14 The Saint Goes On Page 16

  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 he
ad. "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.

  Taking in the grace of her slim young suppleness as she turned away, Simon Templar was more than ever convinced that he was not wasting his time. He had been lured into no wild-goose chase. In that quiet inn at the foot of Larkstone Vale there was a man in whose eyes he had seen the fear of death, and a damsel in distress who was as beautiful as anything he had seen for many moons; that was more or less what he had been promised, and it was only right that the promise should have been so accurately fulfilled. The dreary cynics were everlastingly wrong; such joyously perfect and improbable things did happen-they were always happening to him. He knew that he was once more on the frontiers of adventure; but even then he did not dream of anything so amazing as the offer that Bellamy Wage had made on the day when he was sentenced to ten years, penal servitude after the Neovision Radio Company failed for nearly two million pounds.

  II "SAY," blurted Hoppy Uniatz, broaching a subject which had clearly been harassing him for some time, "is anyt'ing de matter wit' me?"

  "I shouldn't be surprised," said the Saint pitilessly, from the basin where he was washing the dust of travel from his face. "All that whisky you sluice your system with must have its effect some day, even on a tin stomach like yours. What are the symptoms?"

  Mr. Uniatz was not talking about ailments of that kind.

  "De foist time I open my mout' in dis jernt, de barman looks at me like he t'inks I'm gonna take him for a ride. When de goil comes in, she looks at me just de same way, like I was some kinda snake. I ain't no Ronald Colman, boss, but I never fought my pan was dat bad. Have all dese guys here got de jitters, or is anyt'ing de matter wit' me?" he asked, working back to his original problem.

  The Saint finished drying his face with a chuckle, and slung the towel round his neck. He took a cigarette from a packet on the table and lighted it.

  "I'm afraid I've rather led you up the garden, Hoppy," he confessed.

  "De garden?" repeated Mr. Uniatz dimly.

  "I've been kidding you," said the Saint, hastily abandoning metaphor, in which Mr. Uniatz was always liable to lose his way. "We aren't stopping here just because I saw the place and thought we'd stay. I came here on purpose."

  Hoppy Uniatz digested this statement. Simon could watch the idea percolating gradually into his skull.

  "Oah ... I see ... So when you says de name is Tombs "That's the name I'm using here, as long it takes in anybody. And don't you forget it."

  "I get it, boss. An' de room you booked"

  Simon laughed.

  "That requires a little more explanation," he said.

  He took up his coat from where he had thrown it over a chair, and slipped out an envelope from the breast pocket. The lamplight gleamed on a ripple of his bare biceps as he sprawled himself over the bed with it.

  "Listen to this," he commanded:

  "Dear Saint, I've no right to be writing this letter to you, and probably you'll never even read it. I've never met you, and I don't even know what you look like. But I've read about some of the things you've done, and if you're the sort of man I think you are you might listen to me for a minute.

  This is an old sixteenth century inn which belongs to my uncle, who's a retired engineer. My father died in South Africa five months ago, and I came here to live because there was nowhere else for me to go.

  Queer things have been happening here, Saint. I don't know how to go on, because it sounds such utter nonsense. But I've heard people walking around the place at night, when I know perfectly well there's nobody about; and sometimes there are sort of rumbling noises underground that I can't account for. Lately there have been some horrible men here-I know you must be thinking I'm raving already, it sounds so childish and hysterical, but if only 1 could talk to you myself, I might be able to convince you.

  I can't go on writing like this, Saint. You'll just think, 'Oh, another neurotic female who wants a good smacking,' and throw it into the wastepaper basket. But if you're ever travelling this way, and you have a little time to spare, I'd give anything to see you drop in. You can stay here as an ordinary guest, and find out for yourself whether I'm crazy. My uncle says I am, but he's frightened too. I can see he is, even though he won't admit it.

  Something's growing up in this place that must mean trouble; and it might be in your line. I wish I could hope that you'd believe me.

  JULIA TRAFFORD."

  The furrows of painful thought grooved themselves into Mr. Uniatz's brow again.

  "Julia?" he said. "Was dat de dame we spoke to downstairs?"

  "I take it she was."

