Enter the Saint (The Saint Series) Read online

  “We might as well start now,” he murmured. “Where’s the girl?”

  They crept back together to rejoin her.

  “On the mark, kid?”

  A clammy breath of wind had been born on the moor. She shivered in her thin coat.

  “The sooner you get it over, the better I’ll be pleased.”

  “You’ll soon be happy,” said the Saint.

  His teeth gleamed in a smile—it was all they could distinguish of his expression in the gloom. But the faint tremor of eagerness in his voice was perceptible without the aid of eyes.

  “All got your pieces ready to say?” he asked.

  She said, nervously, “I don’t know what I’ve got to do—”

  “Nor would you if you’d really been kidnapped. That’s your piece. Anyhow, you’re supposed to be dead to the world, having assimilated the second instalment of that syringeful. Roger, you’ve got your gun?”

  Conway slapped his pocket for answer.

  “Haven’t you got a gun, Saint?” asked the girl.

  Simon was heard to chuckle softly.

  “Ask Roger if I ever carry guns,” he said. “No—I leave them to other people. Personally, I can’t stand the noise. I have my own copyright armoury, which is much more silent—and just as useful. So we’re ready?”

  “Yes.”

  “Fine! Roger, we expect you to make your dramatic entrance in ten minutes. S’long.”

  “So long. Saint…So long, Betty!”

  Roger felt for the girl’s hand and gave it a reassuring pressure. A moment later he was alone.

  The Saint, with one arm round the girl’s waist to steady her, picked their way over the uneven ground with the uncanny surefootedness of a cat. It was dark enough for his clothes to be unnoticeable. He wore Mr Dyson’s soft hat pulled well down over his eyes, and he had turned up the collar of his coat to assist the crude disguise. Even before they were near the cottage, he was walking with knees bent and shoulders stooped so as to approximate more to the height of Mr Dyson.

  Mr Dyson himself slept peacefully in the Desurio, roped hand and foot and gagged with his own handkerchief.

  The Saint was not bothering to take precautions. He felt a thread snap across his chin, and knew he had sprung a trip-alarm, but he went on unabashed. Only the lights in the two windows went out suddenly…

  He had no idea where the door of the cottage would be, but his preternaturally keen ears heard it creak open when he was still twenty yards away. Instantly he stopped, and his grip on the girl tightened. She felt his lips brush her ear.

  “Now go dead,” he whispered. “And don’t worry. We win this game!”

  He stooped quickly, and lifted her in his arms like a child. It seemed as if there was a rustling in the grass around him that was not of the wind, and the Saint grinned invisibly. He moved forward again, with slower steps…

  Then, directly in front of him, the darkness was split by a probing finger of light. The Saint halted.

  His coat collar shrouded his chin; the girl he carried helped to cover his body; he lowered his head so that the hat-brim obscured most of his face, and kept his eyes away from the blinding beam of the torch.

  There was a second’s pause, broken only by the rustling of the grass, and then, from behind the light, a harsh voice spoke—half startled, half relieved.

  “Dyson!”

  “Who did you think it was?” Simon snapped back hoarsely. “Put out that light!”

  The light winked, and went out. The voice spoke again.

  “Why didn’t you give the signal?”

  “Why should I?”

  In the shadowy mass of the cottage, an upright oblong of light was carved out abruptly. That was the door. Just inside, a man was kindling an oil lamp. His back was turned to the Saint.

  Simon straightened up, and walked in. He set the girl down on her feet, and in three quick smooth movements he took off his borrowed hat, turned down his collar, and settled his coat. But the man was still busy with the lamp, and the shout came from behind the Saint—from outside the door.

  “That’s not Dyson!”

  The man spun round with a smothered exclamation.

  Simon, standing at his elegant ease, was lighting a second cigarette from the stump of his first.

  “No, this isn’t Dyson, dear heart,” he murmured. “But, if you remember, I never said it was. I should like to maintain my reputation for truthfulness for a few minutes longer.”

