The Saint in Action (The Saint Series) Page 11

  An dere I’d be willing to die…”

  Simon unfastened the doors, while the discordant dirge continued to reverberate from the interior.

  “I wish I had someone to lurve me,

  Somebody to call me her own,

  I wish—”

  The Saint’s torch splashed its beam into the van, framing the tableau in its circle of brilliance.

  Mr Uniatz sat on a pile of cases, leaning back with his legs dangling and looking rather like a great ape on a jungle bough. In his left hand he held his Betsy, and the flashlight gripped between his knees was focused steadily on the lorry driver, who stood scowling on the opposite side of the van. One of the cases was open, and a couple of bottles rolled hollowly on the floor.

  A third bottle was clutched firmly in Mr Uniatz’s hand, and he appeared to have been using it to beat time.

  His face expanded in a smile as he screwed up his eyes against the light. “Hi, boss,” he said winningly.

  “Come on out,” said the Saint. “Both of you.”

  The lorry driver shuffled out first, and as he descended Simon caught him deftly by the wrist, twisted his arm up behind his back, and waited a moment for Peter to take over the hold.

  He turned round as Hoppy Uniatz lowered himself clumsily to the ground.

  “How much have you soaked up?” he inquired patiently.

  “I just had two-t’ree sips, boss. I t’ought I’d make sure de booze was jake. Say, dijja know I could yodel? I just loin de trick comin’ along here—”

  The Saint turned to Peter with a shrug.

  “I’m sorry, old son,” he said. “It looks as if you’ll have to take the truck on, after all. I’ve never seen Hoppy break down yet, but all the same it might be awkward if he met a policeman.”

  “Couldn’t that wait till tomorrow?”

  “I’d rather not risk it. The sooner the truck’s cleared and out of the way the better.”

  “Okay, chief.”

  “Hoppy,” said the Saint restrainedly, “stop that god-awful noise and take your boy friend inside.”

  Peter handed over the prisoner, and they walked back towards the front of the van. A last plaintive layee-o, like the sob of a lovesick cat, squealed through the stilly night before Peter climbed back into the driving seat and restarted the engine. Simon helped him to turn the truck round, and then Peter leaned out of the window.

  “What happens next?”

  “I’ll call you in the morning when I know something,” Simon answered. “Happy landings!”

  He watched the lorry start on its clattering descent of the hill, and then he turned and went towards the house. In the bright spacious living-room the lorry-driver was lolling in a chair under Hoppy’s watchful eye. Simon went straight up to him.

  “Get up,” he said. “I haven’t told you to make yourself at home yet. You’re here to answer some questions.”

  4

  The man looked up from under his heavy brows, without moving. His mouth was clinched up so that his under-lip was the only one visible, and his big frame looked lumpy, as if all the muscles in it were knotted. He went on sitting there stolidly and didn’t answer.

  “Get up,” said the Saint quietly.

  The man crossed his legs and turned away to gaze into a far corner of the room.

  Simon’s hand moved quicker than a striking snake. It took hold of the driver and yanked him up on to his feet as if the chair had exploded under him. The man must have been expecting something to happen, but the response he had produced was so swift and unanswerable that for a moment his eyes were blank with stupefaction. Then he drew back his fist.

  The Saint didn’t stir or flinch. He didn’t even seem to take any steps to meet that crudely telegraphed blow. From the slight tilt of his head and the infinitesimal lift of one eyebrow, he might almost have been vaguely amused. But his eyes held mockery rather than amusement—a curious cold glitter of devilish derision that had a bite like steel sword-points. There was something about it that matched the easy and untroubled and yet perfectly balanced way he was standing, something that seemed an essential offshoot of the supple width of his shoulders and the sardonic curve of his lips and the driver’s disturbing memory of an apparently incredible incident only a short time before; something that belonged unarguably to the whiplash quality that had crackled under the quietness of his voice when he spoke…And somehow, for no other reasons, the blow didn’t materialise. The driver’s fist sank stiffly down to his side.

