Send for the Saint (24 page)

“I was afraid of that,” he said. “And Nobbins, I guess, will have gone with him.”

15
Colonel David Pelton inspected his fingernails, made a minute and unnecessary adjustment to the alignment of a folder on his desk, and smiled with thin-lipped satisfaction.

“All in all,” he said briskly to Simon Templar and Ruth Barnaby, “a highly successful operation.”

“I’m glad you think so,” said the Saint curtly.

“Rockham’s men at Kyleham didn’t put up much of a fight against the Paras we sent in there,” Pelton went on. “For the time being, they’ve taken the place over and they’re holding the Squad men there, rather than overcrowd the police cells for miles around.”

The Saint eyed him coldly.

“You’ve no real worries then — about the whole affair?”

Pelton shook his head.

“No. It’s a rough game we’re in. I knew that when I started in this line. My only real concern at the moment is the expense of the whole affair. Our budgeting is — well, Civil Service. And apart from all the other costs, Rockham insisted on having a very substantial down payment for the Instrood job, and incidentally in a highly unorthodox form of currency. The Ministry treasurers weren’t at all amused at having to put that sort of stake on the table. I near enough had to swear my life away to get them to play along. There’ll be hell to pay if they don’t get it back. That’s why I shall be going down to Kyleham tomorrow with a man from Chubb’s — to get into Rockham’s safe.”

There was no hint of a smile on the Saint’s dark and now clean-shaven face, and his eyes were hard chips of blue ice.

“Never mind the funding arrangements,” he said tersely. “What about Nobbins ? My guess is that instead of breaking or turning Instrood, Instrood turned him.”

Pelton sighed, and went through the unnecessary straightening motions with the folder again.

“Poor old Nobbins. I’m afraid he rather went to pieces when he discovered the truth about Instrood. We picked the pair of them up near Hounslow. Nobbins thought he was on his way to the Chinese embassy. There’s no doubt Instrood did a good job.”

“That’s what you call it?

Pelton spread his well-manicured hands half-apologetically.

“Simon — it had to be done.” He glanced at Ruth for support, and she nodded vigorously. “We can’t afford sentimentality in the service. The fact is, Nobbins had been showing certain signs of instability for some months. The weakness, if it was there, had to be brought out in the open.”

Simon laughed ironically.

“And if it wasn’t there — it had to be created.”

“Not exactly. But I agree that the technique used with him was calculated to expose — to precipitate even — a lack of dedication that may have been only latent.”

“So you started by softening him up, putting him under maximum stress. You packed him off to The Squad, and with a cover so ramshackle it was pretty well bound to have holes blown through it within weeks if not days of his arrival there.”

Pelton canted his head over at that birdlike angle, and his small dark eyes glittered.

“Nobbins was useful in the role. And it was, shall we say, not inconvenient that the job put him under a certain amount of pressure.”

“You used him as a pawn in your game with Rockham — callously and with infinite calculation,” said the Saint. He stabbed the air with an accusing forefinger. “You used him in a cold-blooded gambit. And it didn’t matter to you whether your opponent accepted it or not, because you were into a winning line of play either way. Whether he shaped up or not — you’d come out with something to the good. Rockham and his Squad were your main objective, but you could combine settling your doubts about Nobbins in the same operation.”

The Saint was warming to his subject, in so far as it was the sort of subject he could think about in terms of warming to.

“If they tumbled to Nobbins — well, in that case you were rid of a job, and the sacrifice would probably strengthen your hand, like all the best gambits, for the rest of the game. For instance, another of your pieces might well be able to operate more freely. This one.” Simon pointed to himself. “Having rooted out one infiltrator, Rockham wouldn’t be expecting a second one to be already installed. But if on the other hand they didn’t tumble to him — then he’d be collecting some mildly useful information while he was there. And all the time he was obligingly reducing himself to a jelly, to a state of full susceptibility to the next trial he had to go through — the next phase of your plan.”

“As I’ve said, he had to be tested.” Pelton shrugged.