  He looked up blandly, waving his match gently in the air to extinguish it, and saw the men crowding in behind him. One—two—three—four…and two of them displaying automatics. Slightly bigger odds than the Saint had seriously expected. Simon Templar’s face became extraordinarily mild.

  “Well, well, well!” he drawled. “Look at all the flies, Spider—I congratulate you on the collection.”

  The man by the lamp took a pace forward. The movement was queerly lopsided—the shuffling forward of one twisted foot, and the dragging of another twisted foot after it. Simon understood at once the origin of the nickname. The man was almost a dwarf, though tremendously broad of shoulder, with short deformed legs and long ape-like arms. In a small wrinkled face, incredibly faded blue eyes blinked under shaggy eyebrows.

  “One of these matinée idols we read about,” thought the Saint in his mild way, and felt the girl’s shoulder shudder against his.

  The man took another slithering step towards them, peering at them crookedly. Then—

  “Who are you?” he asked, in that harsh cracked voice.

  “His Royal Highness, the Prince What’s-it of I-forget-where,” said the Saint. “And you’re Mr Sleat. Pleased to have you meet me. The introductions having been effected, do you curtsy first or do I? I’m afraid I hocked my table of precedence two seasons ago.…”

  “And this lady?”

  “Miss Betty Aldo. I believe you wanted to see her, so I brought her along. The escort you provided was unfortunately—er—unable to continue the journey. I’m afraid he hit his head on a piece of wood, or something. Anyway, the poor fellow was quite incapacitated, so I thought I’d better take his place.”

  The pale eyes stared back horribly.

  “So you’ve met Dyson?”

  “‘Slinky’—I believe—is what his friends call him. But I call him Dismal Desmond. Yes, I think I can say that we—er—made contact.”

  Sleat looked round.

  “Close that door.”

  Simon saw the door shut and barred.

  “Do you know,” he said conversationally, “when I didn’t know you so intimately as this, I used to call you Whiskers. And now I find you’ve shaved, it’s terribly disappointing. However, to talk of pleasanter things—”

  “Take them in here.”

  “To talk of pleasanter things,” continued the Saint affably, taking Betty’s hand and following without protest into the room where the dwarf led the way with the lamp, “don’t you find the air up here very bracing? And we’ve been having such lovely weather lately. My Auntie Ethel always used to say—”

  Sleat turned with a snarl that bared a row of yellow teeth.

  “That’ll do, for a minute—”

  “But I’m not nearly satisfied yet—as the actress said in one of her famous conversations with the bishop,” remarked Simon. “Like the actress, I want more and more. For instance, what are your favourite indoor sports? Halma, ludo, funny faces—”

  Without the least warning, the dwarf reached up and struck him, flat-handed, across the mouth.

  Once before in Simon’s life a man had dared to do that. And this time, as before, for one blinding second, Simon saw red.

  There were two men covering him with automatics, and two men standing by with heavy sticks, but not even a battery of artillery and a land mine would have stopped the Saint in such a mood. His fist had leapt like a cannon-ball from his shoulder before he had consciously aimed the blow.

  And the next second he was again as cool as ice, and the dwa
rf was picking himself off the floor with a trickle of blood running down from his smashed lips. Nobody else had moved.

  “A distinct loss of temper,” murmured the Saint regretfully, flicking the ash from his cigarette. “All the same, I shouldn’t do that again if I were you, Beautiful—you might get hurt more next time. A joke’s a joke, as Auntie Ethel used to say.”

  “You—”

  “Hush!” said the Saint. “Not before the Bible class. They might misunderstand you. And if you want to know why they didn’t shoot me, the answer is that they never had the nerve…Isn’t that so, honey-bunch?”

  He swung round on one of the armed men—and, without the least haste or heat, flicked him under the nose. He saw the man’s finger tighten on the trigger, and threw up his hands.

  “One moment!” he rapped. “Hear my speech before you decide to shoot—or you may be sorry later. You, too, my pretty one!” He turned to crack the warning at Sleat, whose right hand was sneaking down to his hip. There was a blaze of fury in the dwarf’s eyes, and for a moment Simon thought he would shoot—without waiting to listen. Simon stood quite still.

