Leslie Charteris - Send for the Saint

After a long pause, Lembick accepted the hand.

“OK,” he growled. “For now.”

“Then I’ll go jog off my fidgets,” Simon said amicably.

“OK,” Lembick said. “Just don’t get mixed up with the patrol.”

“And you stay out of my room,” Simon responded genially. “In case you get any ideas, I’ll warn you: the feelthy pictures in my bag are booby-trapped.”

He strolled away on his supposed therapeutic walk through the grounds with the intuitive certainty that his bull-by-the-horns ploy had neutralised Lembick for that night at least. But he was under no illusion that he could count on it to work indefinitely.

That was a problem which would have to be dealt with in what cliché-mongers conveniently dispose of as ‘due course’. Until then, there was no worthwhile guarantee whatever of what form that nebulous futurity would actually take.

Ruth Barnaby was waiting for him outside the wall as arranged, and he told her about the briefing and drills.

“So it’s on,” he concluded. “Pelton’s hypothesis was right. Target — Instrood. At Worplesford Cross, all being well, the genuine platoon go off on a wild goose chase, and we roll up at Braizedown in their place. The guard change is scheduled for five o’clock, and we’ll be at Worplesford before four thirty.”

“I’ll tell Pelton,” she said.

“Will the Lowlanders be put in the picture?”

“I don’t know. That’ll be Pelton’s decision. I’d guess not. It just might get back to Rockham.”

The Saint sighed as he uncoiled himself from the car seat beside her.

“Ruth — I’m sure you’re right. That’s probably exactly what your boss will say.” Simon had got out of the car, and now he paused on his way, leaning in through the open door. “But if Pelton won’t confide in the Lowlanders, I hope he’ll damn-well confide in somebody. Because otherwise,” he said with heavy emphasis, “who the hell’s going to form that powerful reception party he promised?”

And she was still pondering the implications of those words for some time after she watched him ease his long figure back up to the rope ladder and over the wall.

So the curtain was about to go up, he mused, on what looked like being the final act in one of the strangest dramas he had ever been mixed up in. But while he slept that night, another scene of the penultimate act was being played out in another rural setting, not twenty miles away.

From an upstairs window of Braizedown Hall, Ruth Barnaby and Albert Nobbins watched as three vehicles came to a halt in the crunching gravel outside the front door.

First a jeep, decorated with the blue-on-maroon winged horse of the Parachute Regiment: in the driving-seat a Corporal of the Regiment and beside him a Captain. Then the big dark-green official car normally used by Pelton. Then a three-ton army lorry bearing the same insignia as the jeep.

“You think you can break him?” Ruth Barnaby asked.

Nobbins shrugged. He had changed his usual spectacles for a pair with round steel-rimmed lenses that made him look harder, less sympathetic.

“He’s a trained agent,” he said. “And tougher than most, so they say. But we’re calling the tune. And I’ve got him for a week. All to myself.”

Nobbins’s mouth came down in a firm little line and his manner held tense purposefulness that she had never seen in him before.

They watched as two paratroopers armed with Sten guns jumped down off the back of the truck. Four men got out of the car — the driver, two regimental policemen in red berets and white webbing and wearing the black-on-red RP armbands, and a man in a straitjacket and a black hood that completely covered his head.

“James Anthony Instrood,” said Nobbins softly.

“I’ll leave you to it, then,” she said.

“Remember,” he called to her as she went out, “No word about The Squad to Captain Yates or any of the Paras at this stage.”

Nobbins sat back behind the desk. There were two lamps on it, angled to point about three feet above the seat of the empty chair facing him. For the tenth time he switched the lamps on and slightly adjusted the position of the powerful beams, then switched them off again.

There was a knock at the door.

Captain Yates and his corporal pushed Instrood forward into the room.

“Delivery of the prisoner, sir.”

“Thank you, Captain. I take it Colonel Pelton checked him at Blackbushe?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then that’ll be all, Captain. But you’ll leave the Corporal on the door, of course.”

“Sir.” They withdrew and shut the door.

Nobbins undid some straps of the straitjacket: then he loosened the draw-string around Instrood’s neck and lifted off the hood.

“Sit down, Instrood. Cigarette?” He gestured at a box on the desk.

Instrood shook his head, smiling scornfully.

“I’m familiar with interrogation technique. A bit of kindness — then the rough stuff.” He shrugged. “Sometimes it works.”

“But not with James Anthony Instrood?”

“Not with me.”

The two men looked remarkably alike. Nobbins saw that Instrood too was a small man, bulging somewhat at the waist, and that he too wore glasses with steel-rimmed circular lenses. He was rather older than Nobbins, his colouring rather darker, and the three-day stubble on his face gave a tougher line to his jaw; but the two of them were similar enough in general appearance to have been brothers.

Instrood smiled again, with a contemptuous curl to his lips, and said, “You don’t really expect to get anywhere with this, do you, Nobbins?”

“You’ll crack inside a week, Instrood,” Nobbins said, with more conviction than he felt.

Instrood smiled that thin withering smile again, and said nothing.

“You’ll talk!” Nobbins said, provoked. “Before we’re done you’ll beg me to listen!”

Viciously he snapped on the two spotlights. Instrood sighed patiently, sank a little lower in his chair, and closed his eyes.

“Ask your questions, then,” he said resignedly.

“You know what I want from you.”

“Names of resident directors, cut-outs, agents — the communication chain, Yes, of course I know,” Instrood said wearily.

“On September the nineteenth two agents were dispatched to Paris — a French couple,” Nobbins intoned. “Who were they?”

“Abelard and Heloise.”

Nobbins leaned forward eagerly.

“Their code names?”

He realised he had made a fool of himself the moment the words were out of his mouth. Instrood sniggered. Nobbins boiled with fury.

“Communications network?” he demanded, on a shriller note. “Your resident director for Germany? For Italy? For Holland?”

Instrood shook his head.

“Nothing doing.”

“Names, details, facts!” Nobbins almost screamed the words, as he thumped the desk. “I want facts!”

He switched off the two spotlights abruptly and sank back in his chair. Instrood opened his eyes and saw the beads of sweat standing out on the simmering Nobbin’s brow. He smiled to himself.

“I’ll give you some facts,” he said in a quietly reasonable, almost friendly tone. “Listen. Ten years ago I did your job. A bit higher up the ladder maybe, but the same sort of job. I lived on eight hundred a year and haggled for every two quid’s worth of expenses.”

“And then you threw it all over for Peking — I know.”

“Where I’ve lived like a lord. Anything I wanted — cars, girls, the best food and wine — the good life.”

“And these were the facts you were going to give me?” Nobbins said scornfully. “All you’ve told me is that you’ve been living high on the hog. So what?”