18 The Saint Bids Diamonds (Thieves' Picnic) Page 5

  "Si."

  "Bueno. Siga usted."

  The Saint scratched his head.

  "What is this?" he inquired curiously.

  "That does not concern you," replied the talking half of the brace uncommunicatively and stepped back.

  Simon got into the car again and drove on thoughtfully. Certainly, now that he recollected it, the rescue of Joris Vanlinden had not been accomplished in complete silence; in fact, he remembered that one or two shots had been fired in the later stages which would doubtless have been audible for some distance; but the convention of guardias gathered on the spot seemed somewhat disproportionate to the occasion, even under an administration which has always been convinced that posting a herd of police on the scene of a past crime is an infallible method of preventing another crime being committed somewhere else. He puzzled over it for a few moments, trying to recall some other factor which seemed to have slipped his memory; and then he saw the long white wall which he had been told to look out for, and the sight temporarily diverted his mind from other problems.

  He drove slowly past it, and a hundred yards farther on he came to a narrow side turning into which he backed the car. He switched off the engine, turned out the lights and returned on foot. In the middle of the wall there was a wide gateway, wide enough to admit a big car-which it probably did, for the sidewalk was cut away in front of it. The gates were solid wood, studded and bound with iron, and they filled the whole archway so that it was impossible to get a glimpse of the garden inside. In the lower part of one of the gates was a smaller door. Simon scanned it in the subdued beam of a flashlight no larger than a fountain pen, and spelled out the name on the tarnished brass plate-"Las Mariposas." It was Graner's house.

  He walked on, along the wall; and when it ended he climbed over the rough wire fence of the adjoining field and worked along the other side. In this way he made a complete circuit of the property, and presently found himself in the road again. The wall ran all the way round it without a break, two feet over his head the whole time; and the Saint smiled with professional satisfaction. In the circumstances, the household seemed to have all the hallmarks of really well-organised villainy, and Simon Templar approved of well-organised villains. They made life so much more exciting.

  The house itself stood in one angle of the square, so that one corner of the surrounding wall was actually formed by the walls of the house itself; but the only opening in those walls was formed by two or three barred windows on the top floor. Apart from those small apertures, the walls rose sheer from the ground for thirty feet without any break or projection that would have given foothold to a lizard. There was no hope of feloniously entering the property by that route.

  He returned to the first field he had entered, and inspected the wall again from that side. He reached up to the top, and felt a closely woven mesh of barbed wire under his fingers-anyone a little shorter than himself would have had to make a jump for the grip, and would have collected a pair of badly lacerated hands for compensation.

  Simon bent down and took off his shoes. He placed them side by side on top of the wall, hooked his fingers over them, and in that way drew himself up. In that way he discovered something else.

  A fine copper wire ran along the top of the wall, stretched between brackets in such a way that it projected about eight inches from the wall itself and also leaned slightly towards the outside. It had been invisi­ble until he almost put his face into it, and he only just stopped pulling himself up in time. If he had been even a little clumsy with placing his shoes on top of the wall he would have touched it. He studied it intently for a few seconds. And then he lowered himself carefully to the ground, pulled his shoes down after him, and put them on again.

  Exactly what useful purpose that wire served he didn't know, but he didn't like the look of it. It certainly didn't seem strong enough to hold anyone back who intended to go through it, and it wasn't even barbed. But it was so placed that no one could even pull himself up sufficiently to see over the wall without touching the wire; certainly it was impossible to scram­ble over it without doing so. A ladder placed up against the wall would have touched it just the same.

  It might have been connected with some system of alarms, it might even have carried a charge of high-voltage electricity, it might have fired guns or sent up rockets or played martial music; but the one certain thing of which the Saint was profoundly convinced was that it hadn't been put there for fun. He was beginning to acquire a wholesome respect for Reuben Graner which nevertheless failed to depress his spirits.

  "Life," said the Saint, to his guardian angel, "is starting to look more and more entertaining."

