“Where did you take him?”
“You follow your own advice, and don’t butt in,” said Roger shortly. “I’ll tell this story in my own way, or not at all.”
“Go on, then.”
“We took Vargan—somewhere out of London. Then Templar and I came back here to collect a few things…How did you find this place, by the way?”
“I went to Brighton, and found your motor agent,” said Teal comfortably. “All motor agents spend Sunday in Brighton and the most expensive cars out of their showrooms. That was easy.”
Roger nodded.
He went on, slowly, with one eye on the clock:
“Hermann’s pals knew we were interested in Vargan before the fun started. Never mind how—that’s another story…No, it isn’t—now I come to think of it. You remember the first stunt at Esher?”
“I do.”
“Two people escaped past Hume Smith’s chauffeur—a man and a woman. They were Templar and a friend of his. They’d stumbled on the place by accident. They were driving past, and they saw a light and went to investigate. The alarm that scared them off was the second man—the giant whose footprints you found. I’ll tell you his name, because he’s the leader of Hermann’s gang…”
Hermann cut in: “Inspector, this will be another lie!”
Teal lifted one eyelid.
“How do you know?” he inquired mildly.
“He knows I’m telling the truth!” cried Roger triumphantly. “He’s given himself away. Now I’ll tell you—the man’s name was Dr Rayt Marius. And if you don’t believe me, get hold of one of his shoes and see how it matches the plaster casts you’ve got of the footprints!”
Both Mr Teal’s chins were sunk on his chest. He might have been asleep. His voice sounded as if he was.
“And these people traced you here?”
“They did,” said Roger. “And on the way they got hold of the girl who was with Templar that first night—the girl he’s in love with—and Marius came to say that he would exchange her with Templar for Vargan. But Templar wasn’t swopping. He wanted ’em both. We were able to find out where the girl was being taken, and Templar went off to rescue her. I was left to guard the prisoners—Marius and Hermann and another man called Otto. They tricked me and got away—Marius and Otto—and Hermann was left to guard me. I was to be an additional hostage against Templar. Marius and Otto went off in pursuit—they’d already arranged for an ambush to stop Templar on the road. Marius did that by telephone from here—you can ring up the exchange and verify that, if you don’t believe me. And Templar doesn’t know what he’s in for. He thinks he’ll take the men in the house on the hill off their guard. And he’s gone blinding off to certain death…”
“Half a minute,” said Teal. “What house on the hill is this you’re talking about?”
The tone of the question indicated that the authentic ring of truth in the story had not been lost on Teal’s ears, and Roger drew a deep breath.
Now—what? He’d told as much as he meant to tell—and that was a long and interesting preface of no real importance. Now how much could he afford to add to it? How great was the Saint’s danger?
Roger knew the Saint’s fighting qualities. Would those qualities be great enough to pull off a victory against all the odds? And would the arrival of the police just after the victory serve for nothing but to give the Saint another battle to fight?…Or was the Saint likely to be really up against it? Might it be a kind of treachery to spill the rest of the beans—if only to save Pat? How could a man weigh a girl’s safety against the peace of the world? For, even if the betrayal meant the sacrifice of the Saint and himself, it would leave Vargan with Norman Kent. And in case of accidents, Norman had definite instructions…
But where was Norman?
Roger looked into the small bright eyes of Chief Inspector Teal. Then he looked away, to meet the glittering, veiled eyes of Hermann. And, in the shifting of his gaze, he managed to steal another glimpse of the clock—without letting Teal see that he did so.
“What house on what hill?” demanded Teal again.
“Does that matter?” temporised Roger desperately.
“Just a little,” said Teal, with frightful self-restraint. “If you don’t tell me where Templar’s gone, how am I going to rescue him from this trap you say he’s going into?”
Roger bent his head.
Unless Norman Kent came quickly now, and outwitted Teal, so that Roger and Norman could go together to the relief of the Saint, there would be nothing for it but to tell some more of the truth. It would be the only way to save the Saint—whatever that salvation might cost. Roger saw that now.
“Get through on the phone to the police at Braintree first,” he said. “Templar will pass through there. Driving an open Hirondel. I’ll go on when you’ve done that. There’s no time to lose…”
All at once, Teal’s weary eyes had become very wide awake. He was studying Roger’s face unblinkingly.
“That story’s the truth?”
“On my word of honour!”
Teal nodded very deliberately.
“I believe you,” he said, and went to the telephone with surprising speed.
Roger flicked his cigarette end into the fireplace, and sat with his eyes on the carpet and his brain reeling to encompass the tumult unleashed within it.
If Norman was coming, he should have arrived by then. So Norman had decided not to come. And that was that.
The detective’s voice came to Roger through a dull haze of despair.
“An open Hirondel…probably driving hell-for-leather…Stop every car that comes through tonight, anyway…Yes, better be armed…When you’ve got him, put a guard in the car and send him back to London—New Scotland Yard—at once…Ring me up and tell me when he’s on his way…”
Then the receiver went back on its hook.
“Well, Conway—what about this house?”
Something choked Roger’s throat for a moment.
