The Saint in London: Originally Entitled the Misfortunes of Mr. Teal (25 page)

“I’m terribly sorry,” said the aviator, “but I’m afraid I’ve had a forced landing in your grounds.”

Renway looked at him for a moment. He had a dangerous devil-may-care sort of mouth, which showed very white teeth when he smiled. Enrique had had a smile very much like that.

“So I see,” said Renway and returned to his study of rosebuds.

His voice was an epitome of all the mincing rudeness which the English lower classes have been so successfully trained to regard as a symbol of superiority. The Saint would have liked to hit him with a spanner; but he restrained himself.

“I’m terribly sorry,” he repeated. “My oil pressure started to drop rather quickly, and I had to come down where I could. I don’t think I’ve done any damage. If you can direct me to the village, I’ll arrange to get the machine moved as quickly as possible.”

“One of the servants will show you the way.”’

Renway looked up with his complacent squint and glanced at the gardener, who put away his pruning knife and dusted his hands.

“It’s very good of you,” said the Saint; and then an unfortunate accident happened.

He was carrying a valise in one hand, which he had taken out of the machine and brought with him. It could not have been very securely fastened, for at that moment it fell open.

A cascade of shirts, socks, pyjamas, shaving tackle, and similar impedimenta might not have distracted Renway for more than a couple of seconds from his horticultural absorption; but nothing of the kind fell out. Instead, the valise emptied itself of a heavy load of small square tins such as cough lozenges are sold in. The tins did, in fact, carry printed labels proclaiming their contents to be cough lozenges; but one of them burst open in its fall and scattered a small snowfall of white powder over the path.

Simon dropped on his knees and shoveled the tins back with rather unsteady hands, forcing them into the attache case with more haste than efficiency. He scraped the white powder clumsily back into the one which had burst open; and when Renway touched him on the shoulder he jumped.

“Pardon my curiosity,” said Renway, with unexpected suaveness, “but you have the most unusual luggage.”

Simon laughed somewhat shortly.

“Yes, I suppose it is. I’m the Continental traveller for—er—some patent-medicine manufacturers––”

“I see.”

Renway looked back at the aeroplane again; and again his hands tensed involuntarily at his sides. And then, once more, he looked at the Saint. Simon forced the last tin into his case, crammed the locks together, and straightened up.

“I’m awfully sorry to give you so much trouble,” he said.

“Not at all.” Renway’s voice was dry, unnatural. He was aghast at himself, sweating coldly under the arms at the realization of what he was doing; but he spoke without any conscious volition. The jangling of his nerves forced him on, provided the motive power for the fantastic inspiration which had seized him. “In fact, my chauffeur can drive into Folkestone himself and make the necessary arrangements, while you stay here. You can give him instructions; and it’s sure to mean a good deal of waiting about. I surrpose the authorities will have to be notified …”

He was watching the pilot closely when he uttered that last sentence, although the cast in his eye made him appear to be staring past him; and he did not miss the slight instantaneous tightening of the dangerous mouth.

“Oh, I couldn’t possibly let you do that,” Simon protested. “I’ve given you quite enough trouble as it is–—”

“Not a bit of it,” insisted Renway, still watching him.

He was quite sure now. The pilot stiffened almost imperceptibly—Renway saw the shift off his eyes and the whitening of his knuckles on the hand which clutched the valise, and went on with more pronounced assurance: “It’s no trouble at all to me, and my chauffeur has far too little to do. Besides, that landing must have given you one or two bad moments; and I’m sure you wouldn’t refuse a drink. Come along up to the house, my dear fellow, and let me “see what I can find for you.”

He took the Saint’s arm and led him away with a grim cordiality which it would have been difficult to resist–even if Simon had wanted to. They went through a small rockery up to the tennis lawn, across the lawn to a paved terrace, through open French windows into a rather stuffy library.

“Will you have a cigarette—or is it too early for a cigar?”

Simon took a cigarette and lighted it while Renway rang the bell.

“Sit down, Mr.—er––”

“Tombs.”

“Sit down, Mr. Tombs.”

