Send for the Saint (13 page)

And now Randall was dead.

It never even occurred to the Saint that he still had a choice. Almost mechanically, he repeated that the amount of the proffered fee was irrelevant, but said that he would take the job.

Only afterwards was it fully borne in upon him how skilfully Pelton had played the news of Randall’s death, like a high trump kept till the last card. He must have known enough about the kind of man Simon Templar was, and about his likely reactions, to be fairly doubtful of enlisting his aid, so he had saved his biggest gun for the moment when its effect would be most immediately and hopefully decisive.

This said something for Pelton’s strategic talents — which duly went up a couple of notches in the Saint’s estimation — but it also bespoke a degree of coldblooded calculation which cast doubt on his more sympathetic facade, which duly went down the same scale by a similar amount.

But that was after Simon had had a chance, later, to sit down and think about it soberly. At the time, he was carried along in the bitter wake of that final news of Randall. His concentration, once the initial shock had passed, was focused with a grim intensity on one thing and one thing only: the business of getting to grips with The Squad at once or if possible sooner. The Saint was spoiling for a fight, and he was in no mood to wait.

On that score as well as from his healthy aversion to being wrapped up in iron bars and concrete, he was about as far from overjoyed as it is possible to be when Pelton told him that his cover as George Gascott would take an absolute minimum of four weeks to establish, and that he would have to spend three of them in jail.

Patience had never been one of Simon Templar’s outstanding virtues. He was inclined to be impatient in particular with the way things are done in official, as opposed to privateering circles. It often seemed to him, setting aside exaggeration and trying to look at the matter with scrupulous objectivity, that the processes whereby officialdom ground out its slow results were mostly characterised by a degree of lead-footedness beside which a palsied geriatric snail battling through thick treacle against a strong headwind would have seemed to be positively zipping along.

Which is merely one way of pointing out that if The Squad had been purely the Saint’s own party, and Rockham’s base a private target for his own brand of freebooting vengeance, he would probably have figured out another way of setting about it.

However, given the central principle of an infiltrator, he had to admit that Pelton’s cover idea was a good one. And he had to agree, too, that a month was the least possible time it could take him to perfect himself in the role he had to play.

Nobody applied to join The Squad: Rockham selected. And the evidence was that anyone who got as far as a final interview and was then rejected, or turned the job down, found it extraordinary difficult to talk about it, on account of being dead.

Presumably Rockham made good use of certain official documents which were easily enough available to anyone who knew of their existence and only took the trouble to get hold of them. For a start, he would certainly study the periodic lists of newly released convicts and of dishonourable service discharges.

And presumably, too, he had access like the Saint to some of the shifting subterranean networks which carry information of a less official and more guarded kind. Doubtless he would usually come to hear of it before long when a potentially suitable man was, criminally speaking, at a loose end …

Anyhow, whatever his sources, Rockham managed to find a hunting ground of potential recruits. Within it he then applied his own rigorous standards of selection. Physical fitness and courage were not enough; and he only took men who gave evidence of having already developed the prime mercenary qualities — tough ruthlessness and unscrupulous venality — to an advanced level.

George Gascott matched up to the prescription very well. To be irresistible to Rockham, all the Saint had to do was step into Gascott’s identity.

Now in his late thirties, as a younger man George Gascott had held the King’s Commission in the Commandos for several years; until His Majesty decided, or someone decided on His Majesty’s behalf, that in spite of Captain Gascott’s undeniable military efficiency, the commission could be terminated with advantage to His Majesty, the Royal Marines, and the tax-paying public. Some of the latter’s money — by an ingenious and complicated inventory fraud involving non-existent equipment — had almost certainly found its way into the suave Gascott’s pockets. Though the fraud was technically unprovable, fortunately for His Majesty et al a fight in which Gascott half-killed a fellow officer supplied a good enough reason for a parting of the ways.

After that, Gascott had spent a few years in the far east, and the records made it clear that nobody knew what he had done during the war or when exactly he had re-entered Britain. But Simon remembered how a big Hatton Garden robbery had hit the news three years ago, and how the grapevine in those days had named Gascott as masterminding it.

And if Gascott hadn’t had the sheer bad luck to be picked on for a random customs search at Dover, he would have got clean away with the P,000-worth of diamonds they found on him. That was a quarter of the Hatton Garden haul, and he steadfastly refused to say what had happened to the rest.

He was sent down for ten years: the robbery, as the judge remarked, had been one of the most brutal and bloody as well as one of the most lucrative of recent years. But they never got Gascott as far as the prison gates. Somehow, almost miraculously, he escaped from the Black Maria in which they were taking him there; and this time he did get out of the country. No one knew how much of the remaining boodle he took with him.

Rockham would certainly approve of Comrade Gascott, the Saint felt sure of that. Except maybe for the one flaw which rather marred the glory of his escape.

He had been recaptured.

That few of Scotland Yard’s representatives are over-gifted with imagination is a fact which this dutiful chronicler has sometimes been obliged to record, however painful it may have been to himself. However, what they may lack in vision they amply make up for in doggedness; and recently their low-key but persistent search for Gascott had paid off. They had found him in Rio de Janeiro: he had been extradited, and now he was somewhere on the Atlantic Ocean, on his way back. He was sharing a cabin with three of the said dogged representatives, and it is a matter of record that they were watching him very closely indeed.