  “Have a cigarette,” the Saint said genially.

  The driver stared at the packet suspiciously.

  “Wot’s all this abaht?” he demanded.

  “Nothing, Algernon. Nothing at all. Hoppy and I are just a couple of humble philosophers looking for pearls of knowledge. By the way, is your name Algernon?”

  “Wot’s my name got to do with you?”

  “It would help us to talk about you, Algernon. We can’t just point at you all the time—it looks so rude. And then there’s the blonde you didn’t introduce us to. We want to know who she was, so we can give the vicar her phone number. What’s her name?”

  “Wouldn’t you like to know?” snarled the driver belligerently.

  Simon nodded with unaltered cordiality.

  “You’re asking as many questions as I am, Algernon,” he remarked. “Which isn’t what I brought you here for. But I don’t mind letting you into the secret. I would like to know all these things. Go on—have a cigarette.”

  As the man’s mouth opened for another retort the Saint flipped a cigarette neatly into it. The driver choked and snatched it out furiously. The Saint kindled his lighter. He held it out, and his cool blue eyes met the driver’s reddening gaze over the flame. There was no hint of a threat in them, no offer of a challenge, nothing but the same lazy glimmer of half-humorous expectancy as they had held before, and yet once again they baffled the driver’s wrath with a nonchalance that his brain was not capable of understanding. He put the cigarette back in his mouth and bent his head sulkily to accept the light.

  Mr Uniatz, reclining in an abandoned attitude on the settee, had been taking advantage of being temporarily relieved of his duties to sluice his parched throat with the contents of the bottle he had brought in with him. Now, after having remained for some minutes with his head tilted back and the bottle up-ended towards the ceiling, he came reluctantly to the conclusion that no more liquid was flowing into the desert, and simultaneously returned to a sense of his responsibilities.

  “Lemme give him a rub down, boss,” he suggested. “He’ll come t’ru fast enough.”

  Simon glanced at him thoughtfully.

  “Do you think you could make him talk, Hoppy?”

  “Sure I could, boss. I know dese tough guys. All ya gotta do is boin deir feet wit’ a candle an’ dey melt. Lookit, I see a box of candles in de kitchen last night—”

  Mr Uniatz struggled up from the couch, fired with ambition and a lingering recollection of having seen a case of whisky in the kitchen at the same time, but the Saint put out an arm and checked him.

  “Wait a minute, Hoppy.”

  He turned back to the driver.

  “Hoppy’s so impulsive,” he explained apologetically, “and I don’t really want to turn him loose on you. But I’ve got an appointment in an hour or so, and if we can’t get together before then I’ll have to leave Hoppy to carry on. And Hoppy has such dreadfully primitive ideas. The last time I had to leave him to ask a fellow a few questions, when I came back I found that he’d got the mincing machine screwed on to our best table, and he was feeding this guy’s fingers into it. He got the right answers of course, but it made such a mess of the table.”

  “I’m not afraid o’ you—”

  “Of course you aren’t, Algernon. And we don’t want you to be. But you’ve got to change your mind about answering questions, because it’s getting late.”

  The man watched him stubbornly, but his fists were tightening and relaxing nervously, and
there was a shining dampness of perspiration breaking out on his forehead. His eyes switched around the room and returned to the Saint’s face in a desperate search for escape. But there was no hope there of the kind he was looking for. The Saint’s manner was light and genial, almost brotherly; it passed over unpleasant alternatives as remote and improbable contingencies that were hardly worth mentioning at all, and yet the idea of unpleasantness didn’t seem to disturb it in any way. A blusterer himself, the driver would have answered bluster in its own language, but that dispassionate imperturbability chilled him with an unfamiliar sensation of fear…

  And at that moment, with his uncanny genius for keeping his opponents in suspense, the Saint left the last word unsaid and strolled over to sit on the table, leaving the driver nothing but the threat of his own imagination.

  “What’s your name, Algernon?” he asked mildly.

  “Jopley.”

  The word fell out after a tense pause, as if the man was fighting battles with himself.