  "An' she wrote you dat letter?"

  "To which I replied saying that I should come here as soon as I could, armed to the teeth and probably masquerading under the suggestive name of Tombs."

  "So we come here today on poipose"

  "To find out whether the girl really is nuts, or whether there are fun and games in the offing that might keep us out of mischief for a while."

  Mr. Uniatz nodded. The layout was becoming clearer. Only one major point remained obscure. "Whaddas it got to do," he asked, "wit' de garden?"

  The Saint groaned helplessly, and rolled off the bed to rake out a clean shirt from his Oshkosh. Buttoning it at the open window, he looked out through a loose grille of trees, over the red and grey roofs of the village towards the sea. The tide was out, and the estuary was a tongue of glistening reddish mud, veined with tiny rivulets, that licked in between the hills and drank up the flow of the river. On either edge of it a narrow strip of shingle broke straight up into irregular red cliffs capped with velvet grass. The mud was littered with dinghies and stranded buoys, and the broad hulls of a half-dozen fishing boats lay canted over along the line of the deepest channel, with a man or two moving on the decks about the ordinary business of checking tackle and sorting nets. There was a sense of peace and patience about the place, an atmosphere of changeless simplicity and homeliness, that made him wonder once again what sinister racket could possibly find food in such surroundings. But that was what he had come there to discover.

  He picked up his coat with a good-humoured smile.

  "I'll murder you later," he promised Mr. Uniatz kindly.

  Leaving Hoppy to perform his own ablutions, he went downstairs again and strolled out into the road. He wanted a map from his car to gain a more detailed knowledge of the topography of the district; and on his way back he collected another item of information from the legend painted over the door in the traditional style: MARTIN JEFFROLL, Licensed to Sell Wines, Beer, Spirits, and Tobacco. The superscription was not new, but it revealed traces of an older name which had been blacked out. Presumably Mr. Jeffroll was the grey-haired man who had been so strangely frightened by the sound of Hoppy Uniatz's discordant voice.

  Simon went back into the little bar off the hall and lighted a fresh cigarette. It was Jeffroll who came through the curtains and civilly declined the Saint's invitation to join him in a drink. Simon ordered a pink gin, and was served with unobtrusive courtesy: the panic-stricken creature whom he had glimpsed in Jeffroll's shoes a short while ago might never have existed, but the landlord had withdrawn behind a wall of indefinable reserve that was somewhat discouragin
g to idle conversation. Having served the drink, he retired again through the curtain, leaving the Saint alone.

  Simon took up the glass and solemnly drank his own health in the mirror behind the bar; and he was setting the glass down again when the same mirror showed him a man who had just come into the hall. Quite spontaneously he turned round and scanned the newcomer as he came on under the low arch-it was purely the instinctive speculative scan of a lone man at a bar who considers the approach of another lone man with whom he may exchange some of the trivial conversation that ordinarily breaks out on these occasions, and he was unsuspectingly surprised to notice that the other was coming towards him with more than speculative directness.

  There was hardly time in the short distance that the other had to cover for the Saint's curiosity to grow beyond the vaguest neutrality; and then the man was standing in front of him.

  "Is that your car outside?" he asked.

  His voice was harsh and domineering; and the Saint did not like it. Studying the man more closely in the waning light, he decided that he didn't care much for its owner, either. He had never been able to conceive an instant brotherly regard for ginger-headed men in loud-checked ginger plus fours, with puffy bags under their small eyes and mouths that turned down sulkily at the corners, particularly when they spoke with harsh domineering voices; but even then he was not actually suspicious.

  "I have got a car outside," he said coolly. "A cream and red Hirondel."

  "I see. So you're the young swine who drove me into a ditch outside Sidmouth."

  The Saint ceased to be perplexed. A genial smile of complete comprehension lighted up his face.

  "Good Lord!" he exclaimed happily. "Have you been all this time getting out?"

  "What did you say?" snarled the man.

  "I asked whether you'd been all this time getting out," Simon repeated, with undiminished affability. "Or was that a rude question? Is your car still in and did you walk from there?"

  The man took another step towards him. At those still closer quarters, he did not look any more attractive.