There was a quarter-moon and a light mist, a blend of visibility and cover that suited the Saint’s immediate purpose very well. It took him less than twenty minutes to reach Kyleham House, and he smiled with a grim mirthless satisfaction as he saw the wall ten feet high, looming up blankly out of the mist.
This was what the weeks of preparation had been all about. Behind that wall, and three hundred yards beyond the electrified inner fence, he would find John Rockham and The Squad — just as Jack Randall must have found them, on the sortie that was to be the last he ever made.
The Saint’s jaw tightened as he swung the grip case in under the shadow of the wall and opened the haversack.
The rope ladder he had ordered was designed for maximum compactness and minimum weight. It was made of the thinnest possible parachute cord that would support a man’s weight; it was no more than six feet long, and had a big U-shaped claw of tempered steel attached to one end. He had to throw the grappling-iron up to hook over the top of the wall, in which he succeeded at the second attempt, and then to scale the ladder was only a matter of moments.
He paused briefly astride the wall, assuring himself that all was clear on the other side, before repositioning the ladder for his descent and eventual return.
The fence was only three yards beyond; he could see it clearly in the subdued moonlight: the solid wooden posts at eight-foot intervals, and stretched between them the thick continuous copper wires running parallel, about nine inches apart — the top one a good seven feet high.
An Olympic high-jumper might have cleared it, with a good run and at some hazard to his marriageability; but it would have been impossible to climb over it or through it without touching the wires and absorbing whatever unpleasant voltage they carried.
The surgical operation which the Saint performed on this shocking obstacle was simple enough in principle, and he could easily have applied it to all the strands in the section of the fence which was his patient. But that would have taken quite a bit longer; and anyway with reasonable care he would be able to manage his subsequent excursions satisfactorily with just the bottom wire neutralised, leaving a safe eighteen-inch height to squirm under. Beside which, there would be less danger of his scalpel work being discovered.
That was one calculated risk.
He had to do his doctoring by the little natural light that happened to be available. This consisted of connecting a heavily insulated length of wire from his haversack to the lowest electrified strand, at the post, leading it across through the thick grass to the next post, and up that post again to re-connect with the same strand. Having thus bridged the distance between the posts — in case an alarm would have been set off if the original circuit had been crudely broken — he was able to excise the bypassed wire, using a special pair of insulated cutters which were included in the equipment he had requisitioned.
As a finishing touch, he fastened a length of string between the fence posts at the same level, to make the gap in the wire less obvious.
He knew that any really close scrutiny would be bound to reveal the substitution, but he just had to bank on the likelihood that a fence more than a mile long wouldn’t regularly get a yard-by-yard inspection.
By taking sight bearings on a couple of trips inside the grounds, he made sure of being able to locate his handiwork again without hesitation, and then returned to the road outside as he had come, after hiding the haversack and some of its equipment under a bush beside the fence.
A few minutes later he was outside the main entrance.
The gates were of heavy wrought iron, massively bolted and locked. Beside a small brass plate bearing the words
there was a bell-push. He leant on it for a few seconds. He could see a light in the gate lodge, and presently two athletic-looking men emerged. They were dressed alike, in dark blue denims and black roll-neck pullovers. One man was carrying a powerful torch, which he shone full in the Saint’s face. The other man kept one hand behind his back, and it didn’t take a clairvoyant to guess what might be in it.
“Name?” demanded a surly voice from behind the lantern.
“Simon Templar,” said the Saint, in Gascott’s rasping voice.
6
It was an outrageous flourish of the kind he couldn’t resist. And as a variant of the effective technique of deception by the obvious, it had a potential practical function too. A George Gascott who had announced himself under another name, especially if by doing so he was making the ridiculous claim to be the Saint, was less likely to be suspected at some point of being actually a phoney.
The surly voice said: “Come again?”
“Simon Templar,” he repeated. “Tell Rockham I’ve come to sew him a few mailbags.”
There was silence for a few moments as the two guards absorbed this revelation. Their impulse, he knew, was to reject it outright — which might have been unfortunate for him, since their method of rejection would probably have contained no milk of human kindness. But he could see them wavering with uncertainty.
The spokesman spoke again.
“Wait there.”
He went back into the gate lodge, leaving his partner standing on silent watch, and Simon amused himself by imagining the exact course of the conversation on the phone with Rockham, who he was confident would add it up in two seconds flat.
And he was right. A minute later the character with the torch re-emerged. He had a jangling bunch of keys in the other hand.
“Mr Gascott, is it?” he said with rather less surliness and rather more respect in his voice.
Gascott had an arrogant way of half-inclining his head in a confirming gesture that was barely on the affirmative side of indifference. The Saint produced just that condescending wag of the head now, and to perfection, so that any impulse to amiable conversation that might have been about to burgeon in the guard’s tender breast was nipped firmly in the bud till after he had opened the heavy gates enough to let the Saint through, and had slammed the solid bolts and padlocks back into place.
Then the gatekeeper said: “There’ll be a jeep for you in a minute”; and in about that time Simon heard the note of an engine puttering through the mist, and saw the twin cones of light sweeping down the long curve of driveway from the main buildings.
He climbed into the jeep beside the driver; the man nodded to him and grunted a greeting. He was dressed like the two guards, and he had a revolver on the parcel shelf, within easy reach of his right hand.
As the jeep backed and turned, Simon automatically registered and memorised the layout of the front entrance and the gatehouse and driveway. Almost as soon as they had moved off again in forward gear, they passed through a gap which was probably the one single breach in the whole length of the engirdling electrified fence — or had been, until his preparatory foray over the wall.
The main buildings were an architectural hotchpotch spanning two and a half centuries. The original Kyleham House had been one of the county’s principal manor houses. Successive owners, presumably increasingly plutocratic and insensitive, had added wing after unbefitting wing, and piled annexe upon incongruous annexe; and during its days as a boarding college, still more extensions and new outbuildings had further compounded the desecration, so that the whole effect was almost of a random assemblage that a child might have made with a lot of dull-coloured playbricks of ill-assorted shapes and sizes.
At the centre of the sprawl of buildings, embedded in the larger structure that had grown by accretion, was the original manor house, preserved virtually unaltered. Its facade was elegant, white-painted, colonnaded. The jeep stopped in front of it, and the driver led Simon in through the main door and up a curved staircase that must have been designed with the house itself.