The Saint sat on the edge of a plush armchair and smoked in silence until the butler answered the bell. Renway ordered drinks, and the butler went out again. The silence went on. Renway went over to a window and stood there, humming unmusically to himself.

“Awkward thing to have happen to you,” ventured the Saint.

Renway half turned his head.

“I beg your pardon?”

“I said, it’s an awkward thing to have happened to you—oil pressure going down.”

“Quite,” said Renway and went on humming.

The butler came in with a tray, put it down, and departed. Renway crossed over to it and poured whisky into two glasses.

“Soda?”

“Thanks.”

Renway worked the siphon and handed over the drink. Then he took up his own glass; and abruptly, as if he were blurting out something which he had been mustering his determination to say for several minutes, he snapped: “I suppose you don’t think I believe that story of yours about being a patent-medicine salesman?”

“Don’t you?” said the Saint evasively.

“Of course not. I know cocaine when I see it.”

Simon, who had carefully rilled all his tins with boracic, wanted to smile. But he glanced apprehensively at the valise, which he had put down beside his chair, and then hardened his face into an ineffective mask.

“But don’t worry,” said Renway. “I’m not going to tell the police. It’s none of my business. I’m only wondering why a fellow like you—clever, daring, a good pilot—why you should waste your time over small stuff like that.”

Simon licked his lips.

“It isn’t so very small. And what else is there for me to do? There aren’t so many jobs going these days for an out-of-work ace. You know yourself that war heroes are two a penny nowadays. I’m desperate enough to take the risk; and I want the money.”

“You’ll never make a million out of it.”

“If you know anything that I can make a million out of, I’ll do it.” .

Renway swallowed another gulp of whisky and put down his glass. In the last few moments the jangling of his nerves seemed to have risen to a pitch at which anything might crack. And yet it was without the tense wearing raggedness that he had felt before—he had a crazy breathless presentiment of success, waiting for him to grasp if he risked the movement. It had come miraculously, incredibly, literally out of the blue; and it was all personified in the broad-shouldered blue-eyed shape of the dangerous young man whose leather coat filled his armchair. Renway wiped his mouth on a silk handkerchief and tucked it away.

“Tomorrow morning,” he said, “an aeroplane will leave Croydon for Paris with about ten tons of gold on board—as a matter of fact, the value will be exactly three million pounds. It is going to be shot down over the Channel, and the gold is going to be stolen. If you were desperate enough, you would be the man to do it.”

VII

Simon Templar did not need to act. The peculiar stillness that settled over him called for no simulation. It was as starkly genuine as any expression his face had ever worn.

And far back in the dim detached recesses of consciousness he was bowing down before the ever-lasting generosity of fortune. He had taken that wide sweep out over the sea and choked his engine over the cliffs at the southern boundary of March House, staged his whole subsequent demonstration of guilt and truculence, rolled the dice down the board from beginning to end with nothing more substantial behind the play than a vast open-minded optimism; but the little he knew and the little he had guessed, the entire nebulous theory which had given him the idea of establishing himself as a disreputable airman, was revealed to be so grotesquely inadequate that he was temporarily speechless. His puerile stratagem ought to have gained him nothing more than a glimpse of March House from the inside and a quick passage to the nearest police station; instead of which, it had flung doors wide open into something which even now he could scarcely believe in cold blood.

“It couldn’t be done,” he said at length.

“It can be done by a few men with the courage to take big chances for a share in three million pounds,” said Renway. “I have all the necessary information. I have everything organized. The only thing I need to make it certain is the perfect pilot.”

Simon tapped his cigarette.

“I should have thought that was the first thing.”

“It was the first thing.” Renway drank again. He was speaking with more steadiness now, with a conviction that was strengthening through every sentence; his faded stare weaved endlessly over the Saint’s face, changing from one eye to the other. “I had the ideal man; but he—met with an accident. There wasn’t time to find anyone else. I was going to try it myself, but I’m not an expert pilot. I have no fighting experience. I might have bungled it. You wouldn’t.”

