“There’s a door to it in the basement,” Illet said, stepping back. “Mr Dayne is there now.”
“Alive?” Simon inquired, rather carefully.
“Certainly. You remarked very observantly that I’m cautious. It was as easy to chain him up there alive as to kill him. And if anything had gone wrong, the penalty for kidnaping here is much lighter than for murder. I hope I can keep you and Mrs Dayne alive, too — until I’m quite sure that everyone’s given you up and it’s safe to kill you.”
The Saint shrugged.
“Well, that’s almost friendly,” he drawled. “We’d better get going, because that policeman you heard me send for should be here very soon. May I finish my drink? And did they teach you this in the commandos—”
He reached for the glass he had put down, but in the same movement he bumped clumsily against the couch with his knee. The glass tilted and began to fall. His hand followed it frantically, but somehow veered off and dived behind the cushion. It came out again instantly, with his automatic in it, and without even a fragmentary pause he shot Mr Ivalot Inchpenny Illet — having taken everything into consideration — only through the right forearm.
5
There was no difficulty about finding the entrance to the cave — it was a locked door in the cellar which the “caretaker” had once told Lona Dayne led only to a store room in which Mr Parker kept a lot of old trunks full of personal papers. Nor was there any additional problem about finding Havelock Dayne, by way of a crooked tunnel that sloped down into a limestone cavern of quite spacious dimensions considering the size of the island that covered it. It must have been discovered long ago in the course of excavating for a rainwater cistern; but however Illet had come to hear of it, he had evidently envisaged an emergency use for it, in his prudent way, for the iron ring set in concrete to which the missing bridegroom was attached by a long chain was no antique but had certainly not been installed within the past week.
Mr Dayne was dirty and unshaven, but looked as if he would be fairly personable when he was cleaned up. He revealed no physical damage, but he had been badly frightened, and was correspondingly indignant when he realized that there was nothing more to be frightened about. He seemed to be a very serious-minded young man, who did not regard being chained in a cave for three days and nights as an amusing adventure.
“This settles it — you’re resigning from that goddam newspaper right away,” was one of the first things he said.
“We’ll talk about that as soon as I’ve cabled this one last story,” said his bride, with what a more experienced spouse would have identified at once as ominous serenity.
Simon Templar was less interested in various other things that they had to say to each other than he was in a couple of large mildewed valises which he located in another corner of the cave. They were not locked, and when he opened the lids he knew that he had never seen so much cash all in one place at one time.
“Here are those personal papers you were told about,” he murmured. “If this episode had gone exactly the way I was dreaming when I took up the trail, and I weren’t involved now with you respectable citizens, I suppose I’d have left Jolly Roger trussed up upstairs just as he is now, but with only my Saint drawing chalked on his bald head for a souvenir, and I’d still be gone with the boodle before the cops got here — if I’d ever even sent for them. And now all I can do is hope for a lousy few hundred thousand dollars’ reward.”
“If you helped yourself to a few handfuls in advance,” Lona said, “we’d never tell anyone. Would we, Havvie?”
An infinitesimal, scarcely perceptible spasm passed over the Saint’s face, as at the twinge of an old wound.
“I wonder if Mrs Havelock Ellis called her husband that,” he said in suddenly appalled conjecture, but neither of them was even listening to him again.
England: The talented husband
1
The young man at Heathrow was very impersonal, very polite. He looked up from the passport and said, “Oh, yes. Mr Templar. Would you step this way, please, sir?”
Simon Templar followed him obligingly from the reception room in which the other passengers from the plane were being processed. The most respectable citizen receiving an invitation like that, no matter how courteously phrased, could have experienced a sensation of vacuum in the stomach, but to Simon such attention at any port of entry had become almost as routine as a request for his vaccination certificate. For the days when harassed police officers and apprehensive malefactors, not to mention several million happily fascinated readers of headlines, had known him only by the name of The Saint were so far behind as to be almost in the province of archaeologists. And of all the countries on earth which had enjoyed the ambiguous benediction of his presence, England, which had been privileged to be the first to feel the full impact of his outlawry, would probably be the last to forget him.
The Saint was very pleasantly unperturbed by the prospect. In fact, he had been looking forward to it for a long time. And as he strolled into the small office to which he was escorted, and the young man went out again and quietly closed the door, he knew that all his optimism had been justified and that this visit would at least begin as beautifully as he had dared to hope.
He gazed across at the cherubic round face of the man who sat there behind the desk disrobing a stick of chewing gum, and his eyes danced like laughing steel.
“Claud Eustace Teal,” he breathed ecstatically. “My own dream dog. I mean bloodhound. Have you wondered too if we should ever meet again?”
“Good morning, Saint,” Chief Inspector Teal said primly. “What brings you back here?”
“Haven’t you heard? I’m playing two weeks at the Palladium.”
Mr Teal fought for the somnolent authority in his stare. He had fought for it stubbornly ever since he had started waiting for the plane to land, as he had not had to do for many relatively peaceful years. Even five years of war, which had included the fondest ministrations of the Luftwaffe, now seemed in retrospect like a mere ripple in the long interlude of tranquillity with which he had been favored since he last had to cope with the Saint.
Now that vacation in Nirvana might have lasted no longer than since yesterday. He saw the Saint exactly as he had remembered him in nightmares, outrageously looking not a day older, the tall lean figure just as sinewy and debonair, poised with the same insolently vivid grace, the tanned pirate’s face just as keen and reckless, and it was as if the years between had passed over like a flight of birds.
“I’m not doing this because I want to,” Teal said heavily. “The sooner we get the formalities done, the sooner you can be on your way. When someone like you comes back here, we have to ask why.”
“All right, Claud. I really came back on account of you.”
“I said—”
“But I did. Honestly.”
“Why me?”
“I heard you were going to retire.”
Mr Teal’s molars settled into his spearmint like anchors into a bed of sustaining guck. He said, with magnificent stolidity, “How did you manage to hear that?”
“There was a piece in Time, recently, about Scotland Yard. Among some thumbnail sketches of the incumbent hierarchy of beefy brains, your name was mentioned as one of the old-timers shortly to be moved over to the pension list. It’s true, isn’t it?”