Although he wasn’t aware of any actual antagonism on either side, it seemed like damned hard work to pierce through Ruth Barnaby’s professional single-mindedness to anything softer or lighter-hearted underneath.
“It does the job, though?” she inquired dispassionately, indicating the oversuit.
“It does,” he said. “It keeps my clothes from getting dirty and scuffed or muddy on an outing like this and saves awkward questions about where I’ve been and what I’ve been doing.”
“I can tell Pelton that you’re well and truly installed, then?”
“Yes. Though I’ve nothing much to report as yet. But by the way, you never did explain how Nobbins has been reporting.”
“He didn’t — not till he became a trusty. Trusties are allowed odd days off. But that wasn’t till he’d been there a couple of weeks or so. And then he sent those reports you read.”
“And they weren’t too helpful. I suppose he wouldn’t have been up to climbing walls?”
“Neither physically nor psychologically,” she said. “He’s been scared stiff ever since he went in.”
“Then why did he go in?”
She shrugged.
“Pelton’s idea. Bert had been griping a bit about always being behind the scenes — you know, the poor grey anonymous little man. Pelton wanted someone else on the inside in a hurry. He didn’t want to risk sending in another front-line agent. The face just might have been recognised. And then this vacancy came up. Pelton found out that Rockham needed somebody to do his accounts, look after the men’s pay, keep records — all that sort of thing.”
“And Nobbins had the right qualifications?”
“For that, yes — he used to be in the Pay Corps. But for active service as an infiltrator, no — in my opinion.”
The outline facts weren’t new to the Saint at this point. But for the first time he was beginning to see what Bert Nobbin’s real position in the affair might be; and that dawning realisation, or suspicion, made the hairs on the back of his neck stand up and do what felt like an icy little minuet.
“But Pelton put him in regardless,” he said slowly.
“It was a risk,” she admitted, without saying for whom. “But without Bert’s contribution it would have been a lot harder to brief you for your job. And he was keen to prove himself outside his own field.”
“Which is?”
“Information handling,” the girl said. “That’s analysis of incoming reports. For example, from Resident Directors — you know the set-up overseas. Deciphering, extraction, collating, condensing. It’s mostly dull, boring, routine work. But Bert’s good at it. I know — I worked under him for a couple of years.”
Thoughts were chasing each other around in the Saint’s head like wasps in a jam-jar. Somewhere in this whole setup was something — or maybe it was two or three or four things — that didn’t fit, no matter which way up you turned it and no matter what angle you looked at it from. His nose for these matters told him only one thing for certain: somewhere, in some way that it was beyond his present knowledge and understanding to discern, the game was rigged.
It was a little like being in a room where any of the angles or perspectives might be individually possible but which made an impossible whole, so that you felt a weirdly subtle vertigo. The sort of room certain psychological researchers have managed to create to test the disorienting effects of visual incoherence.
And who were the people who formed the corners of this particular psychological test chamber?
Rockham. Pelton. Ruth Barnaby. Gascott. The Saint himself. Nobbins. Jack Randall...
Jack Randall.
She had said, just now, that Pelton hadn’t wanted to risk sending in another front-line agent.
That might have been just an imprecision of speech on her part.
Or it might mean something the thought of which made the Saint grit his teeth in premonition.
“What made Randall do a damn-fool thing like going in on his own to look at the Squad, without a cover?” he asked bluntly.
She looked at him in surprise.
“Orders, of course,” she said. “Pelton told him to.”
8
It was a still-angry Simon Templar who went back to his room shortly after by an exact reversal of his outward route with its incidental manoeuvres, except for leaving the rope ladder under the bush by the fence, for future use and to safeguard it from being found in any search of his room.
The excursion had taken up little more than half an hour; but in consequence of it he was plunged into continuous if not very productive thought for twice as long again.
It was the sort of session in which, once, he would have smoked and enjoyed one cigarette after another: and several times in the course of that hour he found himself wishing heartily that his chronicler’s nicotine-stained conscience hadn’t insisted, some time back, on the Saint’s following his own example and giving the habit up.
At an obscenely early hour of the morning, Cawber appeared, and took his new charge, with a distinct lack of outward brotherly love, to breakfast in the big hall which had been the school refectory.
Cawber, the Saint decided, was a man nobody could ever have described as chummy.
They were joined by Lembick — not someone either whom he would ever have been tempted to take to his bosom.
But then, if the two of them were unpleasant specimens, he could be just as unpleasant himself, in the person of Gascott. He knew that he had worked himself so thoroughly into the part by now that on a superficial level he could give as good — or as bad — as he got when it came to the sort of sadistic bullying in which these two transplanted drill sergeants evidently specialised.
There was a man called Ungill at the next breakfast table whom Simon had vaguely noticed in Brixton. Ungill had left a week or more before him, and a lot more officially. They nodded to each other now. What amazed the Saint was the evident decline in Ungill’s health. He looked exhausted and ill. His skin was the colour of pale cheddar; he seemed to be in a state of quivering nervous tension, and he hobbled painfully to the table and lowered himself into the chair with obvious difficulty.
“Got a little pain, have we, Ungill?” Lembick leered. “Don’t you worry — we’ll soon get that sorted out for you. A nice brisk little five-mile run with the pack on and you’ll be as right as rain. Or maybe you’d prefer an hour or two’s wrestling with Cawber. You know how he enjoys that!”
Cawber licked his lips. There were flecks of cornflake on them, but Simon had the feeling he would have licked them anyway.
“Yeah,” he grinned. “Lemme have him!”
Ungill’s complexion went a couple of shades paler.
“Please, Lembick,” he whined. “Couldn’t I give training a miss today. My back—”
“Your back my backside!” Lembick cut in sneeringly. “You’ll not shirk while I’ve anything to do with it. And stop your snivelling and cringing — you make me sick!” With the air of a judge passing sentence and enjoying it, he added: “Cawber’s going to be busy with me, inducting the new man here. You’ll do the five-mile run — with a fifty-pound pack. Twenty times around the big field.”
Ungill, the Saint knew, was a pretty tough egg by ordinary standards. He was an old lag, and fairly typical of the breed in most ways. He wasn’t old in years — he was maybe in his mid-thirties — so much as in prison experience, having been in and out of penal institutions of one kind and another from the age of twelve. In recent years he had specialised, when he wasn’t actually paying the penalty for his specialisation, in keeping up with the people whose job it was to build bigger and better safes: which he did by devising bigger and better methods of blasting his way into them. And it was presumably for his expertise in explosives that Rockham had wanted him. Though at this rate, he didn’t look like having him for much longer.