The Saint in London: Originally Entitled the Misfortunes of Mr. Teal (27 page)

“Put those damn lights out,” a voice from one of the beds growled at last; and Simon stretched himself out on a hard mattress and continued his meditations in the dark, while the choral symphony of snores gained new and individual artistes around him. After a while he fell asleep himself.

When he woke up the lights were on again, and men were pulling on their coats and gulping cups of hot tea. One by one they began to slouch off into the tunnel; and Simon splashed cold water on his face from a basin and joined in the general move with a reawakening of vitality. A glance at his watch showed him that it was half-past four, but it might have been morning or afternoon for all the sense of time he had left. When he came up the creaking stairladder into the billiard room, however, he saw that it was still dark. Renway, in a light overcoat, was standing close to the panel watching the men as they emerged: he beckoned the Saint with a slight backward tilt of his head.

“How are you getting on?” he asked.

Simon glanced at the last two men as they stum-bled through the panel and followed their com-panions across the room and out by the more conventional door.

“I have been in more hilarious company,” he murmured.

Renway did not appear to hear his answer—the impression was that his interest in Mr. Tombs’s social progress was merely formal. He did something to the woodwork at the level of his shoulder, and the secret panel closed with a slight click.

“You’d better know some more about our arrangements,” he said.

They went out of the house by the same route as they had finally come in the previous morning. The file of men who had preceded them was al-ready trudging southwards over the rough grass as if on a journey that had become familiar by routine—the Saint saw the little dabs of light thrown by their electric torches bobbing over the turf. A pale strip of silver in the east promised an early dawn, and the cool sweetness of the air as indescribably delicious after the acrid frowstiness of the cellar. Renway produced a flashlight of his own and walked in flat-footed taciturnity. They reached the edge of the cliffs and started down a narrow zigzag path. Halfway down it, the Saint suddenly missed the dancing patches of torchlight ahead: he was wondering whether to make any comment when Renway touched his arm and halted.

“This way.”

The oval imprint of Renway’s flashlight flickered over the dark spludge of a shrub growing in a cleft beside the path: suddenly Renway’s own silhouette appeared in the shrinking circle of light, and Simon realized that the Treasury official was going down on all fours and beginning to wriggle into the bush, presenting a well-rounded posterior which might have proved an irresistible and fatal temptation to an aggrieved ex-service civil servant. The Saint, however, having suffered no especial unkindness from the government, followed him dutifully in the same manner and discovered that he could stand upright again on the other side of the opening in the cliff. At the same time he saw the torches of the other men again, heading downwards into the dark as if on a long stairway.

Thirty feet lower down the steps levelled off into an uneven floor. Simon saw the gleam of dark waters in the light of Renway’s torch and realized that he was at the foot of a huge natural cave. The lights of the other men were clustered a few yards away—Simon heard a clunk of wood and metal and the soft plash of an oar.

“The only other way to the sea is under water,” Renway explained, his thin voice echoing hollowly. “You can see it at low neap tides, but at this time of year it’s always covered.”

It was on the tip of the Saint’s tongue to make some facetious remark about submarines when Renway lifted his torch a little, and Simon saw a shining black whaleback of steel curving out of the water a couple of dozen feet from where they stood, and knew that his flippancy could only have seemed ridiculous beside the truth.

“Did you catch that with a rod and line?” he asked, after a considerable silence.

“It was ostensibly purchased by a French film company six months ago,” Renway said prosaically.

“And who’s going to run it?”

“Petrowitz—he was a U-boat officer during the war. The rest of the crew had to be trained. It was more difficult to obtain torpedoes—in case anything should come to the rescue which was too big for you to drive off, you understand. But we succeeded.”

The Saint put his hands in his pockets. His face was chiselled bronze masked by the dark.

“I get it,” he said softly. “The gold is taken on board that little beauty. And then you go down to the bottom and nobody ever sees you any more.

And then when you turn up again somewhere in South America––”

“We come back here,” said Renway. “There are certain reasons why this is one of the last places where anyone would ever expect to find us.”

