The Saint Closes the Case (23 page)

Then Teal went out into the hall; and Roger
could have
cried his relief aloud.

But he could not cry out—hot even to warn
Norman. That
would be no use against Teal, as it would have been of
use
against Hermann. Norman had got to walk into the snare—
and might
all the Saint’s strange gods inspire him as they
would have inspired
the Saint himself… .

Teal opened the front door. And he kept his
right hand
in his coat pocket.

Norman hesitated only the fraction of a
second.

Afterwards, Norman said that the words came to
his lips
without any conscious thought, as if a guardian angel had
put
them unbidden into his mouth.

“Are you Mr. Templar?” asked Norman
Kent.

And, as he heard the words that he had not
known he was
going to speak, he stood appalled at the colossal
simplicity and colossal daring of the ruse.

“No, I’m not,” said Teal curtly.

“Is Mr. Templar in?”

“Not at the moment.”

“Well, is there anything you could do?
I’ve never met Mr.
Templar; but I’ve just had an extraordinary message, and I
thought, before I went to the police——
”

The word pricked Teal’s ears.

“Maybe I can do something for you,”
he said, more
cordially.
“Will you come in?”

“Certainly,” said Norman.

Teal stood aside to let him pass, and turned
to fasten the
door again.

Hanging on the walls of the hall were a number
of curious weapons, relics of the Saint’s young lifetime of wandering in queer
corners of the globe. There were Spanish knives, and a
matador’s sword;
muskets and old-fashioned pistols; South Sea
Island spears, Malay
krises and krambits and parangs; a scim
itar, a boomerang
from New Zealand, an Iroquois bow, an
assegai, a bamboo blow-pipe from
Papua; and other things of
the same kind.

Norman Kent’s eye fell on a knobkerry. It
hung very con
veniently to his hand.

He took it down.

12. How Simon Templar parted with Anna,

and took Patricia in his arms

To attempt to locate, in a strange part of
the country and on
a dark night, a house distinguished by nothing but the
fact
of being situated on “the” hill—particularly in a district
where hills
are no more than slight undulations—might well
have been considered a
hopeless task even by the most op
timistic man. As he began to judge
himself near the village,
the Saint realised that.

But even before he could feel despair, if he
would have
felt despair, his hurtling headlights picked up the figure
of a
belated rustic plodding down the road ahead. The Saint, no
stranger
to country life, and familiar with its habit of retiring
to bed as
soon as the village pub has ejected it at ten o’clock, knew that this gift
could only have been an angel in corduroys,
sent direct from
heaven. The Saint’s gods were surely with him
that night.

“Do you know the house on the hill?”
demanded Simon
brazenly.
     

“Ay, that Oi doo!”

Then the Saint understood that in the English
country dis
tricts all things are possible, and the natives may
easily con
sider “the house on the hill” a full and
sufficient address, just
as a townsman may be satisfied with “the
pub around the
corner.”

“Throo the village, tourrn round boi the
church, an’ keep
straight as ever you can goo for ‘arf a moile. You can’t
miss
ut.” So the hayseed declared; and the Saint sped on. But he
ran the
car into a side turning near the crest of the hill, parked
it with
lights out, and continued on foot. He might be ex
pected, but he wasn’t
advertising his arrival unnecessarily.

He had been prepared to break into and shoot
up every
single house in the district to which the description
“on the hill” might possibly have applied, until he came to the right
one. But he had been saved that; and it remained to capitalise
the godsend.

The gun in his pocket bumped his hip as he
walked; and
in the little sheath on his forearm he could feel the
slight but
reassuring weight of Anna, queen of knives, earned with
blood
and christened with blood. She was no halfling’s toy. In blood
she came,
and in blood that night she was to go.

But this the Saint could not know, whatever
presentiments
he may have had, as he stealthily skirted the impenetrable
blackthorn hedge that walled in the grounds of the house
he had come
to raid. The hedge came higher than his head;
and impenetrable it
was, except for the one gap where the
gate was set, as he
learned by
making a complete circuit. But,
standing back, he could see the upper part of
the house looming over it, a black bulk against the dark sky; and in the upper
story a single window was lighted up. He could see nothing
of the
ground floor from behind the hedge, so that he had no
way of knowing what
there might be on three sides of it; but
in the front he could
see at least one room alight. Standing
still, listening with
all the keyed acuteness of his ears, he could pick up no sound from the house.

Then that lighted upper window gave him an
idea.

On the face of it, one single lighted upper
window could
only mean one thing—unless it were a trap. But if it were
a
trap, it was such a subtle one that the Saint couldn’t see it.

