The Saint Meets the Tiger (6 page)

Bittle turned over the cigars in a box on a side table near the Saint, selected one, amputated the tip, and lighted it with the loving precision of a connoisseur. Then he faced Templar blandly.

“That happens to be just what I can’t allow at the moment,” said Bittle in an apologetic tone. “You see, we have some business to discuss.”

“I guess it’ll keep,” said the Saint gently.

“I don’t think so,” said Bittle.

Templar regarded the other thoughtfully for a few seconds. Then, with a shrug, he jerked the millionaire’s automatic from his pocket and walked to the French windows. He opened one of them a couple of inches, holding it with his foot, and signed to the girl to follow him. With her beside him, he said:

“Then it looks, Bittle, as if you’ll spend to-morrow morning burying a number of valuable dogs.”

“I don’t think so,” said Bittle.

There was a quiet significance in the way he said it that brought the Saint round again on the alert.

“Go hon!” mocked Simon watchfully.

Bittle stood with his head thrown back and his eyes half closed, as though listening. Then he said:

“You see, Mr. Templar, if you look in the cigar box you will find that the bottom sinks back a trifle under quite a light pressure. In fact, it acts as a bell push. There are now three men in the garden as well as four bloodhounds, and two more in the passage outside this room. And the only dog I can imagine myself burying to-morrow morning is an insolent young puppy, who’s chosen to poke his nose into my business.”

“Well, well, well,” said the Saint, his hands in his pockets. “Well, well, WELL!”

Sir John Bittle settled himself comfortably in his armchair, pulled an ash stand to a convenient position, and continued the leisurely smoking of his cigar. The Saint, looking at him in a softly speculative fashion, had to admire the man’s nerve. The Saint smiled; and then Patricia’s hand on his arm brought him back with a jerk to the stern realities of the situation. He took the hand in his, pressed it, and turned the saintly smile on her in encouragement. Then he was weighing Bittle’s automatic in a steady hand.

“Carrying on the little game of Let’s Pretend,” suggested Simon, “let’s suppose that I sort of pointed this gun at you, all nervous and upset, and in my agitation I kind of twiddled the wrong knob. I mean, suppose it went off, and you were in the way? Wouldn’t it be awkward!”

Bittle shook his head.

“Terribly,” he agreed. “And you’re such a mystery to Baycombe already that I’m afraid they’d talk. You know how unkind gossip can be. Why, they’d be quite capable of saying you did it on purpose.”

“There’s something in that,” said Templar mildly, and he put the gun back in his pocket. “Then suppose I took my little knife and began playing about with it, and it flew out of my hand and took off your ear? Or suppose it sliced off the end of your nose? It’s rotten to have only half a nose or only one ear. People stop and stare at you in the street, and so forth.”

“And think of my servants,”’ said Brttle. “They’re all very attached to me, and they might be quite unreasonably vindictive.”

“That’s an argument,” conceded the Saint seriously. “And now suppose you suggest a game?”

Bittle moved to a more comfortable position and thought carefully before replying. The time ticked over, but the Saint was too old a hand to be rattled by any such primitive device, and he leaned nonchalantly against the wall and waited patiently for Bittle to realize that the cat-and-mouse gag was getting no laughs that journey. At length Bittle said:

“I should be quite satisfied, Mr. Templar, if you would spend a day or two with me, and during that time we could decide on some adequate expression of your regret for your behaviour this evening. As for Miss Holm, she and I can finish our little chat uninterrupted, and then I will see her home myself.”

” ‘Um,” murmured the Saint, lounging. “Bit of an optimist, aren’t you?”

“I won’t take ‘no’ for an answer, Mr. Templar,” said Bittle cordially. “In fact, I expect your room is already being prepared.”

The Saint smiled.

“You almost tempt me to accept,” he said. “But it cannot be. If Miss Holm were not with us—well, I should be very boorish to refuse. But as a matter of fact I promised Miss Girton to join them in a sandwich and a glass of ale toward midnight, and I can’t let them down.”

“Miss Holm will make your excuses,” urged Bit-lie, but the Saint shook his head regretfully.

“Another time.”

