“Simon! Please! Do something!”
The Saint could only curse his helplessness. His wrists were now tightly bound, and he was hauled to his feet by the giant who had lifted him into the air and thrown him down again. He knew without looking who that was — and how completely useless it would be to put up any struggle at this point. Tammy screamed as Mahmud raised his slender stick again and swept it in a whistling arc across the girl’s back. She screamed again and writhed, face down, her skirt twisted up around her legs, trying to protect her head with both arms. Mahmud’s next lash was aimed at the bare legs.
“Stop!” commanded the huge wrestler who was holding the Saint. “Somebody might hear. Get her in the house, idiot!”
Mahmud looked furiously confused and frustrated as he hesitated, and then tossed his stick aside. Simon felt that Mahmud’s violence was not so much due to sadism or even loss of temper as it was to the feeling that he had lost face in front of Shortwave and Kalki and had taken the only way he could think of to reassert his masculinity.
“Stupid woman!” he spat at Tammy as he dragged her sobbing to her feet.
Shortwave had been sitting on the ground with his back propped against one of the car’s front wheels without evincing any interest in anything that was happening.
“Come on!” Kalki yelled at him in a voice which was strangely lacking in depth considering the vast dimensions of the man who produced it. He looked like a bull fiddle and sounded like a scratchy viola. “Get up and get in the ruddy house!”
Shortwave looked up at him with glazed eyes, comprehended, and pulled himself to his feet. He was still too fuzzy from the Saint’s punch to do anything more ambitious than perform a wobbling march behind Mahmud and Tammy to a side door of the boathouse. Simon brought up the rear, pushed by his Gargantuan captor.
The ground level of the building, into which medium-sized boats might have been hauled out from the river through full-width roller doors, was apparently being converted to additional living accommodation. A newly built brick unpainted wall in it closed off a large part of it, and another wall had been started where a stairway led to the floor above. Kalki kicked aside a cement-encrusted hoe as he shoved the Saint towards a bare trestle table with a number of cheap wooden chairs around it.
“Sit!” Kalki said to Simon, pushing him into one of the chairs in the middle of the room. “Tie his feet!” he ordered Shortwave.
For the first time Simon could take a good look at the wrestler at close range, and in these cramped quarters he seemed, even more impressive than he had in the alley or on television. His costume was more impressive, too. He had changed his workman’s outfit for a charcoal-grey Edwardian suit with orange waistcoat and burgundy silk tie. His shoes were brightly polished and he smelled of Yardley’s. The suit was too small for him, and a good deal of thick wrist dangled below the jacket cuffs, but the effect he created was no less awe-inspiring because of a few sartorial defects. He looked a bit like a gorilla in formal dress.
“I can’t say I’m pleased to meet you, but I am surprised,” Simon remarked. “We were just watching you smash up somebody on television. How did you get dressed and down here so quickly?”
Kalki’s reaction immediately made it plain that he had at least one weakness commensurate with his size. He puffed up visibly with pride, glanced at Tammy to make sure that she was paying attention, and looked back down at the Saint.
“It was me you saw on the television,” he said self-importantly. “On tape. I made that show last week.”
“How about that?” Simon commented to Tammy. “We’re house guests of a celebrity. Look where ambition and hard work will get you.”
“It’s gonna get you a fancy funeral,” Shortwave said viciously. He planted himself in front of the Saint with a piece of rope in his hand. “When I get through with you, you’ll wish you’d never seen me except on television.”
“Talking of television,” Simon said with impeccable good humour, “how does that come through on your chromium plate? Do you receive the picture as well, or only the sound effects?”
Shortwave glared at him with red eyes and raised the rope, but Kalki stopped him magisterially, taking pride in his own massive self-control.
“Not now,” he said magnanimously. “I do not like the lady to see you hit a man who cannot fight back. Wait until Fowler comes, and if he says so, you can do what you like — for as long as you like.”
The fairly efficient trussing to which Simon had been subjected was not enough to suppress the raising of an eyebrow.
“Fowler?” he echoed. “Who he? — if I may use the idiom.”
“You will find out,” Mahmud said, pushing Tammy into another chair.
“Let me do some more guessing,” Simon said. “He’s the great White Wizard who’s doing so much for you poor benighted victims of race prejudice — and making a nice profit for himself, of course. He also has a useful-sized pleasure boat registered with the Thames Conservancy, but also perfectly capable of running downriver and out to sea to make pick-ups. There can only be two or three locks between here and tidewater... And this is where the immigrant cargo can be landed and wait to be tidily dispersed. Not exactly Ritz accommodation, but I can see you’re working on that... I didn’t notice the boat, though. Could it be somewhere down the Thames Estuary right now, picking up more passengers?”
Mahmud impassively finished tying Tammy’s hands together in front of her. Stubbornly pretending not to listen, he betrayed his tortured anxiety about what he was hearing.
“Not like that,” Shortwave said irritably. “Behind her.”
Kalki intervened, happy to display his authority again.
“Do as you are,” he said to Mahmud. “The lady will be very well.”
“Oh yes, the lady will be very well,” Tammy sighed. She looked utterly defeated, too disheartened even to be frightened any more. “What are you going to do with us?”
“You wanna hear?” Shortwave asked as he got up from tying the Saint’s feet. “It might take me a couple of hours to tell you.”
Kalki gave a leviathan shrug.
“Do not worry about it,” he pontificated to Tammy. “You were expected to be dead now, so no matter what happens this is all extra time. Enjoy it.”
“Thanks so much,” Tammy sighed. Then she suddenly stared at Simon. “They wouldn’t really do it, would they?” she asked in a tone of horrified realisation. “I mean kill us? I didn’t mean anything like that. I just wanted a story.”
“You wanted to see us in prison,” Kalki said without any overt hostility. “You wrote bad things. We warned you.” He twitched his jaw to one side in a c’est-la-vie mannerism that produced a quivering of his black whiskers and a sound of lightly grating teeth. “So.”
The abrupt, formally regretful “so” was self-explanatory enough for Tammy, who shivered as if she had suddenly been touched by a ghost, and dropped her gaze to the floor. For the first time she looked desperately, hopelessly terrified. Then, without any pause for a transition of mood, Kalki wheeled around and moved on Mahmud like a towering thunderstorm.
“And you!” he bellowed. “You bloody fool! I tell you to kill these people and you bring them here! I should have really broken your arm!”