The Saint Closes the Case (4 page)

“From battle, murder, and sudden death,
Good Lord, deliver us!’ ” he quoted once. “How can any live man ask
for that? Why, they’re meat and drink—they’re the things that
make life
worth living!
Into
battle, murder, and sudden death,
Good Lord,
deliver me up to the neck! That’s what I
say… .”

Thus spoke the Saint, that man of superb
recklessness and
strange heroisms and impossible ideals; and went on to
show,
as few others of his age have shown, that a man inspired can
swashbuckle
as well with cloak and stick as any cavalier of
history with cloak and
sword, that there can be as much chiv
alry in the setting of a modern laugh
as there can ever have
been in the setting of a medieval lance, that
a true valour and
venture finds its way to fulfilment, not so much through
the
kind of world into which it happens to be born, as through
the heart
with which it lives.

But even he could never have guessed into what
a strange
story this genius and this faith of his were to bring
him.

On what he had chanced to read, and what
Barney Malone
had told him, the Saint built in his mind a tower of
possibili
ties whose magnitude, when it was completed, awed even
himself. And then, because he had the priceless gift of taking the
products of
his vivid imagination at their practical worth, he
filed the fancy away
in his mind as an interesting curiosity,
and thought no more
about it.

Too much sanity is sometimes dangerous.

Simon Templar was self-conscious about his
imagination.
It was the one kind of self-consciousness he had, and certainly
he kept it a secret which no one would have suspected. Those
who knew
him said that he was reckless to the point of vain
bravado; but they
were never more mistaken. If he had chosen to argue the point, he would have
said that his style was, if
anything, cramped by too much caution.

But in this case caution was swept away, and
imagination
triumphantly vindicated, by the second coincidence.

This came three days later, when the Saint
awoke one morn
ing to find that the showery weather which had hung over
England
for a week had given place to cloudless blue skies and
brilliant sunshine. He
hung out of his bedroom window and
sniffed the air suspiciously, but he
could smell no rain. Forth
with he decided that the business of annoying
criminals could be pardonably neglected while he took out his car and relaxed
in the
country.

“Darling Pat,” said the Saint,
“it’d be a crime to waste a
day like this!”

“Darling Simon,” wailed Patricia
Holm, “you know we’d
promised to have dinner with the
Hannassays.”

“Very darling Pat,” said the Saint,
“won’t they be disappointed to hear that we’ve both been suddenly taken
ill after
last
night’s binge?”

So they went, and the Saint enjoyed his
holiday with the comfortable conviction that he had earned it.

They eventually dined at Cobham, and
afterwards sat for a
long time over cigarettes and coffee and
matters of intimate moment which have no place here. It was eleven o’clock when
the Saint set the long nose of his Furillac on the homeward
road.

Patricia was happily tired; but the Saint
drove very well
with one hand.

It was when they were still rather more than
a mile from
Esher that the Saint saw the light, and thoughtfully
braked
the car to a standstill.

Simon Templar was cursed, or blessed, with an
insatiable
inquisitiveness. If ever he saw anything that trespassed
by half an inch over the boundaries of the purely normal and commonplace, he
was immediately fired with the desire to find out
the reason for such
erratic behaviour. And it must be admit
ted that the light had
been no ordinary light.

The average man would undoubtedly have driven
on some
what puzzledly, would have been haunted for a few days by a
vague and
irritating perplexity, and would eventually have forgotten the incident
altogether. Simon Templar has since
considered, in all sober earnestness,
what might have been
the consequences of his being an average man
at that moment,
and has stopped appalled at the vista of horrors opened up
by
the thought.

But Simon Templar was not an average man, and
the gift
of minding his own business had been left out of his
make-up.
He slipped into reverse and sent the car gently back a
matter
of thirty yards to the end of a lane which opened off the main
road.

A little way down this lane, between the
trees, the silhouette
of a gabled house loomed blackly against the
star-powdered
sky, and it was in an upper window of this house that the
Saint
had seen the
light as he passed. Now he skilfully lighted a ciga
rette with one hand, and stared down the lane. The light was
still there. The Saint contemplated it in silence,
immobile as a
watching Indian, till a
fair, sleepy head roused on his shoul
der.

“What is it?” asked Patricia.

“That’s what I’d like to know,”
answered the Saint, and
pointed with the glowing end of his
cigarette.

The blinds were drawn over that upper window,
but the
light could be clearly seen behind them—a light of astound
ing
brilliance, a blindingly white light that came and went in regular, rhythmic
flashes like intermittent flickers of lightning.

The night was as still as a dream, and at
that moment there
was
no other traffic on that stretch of road. The Saint reached
forward and switched off the engine of the
Furillac. Then he
listened—and the
Saint had ears of abnormal sensitiveness—
in a quiet so unbroken that he could hear the rustle of the
girl’s sleeve as she moved her arm.