Simon admitted it. From Renway’s point of view, it must have loomed out as one of the most cunning certainties of crime. And the Saint was quite cold-bloodedly aware that if he failed to separate himself from the picnic in time, it would still be true.

The party of men in the rowboat had reached the submarine and were climbing out.

“My information is that the gold will be leaving Croydon about eight o’clock,” Renway said in a matter-of-fact tone. “Perhaps you’d like to check over your aeroplane—there are one or two things I want to talk over with Petrowitz.”

The Saint did not want to check over any aeroplane, but there was something else he very much wanted to do. He found his way back up the stairway with Renway’s torch and wriggled out again through the hole in the cliff—the last glimpse he had of that strange scene was the lights glinting on the water far below him and the shadows moving over the dull sheen of the submarine’s arched back. Renway had certainly spared no effort or expense to provide all the most modern and sensational accessories of melodrama, he reflected as he retraced his tracks to the house, what with electrified wire fences, stolen aeroplanes landing by night, bombs, secret panels, caves, submarines, and unshaven desperadoes; but he found the actuality less humorous than he would have found the same recital in a book. Simon had long had a theory that the most dangerous criminal would be a man who helped himself to some of the vast fund of daring ingenuity expended upon his problems by hordes of detective-story writers; and Sir Hugo Renway’s establishment looked more like a detective story come to life than anything the Saint, had ever seen.

The dawn was lightening as he found his way into the library and went directly to the safe. He knelt down in front of it and unrolled a neat leather wallet which he took from a pocket in his voluminous flying coat—the instruments in that wallet were the latest and most ingenious in the world, and would in themselves have been sufficient to earn him a long term of imprisonment, without any other evidence, if Mr. Teal had caught him with them. The safe was also one of the latest and most useful models, but it was at a grave disadvantage. Being an inanimate object, it couldn’t change its methods of defense so nimbly as the Saint could vary his attack. Besides which, the Saint was prepared to boast that he could make any professional peterman look like a two-year-old infant playing with a rubber crowbar when it came to safe-opening. He worked with unhurried speed and had the door open in twenty minutes; and then he carefully rolled up his kit and put it away again before he turned to an examination of the interior.

He had already charted out enough evidence within the thirty-acre confines of March House to have hanged a regiment, but there were still one or two important items missing. He found one useful article very quickly, in a small heap of correspondence on one of the shelves—it was a letter which in itself was no evidence of anything, but it was addressed to Sir Hugo Renway and signed by Manuel Enrique. Simon put it away in his pocket and went on with his search. He opened a japanned deed box and found it crammed with banknotes and bearer bonds: that was not evidence at all, but it was the sort of thing which Simon Templar was always pleased to find, and he was just tipping it out when he heard the rattle of the door handle behind him.

The Saint moved like a cat touched with a high-voltage wire. In what seemed like one connected movement, he scooped the bundle of currency and bonds into his pocket, shoved the deed box back on its shelf, swung the door of the safe, and leapt behind the nearest set of curtains; and then Renway came into the room.

He walked straight across to the safe, fishing out the key from his waistcoat pocket; but the door opened as soon as he touched the handle, and he froze into an instant’s dreadful immobility. Then he fell on his knees and dragged out the empty deed box… .

Simon stepped quietly out from behind the curtains, so that he was between Renway and the door.

“Don’t cry, Mother Hubbard,” he said.

IX

RENWAY got to his feet and looked down the barrel of the Saint’s gun. His face was pasty, but the lipless gash of a mouth was almost inhumanly steady.

“Oh, it’s you,” he whispered.

“It is I,” said the Saint, with impeccable grammar. “Come here, Hugo—I want to see what you’ve got on you.”

He plunged his left hand swiftly and dexterously into the other’s inner breast pocket and found the second thing he had been looking for. It was a cheap pocket diary, and he knew without examining it that it was the one on which his forged trade-marks had been drawn. Renway must have been insanely confident of his immunity from suspicion to keep it on him.

“What ho,” drawled Simon contentedly. “Stand back again, Hugo, while I see if you’ve been compromising yourself.”

