Simon tapped his cigarette.
"I should have thought that was the first thing."
"It was the first thing." Renway drank again. He was speaking with more steadiness now, with a conviction that was strengthening through every sentence; his faded stare weaved endlessly over the Saint's face, changing from one eye to the other. "I had the ideal man; but he--met with an accident. There wasn't time to find anyone else. I was going to try it myself, but I'm not an expert pilot. I have no fighting experience. I might have bungled it. You wouldn't."
Meeting the gaze of those unequally staring eyes, Simon had an eerie intuition that Renway was mad. He had to make a deliberate effort to separate a part of his mind from that precogni-tion while he pieced his scanty facts together again in the light of what Renway had said.
There had been a pilot. That would have been( Manuel Enrique, who died on the Brighton road. A new pilot swooped down out of the sky, and within twenty minutes was being offered the vacant post. With all due deference to the gods of luck, it seemed as if that new aviator were having a remarkable red carpet laid out for him.
"You don't only need a pilot," said the Saint mechanically. "You need a proper fighting ship, with geared machine guns and all the rest of it."
"There is one," said Renway. "I took it from Hawker's factory last night. It's one of a new flight they're building for the Moravian government. The one I took had been out on range tests, and the guns were still fitted. I also took three spare drums of ammunition. I flew it over here myself--it was the first night landing I've ever made."
It had not been a particularly clean one, Simon remembered; and then he saw the continual tensing and twitching of Renway's hands and suddenly understood much more.
There had been a pilot; but he had--met with an accident. And yet the plot in which he had a vital role could not be given up. Therefore it had grown in Renway's mind to the dimensions of an obsession, until the point had been reached where it loomed up as the needle's eye of an insanely conceived salvation. Although Enrique was dead, the aeroplane had still been stolen: Renway had flown it himself, and the ordeal of that untutored night flight had cut into the marrow of his nerves. Still the goal could not be given up. The new pilot arrived at the crisis of an eight-hour sleepless nightmare of strain--a solution, an escape, a straw which he could grapple even while preserving the delusion that he was a superman irresistibly turning a chance tool to his need. Simon recalled Renway's abrupt defiant plunge into the subject after that long awkward silence, and hypothesis merged into certainty. It was queer, he reflected, how that superman complex, that delusion of being able to enslave human instruments body and soul by the power of a hypnotic personality which usually existed only in the paranoiac's own grandiose imagination, had been the downfall of so many promising criminals.
"You did that?" said the Saint, in a tone which contained exactly the right blend of incredulous admiration and sober awe.
"Of course."
Simon put out his cigarette and helped himself to a second.
"That's a beginning," he said. "But the pilots will be armed--they're in touch with the shore by radio all the way------"
"What is the good of that?" asked Renway calmly. "The conditions aren't the same as they would be in war time. They aren't really expecting to be attacked. They see another aeroplane overtaking them, that's all--there's always plenty of traffic on that route, and they wouldn't think anything of it. Then you dive. With your experience, they'd be an easy target. It ought to be finished in a couple of bursts--long before they could wireless any alarm to the shore. And as soon as their wireless stops, I shall carry on with their report. I have a short-wave transmitter installed in this house, and I have a record of every signal that's been sent out by cross-Channel aircraft for the last month. I know all the codes. The shore stations will never know what's happened until the aeroplane fails to arrive."
The Saint blew out a flick of smoke and kept his eyes on Renway's pale complacent face. It was dawning on him that if Renway was a lunatic, he was the victim of a very thorough and methodical kind of madness.
"There isn't only traffic in the air." he said.
"There's also shipping. Suppose a ship sees wha' happens?"
Renway made a gesture of impatience.
"My good fellow, you're going over ground that I covered two months ago. I could raise more objections than you know yourself. For instance, all the time the aeroplane is over the Channel, there will be special motorboats cruising off the French and English coasts. One or more of them may possibly reach the scene. It will be part of your job to keep them at a distance by machine-gun fire from the air until all the gold has been secured."
"How do you propose to do that?" persisted the Saint. "You can't lift ten tons of gold out of a wrecked aeroplane in five minutes."
A sudden sly look hooded Renway's eyes.
"That has also been arranged," he said.
He refilled his glass and drank again, sucking in his lips after the drink. As if wondering whether he had betrayed too much already, he said: "You need only be concerned with your own share in the proceedings. Do you feel like taking a part?"
Simon thought for a moment and nodded.
"I'm your man," he said.
Renway remained looking at him for a while longer, and the Saint fancied he could almost see the man's nerves relaxing in the sedative glow of conquest.
"In that case, I shall not need to send for my chauffeur."
"What about my machine?" asked the Saint.
"You can keep it here until you require it again. I have plenty of accommodation, and one of my mechanics can find out the cause of your trouble and put it right."
For a second the Saint's eyes chilled, for no mechanic would take long to discover that there was nothing whatever the matter with the machine in which he had landed. But he answered easily enough:
"That's very good of you."
Renway picked up his valise and took it to a big built-in safe at one end of the room, into which he locked it. He came back blandly, rubbing his hands.
"Your--er--samples will be quite safe there until you need them. Shall we go and attend to your aeroplane?"
They walked out again in the strengthening sunshine, down through the rose garden and across the small field where the Saint had made his landing. Simon felt the dead weight of the automatic in his pocket bumping his hip as he walked, and felt unexpectedly glad of its familiar comfort: the nervous twitching of Renway's hands had finished altogether now, and there was an uncanny inert calm about his sauntering bulk which was frightful to study--the unnatural porcine opaqueness of a man whose mind has ceased to work like other men's minds. . . .
Renway went on talking, in the same simpering monotone, as if he had been describing the layout of an asparagus bed: "I shall know the number of the transport plane and the time it leaves Croydon five minutes after it takes off--you'll have plenty of time to be waiting for it in the air."
On the other side of the field there was a big tithe barn with the hedge laid up to one wall. Ren-way knocked on a small door, and it opened three inches to show a narrow strip of the grimy face and figure of a man in overalls. After the first pause of identification it opened wider, and they went in.
The interior was cool and spacious, dimly lit in contrast with the sunlight outside by a couple of naked bulbs hung from the high ridge. Simon's first glance round was arrested by the grey bull-nosed shape of the Hawker pursuit plane at the far end of the shed. In another two or three hours he would have found it less easy to recognize, except by the long gleaming spouts of the machine guns braced forward from the pilot's cockpit, for another overalled man mounted on a folding ladder was even then engaged in painting out the wing cocardes with a layer of neutral grey dope. But the national markings on the empennage were still untouched---if the Saint had ever been tempted to wonder whether he had lost himself in a fantastic dream, the sight of those shining strips of colour was the last thing that was needed to show him that he was in touch with nothing more fantastic than astounding reality.