Leslie Charteris - Send for the Saint

And as he remembered how well off he was in comparison, to be committed to spending only about three weeks there before the escape which he would be allowed to make, he said severe words to himself and went on with the preparatory work which would occupy him for that period.

In his seclusion it was easy for him to be given discreet privileges in the form of books, and, as Pelton had promised, anything else within reason and practicality that he needed towards those preparations. One of the things he asked for was a chess set; and with this and some esoteric tomes on the subject, he spent hour after hour in engrossed intellectual contemplation. It was years since he had played the game, but chess was one of Gascott’s passions — and reputedly one of Rockham’s.

In his first week he had two visitors.

One was the “girl friend” Pelton had organised after discovering that there were no genuine friends or relatives of Gascott’s on the scene who were on good enough terms to want to see him. In that all-male stronghold the idea of a visiting “girl friend”, even one of Pelton’s choosing, was something Simon was happy enough to go along with, and he was glad he had done so when he saw her.

Her name was Ruth Barnaby, and she was a member of Pelton’s department. She had dark-brown chestnutty hair immaculately coiffured in an upswept style, and the kind of good looks no woman can get out of a bottle or tube or jar, because they depend on the right bone structure. Either you have it or you haven’t; and Ruth Barnaby decidedly had it. She had been well primed. She greeted him through the wire-mesh grille for the benefit of the warders and fellow inmates present, with exactly the blend of familiarity and restraint that might have been expected of her part; and then she gradually dropped her voice to a level at which it became submerged in the general babble of conversation going on between each of the other men and his visitor and rapidly introduced herself.

“If you manage to get into this group,” she told him, “I’ll be your local contact down at Kyleham. That’s where they’re based. We’ll need to set up a communication system. You’ll be confined to camp for a while, till Rockham thinks you’re trustworthy enough to be let off the leash. I suppose you know about all that?”

Simon nodded, aware of the cool grey depths of her eyes.

“David did mention it,” he said, keeping his voice well down and maintaining the rasping Gascott tones.

Even though nobody could possibly have picked out what they were saying, it was conceivable that a sharp pair of ears would have registered a complete change in his voice quality and intonation.

The girl gave him a few details about the estate at Kyleham and then left, promising to come back the following week.

The second visitor arrived a couple of days later. Simon had never seen him before. He was a big well-groomed man with a strong square face.

“Mr Gascott?” he said in a quiet cultured voice. “We haven’t met, but I’ve been reading about you in the newspapers. My name is Rockham — John Rockham.”

The Saint was completely and utterly taken aback. He simply hadn’t considered the possibility that Rockham might grab at the bait quite as early as that. Yet for all the reaction he showed, the name might have meant absolutely nothing to him.

Which, of course, was no less than Rockham would have expected it to mean to George Gascott.

That the Saint was able to slip naturally and without perceptible delay into the sort of response the real Gascott would have made, even though he had to conceal his excitement at such swift success for the stratagem that Pelton had arranged for him, was entirely to the credit of his acting abilities and to the hard work he had added to them.

“Who the hell are you?” he heard himself rasp at restrained volume, just as he had done with the girl. “I told them very distinctly that I could do without any blasted do-gooder namby-pamby professional visitors poking their sanctimonious snouts in.”

It gave him an eerie feeling to realise that already, at least as far as outward appearances went, he had all but shrugged himself into Gascott’s skin. But that feeling came as a mere fleeting background to the whirling of his brain. Neither he nor Pelton had given any close attention to the problem of how, after his escape, he was going to arrange to be “available” to Rockham. If necessary, in the end, he would simply have presented himself at The Squad’s base and played it by ear from then on. Rockham’s taking the initiative at this stage — before “Gascott” was actually in a position to be of any use to him — was something that needed thought, and for the moment his mind was racing like a motor out of gear as he tried to fit the new development into some kind of schema he could deal with.

One discomfiting result for the Saint was that he had been caught with half his boning up on the real Gascott’s military career still to be done. It was like being stopped in the middle of swotting for tomorrow’s exam and summoned to sit it at once; except that this particular test was a practical one that could all too easily, for him, come to resemble nothing so much as picking his way through a minefield...

Rockham said: “I’m no professional visitor” — for a moment the idea seemed to amuse him — “but I am a professional, and in a similar field to your own. I like what I’ve read about you. I think we’ve some interests in common.”

“I prefer women,” sneered the Saint — “sweetie!”

Rockham nodded.

“I’ve done some homework on you,” he said ambiguously. “But what I meant was that I want to offer you a job.”

Rockham had urbanely ignored the sneer and the facetious comment as though he simply hadn’t noticed them, but the Saint’s watchfulness hadn’t missed the tiny sparks of anger that flared up almost invisibly in Rockham’s pale blue eyes and then were snuffed out almost as soon as they had been ignited; and he knew then that there lay a temper to be reckoned with just beneath that calm and cultivated surface.

And the Saint laughed the cold metallic laugh he had copied with such uncanny accuracy from its original exponent.

“You’ve come to offer me a job, have you? Well, that’s wonderful news! I suppose you’ve brought the rocks with you, that you want broken up? Or is it some private mailbags you’d like me to sew?”

Abruptly he dropped the bantering tone and spat out his next words with a bitter savagery, which was no less contemptuous for being restrained like the rest of the conversation to a level of decibels that insured against deliberate or unwitting eavesdroppers:

“I’m in prison, man, prison! Stir. Jug. Porridge. Detained at His Majesty’s. And when it comes to considering offers of employment, Mister Rockham, I’m just a trifle handicapped.”

Rockham waited imperturbably for the outburst to subside.

“You’d be worth to me.” he said calmly, “two thousand a month. I pay well if I want a man enough. And regarding your present inconvenient predicament” — he paused and flicked his gaze significantly around the visiting-room — “these matters can always be arranged, as you know. I might well be prepared to take a risk to get a man of your calibre on the strength.”

The implication was obvious; and it now seemed hardly credible to Simon Templar that he hadn’t seen at once, right from the beginning, that there was only the one single postulate on which Rockham’s visit could have made any kind of sense. He was offering to spring Gascott from jail.

In the circumstances the Saint found no difficulty at all in achieving a modest levitation of his eyebrows to express a convincingly surprised-looking realisation.