Saint and the Fiction Makers (13 page)

‘I heard something squeak,’ he said, half belligerently and half apologetically.

‘And you woke me up to tell me that?’ Simon cried, working himself rapidly into a temperamental rage. ‘Why didn’t you call your mother?’

Bishop would have stepped into the room if Simon had not blocked his way.

‘I’m supposed to investigate anything strange,’ he muttered.

He was doing his best to investigate, going on tiptoe from one foot to the other as he bobbed from side to side trying to see around the Saint’s shoulders.

‘Well I’m here,’ Simon shouted at him. ‘What more do you want? If you’d prefer total silence you’d better send me home or shut down your blasted listening post!’

There was a sound of running feet behind Bishop, and Warlock himself hove into view, puffing mightily. He was clutching a quilted red robe around him, and he had either lost or not taken time to put on one of his loose-fitting slippers.

‘What’s wrong?’ he called.

T …’ Bishop began, but Simon interrupted.

‘Wrong?’ he yelled. ‘I’ll tell you what’s wrong! These idiots of yours are harassing me to death.’ He pointed at Bishop, almost prodding his nose. ‘Do you know what’s wrong with this one? He heard something squeak! Can you believe that?’ Simon’s voice rose to a tremulous climax as he invoked Warlock’s incredulity. ‘Can you believe it? He heard something squeak!’

‘What is this, Bishop?’ Warlock asked. ‘I told you to call me only in an emergency.’

T …’ Bishop began. Then he paused, red-faced. ‘I heard this sort of loud squeak, and I reckoned …’

‘He reckoned any excuse was enough to let him barge in here and wake me up in the middle of the night!’ said the Saint. ‘And I absolutely cannot function without eight hours of uninterrupted sleep! I cannot!’ He thumped his fist against his open palm. T absolutely cannot.’

‘Well, I’m sorry, Mr. Klein,’ said Bishop, ‘but I distinctly heard …’

‘A squeak,’ Simon said.

‘Is that all, Bishop?’ Warlock asked sternly.

‘It was a loud squeak,’ Bishop said. He tried to see around the Saint into the room. ‘Maybe I’d better check the bed,’ he said defensively.

‘Oh, wonderful!’ said Simon, carried to new heights of sarcasm by the obvious cretinism of Warlock’s staff. ‘Check the bed! Magnificent.’ He flung out an inviting arm. ‘Please do. Please. I don’t know which of us will be most embarrassed, but if it’ll earn me a few hours’ rest, you’re more than welcome.’

‘Bishop,’ said Warlock, ‘go back to the monitoring room. I’ll speak to you later. In the meantime, do not disturb me or Mr. Klein unless you’re quite certain something is wrong.’

‘Yes,’ Simon called after Bishop. ‘Squeak or no squeak. As long as I’m cooped up here I’ll squeak all I please. I’ll stay up all night storming around the room shouting “SQUEAK SQUEAK SQUEAK!” at the top of my lungs if I feel like it!’

‘I’m sorry, Mr. Klein,’ Warlock said. ‘People are a bit jumpy and over-eager, but I’ll try to prevent you from being bothered.’

‘Thank you,’ Simon said, and closed the door in his face.

This time he did not bother to restart the tape recorder. Instead he went straight to the bed and climbed between the curtains.

‘Oh!’ Amity choked.

‘I can’t see a thing,’ Simon assured her. ‘Get dressed again and let’s go.’

‘I never got all the way,’ she whispered.

He could hear her tugging something on as he stood up and relocated the hole in the ceiling.

‘Well, that bit of modesty could have cost your life,’ Simon told her. ‘It doesn’t matter now, though. Just hurry up.’

‘For heaven’s sake, I’m doing my best!’

A moment later he had hoisted her through the bed’s canopy and the hole in the ceiling. Proceeding entirely by touch, he stretched his arms above his head and found one of the beams exposed by the removal of the plasterboard. He could reach just high enough to grasp the top of the beam with his fingers. Using the bed as a springboard, he pushed off with the tips of his toes and lifted himself up in one smooth motion so that his head and shoulders were above the beam. With a renewed swing of his body and perfectly co-ordinated pressure of his arm muscles, he brought his hips and legs up through the hole and came to rest seated on the beam.

‘Are you all right?’ Amity whispered. ‘I can’t see a thing.’

