The Saint Goes On (20 page)

What Ellshaw knew, or what he guessed, none of them ever discovered. It is only on record that he was the first of them to move, the only one to get up and go straight for Ire-lock. Twice the room rocked to the crash of the heavy gun, and Ellshaw staggered at the impact of each shot; but he held on his course. He must have been dead on his feet; but in some uncanny way he caught Irelock at the door and fell on his arm dragging the revolver down so that it could only aim at the floor. It took two men to unlock the clutch of his fingers on Irelock’s wrist; and the bruises of that dying grip were still stamped on the other’s flesh a fortnight later, when he stepped down from the dock to wait for the answer to the greatest mystery of all.

Part III
THE CASE OF THE
FRIGHTENED
INNKEEPER

“BUSINESS” took Simon Templar to Penzance, though nobody ever knew exactly what he had to do there. He took Hoppy Uniatz with him for company. But Hoppy never saw him do it. Simon parked him in the bar of a convenient pub for an hour, and that was that. For all that this story can record, he may have spent the hour in another pub across the street, talking to nobody and watching nothing. The Saint’s business was as irregular as himself, and directed by the same incalculable twists of motive: he was liable to do a great many important things with apparent aimlessness, and a great many unimportant things with the most specious and circumstantial parade of reasons.

It is about two hundred and eighty miles from London to Penzance, which the Saint drove in five hours, including one break for a cigarette and a drink in Taunton; and after that one hour for which Hoppy Uniatz was alone, he climbed back into his car as if he was cheerfully prepared to drive the same two hundred and eighty miles home without further delay.

The chronicler, whose one object it is to conceal no fact which by its unfair suppression might deceive any one of the two hundred and fifty thousand earnest readers of this epic, is able to reveal that this performance had never entered Simon Templar’s head; although the Saint would have done it without turning a hair if it had happened to be necessary. But he did not say so; and Mr. Uniatz, citizen of a country whose inhabitants regard a thousand-mile jaunt in much the same light as the average Londoner regards a trip to Brighton, would have been quite unperturbed whatever the Saint had announced for his programme. Hardly anything was capable of perturbing Mr. Uniatz except a call for mental effort lasting more than five consecutive seconds, and that was an ordeal to which he had never been known to submit himself voluntarily.

He sat placidly at the Saint’s side while the huge snarling Hirondel droned eastwards along the coast, chewing the butt of an incredibly rank cigar in a paradise of utter intellectual vacancy which allowed his battered features to relax in a calm that had its own rugged beauty, being very much like something that Epstein might have conceived in a sportive mood. They left the rocks of Cornwall behind them and entered the rolling pastures and red earth of Devon, diving sometimes through the cool shadows of a wood, sometimes catching sight of a wedge of sea sparkling in the sunlight between a fold of the hills. Simon Templar, who was constitutionally unable to regard the highways of England as anything but a gigantic road-face circuit laid out for his personal use, did nothing to encourage a placid relaxation in anybody who rode with him; but Hoppy had sat in that car often enough to learn that any other atittude could lead only to a nervous breakdown. Only once was he jarred out of his phlegmatic fatalism, when the Saint sounded his horn and pulled out to pass a big speeding saloon on a straight stretch beyond Sid-mouth. As they swept up alongside, the saloon swerved out spitefully: the Saint’s face hardened under a sheath of bronze, and he held grimly on, with his offside wheels on the very edge of the road. They got through, with a shrill scraping of wings; and then Simon swung the Hirondel sharply in, and heard Hoppy’s breath hiss through his teeth.

“Geez, boss,” said Mr. Uniatz uncertainly, “I fought we was finished, den.” He felt around at his hip. “Say, why don’t ya stop de wagon an’ lemme go back an’ shoot up dat goddamn son of a witch?”

Simon glanced at the driving mirror, and smiled rather gently.

“He has been shot up, Hoppy,” he said; and Mr. Uniatz looked back and saw that the saloon had stopped far behind, tilting over at a perilous angle with its nearside wheels buried in a deep ditch.

They roared over four more hills, whipped around half a dozen more corners in hair-raising skids, and thundered past a gaunt grey building in a barren hollow, close to the road. Simon took the cigarette from between his lips and pointed to it.