But the quiet was not silence—it was simply
the absence of
any isolated noise. There was sound—a sound so faint and
soothing that it was no more than a neutral background to a
silence. It
might have been a soft humming, but it was so soft
that it might have
been no more than a dim vibration carried
on the air.

“A dynamo,” said the Saint; and as
he spoke he opened the
door of the car and stepped out into the
road.

Patricia caught his hand.

“Where are you going, Saint?”

Simon’s teeth showed white in the Saintly
smile.

“I’m going to investigate. A perfectly
ordinary citizen might
be running a dynamo to manufacture his own
electric light— although this dynamo sounds a lot heavier than the breed you
usually find in home power plants. But I’m sure no perfectly
ordinary
citizen uses his dynamo to make electric sparks that
size to amuse the
children. Life has been rather tame lately, and one never knows… .”

“I’ll come with you.”

The Saint grimaced.
  
•

Patricia Holm, he used to say, had given him
two white
hairs for every day he had known her. Even since a
memorable
day in Devonshire, when he had first met her, and the
hectic days which followed, when she had joined him in the hunting
of the man
who was called the Tiger, the Saint had been forc
ing himself to realise
that to try and keep the girl out of trou
ble was a hopeless task. By this time he
was getting resigned to
her. She was a law
unto herself. She was of a mettle so utterly
different to that of any girl he had ever dreamed of, a mettle
so much finer and fiercer, that if she had not been
so paradox
ically feminine with it he
would have sworn that she ought
to
have been a man. She was—well, she was Patricia Holm,
and that was that… .

“O.K., kid,” said the Saint helplessly.

But already she was standing beside him. With
a shrug, the Saint climbed back into his seat and moved the car on half a
dozen yards
so that the lights could not be seen from the
house. Then he
rejoined her at the corner of the lane.

They went down the lane together.

The house stood in a hedged garden thickly
grown with
trees. The Saint, searching warily, found the alarm on
the gate,
and disconnected it with an expert hand before he lifted
the
latch and let Patricia through to the lawn. From there, looking
upwards,
they could see that queer, bleak light still glimmer
ing behind the blinds
of the upper window.

The front of the house was in darkness, and
the ground-floor
windows closed and apparently secured. The Saint wasted no
time on those, for he was without the necessary instrument to force the catch
of a window, and he knew that front doors are
invariably solid.
Back doors, on the other hand, he knew
equally well, are
often vulnerable, for the intelligent foresight
of the honest
householder frequently stops short of grasping
the fact that the
best-class burglar may on occasion stoop to
using the servants’
entrance. The Saint accordingly edged
round the side of the house, Patricia
following him.

They walked over grass, still damp and spongy
from the rain
that had deluged the country for the past six days. The
hum
ming of the dynamo was now unmistakable, and with it could
be heard
the thrum and whir of the motor that drove it. The
noise seemed, at one
point, to come from beneath their feet.

Then they rounded the second corner, and the
Saint halted
so abruptly that Patricia found herself two paces ahead
of
him.

“This is fun!” whispered the Saint.

And yet by daylight it would have been a
perfectly ordinary
sight. Many country houses possess greenhouses, and it is
even
conceivable that an enthusiastic horticulturist might have at
tached to
his house a greenhouse some twenty-five yards long,
and high enough to
give a tall man some four feet of head
room.

But such a greenhouse brightly lighted up at
half-past
eleven at night is no ordinary spectacle. And the
phenomenon
becomes even more extraordinary—to an inquisitive mind
like the
Saint’s—when the species of vegetable matter for
which such an
excellent illumination is provided is screened
from the eyes of the
outside world by dark curtains closely
drawn under the
glass.

Simon Templar needed no encouragement to probe
further
into the mystery, and the girl was beside him when he stepped
stealthily
to a two-inch gap in the curtains.

A moment later he found Patricia Holm gripping
his arm
with hands that trembled ever so slightly.

The interior of the greenhouse was bare of
pots and plants;
for four-fifths of its length it was bare of anything at
all. There
was a rough concrete floor, and the concrete extended up
the
sides of the greenhouse for about three feet, thus forming a kind of
trough. And at one end of the trough there was teth
ered a goat.

At the other end of the building, on a kind of
staging set on
short concrete pillars, stood four men.

The Saint took them in at a glance. Three of
them stood in a
little group—a fat little man with a bald head and horn-
rimmed
spectacles, a tall, thin man of about forty-five with a
high,
narrow forehead and iron-grey hair, and a youngish man
with pince-nez and a
notebook. The fourth man stood a little
apart from them, in
front of a complicated switchboard, on which glowed here and there little bulbs
like the valves used
in wireless telegraphy. He was of middle
height, and his age
might have been anything from sixty to eighty. His hair
was
snow-white, and his clothes were shapeless and stained and
shabby.

But it was on nothing human or animal in the
place that
the Saint’s gaze concentrated after that first swift
survey.