  “Who are you?” rasped Sleat.

  “I am Inspector Maxwell, of Scotland Yard, and I’ve come to get y—”

  Sleat’s hand came up, deliberately.

  “…your views on the much-disputed question, why was Bernard Shaw?…And—seriously—I’ll advise you to be careful with that popgun, because my men are all round this house, and anyone who’s going to get through that cordon will have to be thinner than a lath before breakfast. You can’t laugh that off, Rudolph!”

  “I’ve a good mind—”

  “To shoot and chance the consequences. I know. But I shouldn’t. I shouldn’t, really. Because if you do, you’ll quite certainly be hanged by the neck until you’re so dead that it’ll be practically impossible to distinguish you from a corpse. Not that a little more length in the neck would improve your beauty, but the way they do the stretching—”

  One of the armed guard cut in savagely: “Dyson’s squealed—”

  “It was a good squeak,” said the Saint meditatively, “as squeaks go. But the sweet pea had no choice. When we started to singe his second ear—”

  “You’re clever!” grated Sleat.

  “Very,” agreed the Saint modestly. “My Auntie Ethel always said—”

  The sentence merged into a thunderous pounding on the outer door, and the Saint broke off with a smile.

  “My men are getting anxious about me. It’s my fault, for getting so absorbed in this genial chit-chat. But tell me, Spider,” said the Saint persuasively, “is this or is this not entitled to be called a cop?”

  Sleat drew back a pace.

  His eyes fled round the room, like the eyes of a hunted animal seeking an avenue of escape. And yet—there was something about the eyes that was not surrendering. Pale, expressionless eyes in a mask-like wrinkled face. Something about the eyes that told Simon, with a weird certainty, that it was not going to be called a cop…

  The guards stood like statues. Or like three statues—for the fourth was staring at Simon with a wild intentness.

  Sleat’s eyes came back to the Saint, palely, expressionlessly. It was an eerie effect, that sudden paling out of their blaze of fury into a blind cold emptiness. Simon gripped the girl’s arm to steady her, and felt her trembling.

  “Don’t look at me like that!” she mouthed sharply, shakily. “It’s horrible.…”

  “Bear up, old dear,” encouraged the Saint. “He can’t help it. If you had a face like that—”

  Again the thunder on the door.

  And Sleat came to life. He motioned back the two armed men of the guard.

  “Behind those curtains! You take the girl—you take the man. And if they try to give one word of warning—if you hear them say anything that might have a double meaning—you’ll shoot! Understand?”

  The men nodded dumbly, moving to obey. Sleat turned to the other two, indicating each in turn with a jerky pointing finger.

  “You stay here. You go and open the door. And you—”

  He swung round on the Saint.

  “You—you heard the orders I gave. They’ll be carried out. So you’ll dismiss your men, on any excuse you can invent—”

  “Shall I, dear angel?”…

  “You will—unless you want to die where you stand, and the girl with you. If you had been alone, I might have been afraid that your sense of duty might have outweighed your discretion. But you have a—responsibility. I think you will be discreet. Now—”

  The Saint heard the unbarring of the outer door, and the measured step of heavy feet. The curtains three yards away from him reached to the floor. They had settled down, and there was nothing to betray the presence of the men behind them. The third man, standing in one corner, was still staring at him.

  Sleat’s hands, with the automatic, had gone behind him.

  Then Roger Conway walked in and saluted, and Simon’s face was terribly Saintly.

  “Yes, Constable?”

  “Beg pardon, sir,” said Roger stiffly, “but your time’s up. Sergeant Jones sent me in to see if you were all right.”

  “Quite all right, thanks,” said the Saint. “As a matter of fact—”

  And then, out of the tail of his eye, Simon saw a strange light dawn in the face of the third man, the man in the corner, the man who had been staring.

  “Boss—”

  Sleat craned round at the exclamation, with a malignant threat in his face that should have silenced the man. But the man was not silenced. He was pointing at the Saint with a shaking hand.