  As he stood there under the wall, allowing the full flavour of the entertainment to circulate meditatively around his palate, he became conscious of a sound on the other side of the wall. It was hardly more than a faint rustle such as a tree might have made stirring in the breeze; and then the hairs prickled instinctively on the back of his neck as he realised that there was no breeze. . . .

  He listened, standing so still that he could feel the throbbing of the blood in his arteries. The rustling went on; and now that he could analyse it logically he knew that it was too abrupt and irregular to be caused by a wind. It was made by something alive, something heavy and yet stealthy moving about among shrubbery on the other side of the wall. He heard the sound of a subdued sniffing; and all at once the words of Christine Vanlinden rushed through his mind. "They hadn't let the dogs out then . . ."

  He remained frozen to immobility, expecting at any moment to hear the tranquillity of the night shattered by the fierce clamour of barking; but nothing happened. He heard the muffled blare of a ship's siren away down in the harbour, and a car whined up the hill and vanished in a whispering diminuendo; but in between those sounds there was nothing but the drumming in his own ears. When at last he ventured to move, the uproar still failed to break out. Nothing broke the stillness except that occasional stealthy rustle that followed him all the way back to the road, keeping pace with him on the other side of the wall. In the unnatural muteness of that invisible following there was something eerie and horrible that set his nerves tingling.

  Again he stood in front of the arched gateway, lighting a cigarette and considering the situation. Very few things seemed more certain than that it was practically impossible to get into the grounds without raising an alarm-he had discovered a fair number of reasons for that; but they only provided additional reasons for believing that there were other equally ingenious gadgets waiting on the inside of the wall for the resourceful intruder who managed to pass the first line of defence. Besides all of which, of course, there were still the dogs; and their utter and uncanny silence gave the Saint a queer chilly intuition that their purpose was not so much to give alarms as to deal in their own way with intruders. . . .

  One of the cardinal articles of Simon Templar's philosophy, however, was that the more elaborately insoluble such complex problems became, the more pellucidly simple the one and only key to the riddle became -if one could only see it. And in this case the solution was so staggeringly elementary that it left the Saint dumb with awe for a full half-minute.

  And then, very deliberately and accurately, he placed the end of his forefinger on the bell beside the gateway, and pushed.

  There was an interval of silence before he heard the sound of footsteps advancing over flagstones towards the gate. A grille opened in the smaller door, but it was too dark to see the face that looked out from behind it.

  "żQuién es?"

  For the time being the Saint saw no need to advertise the fact that he spoke Spanish as well as any Castilian.

  "Mr Graner is expecting me," he said.

  "Who is it?" repeated the voice, in English.

  "Mr Felson sent me."

  "Just a minute."

  There was another pause. Simon heard a low whistle, the scuffle of claws on the stone, and the tinkle and creak of chains. Then a key was turned, bolts thudded back an
d the small door opened.

  "Come in."

  Simon ducked through the narrow opening and straightened up inside. The man who had admitted him was bending to close the door and fasten the bolts. The Saint noted that there were no less than five of them-two on the lock side, one on the hinge side, and one each in the centre of the top and bottom of the door-and all of them were connected with curious bright metal contacts.

  He glanced thoughtfully around him. The dogs had been tied up to a post set in the flagged pathway with short loops of chain riven through rings in their collars. They were huge, bristling grey brutes, larger than police dogs-he had no idea what breed they were. The chains scraped and rattled as they strained stead­ily towards him, their slavering jaws a little open and their lips curled snarling back from glistening white fangs; but even then neither of them gave tongue. They simply leaned towards him, their feet scrabbling on the paving, quivering with a voiceless intensity of lusting ferocity and power that was more vicious than anything of its kind that the Saint had ever seen before. And a grim little smile touched his lips as he mentally acknowledged the fact that if it was difficult enough to get into that garden, it would be just about as difficult to get out. . . .

