“I could deal with your humour more comfortably, Templar,” he said malevolently, “if you were tied up. Some more rope, Wells.”
“Another of these brave men,” snapped Roger.
The Saint smiled. There had never been a time when the Saint could not smile.
“He’s got a weak heart,” said the Saint, “and his grandmother told him never to leave off his woollen drawers and never to risk the shock of being hit back. He forgot it just now, and he might have been killed. Wouldn’t that have been dreadful?”
Then the man came back, this time with a great coil of rope over his arm. Two of the others seized the Saint.
“Search him,” said Sleat, “and tie him up.”
The Saint was searched, but he had no fear of that. He never carried such obvious things as firearms—only the two little knives which he could throw with such supernatural skill. And they were where only one who knew the secret would ever have dreamed of searching—Anna, his favourite, in a sheath strapped to his left forearm, and Belle, the second, in a similar sheath strapped to his right calf under his sock.
Then they brought up a chair, and he sat down willingly. To have struggled would have been simply a useless waste of energy. They bound his hands behind his back, and roped his ankles to the legs of the chair. Simon encouraged them.
“This is the twenty-seventh time I’ve been tied up like this,” he said pleasantly, “and every time I’ve got away somehow. Just like the hero of numberless hectic adventures in a storybook. But don’t let that depress you. Just try and do better than your predecessors…I’m afraid, though, your technique rather reminds me of the technique of the twenty-second man who did this. I called him Halfred the Hideous, and Auntie Ethel never took very kindly to him, either. He died, unhappily. I had to push him off the top of the house a few hours later. He fell into the orchard, and next season all the trees grew blood oranges.…”
The Saint’s voice was as calm as if he had been discussing the following day’s race-card, and as cheerfully optimistic as if he had been discussing it in the spirit of having collected a packet over a twenty-to-one winner that afternoon. He did it, as much as anything, to lighten the hearts of the others—and particularly the girl’s. But he would probably have behaved in the same way, for his own entertainment, if he had been alone. The Saint never believed in getting all hot under the collar about anything. It was so bad for the smartness of the collar…
Sleat stood by the wall in silence, his automatic in his hand. His fury had settled down into something horribly soft and deadly, like gently simmering vitriol. To anyone less reckless than the Saint, that sudden restraint might have been more paralysing to the tongue than any show of violence. Even Simon felt a chilly tingle slide up his spine like the touch of a clammy hand, and smiled more seraphically than ever.
Sleat spoke.
“Now the other man.”
“Roger—”
The girl’s control broke for an instant, in that involuntary cry.
Conway, forced into a chair like the Saint, with the men rapidly pinioning his arms and legs, answered her urgently: “Don’t worry, darling. These blistered rats can’t do anything I care about. And when I get near that misshapen blot on the landscape, over by that wall, I’ll—”
“You shall have the job of killing him, Roger,” said the Saint dispassionately. “I promise you that. And I should recommend a sharply-pointed barge-pole. You wouldn’t want to touch the skunk with anything shorter.”
The girl stifled a sob. She was white and shaking.
“But what are they going to do?”
“Nothing,” said Roger brusquely.
Sleat put his automatic away in his pocket.
“Now the girl,” he said.
Roger strained at his bonds in agony.
“You’re even afraid of her, are you?” he blazed. “That’s sensible of you! Newborn babes would be about your fighting mark, you white-livered—”
“Why get excited, son?” Simon’s voice drawled in. “You’ll only scare the girl. Whereas there’s really nothing—”
“All right, boss.”
Wells spoke. The roping was finished.
Sleat moved twistedly off the wall.
“Pale blue eyes,” thought the Saint. “Pale blue eyes. All ruthless men—murderers and great generals—have them. This is our evening!” And Sleat picked up his loop of rope from the floor where it had fallen, and shuffled forward again.
He halted in front of the Saint.
“You are the professional humorist of the party, I believe, Templar?” he said, and his cracked voice was high-pitched and uneven.
