"This is a funny business, sir, isn't it?" said the constable, when the doctor had gone on into the house.
He was a middle-aged beefy man who kept shaking himself down uncomfortably in his plain clothes, as if he had been wearing a uniform too long to feel thoroughly at home in any other garb. He would probably continue to wear a uniform for the rest of his life, but it was no less probable that he was quite contented with the prospect.
Simon strolled back with him to his post, and gave him a cigarette. He did not expect the man he was waiting for to enter the grounds for a little while.
"Kidnapped 'is lordship's son, too, didn't they? said the policeman. "Now, why should they want to do that?"
The question was put more or less in rhetorical appeal to some unspecified oracle, rather than as one demanding a direct answer; and the Saint did not immediately attempt to answer it.
"I suppose you know Lord Ripwell fairly well," he said, "Well, so-and-so," said the constable, puffing, "Must be about five year now, sir- ever since 'e bought the house." "I shouldn't think he'd be an easy man to extort money from."
"I wouldn't like to be the man to try it. Mind you, 'is lordship's known to be a generous gentleman-do anything for a fellow oo's out of luck, if he's asked properly. But not the kind you could force anything out of. No, sir. Why I remember in my time what 'appened to a chap oo tried to blackmail 'im."
The stillness of the Saint's eyes could not be seen in the dark.
"Somebody tried to blackmail him once, did they?" he said quietly "Yes, sir. It wasn't nothing much they 'ad to blackmail 'im with, but you can see for yourself 'is lordship must've been quite a lad in 'is time, and some people are that narrow-minded they don't expect a man to be even 'uman." There was a sympathetic note in the constable's voice which hinted that he himself could modestly claim, in his own time to have been Quite A Lad. "Anyway, all 'is lordship did was to get the Inspector up and 'ave him listen to some of this talk. And then, when he could 'ave 'ad the fellow sent to prison, he wouldn't even prosecute 'im."
"No?"
"Wouldn't even make a charge. 'I don't want to, be vindictive,' he says. 'The silly ass 'as had a good fright,' he says, 'and now you let him go. You can see he's just some down-and-out idiot oo thought 'e could make some easy money.' And in the end I believe 'e gave the chap 'is fare back to London."
"Who was this fellow?" Simon asked.
"I dunno. Said 'is name was Smith, like most of 'em do when they're first caught. We never had no chance to find out oo he really was, on account of Ms lordship not prosecuting him, but 'e did look pretty down and out. Seedy little chap with a great red nose on 'im like a stop light."
The doctor came out and returned to his car-Simon heard his parting conversation with Teal at the door, and gathered that Martin Irelock was in no danger. The hum of the car died away; and Simon gave the talkative guard another cigarette and faded back into the dark to resume his own prowling.
His brain was becoming congested with new things to think about. So an attempt had been made to extort money from Ripwell. He was confirmed in his own estimate of the prospects of the hopeful extorter, but apparently the aspirant himself had required to be convinced by experience. There was something about the anecdote as he felt it which gave him a distinct impression of a trial balloon. Someone had wanted first-hand knowledge of Lord Ripwell's reaction to such an attempt; and the constable's brief description of the aspiring blackmailer had one prominent feature in common with the elusive Mr. Ellshaw. Curiously enough, in spite of the increased congestion of ideas, the Saint felt that the mystery was gradually becoming less mysterious. . . .
He moved round the house as soundlessly as a hunting cat. As Chief Inspector Teal knew and admitted, queer things, almost incredible things, happened to Simon Templar when he got out in the dark-things which would never have been believed by the uninitiated observer who had only seen him in his sophisticated moods. He could leave his immaculately dressed, languidly bantering sophistication behind him in a room, and go out to become an integral part of the wild. He could go out and move through the night with the supple smoothness of a panther, without rustling a blade of grass under his feet, merging himself into minute scraps of shadow like a jungle animal, feeling his way uncannily between invisible obstructions, using strange faculties of scent and hearing with such weird certainty that those who knew him best, when they thought about it, sometimes wondered if the roots of all his amazing outlawry might not be found threading down into the deeps of this queer primitive instinct.
No living man could have seen or heard him as he passed on his silent tour, summarising the square lights of windows in the black cube of the house. Lord Ripwell's lighted window, under which the police guard stood, was on one side. A bulb burned faintly in the hall, at the front, facing closely on to the road. The dully luminous colour of curtains on the other side marked the living-room which he had left not long ago. At the back of the house, where the Thames margined the grounds, he could see one red-shaded lamp in an upstairs window- presumably that was Irelock's room, for he had gathered that the only domestic servant employed at the cottage was a daily woman who had gone home immediately after dinner. Chief Inspector Teal must have been keeping watch downstairs with a dwindling supply of spearmint; and Simon wondered whether he had been jarred enough out of his principles to take over Lord Ripwell's revolver and the ammunition, to wait with him for the sudden death that would surely stalk through that place again before morning.
He came down to the water's edge and sat with his back to a tree, as motionless as if he had been one of its own roots. Surely, he knew, the death would come; but whether it would successfully claim a victim depended largely upon him. There was a smooth speed about every move of the case which appealed to him: it was cut and thrust, parry and riposte-a. series of lightning adjustments and counter-moves which he could appreciate for its intrinsic qualities even while he was still fumbling for the connecting link that held it all together. The poison which had found its way into the whisky less than an hour ago belonged to the same scheme of things. He could recall its peculiar sweet oily taste on his tongue, and he thought he knew what it was. The symptoms which Martin Irelock had shown corroborated it. Very few men would have known that it was poisonous at all. How should an illiterate little racetrain rat like Ellshaw have known it?
A mosquito zoomed into his ear with a vicious ping, and one of his thighs began to itch; but still he did not move. At other times in his life he had lain out like that, immobile as a carved outcrop of rock, combing the dark with keyed-up senses as delicate as those of any savage, when the first man whose nerves had cracked under the unearthly strain would have paid for the microscopic easing of a cramped muscle with his life. That utter relaxation of every expectant sinew, the supersensitive isolation of every faculty from all disturbances except those which he was waiting for, had become so automatic that he used no conscious effort to achieve it. And in that way, without even turning his head, he became aware of the black ghost of a canoe that was drifting soundlessly down the stream towards the place where he sat.
Still he did not move. A nightingale started to tune up in the branches over his head, and a frail wisp of cloud floated idly across the hazy stars which were the only light in the darkness. The canoe was only a dim black brush-stroke on the grey gloom, but he saw that there was only one man in it, and saw the ripple of tarnished-silver water as the unknown dipped his paddle and turned the craft in towards the bank. It seemed unlikely that any ordinary man would be cruising down the river at that hour alone, revelling in a dreamy romance with himself, and the Saint had an idea that the man who was coming towards him was not altogether ordinary. Unless a dead man creeping down the Thames in a canoe at midnight could be called ordinary.