She clutched his arm tugging him in the direction from which she had come. She was gasping so hard for breath that she could get out only one sentence.
“I heard you in there,” she said.
7
“You heard me?” the Saint asked. “In the gambling club?”
“Yes,” Cassie panted. “I heard you talking. Come on, hurry!”
She dragged him towards an alley, a short block from Thorpe-Jones’ building. It seemed to be a dead end. There was a van parked in it, its front facing the street. There was no one in the driver’s seat or anywhere near the truck.
“There!” Cassie announced, pointing at it.
Simon looked at the perfectly ordinary vehicle, whose sides advertised it as a carrier of imported Grecian table delicacies. He looked back at Cassie.
“I see the van, dear,” he said with elaborate patience. “Shall we go now?”
“No,” she whispered. “Listen. This is where I heard your voice.”
She pulled him to the side of the van. He stood quietly for a moment. Ghostly voices seemed to come to his ears from no discernible source. One of them sounded like Thorpe-Jones, and the other was unknown.
“Does the sum of two thousand pounds mean anything to you, in connection with Perry Loudon?” the voice of Thorpe-Jones was asking.
After a pause, the second voice answered. Though the sounds were weak, the words were distinct.
“Not a thing, guv’nor. You never paid that much money for these statues, did you?”
Simon moved stealthily around to the back of the truck and put his eye to a crack between the closed doors, from which came a thin line of light. Not only could he hear Thorpe-Jones more clearly, but he could see him too. The van was a mobile television monitoring station, and at the front end of the enclosed part, facing Simon’s vantage point, was a screen showing a large section of the office he had just left a few minutes before. With the owner of the gambling club was a hulk of a man with wavy blond hair and gigantic shoulders which must have required special tailoring even for undershirts. Simon, on previous visits to the club, had seen the man, who was called Bonnie and was Thorpe-Jones’ personal body guard.
“Well,” Thorpe-Jones was saying, “if there’s something in this that implicates me, I want to know about it.”
“Should I check it?” Bonnie asked.
“Not yet. The best way to invite suspicion would be to show too much interest. Let’s hold off overnight at least and see what develops.”
Bonnie left the room, and Thorpe-Jones went to his desk and began looking through some papers. Simon’s view of the interior of the van was so limited that he could see only straight down the center. A figure moved between him and the screen. He could not tell if there was more than one man in the listening station or not.
“What is it?” whispered Cassie.
“First, let’s get away from here,” he cautioned her.
He did not answer her question until they had walked a safe distance from the van.
“Somebody has managed to get a television camera into Thorpe-Jones’ office. From that van, they’re watching every move he makes, and probably recording it, too.”
“But why?”
“Blackmail, most probably. And maybe not just blackmail of Thorpe-Jones. He’s a friend of a lot of high-up people, and all sorts of interesting things may go on in that mansion of his.”
The Saint led the way to his car as he was speaking to Cassie. He helped her in, got in the driver’s seat, and drove a few yards in the direction of the side street where the van was parked. When he stopped he was in a position to see just the nose of the van.
“How could they get a television camera into his office?” Cassie asked.
“I’m sure it took a lot of ingenuity,” Simon said. “Can’t you guess?”
Cassie shook her head.
“It’s in one of Perry Loudon’s sculptures,” he told her. “I’ve just been in that room, and I know exactly where the camera would have to be placed in order to give that particular view. It’s in a big steel and neon monstrosity — the last thing Thorpe-Jones bought from Loudon.”
Cassie was stupefied. She was sitting bolt upright staring at him.
“Then Perry was in with crooks,” she said. “Is that it?”
“More or less. I think Thorpe-Jones was on the level when he told me he’d never paid Loudon as much as a thousand pounds for one of those heaps. Which means that those big payments in Loudon’s bank book must have come from the people who wanted microphones and television cameras incorporated into his creations.” Cassie flopped back in her seat.
“Nobody ever offered me two thousand pounds to incorporate anything into my creations.”
The Saint patted her knee sympathetically. “Well, cheer up. There’s a good side to it. You’re not dead, and Perry Loudon is.”
She thought about that for a while, and before she could make a comment Simon suddenly turned the ignition key and started the engine. A man had just appeared from around the van and was walking briskly, carrying a fat briefcase, towards a grey Mini parked a hundred feet or so in front of the Saint’s. The van stayed where it was as the Mini pulled away from the curb and headed towards North Audley Street.
“If you follow him,” said Cassie, “we’re liable to end up like Perry Loudon — dead!”
“If I don’t follow him,” the Saint retorted, “I’m very likely to end up in jail, which is a prospect I don’t fancy at all. I’ve got to catch Perry Loudon’s real killers within the next two or three hours, and you’re going to have the privilege of a front-row seat for the show.”
Cassie moaned, let her head fall back, and closed her eyes. “I wish I were at home with my dummies,” she whispered, as if in prayer.
The Mini went north at a moderate speed and crossed over Oxford Street, with Simon following only a few lengths behind it. Traffic was now sparse, and there were few turns. It was one of the easier jobs of tail-light dogging the Saint had ever attempted, and it was over before the driver of the automobile he was following had any reason to become suspicious. The end of the line was an elegant apartment building eight stories high, overlooking Regent’s Park in an even more obviously mink-poodle-RolIs Royce neighborhood than Finlay Thorpe-Jones’ gambling club had been, where even the sidewalks seemed to exude an air of staid and irreproachable status.
“Follow him in,” Simon said. “He might recognize me.” Before Cassie could protest, he had stopped his car, leaned across her to open the door on her side, and firmly propelled her out on to the street. “Hurry,” he said.
She obeyed, and probably was taken by the red-uniformed guardian of the apartment building’s thick glass doors as the errant daughter of some millionaire. The doorman undoubtedly knew, as do the proprietors of the most exclusive shops, that the sloppiest looking client may very well be the richest. Cassie was inside within fifteen seconds after the man from the cream-colored car had gone through the same doors. In less than half a minute the same man emerged again, and Cassie strolled out with apparent indifference as he drove away. Then she ran across the street to Simon’s window.
“I saw him give some boxes to the desk clerk,” she gasped, all out of breath.
“What kind of boxes?”
“Like cigarette boxes, only bigger.”
“Probably video or voice tapes from the van,” Simon said. “Did either of them say anything while he was making the delivery?”
“The man from the car just said ‘Usual routine’ and then turned around and walked away. The desk clerk used the telephone — I think to call one of the apartments, because he didn’t dial a regular number. He said something like, ‘The usual packages have arrived, sir.’ That was it.”