Leslie Charteris - Send for the Saint

“You’ve got the muscle for that, have you?” he said, and the question was halfway to being a statement, a thought spoken aloud by a man busily turning over a proposition in his mind.

“I’ve got a hundred and three men,” said Rockham.

“That’s a big outfit.”

“And still growing.” Rockham’s hitherto impassive square features became faintly animated with something Simon assumed to be pride. “We call ourselves The Squad, and operate on military lines,” he explained. “But we’re short of leaders — officer material, like yourself. That’s why I’m prepared to help you out of your difficulty. Besides which, the exercise’ll do the lads good.”

Simon appeared to reflect for a moment longer, and then he shook his head decisively.

“The answer’s no. I don’t want to take a job with anyone who’s got a debt to collect from me. It’d cramp my style in the wage negotiations. But how do you know I haven’t already made my own arrangements.”

Rockham’s cold blue eyes regarded him.

“You’ve friends on the outside?”

“That’s my business. I might have, or I might not. But either way, I’ve no intention of rotting in this hole for long.”

Rockham nodded thoughtfully.

“You did it before,” he mused. “Why not again?”

“I’m a clever boy,” agreed the Saint.

“I don’t doubt it. But you’re also a big spender, from what I hear. I’d bet there isn’t much left of the Hatton Garden haul, after your three years living it up in Rio. So... if and when you fly this coop, Gascott, you may be interested in earning some good money — with prospects of a lot more — for doing the kind of work you’d enjoy.”

Rockham stood up.

“You’ll find me at Petersfield nine-two-seven-four. But we’re in the phone book. The Physical Efficiency Centre, at Kyleham.”

Simon Templar breathed a deep sigh of relief when his visitor had gone. Or to be strictly accurate, what he did was to say “phew!” without actually enunciating the sound; but either an audible phew or a sigh of relief of the regulation depth would have done equally well as a means of expressing his feelings at having survived that unexpected test.

He had been given what amounted to an entrance ticket to The Squad. All he had to do now was to get back to the job of giving himself a chance of surviving once he got there.

In his week-long interlude while the moustachioed Gascott was enjoying the CId’s maritime hospitality, the Saint had not channelled his energies exclusively into nurturing the dark bushy appurtenance that now flourished imitatively on his own upper lip. He had spent much of that week at a certain discreet training centre which is conspicuously absent from the publicly available lists of such government establishments, working harder than he could remember having worked in a very long time.

Into that week, by some wizardry of frantic compression he marvelled at ever after, was packed course after crash course. He learnt what it meant, in the practical essentials, to be a commando officer; he learnt how to handle the latest military weapons, the layout of current assault courses, how to read and send Morse and semaphore signals, how to change a guard... He learnt military regulations, he learnt practical regimental etiquette, he learnt to drive a tank, he learnt to inspect a company of men... Practical was the watchword; the emphasis was on the essential skills of his supposed background with which books wouldn’t be able to help him.

He had had just the one week; and at the end of it the expert instructors who had dealt with him had confessed themselves astounded to a man. Nobody at less than Simon Templar’s magnificent level of physical and mental fitness could have kept up the pace he did or come out of that week having accomplished so much.

But he knew he still had a long way to go.

He had slightly less of a long way to go by the time Ruth Barnaby came for her second visit. He told her about Rockham’s surprise appearance.

“For a moment,” he confessed, “I was almost tempted by his offer to get me out.”

“You should have agreed,” she said at once. “There’d certainly have been no doubt about his finding your escape convincing if he’d engineered it himself.”

Simon looked at her soberly.

“There would have been just one little problem with that, though,” he pointed out. “What about the half dozen or so warders who might have been mown down as a by-product of Rocky-boy’s rescue swoop?”

Ruth made an impatient dismissive gesture.

“I’m sure that could have been avoided somehow.”

“But how?” he said practically. “He’d have no good reason to confide the details of the whole plan to me. In fact, he’d’ve been a fool if he did, since I just might have decided to earn myself some nice safe remission by double-crossing him. And if he hadn’t given me all the dope, including exactly how and when I was to be spirited away, I wouldn’t have been in any position to get warnings to sundry people who’d otherwise be candidates for becoming sundry corpses.”

“But Bert Nobbins would probably have been in the picture,” the girl said “Or, at least, enough to give us some inkling of when-and how you’d be sprung.”

In the short silence that ensued, Simon Templar experienced a sinking sensation which was closely connected with a growing conviction that he was not entirely in command of the situation.

“And who the blue blazes,” he inquired in a voice heavy with restraint, “is Bert Nobbins?”

“Their Paymaster,” she said. “He’s also one of ours. Pelton put him in as a back-up for Randall. But he’s not the type to step into Randall’s place. Pelton says you’re to ignore him.”

Those last few days had certainly dragged. For a while, after Ruth’s second visit, Simon had fumed impotently at having been kept in the dark about Pelton’s opportunist catapulting of the hitherto desk-bound Nobbins into The Squad as Paymaster when the vacancy had providentially arisen only weeks before. But then he had given up fuming impotently, had sat down to do some thinking which at least began to encompass the new factor that now had to be reckoned with, revised his assessment of Pelton again, and finally gone back to his books and notes. And slowly those last few days had ticked away... until three were left... then two...

Then one: and with the recurrence of Gascott’s convenient malaria he had been moved to the prison hospital wards.

Without digressing too far into the details of the plan that had been worked out, it may reasonably be disclosed that on the following day a certain vehicle arrived to make a delivery of medical supplies, and that when it was driven out through the prison gates again the dark moustached man at the wheel was not the same dark moustached man who had driven it in.

Within two hours Simon Templar was on his way to Petersfield, skimming his big cream and red Hirondel down the Portsmouth Road with even more inner zest than usual and only a shade less outward elan. He was still savouring the incomparable blessed wine of recovered freedom, and fighting a powerful impulse to scamper and frolic about manically in the sweet open air like a puppy let out for a run. But a degree of inconspicuousness seemed called for; and scampering, he judged, might have attracted some attention.

The hue and cry was out for Gascott — and genuinely. Rockham’s possible accomplices in the various arms of the official establishment being an unknown factor, only the absolutely essential minimum of reliable stalwarts among prison and police staff had been told the truth about their now-absquatulated detainee. The rest of them were playing it for real. And that was emphatically the way Simon Templar preferred it, even though it did mean that every village bobby in the land would be on the lookout for him.