  “Been driving these trucks for long?”

  “Wot’s that got—”

  “Been driving these trucks for long?”

  “I bin drivin’ ’em for a bit.”

  “Do pretty well out of it?”

  The driver was silent again for a space, but this time his silence was not due to obstinacy. His frown probed at the Saint distrustfully, but Simon was blowing wisps of smoke at the ceiling.

  “I don’t do too bad.”

  “How much is that?”

  “Ten quid a week.”

  “You know, you’re quite a character, aren’t you?” said the Saint. “There aren’t many people who’d let Hoppy singe their tootsies for ten quid a week. How d’you work it out—a pound a toe?”

  The man dragged jerkily at his cigarette, without answering. The question was hardly answerable, anyway—it was more of a gentle twitch at the driver’s already overstrung nerves, a reminder of those unpleasant possibilities which were really so unthinkable.

  “If I were you,” said the Saint, with an air of kindly interest, “I’d be looking for another job.”

  “Wot sort of job?”

  “I think it’d be a kind of sideline,” said the Saint meditatively. “I’d look around for some nice generous bloke who wouldn’t let people toast my feet or anything like that, but who’d just pay me an extra twenty quid a week for answering a few questions now and again. He might even put up fifty quid when I had anything special to tell him, and it wouldn’t hurt me a bit.”

  “It’s a waste of money, boss,” said Mr Uniatz with conviction. “If de candles don’t woik, I got a new one I see in de movies de udder day. You mash de guy’s shins wit’ a hammer—”

  “You won’t pay too much attention to him, will you, Algernon?” said the Saint. “He gets a lot of these ideas, you know—it’s the way he was brought up. It’s not my idea of a spare-time job, though.”

  The driver shifted himself from one foot to the other. It wasn’t his idea of a spare-time job, either—or even a legitimate part of the job he had. He didn’t need to have the balance of the alternatives emphasised to him. They were so clean-cut that they made the palms of his hands feel clammy. But that lazily, frighteningly impersonal voice went on:

  “Anyway, you don’t have to make up your mind in a hurry if you don’t want to. Hoppy’ll keep you company if you don’t mind waiting till I come back, so you won’t be lonely. It’s rather a lonely place otherwise, you know. We were only saying the other day that a bloke could sit here and scream the skies down, and nobody would hear him. Not that you’d have anything to scream about, of course…”

  “Wot is this job?” asked the man hoarsely.

  Simon flicked the ash from his cigarette, and hid the sparkle of excitement in his eyes. “Just telling us some of these odd things we want to know.”

  The man’s lips clamped and relaxed spasmodically, and his broad chest moved with the strain of his breathing. He stood with his chin drawn in, and his eyes peered up from under a ledge of sullen shadow.

  “Well,” he said. “Go on.”

  “Who was the girl friend?”

  “Why don’t you ask her?”

  The voice was soft and musical, startlingly unlike the harsh growl that Simon’s ears had been attuned to, and it came from behind him.

  The Saint spun round.

  She stood in the open doorway, her feet astride with a hint of boyish swagger, still in her soiled overalls, one hand in the trouser pocket, with the yellow curls tumbling around her exquisitely moulded face, a slight smile on her red lips. Her eyes, he discovered, now that he saw them open for the first time, were a dark midnight grey—almost the same shade as the automatic she held steadily levelled at his chest.

  For three seconds the Saint stood rigidly spellbound. And then a slow smile touched the corners of his mouth in response.

  “Well, darling,” he murmured, “what is your name?”

  5

  “You ought to be a detective, Mr Templar,” she said. “I don’t have to ask you yours.”

  “But you have an advantage. We’ve tried checking up on your lorries, but you always send them out with fake number-plates and no other identification, so it’s rather difficult. I have to suffer for being honest.”

  “Or for not being so careful,” she said. “By the way, will you tell your friend to do something about his hands?”

  Simon looked round. Mr Uniatz was still frozen as the interruption had caught him, with his mouth hanging open and his right hand arrested half-way to the armpit holster where his Betsy nestled close to his heart. His eyes welcomed the Saint with an agonised plea for guidance, and Simon took his wrist and put his hand gently down.