  "Come this way," said the man who had let him in; and they walked along the paved pathway that ran around the house. "I'm Graner. What's your name?"

  "Tombs," said the Saint.

  He had cherished for years an eccentric affection for that morbid alias.

  There was a light over the porch outside the front door, and for the first time he was able to inspect his host, while Graner looked at him. From Simon's side the inspection was something of a shock.

  Reuben Graner was a full head shorter than himself, and as thin as a lath; and his skinny shape was accentuated by a mauve-striped suit which fitted him so tightly that it looked as if it had been shrunk on to him. Between his green suede shoes and the ends of his clinging trousers appeared a pair of bright yellow spats; and what could be seen of his shirt behind a tie like a patchwork quilt was a pale rose pink. Above that, his sallow face was as thin and sharp as an axe blade. From either side of his inordinately long and narrow nose hard, deeply graven lines ran down like brackets to enclose a mouth that was merely a horizontal slit in the tight-drawn skin, which was so smoothly stretched over the forehead and high cheek-Hones that it seemed as if there was no flesh between it and the skull. At that first inspection, only his eyes seemed to justify the uncontrollable horror with which Christine Vanlinden had spoken of him; they peered out with an odd unblinking intentness from behind large tortoise-shell spectacles, black and beady and inscrutable as damp pebbles.

  "Come in," Graner said again.

  He opened the door, which led into a bare narrow hall beyond which Simon could see palm trees in a dimly illuminated patio. On either side of the hall there were other doors, and one of them was ajar-Simon saw the strip of light along the edge of the frame. And as he crossed the threshold the Saint heard something that made him feel as if he had been hurled suddenly into the air and spun round three or four times before he was dumped back on the doorstep with a jar that left his heart thumping. It was a man's voice raised in blustering anger, with a subtle note of fear pulsing it in. Simon heard every word as distinctly as if the speaker had been standing next to him.

  "I tell you I never had the blasted ticket. I was hunting through Joris' pockets for it when that swine jumped on me. If anybody's got it, he has!"

  III How Simon Templar Read a Newspaper, and Reuben Graner Put on His Hat

  BY SOME SUPERHUMAN EFFORT of unconscious will, the Saint let his weight follow the step he had started to take. He never quite knew how it was done, but somehow he went on his way into the house without an instant's check in the natural flow of his movements; and since Graner had stood aside to let him go first it was impossible for his face to give him away. By the time he was in the hall and had turned round so that Graner could see him again, the dizzy moment had passed. He stood there lighting a cigarette, aware of the sudden sharp scrutiny of Graner's beady eyes, without giving any sign that he noticed it. He might have heard nothing more than a meaningless fragment of any commonplace conversation. Only the vertiginous whirl that was still turning his mind upside down remained to bear witness to the quality of the shock that he had received.

  Graner seemed to be satisfied that the words had made no particular impression. He turned away and pressed a button switch beside the door; and the Saint was momentarily puzzled, for no lights went on or off. Then he heard a swift scurrying outside, a light thud on the door and the scratch of claws; and all at once he understood the pressing of the switch and the reason for those unusually short chains on the post to which the dogs had been fastened. Doubtless the switch released them again by some electrical mechanism after any visitor had been taken inside the house.

  No other voice had spoken from the room opening off the hall, and the dead silence continued as Graner strutted towards it in his pompous, affected way and pushed open the door.

  "These are some friends of mine, Mr Tombs."

  Simon took in the room with a leisured glance. It was furnished in the modern style, but with a garishness that contrived to be more eye-aching than chintz and brocades. The curtains were bright scarlet, the carpet was chequered purple and orange, the chairs were upholstered in grass-green tapestry. The solid comfort of the chairs was mixed up with little spindle-legged, glass-topped tables which looked as if a sneeze would blow them over; and every available horizontal surface was littered with a collection of cheap nondescript vases and tasteless bits of china that might have been taken straight out of an old-fashioned, middle-class drawing room. It was a room into which Reuben Graner fitted so perfectly that, after seeing him in it, it was impossible to imagine him in any other setting.

