He stepped back. The gears meshed, and the Hirondel swung round in a tight semicircle and streaked away towards the main road.
Angela Lindsay stared after it, and caught the Saint's sleeve with sudden uncertainty. Her eyes were wide in the gloom.
"What's that for? Where is he going?"
"To look after our alibi," Simon answered truthfully. "Anything may happen here tonight, and you don't know Teal's nasty suspicious mind as well as I do. I'm pretty sure we shook off our shadows in Walton, but there's no need to take any chances."
She was looking about her uneasily.
"But this isn't Chertsey—"
"This is Laleham, on the opposite side of the river. We came this way to make it more confusing, and also because it'll make it a lot harder for our shadows if they're still anywhere behind. Unless my calculations are all wrong, Hogsbotham's sty ought to be right over there." His arm pointed diagonally over the stream, "Let's find out."
His hand took Verdean's arm close up under the shoulder. The girl walked on the bank manager's other side. Verdean was easy to lead. He seemed to have no more will of his own. His head kept rolling idiotically from side to side, and his voice went on unceasingly with an incoherent and practically unintelligible mumbling. His legs tried to fold intermittently at the joints, as if they had turned into putty; but the Saint's powerful grip held him up.
They crossed a short stretch of grass to the water's edge. The Saint also went on talking, loudly and irrelevantly, punctuating himself with squeals of laughter at his own wit. If any of the necking parties in the parked cars had spared them any attention at all, the darkness would have hidden any details, and the sound effects would infallibly have combined to stamp them as nothing but a party of noisy drunks. It must have been successful, for the trip was completed without a hitch. They came down to the river margin in uneventful co-ordination; and any spectators who may have been there continued to sublimate their biological urges unconcerned.
There was an empty punt moored to the bank at exactly the point where they reached the water. Why it should have been there so fortunately was something that the girl had no time to stop and ask; but the Saint showed no surprise about it. He seemed to have been expecting it. He steered Verdean on board and lowered him on to the cushions, and cast off the mooring chain and settled himself in the stern as she followed.
His paddle dug into the water with long deep strokes, driving the punt out into the dark. The bank which they had just left fell away into blackness behind. For a short while there was nothing near them but the running stream bounded by nebulous masses of deep shadow on either side. Verdean's monotonous muttering went on, but it had become no more obtrusive than the murmur of traffic heard from a closed room in a city building.
She said, after a time: "I wonder why this all seems so different?"
He asked: "Why?"
She was practically invisible from where he sat. Her voice came out of a blurred emptiness.
"I've done all sorts of things before — with Judd," she said. "But doing this with you… You make it an adventure. I always wanted it to be an adventure, and yet it never was."
"Adventure is the way you look at it," he said, and did not feel that the reply was trite when be was making it.
For the second time since he had picked her up at the Stag and Hounds he has wondering whether a surprise might still be in store for him that night. All his planning was cut and dried, as far as any of it was under his control; but there could still be surprises. In all his life nothing had ever gone mechanically and unswervingly according to a rigid and inviolable schedule: adventure would soon have become boring if it had. And tonight he had a feeling of fine-drawn liveness and that was the reverse of boredom.
The feeling stayed with him the rest of the way across the water, and through the disembarkation on the other side. It stayed with him on the short walk up Greenleaf Road from the towpath to the gates of Mr Hogsbotham's house. It was keener and more intense as they went up the drive, with Verdean keeping pace in his grasp with docile witlessness. It brought up all the undertones of the night in sharp relief — the stillness everywhere around, the silence of the garden, the whisper of leaves, the sensation of having stepped out of the inhabited world into a shrouded wilderness. Some of that could have been due to the trees that shut them in, isolating them in a tenebrous closeness in which there was no sight or sound of other life, so that even Verdean's own house next door did not intrude on their awareness by so much as a glimmer of light or the silhouette of a roof, and the Saint could not tell whether a light would have been visible in it if there had been a light to see. Some of the feeling was still left unaccounted for even after that. The Saint stood on the porch and wondered if he was misunderstanding his own intuition, while Verdean fumbled with keys at the door, muttering fussily about his stolen fortune. And his mind was still divided when they went into the hall, where a single dim light was burning, and he saw the bank manager stagger drunkenly away and throw himself shakily up the stairs.
He felt the girl's fingers cling to his arm. And in spite of all he knew about her, her physical nearness was something that his senses could not ignore.
"He's going to get it," she breathed.
The Saint nodded. That psychic electricity was still coursing through his nerves, only now he began to find its meaning. From force of habit, his right hand slid under the cuff of his left sleeve and touched the hilt of the razor-edged throwing knife in its sheath strapped to his forearm, the only weapon he had thought it worth while to bring with him, making sure that it would slip easily out if he needed it; but the action was purely automatic. His thoughts were a thousand miles away from such things as his instinct associated with that deadly slender blade. He smiled suddenly.
"We ought to be there to give him a cheer," he said.
He took her up the stairs with him. From the upper landing he saw an open door and a lighted room from which came confused scurrying noises combined with Verdean's imbecile grunting and chattering. Simon went to the door. The room was unquestionably Mr Ebenezer Hogsbotham's bedroom. He would have known it even without being told. Nobody but an Ebenezer Hogsbotham could ever have slept voluntarily in such a dismally austere and mortifying chamber. And he saw Robert Verdean in the centre of the room. The bank manager had lugged a shabby suitcase out of some hiding place, and had it open on the bed; he was pawing and crooning crazily over the contents — ruffling the edges of packets of pound notes, crunching the bags of silver. Simon stood for a moment and watched him, and it was like looking at a scene from a play that he had seen before.
Then he stepped quietly in and laid his hand on Verdean's shoulder.
"Shall I help you take care of it?" he said gently. He had not thought much about how Verdean would be likely to respond to the interruption, but had certainly not quite expected the response he got.
For the first time since Hoppy had applied his remarkable treatment, the bank manager seemed to become aware of outside personalities in a flash of distorted recognition. He squinted upwards and sidelong at the Saint, and his face twisted.
"I won't give it to you!" he screamed. "I'll kill you first!"
He flung himself at the Saint's throat, his fingers clawing, his eyes red and maniacal.
Simon had very little choice. He felt highly uncertain about the possible results of a third concussion on Verdean's already inflamed cerebral tissue, following so closely upon the two previous whacks which it had suffered in the last twenty-four hours; but on the other hand he felt that in Mr Verdean's present apparent state of mind, to be tied up and gagged and left to struggle impotently while he watched his loot being taken away from him would be hardly less likely to cause a fatal hemorrhage. He therefore adopted the less troublesome course, and put his trust in any guardian angels that Mr Verdean might have on his overburdened payroll. His fist travelled up about eight explosive inches, and Mr Verdean travelled down…