Which is merely one way of pointing out that if The Squad had been purely the Saint’s own party, and Rockham’s base a private target for his own brand of freebooting vengeance, he would probably have figured out another way of setting about it.
However, given the central principle of an infiltrator, he had to admit that Pelton’s cover idea was a good one. And he had to agree, too, that a month was the least possible time it could take him to perfect himself in the role he had to play.
Nobody applied to join The Squad: Rockham selected. And the evidence was that anyone who got as far as a final interview and was then rejected, or turned the job down, found it extraordinary difficult to talk about it, on account of being dead.
Presumably Rockham made good use of certain official documents which were easily enough available to anyone who knew of their existence and only took the trouble to get hold of them. For a start, he would certainly study the periodic lists of newly released convicts and of dishonourable service discharges.
And presumably, too, he had access like the Saint to some of the shifting subterranean networks which carry information of a less official and more guarded kind. Doubtless he would usually come to hear of it before long when a potentially suitable man was, criminally speaking, at a loose end...
Anyhow, whatever his sources, Rockham managed to find a hunting ground of potential recruits. Within it he then applied his own rigorous standards of selection. Physical fitness and courage were not enough; and he only took men who gave evidence of having already developed the prime mercenary qualities — tough ruthlessness and unscrupulous venality — to an advanced level.
George Gascott matched up to the prescription very well. To be irresistible to Rockham, all the Saint had to do was step into Gascott’s identity.
Now in his late thirties, as a younger man George Gascott had held the King’s Commission in the Commandos for several years; until His Majesty decided, or someone decided on His Majesty’s behalf, that in spite of Captain Gascott’s undeniable military efficiency, the commission could be terminated with advantage to His Majesty, the Royal Marines, and the tax-paying public. Some of the latter’s money — by an ingenious and complicated inventory fraud involving non-existent equipment — had almost certainly found its way into the suave Gascott’s pockets. Though the fraud was technically unprovable, fortunately for His Majesty et al a fight in which Gascott half-killed a fellow officer supplied a good enough reason for a parting of the ways.
After that, Gascott had spent a few years in the far east, and the records made it clear that nobody knew what he had done during the war or when exactly he had re-entered Britain. But Simon remembered how a big Hatton Garden robbery had hit the news three years ago, and how the grapevine in those days had named Gascott as masterminding it.
And if Gascott hadn’t had the sheer bad luck to be picked on for a random customs search at Dover, he would have got clean away with the £50,000-worth of diamonds they found on him. That was a quarter of the Hatton Garden haul, and he steadfastly refused to say what had happened to the rest.
He was sent down for ten years: the robbery, as the judge remarked, had been one of the most brutal and bloody as well as one of the most lucrative of recent years. But they never got Gascott as far as the prison gates. Somehow, almost miraculously, he escaped from the Black Maria in which they were taking him there; and this time he did get out of the country. No one knew how much of the remaining boodle he took with him.
Rockham would certainly approve of Comrade Gascott, the Saint felt sure of that. Except maybe for the one flaw which rather marred the glory of his escape.
He had been recaptured.
That few of Scotland Yard’s representatives are over-gifted with imagination is a fact which this dutiful chronicler has sometimes been obliged to record, however painful it may have been to himself. However, what they may lack in vision they amply make up for in doggedness; and recently their low-key but persistent search for Gascott had paid off. They had found him in Rio de Janeiro: he had been extradited, and now he was somewhere on the Atlantic Ocean, on his way back. He was sharing a cabin with three of the said dogged representatives, and it is a matter of record that they were watching him very closely indeed.
His arrival at Tilbury, a week after Pelton’s meeting with the Saint, brought a predictable splash of front-page newspaper coverage, including photographs of the man who was on his way to Brixton to serve the sentence he should have begun three years before. But for some reason the mug-shots which the authorities saw fit to release were of a photographic quality rivalling the results of Aunt Mabel’s efforts with a box camera on a misty evening.
Pelton had quietly gone aboard with the pilot; and when Gascott disembarked three hours later any direct contact with the aggrieved gentlemen of the press was precluded by his posture and his condition, which were respectively horizontal and delirious.
The fuzzy photographs were of Simon Templar, complete with new hairstyle and hastily grown moustache; and the fuzziness was a necessary precaution against the potential puzzled squawking of any of Gascott’s friends, relatives, or victims who might have detected the substitution — or for that matter of any zealous newspaperman or policeman who wasn’t privy to Pelton’s plan.
The reports accompanying the fuzzy photos gave lurid details of his exploits and ascribed his horizontally and delirium to a violent bout of malaria, a recurring legacy of his time in Malaya. Accordingly, the reports continued, he would not be going straight to Brixton but would be “kept under observation” for a few days in another prison hospital.
Actually he was taken to one of Pelton’s “safe houses”, and Simon Templar was taken there too.
“There’s more than a remote chance,” Pelton dryly pointed out, “that once you get into The Squad — assuming you do — you’ll meet someone who’s known Gascott, at some time. If your cover’s going to stand up to that kind of test, you’ll need to be equipped to give a pretty convincing impersonation.”
And the Saint knew that Pelton was right. It didn’t have to be perfect — anyone Simon was likely to run into who had known Gascott before would probably not have seen him for several years — but it had to be pretty good.
That was why he met the real George Gascott and spent three days almost constantly in his company. They talked about anything that might help him to get an insight into Gascott’s character; which meant that they talked about almost anything under the sun, but in particular about his military experience and his shadier contacts. And all the time throughout those three days, Simon was also studying, consciously and osmotically, Gascott’s distinctive voice and smoothly arrogant manner.
He couldn’t find much to like in Gascott. There was just one saving grace as far as the Saint was concerned: Gascott was not without humour; and at times, when just for a while the sadistic edge was missing, it was a humour something like the Saint’s own. For which he was grateful, because it would make the part just that bit less onerous to keep up.
In the three days he got everything he usefully could have got out of personal contact; and then there was no need to extend that contact any longer. He took his leave of Gascott with considerable relief, and went away with a sheaf of notes which promised to keep him well occupied in his prison cell.