Then—
“We only know it as ‘the house on the hill.’ That was what it was called in the letter we found on Marius. But it’s at…”
Zzzzzzing…zzzzzing!
Teal looked at the door. Then he turned sharply.
“Do you know who that is?”
“I haven’t the faintest idea.”
Zzzzzzzzzing!
Again the strident summons, and Roger’s heart leapt crazily. He never knew how he kept the mask of puzzlement on his face, but he knew that he did it: the fading suspicion in Teal’s stare told him that. And he had put everything he knew into his lie. “I haven’t the faintest idea…”
But he knew that it could only be one man out of all the world.
Hermann also knew.
But Roger gave no sign, and never looked at the man. It remained a gamble. With Roger telling the truth—and intending, for all Hermann knew, to go on telling the truth—the man was in a quandary. The story that Roger was building up against himself was also giving Hermann a lot to answer…Would Hermann be wise and swift enough to see that he would have a better chance with his unofficial enemies than with the police?…
Hermann never spoke.
Then Teal went out into the hall, and Roger could have cried his relief aloud.
But he could not cry out—not even to warn Norman. That would be no use against Teal, as it would have been of use against Hermann. Norman had got to walk into the snare—and might all the Saint’s strange gods inspire him as they would have inspired the Saint himself…
Teal opened the front door. And he kept his right hand in his coat pocket.
Norman hesitated only the fraction of a second.
Afterwards, Norman said that the words came to his lips without any conscious thought, as if a guardian angel had put them unbidden into his mouth.
“Are you Mr Templar?” asked Norman Kent.
And, as he heard the words that he had not known he was going to speak, he stood appalled at the colossal simplicity and coloss
al daring of the ruse.
“No, I’m not,” said Teal curtly.
“Is Mr Templar in?”
“Not at the moment.”
“Well, is there anything you could do? I’ve never met Mr Templar, but I’ve just had an extraordinary message, and I thought, before I went to the police…”
The word pricked Teal’s ears.
“Maybe I can do something for you,” he said, more cordially. “Will you come in?”
“Certainly,” said Norman.
Teal stood aside to let him pass, and turned to fasten the door again.
Hanging on the walls of the hall were a number of curious weapons, relics of the Saint’s young lifetime of wandering in queer corners of the globe. There were Spanish knives and a matador’s sword, muskets and old-fashioned pistols, South Sea Island spears, Malay krises and karambits and parangs, a scimitar, a boomerang from New Zealand, an Iroquois bow, an assegai, a bamboo blow-pipe from Papua, and other things of the same kind.
Norman Kent’s eye fell on a knobkerrie. It hung very conveniently to his hand.
He took it down.
12
HOW SIMON TEMPLAR PARTED WITH ANNA, AND TOOK PATRICIA IN HIS ARMS
To attempt to locate, in a strange part of the country and on a dark night, a house distinguished by nothing but the fact of being situated on “the” hill—particularly in a district where hills are no more than slight undulations—might well have been considered a hopeless task even by the most optimistic man. As he began to judge himself near the village, the Saint realised that.
But even before he could feel despair, if he would have felt despair, his hurtling headlights picked up the figure of a belated rustic plodding down the road ahead. The Saint, no stranger to country life, and familiar with its habit of retiring to bed as soon as the village pub had ejected it at ten o’clock, knew that this gift could only have been an angel in corduroys, sent direct from Heaven. The Saint’s gods were surely with him that night.
“Do you know the house on the hill?” demanded Simon brazenly.
“Ay, that Oi do!”
Then the Saint understood that in the English country districts all things are possible, and the natives may easily consider “the house on the hill” a full and sufficient address, just as a townsman may be satisfied with “the pub round the corner.”
“Throo the village, tourrn round boi the church, an’ keep straight as ever you can goo for ’arf a moile. You can’t miss ut.” So the hayseed declared, and the Saint sped on. But he ran the car into a side turning near the crest of the hill, parked it with lights out, and continued on foot. He might be expected, but he wasn’t advertising his arrival unnecessarily.
He had been prepared to break into and shoot up every single house in the district to which the description “on the hill” might possibly have applied, until he came to the right one. But he had been saved that, and it remained to capitalise the godsend.
The gun in his pocket bumped his hip as he walked, and in the little sheath on his forearm he could feel the slight but reassuring weight of Anna, queen of knives, earned with blood and christened with blood. She was no halfling’s toy. In blood she came, and in blood that night she was to go.
But this the Saint could not know, whatever presentiments he may have had, as he stealthily skirted the impenetrable blackthorn hedge that walled in the grounds of the house he had come to raid. The hedge came higher than his head, and impenetrable it was, except for the one gap where the gate was set, as he learned by making a complete circuit. But, standing back, he could see the upper part of the house looming over it, a black bulk against the dark sky, and in the upper story a single window was lighted up. He could see nothing of the ground floor from behind the hedge, so that he had no way of knowing what there might be on three sides of it, but in the front he could see at least one room alight. Standing still, listening with all the keyed acuteness of his ears, he could pick up no sound from the house.
Then that lighted upper window gave him an idea.