“Do you know what that place is, Hoppy?” he asked.

Hoppy screwed his neck round.

“It looks like a jail, boss,” he said; and the Saint grinned.

“It is a jail,” he murmured. “With that eagle eye of yours, you go straight to the bullseye. That noble pile is Larkstone Prison, where the worst of the first offenders go-there isn’t anyone in it who’s doing less than seven years. Chief Inspector Claud Eustace Teal has often told me how much he’d like to see me there.”

They climbed another slope, and dropped down with surprising contrast into Larkstone Vale. In an instant the rather monotonously undulating agricultural country through which they had been travelling disappeared like a mirage, and they were coasting down a mild gradient cut into one wall of the valley towards the sea. A glimpse of thatched cottages clustering along the borders of the estuary blinked through the trees which cloaked the slope, and a broad shallow stream wound southwards in the same direction a little way below them. It was one of the least known beauty spots in the South West, still unspoiled even in those days; and the setting sun, abruptly cut off by the rise which they had just crested, left it in a pool of peaceful dusk which made all the tortuous alleys of lawlessness where the Saint made his career, and where the men in the drab prison over the last spur of hill had been less fortunate, seem momentarily ridiculous and unreal.

Simon trod on the brake and brought the great car to a smooth standstill on the upper ledge of the village.

“I think this will do us for the night,” he said.

“We ain’t goin’ back to London?” asked Mr. Uniatz, putting two and two together with a certain justifiable pride in his achievement.

The Saint shook his head.

“Not tonight, Hoppy. Perhaps not for days and days. I like the look of this place. There may be adventure-romance- a beauteous damsel in distress-anything. You never know. They may even have some good beer, which would do me almost as much good. C’mon, fella-let’s have a look round.”

Mr. Uniatz disentangled himself from the bucket seat in which his muscular form had been wedged, and stepped stoically into the road. He was not by nature or upbringing a romantic man, and the only damsels in distress he had ever seen were those he distressed himself; but he had been afflicted since adolescence with a chronic parching of the gullet, and the place where they had stopped looked as if it might be able to assist him on his endless search for relief. It was an old rambling house of white plaster and oak timbering, with dormer windows breaking through a thatched roof and crimson ramblers straggling up the walls; a carved and painted sign over the door proclaimed it to be the Clevely Arms. Entering hopefully, Mr. Uniatz saw the Saint drawing off his gloves in a sort of lounge hall with a rough-hewn staircase at the far end, his dark head almost touching the beams and his blue eyes twinkling with an expectant humour that might well have been worn by an Elizabethan privateer standing in the same spot three hundred and fifty years ago. But no Elizabethan privateer could have had more right to that smile and the twinkling eye with it than the Saint, who had carved his name into the dull material of the twentieth century as a privateer on a scale that would have made Queen Elizabeth dizzy to think of.

“Over there,” he said, “I think you’ll find what you want.”

He swung across the hall and ducked under a low lintel on one side into a small but comfortable bar. A pleasant-looking grey-haired man with glasses came through a curtain behind the counter as he approached, and bade them good evening.

“I should like a pint of beer,” said the Saint, “and half a bottle of whisky.”

The grey-haired man filled a pewter tankard from the wood, and turned back with it.

“And a whisky?” he queried.

He had a quiet and educated voice, and the Saint hated to shock him. But his first duty was to his friend.

“Half a bottle,” he repeated.

“Would you like me to wrap it up?”

“I hardly think,” said the Saint, with some regret, “that that will ever be necessary.”

The landlord took down a half-bottle from the shelf behind him, and put it on the counter. Simon slid it along to Mr. Uniatz. Mr. Uniatz removed the cap, placed the neck in his mouth, and poured gratefully. His Adam’s apple throbbed in rhythmic appreciation as the neat spirit flowed soothingly through the arid deserts of his throat in a stream that would have rapidly choked anyone with a less calloused esophagus.

Simon turned again to the landlord, who was watching the demonstration in a kind of dazed awe.

“You see why I find it cheaper to buy in bulk,” he remarked.

The grey-haired man blinked speechlessly; and Hoppy put down the empty bottle and wiped his lips with a sigh.