Simon looked him steadily in the eyes.
“Quite right,” he said. “At least, that’s my reputation. And you’re the monstrosity from the touring menagerie, aren’t you? Let me know when you’re ready to start your turn.”
Then he saw what was going to happen, and his voice ripped out again in a desperate command.
“Don’t look, Betty! Whiskers is going to make one of his funny faces, and you might die laughing!”
“I dislike your kind of humour,” said Sleat in the same tone as before, and swung the loose end of the rope.
The girl screamed once and closed her eyes.
Roger swore foully, impotently.
Sleat babbled: “…that…and that…and that…and that…and that!” He paused, panting. “And if you’ve any more humorous remarks to make, Templar—”
“Only,” said the Saint with nothing but the least tremor in his voice, “that my Auntie Ethel had a very good joke about an incorrigible bi-metallist of Salt Lake City whose hobby was collecting freaks. He was quite happy until one day he noticed that all pigs had short curly tails. He went quite mad, and wore himself to a shadow touring all the pig-farms in the States looking for a pig with a long straight tail. For all I know, he’s searching still, and it occurred to me that perhaps your tail—”
Sleat, with the face of a fiend, lifted his rope’s end again.
“Then you can add that…and that…”
It was Roger who interrupted, with an unprintable profanity which, for some reason, found its mark.
The dwarf turned on him.
“Another humorist?” he sneered. “Then—”
He struck once, twice…
“You fool!” sobbed the girl hysterically. “That won’t help you! There aren’t any men outside, I tell you—”
Sleat paused with his hand raised again—and slowly lowered it. And as slowly as that slow movement, the flush of madness froze under the surface of his face, leaving it grey and twitching.
“There aren’t any men outside,” he muttered. “That’s what I wanted to be sure about, in case he was trying to make me walk out into a trap. But there aren’t any men outside.…”
He dropped the rope.
“Oh, Roger—Saint—”
The girl was sobbing weakly in her chair.
Conway called to her, insistently: “Don’t cry, dear—don’t cry, please! It’ll only make that walking ulcer think he’s won. I’m not hurt. Don’t cry!”
“You beasts—you beasts!”
Sleat shambled over to her and tilted back her head brutally.
“How did they come here?” he demanded.
“In a car—it’s by the road—and your man’s in it—”
“You little fool!” broke in the Saint’s bitter voice. “You’re smashing the game to glory! Why don’t you go down on your knees and beg the scab to spare us? That’d finish it splendidly.”
Sleat turned.
“Unless you want some more rope, Templar—”
“Thanks,” said the Saint clearly, with his head held high and the blood running down to stain his collar, “that hurts me a lot less than the thought of all the clean mud you must have soiled by crawling through it.”
The dwarf lifted his hand, and then he mastered himself.
“I know all I want to know,” he said, “and I have things to attend to at once
.”
“Disposing of the body of Sebastian Aldo, for instance?” suggested the Saint insolently.
“Yes—I shall do that at the same time as I dispose of yours.”
“So he’s dead?” said Roger.
“He died of heart failure.”
“When he saw you, I suppose?”
The girl said, “You cowards! You murdered him—”
“I said he died of heart failure,” snarled the dwarf. “Why should I trouble to lie, when none of you will ever be able to use anything I tell you? The shock killed him.”
“That is sufficient for me,” said the Saint. “For that alone I shall be justified in ordering your execution. And the sentence will be carried out.”
Sleat shook his head. His eyes shifted over to the Saint, and a slow malevolent leer came into his wrinkled face.
“You will order nothing,” he said.
Only the dim yellow light of the oil lamp on the table illuminated that macabre scene. The four guards stood motionless around the walls. Simon, Roger, and Betty, in their chairs, were ranged in a rough crescent. In the centre of the room stood Sleat, with a queer light flickering in his pale eyes, and his face twisted and ghoulish.
There was a moment’s silence.