  “Leave it alone for a minute, Hoppy,” he said. “We don’t want the lady to start shooting…” His gaze turned back to the girl. “That is, if she can shoot,” he added thoughtfully.

  “Don’t worry,” she said calmly. “I can shoot.”

  The Saint’s glance measured the distance.

  “It’s about six yards,” he observed. “And a lot of people have mistaken ideas about how easy it is to pot a moving target with an automatic at six yards.”

  “Would you like to try me?”

  Simon poised his cigarette-end between his forefinger and thumb and flipped it sideways. It struck Hoppy’s discarded bottle, over by the settee, with a faint plunk! and sent up a tiny fountain of sparks.

  “Hit that,” he said.

  The muzzle of the gun swung away from his body, but it was only for an instant. She fired without seeming to aim, and the automatic was aligned on the Saint’s breastbone again before the crash of the explosion had stopped rattling in his ears, but the bottle was spattered in fragments over the carpet.

  The Saint nodded to Hoppy.

  “She can shoot,” he remarked. “She’s been practising.”

  “It’s not much use having a gun if you don’t.”

  “You’ve been reading some good books,” said the Saint, and his smile was serene but watchful. “It looks as if you have what is known as the Bulge—for the time being, anyway. So where do we go from here? Would you like us to sing and dance for you? Hoppy’s just discovered that he can yodel, and he’s dying for an audience.”

  “I’m afraid we haven’t time for that. Jopley—”

  The driver came out of his temporary stupor. He thrust himself forward and retrieved his gun from the Saint’s pocket, and shuffled crabwise around the room in the direction of the door, keeping well clear of the girl’s line of fire. Remembering the stage at which their conversation had been interrupted, the Saint could understand why he had not been so quick to seize his opportunity as might have been expected, and a malicious twinkle came into his gaze.

  “What—you don’t want him, do you?” he said. “We thought we’d do you a good turn and take him off your hands.”

  “I came back for him,” she said, “so I suppose I do want him.”

  Simon acknowledged
the argument with a slight movement of his head.

  “You didn’t waste much time about it, either,” he said appreciatively. “How did you track him down—by smell?”

  “I followed you. I pulled into a side turning in West Holme and waited to see if you’d go that way. Then I just kept behind you. It wasn’t difficult.”

  It didn’t sound very difficult, when the trick was explained. The Saint sighed ruefully at the reflection of his own thoughtlessness.

  “That’s the worst of lorries,” he complained. “It’s so hard to notice what’s behind you. Something ought to be done about it…But I hope you’ll take care of Algernon if you’re borrowing him. We were just starting to get matey.”

  “I heard you,” she said.

  “Yus.” Jopley’s voice was loud and grating. “Goin’ ter burn me feet, that’s ’ow they were goin’ ter get matey. I’ve a good mind—”

  “You haven’t,” said the girl evenly. “We’ll leave things like that to gentlemen like Mr Templar.”

  The Saint smiled at her.

  “We’ve got a second-hand rack and some thumb-screws in the cellar, too,” he said. “But I prefer boiling people down with onions and a dash of white wine. It makes quite a good clear soup, rather like madrilène.”

  She really did look like something out of a fairy-tale, he thought, or like a moment of musical comedy dropped miraculously into the comfortable masculine furnishings of the Old Barn, with the perfect proportions of her slender body triumphing even over that shabby suit of dungarees, and her face framed in its setting of spun gold, but there was nothing illusory about the unfaltering alertness of those dark grey eyes or the experienced handling of the gun she held. The only uncertain thing about her was the smile that lingered about her lips.

  She said, “I’m glad you didn’t get me here.”

  “But you’re here now,” said the Saint. “So couldn’t we make up for lost time?”

  His hand moved towards his breast pocket, but the two guns that covered him moved more quickly. Simon raised his eyebrows.

  “Can’t I have a cigarette?”

  “Take them out slowly.”