Meeting the gaze of those unequally staring eyes, Simon had an eerie intuition that Renway was mad. He had to make a deliberate effort to separate a part of his mind from that precogni-tion while he pieced his scanty facts together again in the light of what Renway had said.

There had been a pilot. That would have been( Manuel Enrique, who died on the Brighton road. A new pilot swooped down out of the sky, and within twenty minutes was being offered the vacant post. With all due deference to the gods of luck, it seemed as if that new aviator were having a remarkable red carpet laid out for him.

“You don’t only need a pilot,” said the Saint mechanically. “You need a proper fighting ship, with geared machine guns and all the rest of it.”

“There is one,” said Renway. “I took it from Hawker’s factory last night. It’s one of a new flight they’re building for the Moravian government. The one I took had been out on range tests, and the guns were still fitted. I also took three spare drums of ammunition. I flew it over here myself—it was the first night landing I’ve ever made.”

It had not been a particularly clean one, Simon remembered; and then he saw the continual tensing and twitching of Renway’s hands and suddenly understood much more.

There had been a pilot; but he had—met with an accident. And yet the plot in which he had a vital role could not be given up. Therefore it had grown in Renway’s mind to the dimensions of an obsession, until the point had been reached where it loomed up as the needle’s eye of an insanely conceived salvation. Although Enrique was dead, the aeroplane had still been stolen: Renway had flown it himself, and the ordeal of that untutored night flight had cut into the marrow of his nerves. Still the goal could not be given up. The new pilot arrived at the crisis of an eight-hour sleepless nightmare of strain—a solution, an escape, a straw which he could grapple even while preserving the delusion that he was a superman irresistibly turning a chance tool to his need. Simon recalled Renway’s abrupt defiant plunge into the subject after that long awkward silence, and hypothesis merged into certainty. It was queer, he reflected, how that superman complex, that delusion of being able to enslave human instruments body and soul by the power of a hypnotic personality which usually existed only in the paranoiac’s own grandiose imagination, had been the downfall of so many promising criminals.

“You did that?” said the Saint, in a tone which contained exactly the right blend of incredulous admiration and sober awe.

“Of course.”

Simon put out his cigarette and helped himself to a second.

“That’s a beginning,” he said. “But the pilots will be armed—they’re in touch with the shore by radio all the way––”

“What is the good of that?” asked Renway calmly. “The conditions aren’t the same as they would be in war time. They aren’t really expecting to be attacked. They see another aeroplane overtaking them, that’s all—there’s always plenty of traffic on that route, and they wouldn’t think anything of it. Then you dive. With your experience, they’d be an easy target. It ought to be finished in a couple of bursts—long before they could wireless any alarm to the shore. And as soon as their wireless stops, I shall carry on with their report. I have a short-wave transmitter installed in this house, and I have a record of every signal that’s been sent out by cross-Channel aircraft for the last month. I know all the codes. The shore stations will never know what’s happened until the aeroplane fails to arrive.”

The Saint blew out a flick of smoke and kept his eyes on Renway’s pale complacent face. It was dawning on him that if Renway was a lunatic, he was the victim of a very thorough and methodical kind of madness.

“There isn’t only traffic in the air.” he said.

“There’s also shipping. Suppose a ship sees wha’ happens?”

Renway made a gesture of impatience.

“My good fellow, you’re going over ground that I covered two months ago. I could raise more objections than you know yourself. For instance, all the time the aeroplane is over the Channel, there will be special motorboats cruising off the French and English coasts. One or more of them may possibly reach the scene. It will be part of your job to keep them at a distance by machine-gun fire from the air until all the gold has been secured.”

“How do you propose to do that?” persisted the Saint. “You can’t lift ten tons of gold out of a wrecked aeroplane in five minutes.”

A sudden sly look hooded Renway’s eyes.

“That has also been arranged,” he said.

He refilled his glass and drank again, sucking in his lips after the drink. As if wondering whether he had betrayed too much already, he said: “You need only be concerned with your own share in the proceedings. Do you feel like taking a part?”

Simon thought for a moment and nodded.

“I’m your man,” he said.