"Don't do it!" he blared.
"— and apologize," said the Saint; and in spite of himself, in spite of every obdurately logical belief he held, Chief Inspector Teal thought for a moment that he would not have liked to stand in the shoes of the man who ventured to impersonate the owner of that quiet satirical voice.
III
March house, from one of the large-scale ordnance maps of which Simon Templar kept a complete and up-to-date library, appeared to be an estate of some thirty acres lying between the village of Betfield and the sea. Part of the southern boundary was formed by the cliffs themselves, and a secondary road from Betfield to the main Folkestone highway skirted it on the northwest. The Saint sat over his maps with a glass of sherry for half an hour before dinner the following evening, memorizing the topography — he had always been a firm believer in direct action, and, wanting to know more about a man, nothing appealed to him with such seductive simplicity as the obvious course of going to his house and taking an optimistic gander at the scenery.
"But whatever makes you think Renway had anything to do with it?" asked Patricia Holm.
"The top hat and spats," Simon told her gravely. He smiled. "I'm afraid I haven't got the childlike faith of a policeman, lass, and that's all there is to it. Claud Eustace would take the costume as a badge of respectability, but to my sad and worldly mind it's just the reverse. From what I could gather, Hugo wasn't actually sporting the top hat at the time, but he seems to have been that kind of man. And the picture they found on the body was rather squiggly — as it might have been if a bloke had drawn it in a car, traveling along… I know it's only one chance in a hundred, but it's a chance. And we haven't any other clue in the whole wide world."
Hoppy Uniatz had no natural gift of subtlety, but he did understand direct action. Out of the entire panorama of human endeavour, it was about the only thing which really penetrated through all the layers of bullet-proof ivory which protected his brain. Detaching his mouth momentarily from a tumbler of gin nominally diluted with ginger ale, he said: "I'll come wit' ya, boss."
"Is it in your line?" asked the Saint.
"I dunno," Hoppy confessed frankly. "I ain't never done no boiglary. Whadda we have to wear dis costume for?"
Patricia looked at him blankly.
"What costume?"
"De top hat an' spats," said Hoppy Uniatz.
The Saint covered his eyes.
Six hours later, braking the Hirondel to a smooth standstill under an overarching elm where the road touched the northwest boundary of March House, Simon felt more practically cautious about accepting Hoppy's offer of assistance. On such an expedition as he had undertaken, a sportive elephant would certainly have been less use; but not much less. All the same, he" had no wish to offend Mr. Uniatz, whose proud spirit was perhaps unduly sensitive on such points. He swung himself out into the road, detached the spare wheel, and opened up the tool kit, while Hoppy stared at him puzzledly.
"This is where you come in," the Saint told him flatteringly. "You're going to be an unfortunate motorist with a puncture, toiling over the wheel."
Mr. Uniatz blinked at him dimly.
"Is dat part of de boiglary?" he asked.
"Of course it is," said the Saint unscrupulously. "It's probably the most important part. You never know when some village slop may come paddling around these parts, and if he saw a car standing by the road with nobody in it he'd naturally be suspicious."
Hoppy reached round for his hip flask and nodded.
"Okay, boss," he said. "I get it. If de cop comes while you're gone, I give him de woiks."
"You don't do anything of the sort," said the Saint wearily. "They don't allow you to kill policemen in this country. What you do is to give your very best imitation of a guy fixing a flat. You might possibly get into conversation with him. Talk sentimentally about the little woman at home, waiting for her man. Make him feel homesick and encourage him to push on. But you don't give him de woiks."
"Okay, boss," repeated Hoppy accommodatingly. "I'll fix it."
"God help you if you don't," said the Saint harrowingly and left him to it.
The frontier of the March House estate at that point consisted of a strong board fence about eight feet high topped with three lines of barbed wire carried on spiked iron brackets beetling outwards at an angle: the arrangement was effective enough to have checked any less experienced and determined trespasser than the Saint, and even Simon might have wasted some time over it if it had not been for the overhanging elm under which he had thoughtfully stopped his car. But by balancing himself precariously on the side of the tonneau and leaping upwards, he was able to get a fingerhold on one of the lower branches; and he swung himself up onto it as if Tarzan had been his grandfather.
Finding his way through the tree, in the dark, was not quite so easy; but he managed it more or less silently, and dropped from another branch onto a mat of short undergrowth on the inside of the fence.
From there, while the muffled mutterings of Hoppy Uniatz wrestling with a wheel drifted faintly to his ears, he surveyed the lay of the land ahead of him. He was in a spinney of young trees and brushwood; barred here and there with the boles of older trees similar to the one by,which he had made his entrance; a half-moon, peeping fitfully between squadrons of cirrus cloud, gave his night-hunter's eyes enough light to make out that broad impression and at the same time suggested an open space some distance farther on beyond the coppice. The house itself stood roughly in the same direction, according to his map-reading; and with a fleeting smile for the complete craziness of his intentions he began to pick his way through the scrub towards it.
A small bird let out a startled squeak at his feet and went whirring away into the dark, and from time to time he heard the rustlings of diminutive animal life scurrying away from his approach; but he encountered no pitfalls or trip wires or other unpleasant accidents. The clear space ahead was farther away than he had thought at first, and as he went on he seemed to make very little progress towards it. Presently he understood why, when he broke out through a patch of thinner shrubbery into what seemed to be a long narrow field laid out broadside to his route: twenty yards away, on the other side, was a single rank of taller trees linked by what appeared to be another fence — it was this wall of shadow and line of lifting tree trunks which he had never seemed to come any nearer to as he threaded his way through the spinney.
As he crossed the field and came close to this inner boundary, he saw that it was not a fence, but a loosely grown hedge about six feet high. He was able to see this without any difficulty because when he was still a couple of yards away the pattern of it was suddenly thrown up in silhouette by the kindling of a light behind it. At first his only impression was that the moon had chosen that moment for one of its periodical peeps from behind the drifting flotillas of cloud. Then, very quickly, the light flared up brighter. He saw the patchwork shadow of the hedge printed on his own clothes, and instinctively ducked behind the sheltering blackness of the nearest tree. And as he did so he became aware that the humming noise he had been hearing had grown much louder.
It was a noise which had been going on, very faintly, for some time; but he had thought nothing of it. A car passing on another road half mile away might have caused it, and a subconscious suggestion of the same car drawing nearer had prevented him paying much attention to the first increase in its volume. But at this moment it had swelled into a steady drone that was too powerful and unvarying for any ordinary car to make, rising to the indefinable borderline of assertiveness at which his sense of hearing was jolted into sitting up and taking notice. He listened to it, frowning, while it grew to sharp roar — and then stopped altogether.