Bittle moved again in the chair, and went on with his cigar. And it began to dawn upon the Saint that, much as he was enjoying the sociable round of parlour sports, the game was becoming a trifle too one-sided. There was also the matter of Patricia, who was rather a handicap. He found that he was still holding her hand, and was reluctant to make any drastic change in the circumstances, but business was business.

With a sigh the Saint hitched himself off the wall which he had found such a convenient prop, released the hand with a final squeeze, and began to saunter round the room, humming light-heartedly under his breath and inspecting the general fixtures and fittings with a politely admiring eye.

“This room is under observation from two points,” Bittle informed him as a tactful precaution.

“Pity we haven’t got a camera—the scene’d shoot fine for a shocker,” was the Saint’s only criticism.

And Simon went on with his tour of the room. He had taken Bittle’s warning with the utmost nonchalance, but its reactions on the problem in hand and his own tentative solution were even then being balanced up in his mind. Bittle, meanwhile, smoked away with a large languidness which indicated his complete satisfaction with the entertainment provided and a sublime disregard for the time spent on digesting it. Which was all that the Saint could have asked.

In its way, it was a classical performance. Anyone with any experience of such things, entering the room, would have sensed at once that both men were past masters. Nothing could have been calmer than their appearance, nothing more polished than their dispassionate exchange of backchat.

The Saint worked his unhurried way round the room. Now he stopped to examine a Benares bowl, now an etching, now a fine old piece of furniture. The patina on a Greek vase held him enthralled for half a minute: then he was absorbed in the workmanship of a Sheraton whatnot. In fact, an impartial observer would have gathered that the Saint had ao other interest in life than the study of various antiques, and that he was thoroughly enjoying a free invitation to take his time over a minute scrutiny of his host’s treasures. And all the while the Saint’s eyes, masked now by lazily drooping lids, were taking in all the details of the furnishing to which he did not devote any ostentatious attention, and searching every inch of the walls for the spyholes of which Bittle had spoken.

The millionaire was unperturbed, and the Saint once again permitted the shadow of a smile to touch the corners of his mouth as he caught Patricia’s troubled eyes. The smile hardly moved a muscle of his face, but it drew an answering tremor of the girl’s lips that showed him that her spirits were still keeping their end up.

The Saint was banking on Bittle’s confidence as a bluffer, and he was not disappointed. Bittle knew that, for all the guards with whom he had surrounded himself, his personal safety hung by the slender thread of a simulated carelessness for it. Bittle knew that to show the least anxiety, the faintest flutter of uncertainty, would have been to throw an additional weapon into Templar’s already dangerously comprehensive armoury, and that was exactly what Bittle dared not do. Therefore the millionaire affected not to notice the Saint’s movements, and never changed his position a fraction or allowed his eyes to betray him by following Simon round the room. Bittle leaned back among the cushions and gazed abstractedly at a water colour on the opposite wall. At another time he studied the pattern on the carpet. Then he looked expressionlessly at Patricia. Once he pored over his fingernails, and measured the length of ash on his cigar against his cuff. All the while the Saint was behind him, but Bittle did not turn his head, and the Saint was filled with hope and misgiving at the same time. He had located one peephole, cunningly concealed below a pair of old horse pistols which hung on the wall, but the second he had failed to find. It might have been a bluff; in any case, the time was creeping on, and the Saint could not afford to carry his feigned languor too far. He would have to chance the second watcher.

He began a second circuit, deliberately passing in front of Bittle, and the millionaire looked up casually at him.

“Don’t think I’m hurrying you,” said Bittle, “but it’s getting late, and you might have rather a tiring day to-morrow.”

“Thanks,” murmured Simon. “It takes a lot to tire me. But I’ve decided to spend the night with you, at any rate. You might tell the big stiff with the damaged proboscis to fill the hot-water bottle and lay out some nightshirts.”

Bittle nodded.

“I can only commend your discretion,” he remarked, “as sincerely as I appreciate your simple tastes.”

“Not at all,” murmured the Saint, no less suave. “Would it be troubling you too much to ask for the loan of a pair of bedsocks?”

The Saint was now behind Bittte again. He was standing a bare couple of feet from the millionaire’s head, one hand resting lightly on the back of a small chair. The other hand was holding a bronze statuette up to the light, and the whole pose was so perfectly done that its hidden menace could not have struck the watchers outside until it was top late.

