“No, no,” he went on, “that certainly wouldn’t have been playing the game. No real target practice at all! But don’t you worry about Mike Argyle — he’s not going to be in our hair any more.”
There was a terrible calm finality in Gascott’s last sentence that chilled even the hardened trainers of The Squad.
“Well, anyway, Rockham should be pleased enough,” Lembick grunted, still controlling his antagonism with an effort.
Again Gascott’s chilling laugh rang out.
“Poor old Mike — a posthumous film-star! But if you’re good boys,” he rasped confidingly, “I’ll ask Rockham to let you. bring around the ice creams in the interval.”
It was Albert Nobbins they had left lying there face down in the mud, with the rain pattering on to his back. But the men of The Squad knew him only as Mike Argyle, a name he had chosen for himself as more befitting the sort of personage he would have liked to be, under which he had lived among them for the six fear-ridden weeks of his masquerade. Likewise, the man who had fired the gun was know to the Squad as George Gascott, and by no other name. But to some, despite the changes in his appearance, voice, and manner, he would have been recognisable as Simon Templar — more widely known as “The Saint”.
2
The three weeks Simon Templar had spent in Brixton Prison were among the longest in his memory.
For more years than he cared to count, the police of at least half a dozen countries around the world had been longing to put the Saint behind bars; while for his part the Saint — whose preference was decidedly for the kind of bars that dispense liquid conviviality — had just as consistently declined to gratify their police-manly yearnings. His chief occupation through those years had been the noble sport of thumping the Ungodly on the hooter, but he had had almost as much fun out of tweaking the proboscis of the often absurd Guardians of the Law; and best of all he enjoyed the sublimely compounded entertainment he derived from mounting his irreverent assaults on both sets of noses simultaneously.
Inevitably in that career of debonair and preposterous lawlessness, he had had his hair’s-breadth escapes. But despite the best endeavours of some dedicated policemen, he had never yet heard a British prison gate clang shut behind him.
Until the events that were begun by Pelton’s phone call.
“Simon Templar?” said the clipped precise voice. “Pelton. David Pelton. Colonel. I expect you’ll remember me.” And as Simon groped through his memory the voice went on with the same brisk precision. “We met, as I recall, three times. The last occasion was just under six years ago. You were serving with some cloak-and-dagger outfit under a bloke named Hamilton, and I was one of your London contacts. You’ll remember that I was then — as indeed I still am now — in one of the...” — here the voice paused fractionally — “Government Departments.”
Simon remembered. The mention of Hamilton struck a chord of memory which he hoped would never be altogether silent. He remembered those days in a war-torn world when he had enjoyed a commission as tenuously legal as anything in his highly illegal career; days when, in the midst of war, he had known a paradoxical peace, a unique pride in his own functioning and that of friend and comrade. He seldom thought back to those days — they belonged to another life — but he could never forget them. And Pelton’s words made them come back to him now with a sudden vivid clarity, so that for a few moments he saw them in sharp detail as if a strip of movie film had suddenly been started in his mind.
“Yes, of course I remember,” he said easily. “One of the... lesser-known departments, isn’t it?”
“Quite so.” Pelton went straight on as if he had planned out exactly what he was going to say, down to the last unspoken comma. “Look here, Simon — I may call you Simon? — I’ll come straight to the point, as far as that’s possible in advance. I’m authorised to make you a proposition, which I hope you’ll consider seriously. Can you come to my office in the morning?”
Pelton quite properly refused to give any particulars over the phone, except to say that what he wanted to talk about was a temporary job which the Saint might well find irresistible. Simon declared bluntly that as a free spirit whose days of legal employment had ended with the war, by his own decision, he was likely to find it all too resistible. But Pelton pointed out that he could lose nothing by hearing the details, and Simon had to agree. In truth he had made up his mind at once to hear them. His curiosity would never have let him do otherwise.
But curiosity was as far as it would go, he told himself with conviction as, next morning, he weaved the big Hirondel in and out of the London traffic on his way to the appointment. Simon Templar was first and last his own man, and just then he could think of no peace-time circumstances that might persuade him to surrender a slice of his independence for the dubious pleasure of working for Pelton’s intelligence department.
The address Pelton had given him was one of those dull characterless office buildings off Whitehall in which some of the more shabbily anonymous Government enterprises are housed, or concealed. Simon was struck by how little the man he remembered had altered in the intervening years. The hair was maybe a half-shade greyer, the lines etched into his alert face perhaps fractionally deeper; but he was the same odd birdlike man, with a scrawny neck, a scrubby moustache, and a habit of cocking his head on one side as he spoke. Simon had had little to do with him personally in those days — there had been just the three brief meetings Pelton had mentioned on the phone — but he knew that the colonel’s rather stiff military manner hid an astute brain and an often startling unorthodoxy of approach. Or so his reputation had insisted.
Once the inevitable tea ceremony was over, Pelton dismissed his secretary with a curt nod and a flick of the hand. Then he leaned back in his chair, put his neatly manicured fingertips together, and studied the Saint with his small dark eyes. They had a peculiar glittering brightness which completed the birdlike effect.
“According to the rule-book,” he began half-apologetically, “I ought to remind you — though I don’t imagine it’s really necessary in your case — that you signed the Official Secrets Act nine years ago—”
“And when you sign, you sign for life,” supplied the Saint succinctly.
“Quite so.” Pelton paused, with his head cocked in his characteristic manner. “I’ll come straight to the point, then. Does the name John Rockham mean anything to you?”
Simon shook his head.
“Never heard of him. Sounds like a boxer, or someone who should have a diamond named after him. What’s his line of business?”
“His line of business, as you put it,” Pelton said in his rather precise tones, “involves masterminding a nasty little — or not so little — organisation of ex-military and criminal misfits. Even if you’ve never heard of Rockham himself, I think you may well have heard of The Squad.”
“The Squad?...” A furrow appeared fleetingly in the Saint’s brow as he tried to recall something that had been printed only lightly on his memory. “Wait a minute — it does ring a bell. Those three big bank raids in the summer. Rumour had it, in the unorthodox circles in which I sometimes move, that a gang calling themselves The Squad were responsible. And the same gang were credited with that lulu of a currency snatch at the airport.”
“Your information came from... underworld sources?” inquired Pelton, and the Saint nodded.
“Heard it on the grapevine. But I’ve been abroad — so I’ve had fewer lines open than usual. Or should it be tendrils?”
Pelton regarded Simon soberly.
“What else did the grapevine have to say about The Squad?”