Leslie Charteris - The Saint Goes On

There was one obvious thing to do there, and the Saint was nerveless enough to do it. He paid the money scrupulously into the till and sat on the bar with his modest glass and a completely brazen cigarette, waiting and listening in silence. Twenty minutes later he heard the noise again.

This time it seemed to give birth to three faint echoes — they were about sixty seconds apart, and each of them was sharper and crisper in tone than the original sound. The effect was something like that of three slow spaced rollers of surf sweeping up a shingle beach. Again the noise was not startlingly loud, but it was closer and clearer.

Simon ran thoughtful fingers through his hair. The rumble passed again, seeming to recede into the distance; and then the stillness settled down again. His watch told him that it was nearly midnight, but he had no superstitions.

He slid down to the floor, broke up the stub of his cigarette and washed the fragments down the sink under the bar, dried his glass on a cloth and replaced it on its shelf, and picked up his torch. He was, for the moment, irritatingly stymied; but he felt that something ought to be done. He had verified the last fraction of Julia Trafford's story, and he was baffled to find any natural explanation. On the other hand, up to that moment he had also failed to find an unlawful solution. Secret passages of some kind were manifestly indicated, but to measure every room and corridor and draw up plans of the building to locate discrepancies in the sum total was a lengthy job for which he had very little patience and, prosaically enough, no implements at all.

There remained the locked door of Jeffroll's private office, and he thought he could cope with this. Curiously enough it gave him an unaccountable difficulty, and he had been working on it for a couple of minutes before he discovered that the thing that was obstructing his skeleton key was another key left in the lock on the inside.

He changed his instrument for a pair of thin-nosed pliers and turned the key quite easily, but with even greater caution. A key on the inside of a locked room, except in fictional murder mysteries, vouches for someone on the inside to turn it; and yet he could not see so much as a glimmer of light in the cracks between the old badly-fitting oak door and its frame.

Then, as he took up the pressure of the latch with delicately practised fingers, he heard a limp sort of dragging scuff of movement which no normal ambusher would have made, and a grunting moan of sterterously exhaled breath which removed the last of his hesitation.

The nape of his neck prickled, but he went in boldly — he had an intuitive certainty of what he would find there, and he did not gasp when the beam of his torch shone full into the dilated eyes of the man with ginger hair.

Simon swept his flashlight round in a quick survey of the rest of the room. There was no other visible exit than the door which he had just opened, unless the door of a large built-in safe in another wall concealed unconventional secrets. There was a desk with a swivel chair behind it, a typewriter on a side table, a filing cabinet, a shelf littered with books and papers, an armchair, and a few faded and nondescript prints on the walls — the conventional furnishings of a small country hotel office. He had no doubt that some of these superficially innocuous fittings might repay closer investigation, but he turned back to the ginger-haired man as a more obvious feature of interest.

"Do you do this for fun, or are you practising a vaudeville act?" he murmured pleasantly.

The other made no answer, for the very good reason that his mouth was blocked by an amateurish but effective gag. Nor, as he might well have been tempted to do, did he get up and make another attempt to destroy the symmetry of the Saint's face, because the lengths of wire bound tightly about his wrists and ankles made any such hearty greeting impossible.

Simon enjoyed the sound of his own voice, but in those circumstances he was prepared to be generous. He squatted down and loosened the gag sufficiently to remove one of Gingerhead's disadvantages, but not so thoroughly that it could not be speedily replaced if necessary. When the cloth was pulled down he saw that the man's mouth was twitching with fear.

"What are you going to do?"

Simon tilted up his flashlight to show his own face.

"What would you do to a bloke who was very rude to you and spilt your drink?" he asked.

The man licked his lips.

"I didn't mean to do that. I lost my temper. I didn't know—"

"What didn't you know?"

"I didn't know you were — one of them. You've got to let me out. You can't do anything to me. There's a law in this country—"

Simon thought quickly, and came to a decision.

"Let you out, Ginger Whiskers? You're a bit of an optimist, aren't you?"

"I could make it worth your while," said the other feverishly. His voice was not harsh and domineering now, but its quavering terror was perhaps more unpleasant. "I'll give you anything you like — a thousand, two thousand—"

"Go on."

"Five thousand—"

The Saint clicked his tongue reproachfully.

"Ten thousand pounds," said the man shakily. "I'll give you ten thousand pounds to let me go!"

"This is getting interesting," drawled the Saint. "Have you got all this money in your pocket?"

"I can get it for you." The man dropped his voice lower, although neither of them had spoken far above a whisper.

The Saint sighed.

"Sorry, brother, but this is a cash business."

"You could have it first thing in the morning — before that, if you wanted it."

"Where is it coming from?" asked the Saint, with calculated scepticism. "Will you do down into the village and hold out your hat, or are you going to burgle the bank?"

"I know where I can get it. I've got to meet a man — to-night!"

"Where are you going to meet him?"

The man glared at him silently, with narrowing eyes; but Simon stuck to his point.

"Let me go and meet this man," he said slowly. "If hell pay ten thousand quid to save your life, I'll come back and see about it."

"How do I know you will?"

"You don't," Simon admitted sadly. "But you can take it from me that unless I do see this bird and his money I'm not going to do anything for you. And then the uncertainty would be so much more trying. Instead of wondering whether I was going to help you or not, you'd only be able to wonder whether you were going to be buried alive under the public bar or fed to the congers off Larkstone Point."

He kept his light focused on the ginger-haired man's blotched puffy face, and read everything that was going on in the mind behind it.

"He'll be waiting on the road to Axminster, exactly three miles from Seaton," came the reply at length. "He'll do anything to get me out. For God's sake, hurry!"

Simon doubted whether God would really be deeply concerned, but he allowed the invocation to pass unchallenged. He bent forward and replaced the gag as it had been when he came in, and switched out his light on the ginger-haired man's mutely terrified eyes.

"If they have fed you to the congers when I get back, I'll go fishing," he murmured kindly.

He left the office on this encouraging note, and let himself out into the back yard by the door at the end of the kitchen passage. The garage doors had been left open, and after a second's hesitation he began to manoeuvre his car out of its place by hand. It was a task that taxed all his strength, but he preferred the hard work to the risk of starting the engine where it might be heard by someone in the hotel. Fortunately the garage was built on a slight slope, and after a good deal of straining and perspiration he manhandled the big Hirondel into a position where he could get in behind the wheel and coast out of the yard and down the hill until it was safe to touch the self-starter. At the first corner he turned round, and sent the great purring monster droning back up the grade towards the Seaton Road. He was well on his way before he remembered that he had not even waited to tell Hoppy Uniatz where he was going.