Bittle was a fraction quicker on the uptake. The Saint caught Patricia’s eye and made an almost imperceptible motion toward the window; and at that moment the millionaire’s nerve faltered for a split second, and he began to turn his head. In that instant the Saint sogged the statuette into the back of Bittle’s skull—without any great force, but very scientifically. In another lightning movement, he had jerked up the chair and flung it crashing into the light, and blackness fell on the room with a totally blinding density.

The Saint sprang toward the window.

“Pat!” he breathed urgently.

He touched her groping hand and got the French window open in a trice.

There was a hoarse shouting in the garden and in the corridor, and suddenly the door burst open and a shaft of light fell across the room, revealing the limp form of Bittle sprawled in the armchair. A couple of burly figures blocked the doorway, but Patricia arid Simon were out of the beam thrown by the corridor lights.

Before she realized what was happening, the girl felt herself snatched up in a pair of steely arms. Within a bare five seconds of the blow that removed Sir John Bittle from the troubles of that evening the Saint was through the window and racing across the lawn, carrying Patricia Holm as he might have carried a child.

The complete manoeuvre was carried through with so faultless a technique that Simon Templar, for all his burden, passed right between the two men who were waiting outside the French window, and the ambush was turned into a cursing pursuit. As soon as that danger was past, Simon paused for a moment to set the girl down again; and then, still keeping hold of her hand, he ran her toward the obscurity of a clump of bushes at the end of the lawn.”

They had a flying start, and they reached the shrubbery with a lead of half a dozen yards. Without hesitation the Saint plunged into the jungle, finding by instinct the easiest path between the bushes, doubling and dodging like a wild animal and dragging Patricia after him with no regard for the twigs and branches that ripped their clothes to shreds and grazed blood from the exposed skin. Presently he stopped dead, and she stood close beside him, struggling to control her breathing, while he listened for the sounds of pursuit. They could hear men ploughing clumsily through the shrubbery, calling to one another, crashing uncertainly about. Then, as the hunters realized that their quarry was running no longer, the noise died down, and was succeeded by a tense and straining hush.

Patricia heard Simon whispering in her ear.

“We’re right by the wall. I’m going to get you over. Go home and don’t say anything to your aunt. If I don’t turn up in an hour, tell Dr. Carn. Get me? Don’t, whatever you do, start raising hell in less than an hour.”

“But aren’t you coming?”

Her lips were right against his ear, so that she could feel his head move negatively, though she could not see it.

“Nope. I haven’t quite had my money’s worth yet. Come along.”

She felt him move her so that she could touch the wall. Then he had stooped and was guiding her foot on to his bent knee. As he raised her other foot to his shoulder, while she steadied herself against the wall, a twig snapped under his heel, and the hunt was up again.

“Quick!” he urged.

He straightened up with her standing on his shoulders.

“Mind the glass on top. My coat’s up there. Found it? … Good. Over you go. Have some beer waiting for me—I’ll need it.”

“I hate leaving you.”

She could just see a tiny flashing blur of white as he moved a little away from the wall, for she was now nearly over, and she recognized it for his familiar smile. “Tell me that some time when I can make an adequate reply,” he said. “Tinkety-tonk!”

Then she was gone—he drew himself up and almost thrust her down into the road outside.

The pursuers were very near, and the Saint broke off along the wall with a cheery “Tally-ho!” so that there should be no mistake as to his whereabouts. His job at the moment was to divert the attention of the hunt until the girl had reached safety. He also had a vague idea of taking a look at some of the other rooms of the house—it was only a vague idea, for the Saint was the most blithely irresponsible man in the world, and steadfastly refused to burden himself with a cut-and-dried programme.

Again he distanced the pursuit, working away from the wall to minimize the risk of being cornered, and trying to make enough noise to persuade the enemy that they were still chasing two people. Once, pausing in silence to relocate the trackers, he heard a scuffle not far away, which” shortly terminated in an outburst of profanity and mutual recrimination; and the Saint chuckled. In being saved the trouble of distinguishing friend from foe he had an incalculable advantage over the others, although it made him wonder how long it would be before the search became more systematic and electric torches were brought into service. Or would they decide to wait until daylight? The Saint began to appreciate the numerous advantages attached to a garden wall which so effectively shut out the peering of the stray passerby.