‘I’m here,’ Simon assured her. ‘Be sure you stay on the beams. You’ll drop right down through the ceiling otherwise.’

‘It seems to have a kind of floor over this way,’ she told him. ‘And I feel some wires I think.’

‘Don’t touch anything. That drainpipe I saw this afternoon should be right opposite us. This way.’

‘Can we have a light now?’

‘Wait until we get over where the roof meets the floor.’

Simon worked his way gingerly from beam to beam, moving towards the front of the house. He could hear Amity coming along behind him.

‘Can you feel the roof yet?’ she whispered.

‘Not yet.’

He had been reaching above his head frequently without making contact with anything but empty air. Almost immediately after Amity asked her question his fingers touched a slanting rafter. Between it and its neighbour, which the Saint quickly located, was a band of felt insulation. Above the insulation, he knew, were the tiles of the roof.

‘Here we are,’ he said. ‘Come up alongside, but don’t stand up straight or you’ll smash your head.’

‘Shall I use my lighter now?’

‘Yes, but try to keep the light from getting down into the bedroom.’

A second later Amity flicked her lighter and produced a tiny flame. Small as it was, in comparison with the total darkness of a moment before it seemed as bright as a miniature sun. The attic was compartmented. Undoubtedly some of the other areas contained their share of the building’s elaborate equipment. The section in which Simon and Amity found themselves was small and empty except for wiring.

‘Now I’ll strip off some of this insulating material and you take the tiles when I hand them to you.’

He used the scissors to help tear away the felt. In the wavering flame he could see the overlapping tiles which formed the roof itself. He had to be careful not to send any of the tiles skittering down the roof to the ground. Luckily the pitch of the roof was shallow, a fact he had taken into account while evolving his plan in the afternoon. It was fairly simple to free one of the tiles and carefully push it out of place.

‘Put the light out now,’ he instructed Amity. ‘We don’t want some guard spotting that from out in the garden.’

She obeyed, and Simon—since the first tile he had loosened would not fit through the hole its removal had created—reached up through the hole and laid the tile on the gentle slope of the roof. The second tile which he pulled free came easily through the hole. He brought it down and handed it to Amity, who set it aside on one of the beams which formed the floor of the attic.

In a matter of seconds, Simon had pulled loose and passed down several tiles and made a hole in the roof large enough for him and Amity to climb through.

‘Oh, isn’t it beautiful?’ she said in a hushed voice. ‘Sky, fresh air, stars … and freedom.’

She was kneeling beside Simon, looking up through the hole, in a kind of prayerful rapture.

‘It is beautiful,’ he said, ‘but I’m afraid this was only the easy part, for us. We’ll have to save our celebrating for the other side of that electrified fence.’

He climbed easily up on to the roof, sat next to the hole he had made in the tiles, and reached down to take Amity’s hands in order to help her follow him.

‘Easy now,’ he soothed her. ‘There’s nothing to it. Don’t flail around.’

Unfortunately, she did flail around. Instead of arriving beside the Saint in one simple movement, which was all that would have been necessary, she struggled like a cat trying to scale the side of a gravel heap. She ended up with her upper half on the roof and her legs kicking below. In her scrambling to go the rest of the way, she dislodged one of the tiles from the lower edge of the hole. With a loud clatter it rattled down the roof, bounced over the edge of the eaves, and a moment later clumped into the shrubbery below.

‘Oh my,’ said Amity, who was now lying flat on the roof next to Simon.

A dog had set up a vicious barking in front of the house. As the Saint prostrated himself alongside Amity, he could hear the voice of a man, apparently speaking to the dog. The glare of an electric light playing over the lower part of the building reflected above the eaves. Then the dog was quiet, there was some rustling in the shrubs, and the footsteps of the guard finally moved away. There was no more detectable light except from the starry sky.

‘He must have decided it wasn’t anything,’ Simon whispered.

He raised himself to a sitting position again and stretched his neck in order to see down into the yard below.

‘Let’s hope,’ Amity said. ‘What now?’

Simon pointed towards the darkness beyond the eaves.

‘Follow that falling tile,’ he said cheerily.

‘I usually write in a helicopter at this point.’ Amity said.

‘I’m afraid you stacked the deck in the bad guys’ favour this time. The forces of sweetness and light are going to have to climb down the drainpipe. Just follow me. Hold on to the eaves, swing your legs down and catch the pipe, then climb down as fast as you can.’