He stepped back himself and barely had time

to feel the foot of the man behind him under his heel before a brawny arm shot over his shoulder and grasped his gun wrist in a grip like a twisting Clamp of iron. Simon started to turn, but in the next split second another brawny arm whipped round his neck and pinned him.

The wrenching hand on his wrist forced him to drop his gun—it had begun to twist too long before he began resisting. Then he let himself go completely limp, while his left hand felt for the knees of the man behind him. His arm locked round them and he heaved himself backwards with a sudden jerk of his thighs. They fell heavily together, and the grips on his wrist and neck were broken. Simon squirmed over, put a knee in the man’s stomach, and sprang up and away; and then he saw that Renway had snatched up the automatic and was covering him.

Simon Templar, who knew the difference between certain death and a sporting chance, put up his hands quickly.

“Okay, boys,” he said. “Now you think of a game.”

Renway’s forefinger weighed on the trigger.

“You fool!” he said almost peevishly.

“Admitted,” said the Saint. “Nobody ought to walk backwards without eyes in the back of his Head.”

Renway had also picked up the diary, which Simon had dropped in the struggle. He put it back in his pocket.

The Saint’s brain was turning over so fast that he could almost hear it hum. He still had Enrique’s letter—and the bundle of cash. There was still no reason for Renway to suspect him of anything more than ordinary stealing: his taking of the diary was not necessarily suspicious. And Simon understood very clearly that if Renway suspected him of anything more than ordinary stealing, he could, barring outrageous luck, only leave March House in one position. Which would be depressingly and irrevocably horizontal.

Even then, there might be no alternative attitude; but it was worth trying. Simon had a stubborn desire to hang onto that incriminating letter as long as possible. He took out the sheaf of bonds and banknotes and threw them on the desk.

“There’s the rest of it,” he said cynically. “Shall we call it quits?”

Renway’s squinting eyes wandered over him.

“Do you always expect to clear yourself so easily?” he asked, like a schoolmaster.

“Not always,” said the Saint. “But you can’t very well hand me over to the police this time, can you? I know too much about you.”

In the next moment he knew he had made a mistake. Renway’s convergent gaze turned Petrowitz, who was massaging his stomach tenderly.

“He knows too much,” Renway repeated.

“I suppose there’s no chance of letting bygones be bygones and still letting me fly that aeroplane?” Simon asked shrewdly.

The nervous twitch which he had seen before went over Renway’s body, but the thin mouth only tightened with it.

“None at all, Mr. Tombs.”

“I was afraid so,” said the Saint.

“Let me take him,” Petrowitz broke in with his thick gruff voice. “I will tie iron bars to his legs and fire him through one of the torpedo tubes. He will not talk after that.”

Renway considered the suggestion and shook his head.

“None of the others must know. Any doubt or fear in their minds may be dangerous. He can go back into the cellar. Afterwards, he can take the same journey as Enrique.”

Probably for much the same offense, Simon thought grimly; but he smiled.

“That’s very sweet of you, Hugo,” he remarked; and the other looked at him.

“I hope you will continue to be satisfied.”

He might have been going to say more, but at that moment the telephone began to ring. Renway sat down at the desk.

“Hullo… . Yes… . Yes, speaking.” He drew a memorandum block towards him and took up a pencil from a glass tray. With the gun close to his hand, he jotted down letters and figures. “Yes. G-EZQX. At seven… . Yes… . Thank you.” He sat for a little while staring at the pad, as if memorizing his note and rearranging his plans. Then he pressed the switch of a microphone which stood on the desk beside the ordinary post-office instrument. “Kellard?” he said. “There is a change of time. Have the Hawker outside and warmed up by seven o’clock.”

He picked up the automatic again and rose from the desk.

“They’re leaving an hour earlier,” he said, speaking to Petrowitz. “We haven’t any time to waste.”

The other man rubbed his beard. “You will be flying yourself?”

“Yes,” said Renway, as if defying contradiction. He motioned with his gun towards the door. “Petrowitz will lead the way, Mr. Tombs.”