Conway sat grimly still. His face was white, save for two thick red weals that ran across either cheek, and behind his eyes burned a dull fire. He looked at the Saint, and saw the Saint’s head thrown back with its old unconquerable mocking arrogance, and the Saint’s face bruised and bloody. He looked at the girl, and met her eyes. Her quick breathing was then the only sound in that moment’s silence.
“I warn you,” said the Saint clearly, “that whatever you do—whether you fly to the end of the world, or hide yourself at the bottom of the sea—my friends will follow you and find you. And you will die.”
Again Sleat shook his head. It was like the wagging of the head of a grotesque doll.
“You will order nothing,” he repeated. “Because you—and these two friends of yours—will die—tonight.”
A window rattled in the wind, and the flame of the lamp flickered like a tired soul.
9
The Saint felt the atmosphere weighing down as if with a tense, dark, evil heaviness. And he laughed the laugh of a boy, and shattered that evil cloud with a breath.
“Very dramatic!” he mocked, in a voice that slipped through that murky room like a shaft of sunlight. “But a shade theatrical, my pet. Never mind. We don’t object to sharing your simple fun. That infectious gaiety is the most charming thing about you. And after Roger’s killed you, I shall commemorate it in a snappy little epitaph which I’ve just made up. It’s all about ‘a handsome young hero named Sleat, whose pleasures were simple but sweet. He’d be happy for hours just gathering flowers, or removing his whiskers with Veet.’ That ought to look well in marble.…”
“With a memorial statue over a refuse heap,” added Roger.
Sleat leered and shuffled away.
He went into one corner, and dragged aside a box that stood there. Stooping, he picked up what looked like two ends of black cord, and came a little forward again, trailing them behind him.
“I’ve been to prison once,” he said, “and I swore then that I’d never be taken again. I prepared this place so that if the police ever came here I could blow, them all to blazes—and myself with them. You see these fuses?”
No one answered.
“This one—marked with a piece of thread—is fast. It burns in about three seconds. The other is slow. It should burn for about eight minutes. And under this floor there are twenty pounds of dynamite. In the next room”—the vacant eyes focused on the girl—“is your uncle. He is dead. You will soon join him. And there will be no trace—nothing but a crater in the moor—in eight minutes’ time. I light the slow fuse, you understand.…”
The eyes moved along the short line of bound figures, studied, with a ghastly delight, the girl, sitting numbed with horror, and the two men, sitting erect and unflinching.
“The slow fuse,” said Sleat harshly. “I don’t want to blow myself up as well. So you will have a little leisure in which to meditate your folly. I shall hear the explosion as I drive away, and I shall laugh.…”
He laughed then, a short raucous cackle.
“So easy,” he said, “and so quick, after the first eight minutes. Some matches, Wells…And you may go. You may all go. Find his car, and wait for me with it on the road…I light the slow fuse—”
The match was sizzling up between his fingers as the men filed out. He touched the match to the fuse, and blew on the glowing end so that it shone like a tiny glow-worm. He held it up.
“You see?” he cackled. “I’ve lighted the fuse!”
“Yes,” said Simon mechanically, “you’ve lighted the fuse!”
And, now that there was no longer anyone behind him, the Saint was reaching his bound hands down and round behind the chair, twisting them till the cords ate into his wrists. It was impossible to reach the knife on his leg, but if he could only loosen the ropes on his wrists sufficiently—the merest trifle would do—enough to enable the fingers of his right hand to reach the hilt of the little knife on his left forearm…
Sleat dropped the lighted fuse and came over to the Saint. He thrust his face down to within a few inches of Simon’s.
“And you die!” he gloated, “while I go and collect the diamonds for which I gave seven years of my life. You knew about the diamonds?…I thought you did. You know too much, my friend. And you are too funny—”
He lashed out at the Saint’s face, but Simon dropped his head and took the blow on his forehead. Sleat did not seem to notice it. He turned to the girl and took her face between his hands.
“You are beautiful,” he said, and she looked him in the eyes.
