“I’m sure that could have been avoided somehow.”
“But how?” he said practically. “He’d have no good reason to confide the details of the whole plan to me. In fact, he’d’ve been a fool if he did, since I just might have decided to earn myself some nice safe remission by double-crossing him. And if he hadn’t given me all the dope, including exactly how and when I was to be spirited away, I wouldn’t have been in any position to get warnings to sundry people who’d otherwise be candidates for becoming sundry corpses.”
“But Bert Nobbins would probably have been in the picture,” the girl said “Or, at least, enough to give us some inkling of when-and how you’d be sprung.”
In the short silence that ensued, Simon Templar experienced a sinking sensation which was closely connected with a growing conviction that he was not entirely in command of the situation.
“And who the blue blazes,” he inquired in a voice heavy with restraint, “is Bert Nobbins?”
“Their Paymaster,” she said. “He’s also one of ours. Pelton put him in as a back-up for Randall. But he’s not the type to step into Randall’s place. Pelton says you’re to ignore him.”
5
Those last few days had certainly dragged. For a while, after Ruth’s second visit, Simon had fumed impotently at having been kept in the dark about Pelton’s opportunist catapulting of the hitherto desk-bound Nobbins into The Squad as Paymaster when the vacancy had providentially arisen only weeks before. But then he had given up fuming impotently, had sat down to do some thinking which at least began to encompass the new factor that now had to be reckoned with, revised his assessment of Pelton again, and finally gone back to his books and notes. And slowly those last few days had ticked away... until three were left... then two...
Then one: and with the recurrence of Gascott’s convenient malaria he had been moved to the prison hospital wards.
Without digressing too far into the details of the plan that had been worked out, it may reasonably be disclosed that on the following day a certain vehicle arrived to make a delivery of medical supplies, and that when it was driven out through the prison gates again the dark moustached man at the wheel was not the same dark moustached man who had driven it in.
Within two hours Simon Templar was on his way to Petersfield, skimming his big cream and red Hirondel down the Portsmouth Road with even more inner zest than usual and only a shade less outward elan. He was still savouring the incomparable blessed wine of recovered freedom, and fighting a powerful impulse to scamper and frolic about manically in the sweet open air like a puppy let out for a run. But a degree of inconspicuousness seemed called for; and scampering, he judged, might have attracted some attention.
The hue and cry was out for Gascott — and genuinely. Rockham’s possible accomplices in the various arms of the official establishment being an unknown factor, only the absolutely essential minimum of reliable stalwarts among prison and police staff had been told the truth about their now-absquatulated detainee. The rest of them were playing it for real. And that was emphatically the way Simon Templar preferred it, even though it did mean that every village bobby in the land would be on the lookout for him.
Ruth Barnaby met him in the late afternoon at Petersfield, arranged garaging for his car, and drove him the last few miles in her own sporty two-seater.
The Bull at Kyleham was a comfortable inn, and handily placed just under a mile from the wall surrounding Rockham’s fifty-five acre base, which she pointed out to him as they passed it. The publican was a harmless soul whose co-operation had been easily enough ensured by a bit of official, not to say officious, finger-to-the-lips confidentiality. He had been told, in other words, only what he absolutely had to know; which was that for reasons having to do with national security he would kindly look no further for a relief barmaid than the attractive and competent-seeming young woman who was introduced to him as, simply, Ruth. As instructed, he provided her with a room and asked no questions; and in return she ably performed her duties behind the bar. It was as simple as that.
It was, technically, just a few minutes before opening time, so there was no one else in the bar when they came in.
“What can I get you?” she asked.
“A pint of Guinness for a start,” he said. “Just to rinse the dust off the tonsils.”
She went behind the bar and drew it. The Saint took a long and appreciative pull at the brimming tankard, and settled himself on a stool.
“Freedom,” he declared expansively to his audience of one, “is a thing you never truly value till after you’ve been deprived of it. Which I suppose puts it squarely in the same bracket as just about anything else in the world that’s worth having.”
The girl set down a glass she had been vigorously drying — and so brought to an end, for the time being, an entertainment which owed a lot to her natural endowments and also something to the well-fitting sweater that inadequately concealed them.
“Prison seems to have brought out the philosopher in you,” she observed.
The Saint engulfed another vast draught of the rich velvet brew, while noting with approval that the vigorous drying-action and accompanying mammary vibrations had been resumed.
“I suppose,” he opined, “that to anyone who ever did a stretch in Buchenwald, or in an old-fashioned English public school — to paraphrase one of our more eminent literati, Brixton would have seemed like home from home.”
Ruth Barnaby reached down for a well-filled haversack which she had brought in with her, and put it on the counter in front of him.
She said: “Here’s the stuff you asked for.”
Simon picked it up. It was light for its size. He opened it and took out two bulging oilskin bags. In the bottom of the haversack he could see a lightweight nylon rope ladder of the special design he had stipulated.
He peered into one of the oilskin bags, poking around in it with a lean brown hand, and nodded approvingly.
“The other one’s the same?” he inquired.
“Identical. Everything you asked for.”
She dipped into her handbag and brought out a large manilla envelope. Rapidly she pointed to each item of the contents which she drew half-out of it.
“Local maps, aerial photo of Kyleham House Estate, details of guard patrols... and all Bert Nobbins’s reports. All two of them,” she added with a hint of malicious satisfaction.
The Saint looked at his watch and stood up.
“Thanks. I think I’ll take these as my cue to withdraw to your back room,” he said good-humouredly. He finished his pint, and picked up the folder and haversack. “A public bar’s just a bit too public for serious study — and any minute now your regulars are going to be piling through the door in their droves, tongues hanging out. See you later.”
He had often had occasion to dilate satirically upon the parlous state of a nation whose idiotic nanny-like licensing laws frowned on the thirst of its citizens except within prescribed periods of the day. But just now he had more pressing matters to attend to, and he gave them his undivided concentration for the next two hours.
When the girl came through to the back room after that interval, he had already buttoned up his dark raincoat and shouldered the haversack.
“I’m on my way,” he said. “It’ll be dark enough by the time I get to the merry old health farm.”
“Good luck,” she said, almost perfunctorily.
“I’ll try to give you the first news about O-two-hundred hours,” he said. “Be outside the wall, about fifty yards east of the main gate. Okay?”
He picked up the single grip bag that was his luggage, went out by the back door, and melted into the dark.