  But Simon Templar was not looking so much at the room, as at the men in it. There were three of them; he suppressed a smile of unholy glee as he noted that at least two of them showed unmistakable signs of having been on a party.

  "Mr Palermo," said Graner, in his high-pitched, mincing voice.

  He indicated a dark, slender gentleman with a swarthy skin and a natty little moustache, whose beauty was somewhat impaired by the radiant sunset effects surrounding his right eye and the swollen heelprint on the other side of his face "Mr Aliston --"

  Mr Aliston was tall and sandy-haired, with prominent pale blue eyes and a willowy slouch. What was left of his complexion was pink and white, like that of a freshly scrubbed schoolboy; but much of it was obscured by a raw-looking graze that ran up from his chin to terminate in a large black-and-blue lump near his left temple.

  "-and Mr Lauber."

  The third member of the party was a big, raw-boned, heavy-jowled man whom Simon recognised without difficulty as his last opponent in the exchange of pleasantries that had started the picnic. He looked easily the least damaged of the trio; but the Saint knew that he would be carrying a souvenir of Mr Uniatz' Betsy on the back of his head that would have been highly misleading to a phrenologist.

  "Pleased to know you," Lauber said heartily; and as soon as he spoke Simon knew also that he was the man whose voice he had heard as he entered the house.

  The Saint's eyes summed up the big man interestedly, without seeming to give him more attention than they gave everybody else. Certainly Lauber had been the last warrior to fling himself into the battle: he had been busily kneeling on Joris Vanlinden's chest until the shortage of other gladiators had forced him to take part in the festivities. And a slow squirm of delight began to crawl around Simon Templar's inside as some understanding of Lauber's amazing protestation started to sink into his brain.

  "Mr Tombs," Graner explained, "is the friend that Felson wired us about."

  The others kept silence. They were grouped at the end of the table, with Lauber in the middle; and they stayed there without moving, as if they were still bent on keeping Lauber in a corner. Only their eyes turned to meet the Saint, and rema
ined fixed on him with cold intentness. Even Lauber, whose solitary answering welcome hinted that it had been prompted more by relief at the temporary diversion than by any natural cordiality, relapsed into silence after that one remark, and stared at him with the same watchful expectancy. They were like a cage of wild animals summing up a new trainer.

  "Sit down," said Graner.

  Palermo extended his foot without shifting any of the rest of him, and pushed a chair towards the Saint. Graner took another chair. He deposited himself primly on the edge of it and crossed his legs-a movement which disclosed an expanse of brilliant blue silk sock above the top of his spats.

  "Felson said very little about you." Graner searched through his pockets and eventually encountered a telegraph form. He read it through, pulling his long upper lip. "Didn't he give you a letter or anything?"

  Simon shook his head. -- "I didn't see him. He phoned me in London, and I left at once."

  "You got here very quickly."

  "I flew to Seville. I tried to phone Rodney in Ma­drid from there, but I couldn't get him. I couldn't wait to get hold of him because I had to catch the boat, and he'd told me it was urgent."

  "Didn't the boat get in this morning?" Graner's tone held no more than conventional interest.

  The Saint nodded easily.

  "I made some friends on board, and they wanted to go over to Orotava for a farewell lunch party. I didn't know it was so far away, and once I was over there I couldn't leave until they were ready to go. And they wanted a lot of shifting. Then I had to get fixed up at a hotel, and then we had to have dinner, and then we had to have some more drinks, and then I had to see them back to the boat --" He shrugged apologetically. "You know how these parties go on. I suppose this is rather late to introduce myself, but I thought I'd better check in before I went to bed."

  Graner frowned.

  "You went to a hotel?"

  "Of course," said the Saint innocently. "It's a nice climate, but I didn't feel like sleeping under a tree."