2

It was as uncomplicated as Simon predicted. The descent was accomplished with a minimum of noise, and even Amity managed to creep through the shrubbery without attracting the keen ears of the watchdogs. From the corner of the house she and Simon could see both the garage and the front gate. A guard without a canine companion stood by the gate. Simon’s eyes followed the paved drive which led from the gate to the garage, where he had seen Frug washing the limousine that afternoon.

‘You’re sure that guard has no way to shut down the electricity in the fence or to unlock the gate?’ he asked Amity.

‘I’m sure—if Warlock followed my books,’ she answered. ‘Only Warlock can do that, from inside the house.’

‘Let’s just hope he was as thorough when he designed that limousine. If I understand you, the auxiliary ignition switch is recessed under the steering column.’

‘Right. Warlock almost got captured once when he lost the keys to the car, so he had the second switch installed. Only he is supposed to know about it.’

‘Well, then, here goes. Flatten yourself against the garage door as soon as we get to it.’

The distance between house and garage was only a few paces. The guard at the gate did not notice the shadowy figures darting from the shelter of one wall to another.

‘Now, something I just thought of,’ Simon said. ‘Won’t these garage doors be wired into the alarm system?’

‘Yes, but there’s a switch you can throw by pushing one of the bricks down here next to the ground.’ Amity knelt down and felt the lower bricks beside the articulated metal door. ‘Yes. Here. This one moved when I pressed it. It gives me the most uncanny feeling. He’s thought of everything.’

‘Including the extra ignition switch, I hope! Now, the guard may hear the door going again, so get ready for some fast action. I’ll see what I can do with this lock.’

‘Maybe it’s not locked,’ suggested Amity.

‘It must be.’

But when Simon tried turning the handle his hand met no resistance. He and Amity each took one of the doors and swung them quietly outwards. In the deeper darkness of the garage’s interior glinted the black limousine, its nose towards the door.

‘Too easy,’ Simon whispered as they ran to either side of the big car. ‘Don’t tell me Mr. Warlock was good enough to leave the car open too.’

The limousine’s windows were up, but the doors were not locked.

‘Don’t look gift horses in the mouth,’ Amity said.

‘Where’s that ignition switch?’

Their hands groped beneath the steering wheel. Suddenly light flared through the front window of the car.

‘It’s the guard!’ Amity cried, no longer bothering to hold her voice to a whisper. ‘He’s coming this way!’

Simon’s fingers found the small metal button beneath the steering column. The engine rumbled. Simon engaged the automatic shift and jammed the gas pedal to the floor. The wheels whined on the cement floor of the garage, propelling the giant limousine out along the drive like a shell from a cannon. The guard with the light was in the centre of the pavement. He dived for the grass. One of the patrol dogs came racing towards the car, barking wildly, its handler running behind it with a shotgun.

Those were Simon’s last impressions in the seconds it took the car to cover the ground between the garage and the wire mesh gate. He had already reached a speed of fifty miles an hour. He would have liked more, but the gate seemed to expand directly ahead of him in the car lights. The shotgun roared at almost point blank range, and the full charge spat harmlessly against the window just six inches from Amity’s cheek.

‘Good glass,’ Simon had time to say. ‘Hang on.’

The front of the car ripped into the wire fence, creating an explosion of sparks as the deadly electric current was shorted in a hundred places. Next came the crunching sound of splintering wood as the limousine hurtled through the second gate immediately beyond the first. It was free then, roaring out of the volcanic incandescence of its escape into a straight stretch of dark country road.

‘Are we out?’ Amity asked in a quavering voice.

She had thrown herself to the floor and covered her head with her hands.

‘We’re out,’ Simon said. ‘You can come up now.’

He slowed the limousine to a reasonable speed as Amity sat beside him. She pointed to the spider web of cracks and pockmarks made by the shotgun blast.

‘Look.’

Her voice was weak.

‘This thing is like a tank,’ Simon said, patting the door affectionately. ‘Congratulations on furnishing it with bullet-proof glass.’

‘Thanks, but I don’t even want to think about those books again, much less write any.’ She turned to look out the back window. ‘There’s nobody after us yet.’

‘I wonder where we are. Watch for road signs.’

Amity turned and sat back in the seat with a deep sigh. She lowered her window halfway so that she could see beyond the cracked glass.