“You ain’t seen nut’n yet, pal,” he declared. “Where I come from, dey call me a fairy.”

It was the first time he had spoken since they entered the house, and Simon was utterly unprepared for the result.

All the colour drained out of the grey-haired man’s face; and the ten-shilling note which Simon had laid on the bar, which he had just picked up, slipped through his shaking fingers and fluttered down out of sight. He stared at Hoppy with his nostrils twitching and his eyes dilated in stark terror, waiting without movement as if he expected sudden death to leap at him across the bar.

It only lasted for a moment, that startling transformation into terrified immobility; and then he stooped and clumsily retrieved the fallen note.

“Excuse me,” he muttered, and shuffled out through the curtain behind the counter.

The Saint put down his tankard and fished out a cigarette. Not even the most shameless flatterer had ever said that Hoppy’s voice was vibrant with seductive music: such a statement, even with the kindest intentions, could not have been made convincingly about that rasping dialect of New York’s lower East Side which was the only language Mr. Uniatz knew. Hoppy’s voice was about as attractive and musical as a file operating on a sheet of jagged tinplate. But the Saint had never known it to strike anyone with such sheer paralysed horror as he had seen the landlord reduced to for that brief amazing moment.

Mr. Uniatz, who had been staring at the curtained opening with a blank fish-like expression which in its own way was no less cataleptic, turned perplexedly towards him, seeking light.

“Dijja see dat, boss?” he demanded. “De guy looked like he was waitin’ for us to turn de heat on him! Did I say anyt’ing I shouldn’t of?”

Simon shook his head.

“I wouldn’t know, Hoppy,” he answered thoughtfully. “Maybe the bloke doesn’t like fairies-you can never tell, in these great open spaces.”

He might have said more; but he heard a footstep beyond the curtain, and picked up his tankard again. And then, for the second time, he put it down untouched; for it was a girl who came through into the serving space behind the bar.

If there was to be a beauteous damsel in distress, Simon decided, the conventions insisted that it must be her role. She was tall and slender, with dark straight hair that took on an unexpected curl around her neck, steady grey eyes, and a mouth to which there was only one obvious way of paying tribute. Her skin reminded him vaguely of peaches and rose-petals, and the sway of her dress as she came in gave him a suggestion of her figure that filled his head with ideas of a kind to which he was quite amorally susceptible. She said “good evening” in a voice that scarcely intruded itself into the quiet room, and turned to some mysterious business with the shelves behind her.

Simon left a drift of smoke float away from his cigarette, and his blue eyes returned with a trace of reluctance to the homely features of Mr. Uniatz.

“What would you think,” he asked, “of a girl whose name was Julia?”

Out of the corner of his eye he saw her start, and turned round to face her with that gay expectant smile coming back to his lips. He knew he had been right.

“I came right along,” he said.

Her gaze flashed to Hoppy Uniatz, and then back to the Saint, in a second of frightened uncertainty.

“I don’t understand,” she said.

Simon picked up a burnt match-stick from the floor and leaned his elbows on the bar. As he moved his tankard to make room, it split a tiny puddle of beer on the scarred oak. He put the match-stick in the puddle and drew a moist line down from it towards her, branching out into a couple of legs. While he did it, he talked.

“My name is Tombs.” He drew a pair of arms spreading out from his first straight line, so that the sketch suddenly became an absurd childish drawing of a man with the original spot of liquid from which it had developed for a head. “I booked a room the other day, by letter.” He dipped the match again, and drew a neat elliptical halo of beer over the head of his figure. “Didn’t you get it?” he asked, with perfectly natural puzzlement.

She stared down at his completed handiwork for a moment; and then she raised her eyes to his face with a sudden light of hope and relief in them. She picked up a cloth and wiped the drawing away with a hand that was not quite steady.

“Oh, yes,” she said. “I’m sorry-I didn’t recognise you. You haven’t stayed here before, have you?”

“I’m afraid not,” said the Saint. “But then, I didn’t know what I was missing.”

Once again she glanced nervously at Mr. Uniatz, who was gazing wistfully at a row of bottles whose smug fullness was reawakening the pangs of his incurable malady.

“I’ll get the man to take your bags up,” she said.