was making it.
For the second time since he had picked her up at the Stag and Hounds he has wondering whether a surprise might still be in store for him that night. All his planning was cut and dried, as far as any of it was under his control; but there could still be surprises. In all his life nothing had ever gone mechanically and unswervingly according to a rigid and inviolable schedule: adventure would soon have become boring if it had. And tonight he had a feeling of fine-drawn liveness and that was the reverse of boredom.
The feeling stayed with him the rest of the way across the water, and through the disembarkation on the other side. It stayed with him on the short walk up Greenleaf Road from the towpath to the gates of Mr Hogsbotham's house. It was keener and more intense as they went up the drive, with Verdean keeping pace in his grasp with docile witlessness. It brought up all the undertones of the night in sharp relief— the stillness everywhere around, the silence of the garden, the whisper of leaves, the sensation of having stepped out of the inhabited world into a shrouded wilderness. Some of that could have been due to the trees that shut them in, isolating them in a tenebrous closeness in which there was no sight or sound of other life, so that even Verdean's own house next door did not intrude on their awareness by so much as a glimmer of light or the silhouette of a roof, and the Saint could not tell whether a light would have been visible in it if there had been a light to see. Some of the feeling was still left unaccounted for even after that. The Saint stood on the porch and wondered if he was misunderstanding his own intuition, while Verdean fumbled with keys at the door, muttering fussily about his stolen fortune. And his mind was still divided when they went into the hall, where a single dim light was burning, and he saw the bank manager stagger drunkenly away and throw himself shakily up the stairs.
He felt the girl's fingers cling to his arm. And in spite of all he knew about her, her physical nearness was something that his senses could not ignore.
"He's going to get it," she breathed.
The Saint nodded. That psychic electricity was still coursing through his nerves, only now he began to find its meaning. From force of habit, his right hand slid under the cuff of his left sleeve and touched the hilt of the razor-edged throwing knife in its sheath strapped to his forearm, the only weapon he had thought it worth while to bring with him, making sure that it would slip easily out if he needed it; but the action was purely automatic. His thoughts were a thousand miles away from such things as his instinct associated with that deadly slender blade. He smiled suddenly.
"We ought to be there to give him a cheer," he said.
He took her up the stairs with him. From the upper landing he saw an open door and a lighted room from which came confused scurrying noises combined with Verdean's imbecile grunting and chattering. Simon went to the door. The room was unquestionably Mr Ebenezer Hogsbotham's bedroom. He would have known it even without being told. Nobody but an Ebenezer Hogsbotham could ever have slept voluntarily in such a dismally austere and mortifying chamber. And he saw Robert Verdean in the centre of the room. The bank manager had lugged a shabby suitcase out of some hiding place, and had it open on the bed; he was pawing and crooning crazily over the contents—ruffling the edges of packets of pound notes, crunching the bags of silver. Simon stood for a moment and watched him, and it was like looking at a scene from a play that he had seen before.
Then he stepped quietly in and laid his hand on Verdean's shoulder.
"Shall I help you take care of it?" he said gently. He had not thought much about how Verdean would be likely to respond to the interruption, but had certainly not quite expected the response he got.
For the first time since Hoppy had applied his remarkable treatment, the bank manager seemed to become aware of outside personalities in a flash of distorted recognition. He squinted upwards and sidelong at the Saint, and his face twisted.
"I won't give it to you!" he screamed. "I'll kill you first!"
He flung himself at the Saint's throat, his fingers clawing, his eyes red and maniacal.
Simon had very little choice. He felt highly uncertain about the possible results of a third concussion on Verdean's already inflamed cerebral tissue, following so closely upon the two previous whacks which it had suffered in the last twenty-four hours; but on the other hand he felt that in Mr Verdean's present apparent state of mind, to be tied up and gagged and left to struggle impotently while he watched his loot being taken away from him would be hardly less likely to cause a fatal hemorrhage. He therefore adopted the less troublesome course, and put his trust in any guardian angels that Mr Verdean might have on his overburdened payroll. His fist travelled up about eight explosive inches, and Mr Verdean travelled down. . . .
Simon picked him up and laid him on the bed.
"You know," he remarked regretfully, "if this goes on much longer, there is going to come a time when Comrade Verdean is going to wonder whether fifteen thousand quid is really worth it."
Angela Lindsay did not answer.
He looked at her. She stood close by the bed, gazing without expression at Verdean's unconscious body and the suitcase full of money at his feet. Her face was tired.
Still without saying anything, she went to the window and stood there with her back to him.
She said, after a long silence: "Well, you got what you wanted, as usual."
"I do that sometimes," he said.
"And what happens next ?"
"You'll get the share you asked for," he answered carefully. "You can take it now, if you like."
"And that's all."
"Did we agree to anything else?"
She turned round; and he found that he did not want to look at her eyes.
"Are you sure you're never going to need any more help ?" she said.
He did not need to hear any more. He had known more than she could have told him, before that. He understood all the presentiment that had troubled him on the way there. For that moment he was without any common vanity, and very calm.
"I may often need it," he said, and there was nothing but compassion in his voice. "But I must take it where I'm lucky enough to find it. ... I know what you mean. But I never tried to make you fall in love with me. I wouldn't wish that kind of trouble on anyone."
"I knew that," she said, just as quietly. "But I couldn't help wishing it."
She came towards him, and he stood up to meet her. He knew that she was going to kiss him, and he did not try to stop her.
Her mouth was hot and hungry against his. His own lips could not be cold. That would have been hypocrisy. Perhaps because his understanding went so much deeper than the superficial smartness that any other man might have been feeling at that time, he was moved in a way that would only have been cheapened if he had tried to put word to it. He felt her lithe softness pressed against him, her arms encircling him, her hands moving over him, and did not try to hold her away.
Presently she drew back from him. Her hands were under his coat, under his arms, holding him. The expression in her eyes was curiously hopeless.
"You haven't got any gun," she said.
He smiled faintly. He knew that her hands had been learning that even while she kissed him; and yet it made no difference,
"I didn't think I should need one," he said.
It seemed as if she wanted to speak, and could not.
"That was your mistake," said the harsh voice of Judd Kaskin. "Get your hands up."
The Saint turned, without haste. Kaskin stood just inside the door, with a heavy automatic in his hand. His florid face was savagely triumphant. Morris Dolf sidled into the room after him.
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