What he did see, with a crushing force of
logic, was that the
garrison of a fortified house, expecting an attempt to
rescue
their prisoner, would be likely to put her as far away from the
attacker’s
reach as possible. Prisoners are usually treated like
that, almost
instinctively, being ordinarily confined in attics
or cellars even when
no attempt at rescue is expected. And a country house of that type would be
unlikely to have a cellar
large enough to confine a prisoner whose value
would drop to
zero if asphyxiated. Patricia could surely be in but one
place —and that lighted window seemed to indicate it as plainly as
if the
fact had been labelled on the walls outside in two-foot
Mazda letters.

The Saint could not know that this was the
simple truth— that the same fortune that had watched over him all through
the adventure
had engineered that breakdown on the long-
distance wire to
prevent Marius communicating with the house
on the hill. But he
guessed and accepted it (except for the
breakdown) with a
force of conviction that nothing could have
strengthened. And he
knew, quite definitely, without any re
course to deduction
or guesswork, that Marius by that time
must be less than ten
minutes behind him. His purpose must
be achieved quickly if it were to be
achieved at all.

For a moment the Saint hesitated, standing in
a field on
the wrong side of the blackthorn hedge. Then he bent and
searched
the ground for some small stones. He wanted very
small stones, for
they must not make too much noise. He found three that satisfied his
requirements.

Then he wrote, by the light of a match cupped
cautiously
in one hand, on a scrap of paper he found in his pocket:

I’m here, Pat darling. Throw Anna back over
the hedge and
then start a disturbance to divide their
attention. I’ll be right
in.
—S
IMON
.

He tied the scrap to the handle of Anna with
a strip of silk ripped from his shirt, and straightened up.

Gently and accurately he lobbed up two stones,
and heard
each of them tap the lighted pane. Then he waited.

Now, if there were no response—suppose Pat had
been tied
up, or was doped, or anything like that… . The thought
made his muscles tighten up so that he felt them quivering all
over his
body like a mass of braced steel hawsers… . He’d
have to wade in
without the help of the distracting disturbance,
of course… . But
that wasn’t the thought that made his
pulse beat quicker and his mouth
narrow down into a line that
hardly smiled at all. It was the thought of
Patricia herself—
the
thought of all that might have happened to her, that might
be happening… .

“By God!” thought the Saint, with an ache in his heart,
“if
any of their filthy hands…”

But he wanted to see her once more before he
went into
the fight that he was sure was jeopardised against him.
In case
of accidents. Just to see her blessed face once more, to take
the memory
of it as a banner with him in to the battle… .

Then he held his breath.

Slowly the sash of the window was being raised, with in
finite precautions against noise. And the Saint
saw, at the
same time, that what he had taken, in silhouette, to be
leaded
panes, were, in fact, the shadows of
network of closely set bars.

Then he saw her.

She looked out, down into the garden below,
and along the
side of the house, puzzledly. He saw the faltered
parting of the
red lips, the disordered gold of her hair, the brave
light in the
blue eyes.
…

Then he balanced Anna in his hand and sent her flickering through
the dark. The knife fell point home, quivering in the
wooden sill beside the girl’s hand.

He saw Patricia start, and stare at it with a
wild surmise.
Then she snatched it out of the wood and disappeared
into the
room.

Half a minute ticked away whilst the Saint
waited with a
tingling impatience, fearing at any moment to hear a car,
which could only belong to one man, come purring up the
hill. But,
fearfully as he strained his ears, he found the stillness
of the
night unbroken.

And at last he saw the girl again. Saw her
hand come
through the bars, and watched Anna swooping back towards
him like a scrap
stripped from a moonbeam… .

He found the little knife, after some
difficulty, in a clump
of long grass. His slip of paper was still
tied to the handle, but
when he unrolled it he found fresh words
pencilled on the
other side.

Eight men here. God bless you, darling.
—P
AT.

The Saint stuffed the paper into his pocket
and slid Anna
back into her sheath.

“God bless us both, Pat, you wonderful,
wonderful child!”
he whispered to the stillness of the night;
and, looking up
again, he saw her still at the window, straining her eyes
to find him.

He waved his handkerchief for her to see, and
she
waved back. Then the window closed again. But she had
smiled. He
had seen her. And the ache in his heart became a
song… .

He was wasting no more time looking for a way
through the
hedge. His first survey had already shown that it was
planted
and trained as an effective palisade. But there was always the
gate.

On the road. A perfectly ordinary gate.

That, of course, was the way they would expect
him to come.

Pity to disappoint them!

He hardly spared the gate a glance. It was
probably elec
trified. It was almost certainly wired with alarms. And
it was covered by a rifleman somewhere, for a fiver. But it remained
the only
visible way in.

The Saint took a short run and leapt it
cleanly.

Beyond was the gravel of the drive, but he
only touched that with one foot. As he landed on that one foot, he squirmed
aside
and leapt again—to the silent footing of the lawn and the covering
shadow of a convenient shrub. He stooped there, thumb
ing back the
safety-catch of the automatic he had drawn, and wondering why no one had fired
at him.