“Or was it tempted? You know as well as I do that there’s a sensible ordinance in this country that prohibits the police from inciting a man to commit a crime in order to charge him with it. I’ve no doubt there are a hundred and one more or less subtle ways of acting the agent provocateur in that sense without technically breaking that law, but at least it helps prevent official incitement of the more blatant kinds. I’m only sorry — for Nobbins’s sake — that a similar bridle doesn’t apply here.”

Again the Saint’s forefinger stabbed out in Pelton’s direction.

“But it doesn’t,” he went on. “So you baited your double hook — Instrood, or whatever his real name is — for Rockham and for Nobbins. You assigned Nobbins to the interrogation, and you briefed Instrood to go to work on him — to play on his weaknesses in any way possible. I suppose Nobbins was made to feel he’d be more highly valued in Peking than here — especially if he’d helped their precious Instrood to get back to them.”

Pelton nodded. He gazed at Simon with quiet perceptiveness.

“Something of the sort,” he agreed. “I rather gathered from Ruth here that you’d managed to work it out for yourself. I’m most impressed, Simon, most impressed. Mind you, she herself had guessed most of it by this evening.”

“It wasn’t too difficult,” she said modestly. “When you sent Bert Nobbins into The Squad, at first I thought just what he was meant to think. I knew he’d asked for something different a few times — a more active assignment. And now something had come up, and you were giving him the chance he’d been asking for. He wanted to do it, even if he was petrified from start to finish. But then, when you gave him the job of interrogating Instrood, I began to wonder what you were up to. I knew you couldn’t really leave a genuinely important interrogation to him. But after I’d worked it out, I must say I thought you’d been extremely clever.”

Pelton favoured her with one of his thin smiles; but the Saint’s expression was stony.

“I thought it was clever, too,” he said evenly. “But the reaction it produces in me, as you’ve gathered, isn’t one of admiration. Nor do I propose to bore you with a detailed recital of the thought processes I followed in tuning myself in to your unsavoury machinations. My reasoning was probably much the same as Ruth’s anyhow, and she presents it with so much more flattery than I ever could.”

The Saint stood up, and looked hard at the two of them for what he earnestly hoped would be the last time.

“You already know,” he said, “that I’d never have agreed to get mixed up in any of this if I’d known then what I know now. But I did get myself into it, and I’ve done what you asked. And now I’m going away to wash the nasty taste out of my mouth. As you said — it’s a rough game, Pelton. And I’m used to rough games. But your kind of rough game isn’t mine. I’m too sorry for the losers, the exploited — the little men, the cheated and chiselled of the world. Men like Nobbins.”

He paused, with his hand on the doorknob; and because he had reached the end of that episode in his life, and was about to return thankfully to being wholly his own man again, something of the old light had already begun to come back into his dark buccaneering face. There was a parting shot he couldn’t resist.

“There are many words, Pelton,” he said quietly, “for what you are. But let me put it this way. You and your job may have been made for each other, but there’s another vocation which I’m afraid you’ve missed. You would have been very good on the land … if only they’d thought up a way of spreading you!”

And the Saint shut the door and went out into the cool London night.

For a time, which may have been ten minutes or twenty or thirty, he wandered by the Thames, along the embankment near Westminster Bridge, gazing at the sluggish current of the dark waters which symbolised for him bitter adventure that would soon be only a memory like all the others. That was a consolation. There were few of those adventures that he regretted, but this was one; and the sooner it became a distant recollection, the better.

But there were other consolations, too; and a little more of that light came back into his face and into his mind, pushing aside the dark clouds that had formed there, when he thought of the return trip he would make to Kyleham that night. There was a girl there, he remembered, with summer in her hair and autumn in her eyes, and who drove a tractor with a zest that spoke volumes about her in itself, who had probably never even dreamed that such a dirty tricks department as Pelton’s even existed.

But before looking her up, as he had promised, he still had his way over the wall of Rockham’s former camp; and he felt reasonably confident that he could get into Kyleham House, and open Rockham’s safe, and close it again, and get back out of the grounds, leaving no evidence of his return, long before Pelton got there with his man from Chubbs.