On the face of it, one single lighted upper window could only mean one thing—unless it were a trap. But if it were a trap, it was such a subtle one that the Saint couldn’t see it.
What he did see, with a crushing force of logic, was that the garrison of a fortified house, expecting an attempt to rescue their prisoner, would be likely to put her as far away from the attacker’s reach as possible. Prisoners are usually treated like that, almost instinctively, being ordinarily confined in attics or cellars even when no attempt at rescue is expected. And a country house of that type would be unlikely to have a cellar large enough to confine a prisoner, whose value would drop to zero if asphyxiated. Patricia could surely be in but one place—and that lighted window seemed to indicate it as plainly as if the fact had been labelled on the walls outside in two-foot Mazda letters.
The Saint could not know that this was the simple truth—that the same fortune that had watched over him all through the adventure had engineered that breakdown on the long-distance wire to prevent Marius communicating with the house on the hill. But he guessed and accepted it (except for the breakdown) with a force of conviction that nothing could have strengthened. And he knew, quite definitely, without any recourse to deduction or guesswork, that Marius by that time must be less than ten minutes behind him. His purpose must be achieved quickly if it were to be achieved at all.
For a moment the Saint hesitated, standing in a field on the wrong side of the blackthorn hedge. Then he bent and searched the ground for some small stones. He wanted very small stones, for they must not make too much noise. He found three that satisfied his requirements.
Then he wrote, by the light of a match cupped cautiously in one hand, on a scrap of paper he found in his pocket:
I’m here, Pat darling. Throw Anna back over the hedge and then start a disturbance to divide their attention. I’ll be right in.—Simon.
He tied the scrap to the handle of Anna with a strip of silk ripped from his shirt, and straightened up.
Gently and accurately he lobbed up two stones, and heard each of them tap the lighted pane. Then he waited.
Now, if there were no response—suppose Pat had been tied up, or was doped, or anything like that…The thought made his muscles tighten up so that he felt them quivering all over his body like a mass of braced steel hawsers…He’d have to wade in without the help of the distracting disturbance, of course…But that wasn’t the thought that made his pulse beat quicker and his mouth narrow down into a line that hardly smiled at all. It was the thought of Patricia herself—the thought of all that might have happened to her, that might be happening…
“By God!” thought the Saint, with an ache in his heart, “if any of their filthy hands…”
But he wanted to see her once more before he went into the fight that he was sure was jeopardised against him. In case of accidents. Just to see her blessed face once more, to take the memory of it as a banner with him into the battle…
Then he held his breath.
Slowly the sash of the window was being raised, with infinite precautions against noise. And the Saint saw, at the same time, that what he had taken, in silhouette, to be leaded panes, were, in fact, the shadows of the network of closely set bars.
Then he saw her.
She looked out, down into the garden below, and along the side of the house, puzzledly. He saw the faltered parting of the red lips, the discorded gold of her hair, the brave light in the blue eyes…
Then he balanced Anna in his hand and sent her flickering through the dark. The knife fell point home, quivering in the wooden sill beside the girl’s hand.
He saw Patricia start, and stare at it with wild surmise. Then she snatched it out of the wood and disappeared into the room.
Half a minute ticked away whilst the Saint waited with a tingling impatience, fearing at any moment to hear a car, which could only belong to one man, come purring up the hill. But, fearfully as he strained his ears, he found
the stillness of the night unbroken.
And at last he saw the girl again. Saw her hand come through the bars, and watched Anna swooping back towards him like a scrap stripped from a moonbeam…
He found the little knife, after some difficulty, in a clump of long grass. His slip of paper was still tied to the handle, but when he unrolled it he found fresh words pencilled on the other side.
Eight men here. God bless you, darling.—Pat.
The Saint stuffed the paper into his pocket and slid Anna back into her sheath.
“God bless us both, Pat, you wonderful, wonderful child!” he whispered to the stillness of the night, and, looking up again, he saw her still at the window, straining her eyes to find him.
He waved his handkerchief for her to see, and she waved back. Then the window closed again. But she had smiled. He had seen her. And the ache in his heart became a song…
He was wasting no more time looking for a way through the hedge. His first survey had already shown that it was planted and trained as an effective palisade. But there was always the gate.
On the road. A perfectly ordinary gate.
That, of course, was the way they would expect him to come.
Pity to disappoint them!
He hardly spared the gate a glance. It was probably electrified. It was almost certainly wired with alarms. And it was covered by a rifleman somewhere, for a fiver. But it remained the only visible way in.
The Saint took a short run and leapt it cleanly.
Beyond was the gravel of the drive, but he only touched that with one foot. As he landed on that one foot, he squirmed aside and leapt again—to the silent footing of the lawn and the covering shadow of a convenient shrub. He stooped there, thumbing back the safety-catch of the automatic he had drawn, and wondering why no one had fired at him.
Then wondering went by the board, for he heard, through the silence, faintly, very far off, but unmistakable, the rising and falling drone of a powerful car. And he had barely attuned his bearing to that sound when another sound slashed through it like a sabre-cut—the scream of a girl in terror…
The Saint Closes the Case (The Saint Series) Page 14