“I’m not afraid of you,” she flashed back.
“It is a pity that you should die with your beauty,” said the dwarf in the same unemotional way. “But you are like the others—you know too much. So I bid you farewell—like this—”
He bent suddenly and kissed her full on the mouth, and Roger Conway’s chair creaked with his mad struggling.
“You disgusting blot! You foul, slimy crawling—”
Sleat let go the girl and shuffled across to him.
“As for you,” he croaked, “you also know too much. And you also are too funny. I bid you farewell—like this—”
His fist struck Roger on the mouth, half stunning him, but through a reeling red haze Roger heard the Saint’s voice ring out like the voice of a trumpet.
“Wait, Sleat! You lose!”
Sleat limped round. And the glowing cad of the fuse was stealing across the bare floor like the eye of a retreating worm.
“Why do I lose?”
“Because you do,” taunted the Saint. “Why? I’ll tell you in about six minutes—just before the fuse blows up. You’ll have the satisfaction of knowing, before you die with us!”
To Roger it was all like a nightmare, from which he could have believed that he would wake up in a moment—if it had not been for the pain which racked his face from brow to chin. He could only guess what the Saint must have been suffering, for Simon had never shown it by the flicker of an eyelid.
The atom of red light seemed to be racing across the floor at lightning speed. Unless Sleat had underestimated the length of his fuse—or unless there was more of it concealed under the boards—
He could see the Saint’s hands, behind his chair. The Saint was wrestling with his wrists, but Roger could not see the knife. The Saint’s fingers were in his left sleeve, groping and straining, but nothing seemed to happen.
Then Roger saw the Saint’s fingers stop moving—saw the Saint’s fingers relax and his hands sink limply down behind his back—and understood.
The Saint could not reach his knife.
For once the trick had failed. The ropes had been tied too tightly, or else the knife had slipped round…
An
d the Saintly smile had never been sweeter.
“Why do I lose?” asked Sleat again.
“Wouldn’t you like to know?” jeered the Saint.
Sleat’s face convulsed with a spasm of rage. He stared about him, and saw the discarded piece of rope. He started to move towards it.
“And if you think that’ll help you,” came Simon’s voice steadily, “you’ve got another guess due, sweetheart. Torture doesn’t make me whine. You ought to have found that out—”
The smouldering end of the fuse was only a few inches from the hole in the floor. Four inches, at the most…three…
Roger’s head swam. The Saint could only be doing one thing. His trump card had been snatched from him, and he was taking the only revenge that was left. To waste time, distract Sleat’s attention—to take Sleat with them into eternity…
Roger shouted. He knew he was shouting, because he heard his own voice like the voice of another man across an infinite emptiness. He shouted, “Betty—”
Her answer came to him as from a vast distance. There was nothing real—nothing. And the glow-worm was slipping into the hole in the floor.
“Why can’t you hold me?” sobbed the girl pitifully.
Roger groaned.
“I can’t,” he said in a whisper. “I can’t. They’ve tied me too tight. I can’t move. My dear—”
A few feet away, on the other side of the earth, he saw her. And he saw Spider Sleat, moving with what seemed to be an unbelievable slowness, picking up the rope. And he saw the Saint smiling his indomitable smile.
And again the shaft of sunlight, that was the Saint’s voice, leapt through the air. And this time it seemed to fall on a bright banner of triumph.
“You’re too late!” cried the Saint. “It’s too late even for torture—because you can’t put out the fuse! It’s gone. It’s been gone for a minute now. You can’t reach it unless you tear up the floor—and you haven’t the time for that. You’ve less than four minutes—”
And the Saint’s heart was singing with a wild hope.
It was true—Roger’s surmise had been right at first. The Saint had been playing for time, fighting to make Sleat forget the lighting of the fuse and the flight of time, with the grim intention of keeping Sleat there to be hurled with his victims into the black sky. He had played for time—but he had won.
Enter the Saint (The Saint Series) Page 16