His arrival at Tilbury, a week after Pelton’s meeting with the Saint, brought a predictable splash of front-page newspaper coverage, including photographs of the man who was on his way to Brixton to serve the sentence he should have begun three years before. But for some reason the mug-shots which the authorities saw fit to release were of a photographic quality rivalling the results of Aunt Mabel’s efforts with a box camera on a misty evening.

Pelton had quietly gone aboard with the pilot; and when Gascott disembarked three hours later any direct contact with the aggrieved gentlemen of the press was precluded by his posture and his condition, which were respectively horizontal and delirious.

The fuzzy photographs were of Simon Templar, complete with new hairstyle and hastily grown moustache; and the fuzziness was a necessary precaution against the potential puzzled squawking of any of Gascott’s friends, relatives, or victims who might have detected the substitution — or for that matter of any zealous newspaperman or policeman who wasn’t privy to Pelton’s plan.

The reports accompanying the fuzzy photos gave lurid details of his exploits and ascribed his horizontally and delirium to a violent bout of malaria, a recurring legacy of his time in Malaya. Accordingly, the reports continued, he would not be going straight to Brixton but would be “kept under observation” for a few days in another prison hospital.

Actually he was taken to one of Pelton’s “safe houses”, and Simon Templar was taken there too.

“There’s more than a remote chance,” Pelton dryly pointed out, “that once you get into The Squad — assuming you do — you’ll meet someone who’s known Gascott, at some time. If your cover’s going to stand up to that kind of test, you’ll need to be equipped to give a pretty convincing impersonation.”

And the Saint knew that Pelton was right. It didn’t have to be perfect — anyone Simon was likely to run into who had known Gascott before would probably not have seen him for several years — but it had to be pretty good.

That was why he met the real George Gascott and spent three days almost constantly in his company. They talked about anything that might help him to get an insight into Gascott’s character; which meant that they talked about almost anything under the sun, but in particular about his military experience and his shadier contacts. And all the time throughout those three days, Simon was also studying, consciously and osmotically, Gascott’s distinctive voice and smoothly arrogant manner.

He couldn’t find much to like in Gascott. There was just one saving grace as far as the Saint was concerned: Gascott was not without humour; and at times, when just for a while the sadistic edge was missing, it was a humour something like the Saint’s own. For which he was grateful, because it would make the part just that bit less onerous to keep up.

In the three days he got everything he usefully could have got out of personal contact; and then there was no need to extend that contact any longer. He took his leave of Gascott with considerable relief, and went away with a sheaf of notes which promised to keep him well occupied in his prison cell.

When he entered that cell for the first time, on the following day, the real George Gascott remained in relatively comfortable lodgings at the safe house, well guarded but consoled by the promise that in return for his cooperation, when he was eventually transferred to an ordinary prison, his very first application for parole would be granted.

It had been no sweat for Pelton, talking Gascott into it. Once he had got over an understandable initial suspicion, Gascott had agreed at once. It meant that his aborted escape would not be held against him, and complete freedom would be brought very close; and in return all he had to do was agree to the loan of his identity for an undisclosed purpose. That was the bargain. And Gascott was more than content with it.

Simon Templar, on the other hand, was soon feeling every bit as restless and discontented as he had known he would. Prison life did not agree with him. He hated the routine, he hated the meals, and most of all he hated being cooped up.

True, he was rather a special prisoner. The needs of his mission dictated a semi-solitary confinement. Though he ate with the others, he took his exercise sessions alone in the concrete prison quadrangle — or alone except for the four armed warders — and was otherwise kept very much to his small single cell. Gascott’s record, fortunately, made these arrangements seem plausible enough to avoid raising suspicion among any of the fellow inmates.

The move of the supposed “Gascott” to Brixton from the unnamed hospital where he had recovered from his bout of malaria had not gone unreported; and even though at that period no system of morning deliveries of the newspapers to those detained at His Majesty’s pleasure had yet been implemented, still the word sped around, and there was scarcely a man in the prison on the day after his arrival who didn’t know that the tall newcomer with something of the look of a pirate or gypsy about him was George Gascott.

Only he wasn’t.

Simon Templar had to admit that the physical discomfort he was enduring in Gascott’s stead was less than extreme. The food was an affront to his educated palate, but doubtless it supplied an adequate minimum of sustenance and was a whole lot better than bread-and-water rations would have been. And the cell was hardly a dank dark dungeon reminiscent of the Bastille; it was a light painted room, simple and functional, with a narrow bed, a table, and a chair — all solidly made and bolted firmly to the floor. And there was a washbasin, with cold water. The conditions were plain and spartan rather than punitive in themselves.

But the loss of liberty: that was real enough to the Saint, and there were times when he paced back and forth in his cell like a caged panther, and times when he found himself gazing up through the high barred window for long minutes at the rectangular patch of sky beyond, now blue, now grey, now star-scattered. And then he thought of the men in prisons the world over, the generations of the incarcerated, many of them with little or no prospect of ever being released, for whom that tantalising rectangle of barred sky must have stood as the ever-present symbol of both despair and hope through seemingly interminable years. Educationally, it was quite an experience.

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.