  “Boss, dat ain’t no bull! De foist time I see him was when he stuck up de Paradiso, back of Nassau Street, in Noo Yoik, four years back. Dat guy wid de goil’s de Saint!”

  Sleat spun back with his gun hand leaping into view, but the Saint’s hands were high in the air.

  “O.K., buddy!” he drawled. “You take the Memory Prize. Roger, take that hand away from your pocket. There’s a whole firing squad got the drop on you at this moment, and they mightn’t believe you were only going to produce your birth certificate…Boys and girls, you may take it from me. This is our night out!”

  8

  Conway saw the gun in Sleat’s hand even as the Saint warned him, and his hands went up slowly as he moved over to join the Saint. Then the curtains moved, and the hidden men came out.

  “So!” said Sleat harshly. “I thought you were a fraud from the first words you spoke. I’ve known a good many busies—”

  “And you’ll know a lot more before you’re finished,” said the Saint equably. “You’ve heard of me?”

  “I have.”

  “Then you’ll know I have—friends. Three of them are outside this house now. Unless you leave as my prisoners, you’ll never pass them. They’ll stalk you over the moor, in the dark, and take you one by one. Not one of you will reach the road alive. Those were my orders. You can smile at that one, sonny boy!”

  “Your men don’t kill.”

  “They killed Chastel—you’ve heard of him? And there are others who’ve never been heard of. And for me they would kill you with as little compunction as they’d kill any other poisonous spider. If you don’t believe me, send one of your men outside and see if he comes back.”

  It was bluff—blind, desperate bluff. But it was the only card Simon could find in his hand at that moment. At least it gave him a few seconds’ respite to think…

  Sleat looked at him, his head on one side, as though seeking the first flaw in voice or manner. But the Saint stood as coldly solid as an iceberg, and his voice was as smooth and hard as polished steel.

  “You think they’ll obey your orders?” said Sleat.

  “In anything.”

  The dwarf nodded.

  “Then you’ll give me a key to let myself out of your trap. It used to be said that the Saint was clever, but it seems that he also makes his mistakes. You will call them in here—please.”
>
  Simon laughed shortly.

  “You have a hope!”

  “Otherwise…Fetch me a rope, Wells.”

  One of the men left the room.

  “He’s bluffing,” said Roger tensely.

  “Of course he is,” murmured the Saint. “But don’t spoil his fun, if it amuses him. A plain man of simple amusements, our Whiskers. He reminds me of—”

  “In a moment we shall see who’s bluffing,” said Sleat.

  He turned as the man came back with a length of rope. Sleat took it and tied it in a short loop.

  “Just now,” he said, as he worked, “you spoke to me of a way of stretching necks. Personally, I prefer to compress them horizontally.”

  He tightened his knot carefully. The loop was just big enough to pass over a man’s head. He passed it back to the man who had brought it.

  “That rope, Wells, and the poker. You understand the principle of the garotte?…You put the loop round the man’s neck, put the poker through the loop, and twist so that the rope tightens slowly. Very slowly, you understand, Wells…No—”

  He broke off, and a gleam of venomous ferocity came into his faded eyes.

  “No,” said Sleat. “I made a mistake. Not round the man’s neck. Round the girl’s.”

  Roger started forward, and instantly an armed man barred his way menacingly. Conway, helpless before the automatic that drove into his chest, raved like a maniac: “You filthy scum.”

  “My shout, Roger!”

  The Saint’s voice came very quietly. A stick of dynamite may also be quiet for a long time. Simon was facing Sleat.

  “I admit the argument. And the answer is—there’s no one outside. That’s the truth.”

  “I see—another bluff!”

  “We don’t get you, Funny Face.”

  “Was his face as funny as that before you hit him?” asked Roger insultingly.

  “No,” said the Saint. “Before that, it was a tragedy.”

  Sleat stepped forward, his face contorted in a spasm of rage. The Saint thought for a second that Sleat was going to strike him again, and braced himself for the shock, but with a tremendous effort the man controlled himself.