Again the Saint’s forefinger stabbed out in Pelton’s direction.
“But it doesn’t,” he went on. “So you baited your double hook — Instrood, or whatever his real name is — for Rockham and for Nobbins. You assigned Nobbins to the interrogation, and you briefed Instrood to go to work on him — to play on his weaknesses in any way possible. I suppose Nobbins was made to feel he’d be more highly valued in Peking than here — especially if he’d helped their precious Instrood to get back to them.”
Pelton nodded. He gazed at Simon with quiet perceptiveness.
“Something of the sort,” he agreed. “I rather gathered from Ruth here that you’d managed to work it out for yourself. I’m most impressed, Simon, most impressed. Mind you, she herself had guessed most of it by this evening.”
“It wasn’t too difficult,” she said modestly. “When you sent Bert Nobbins into The Squad, at first I thought just what he was meant to think. I knew he’d asked for something different a few times — a more active assignment. And now something had come up, and you were giving him the chance he’d been asking for. He wanted to do it, even if he was petrified from start to finish. But then, when you gave him the job of interrogating Instrood, I began to wonder what you were up to. I knew you couldn’t really leave a genuinely important interrogation to him. But after I’d worked it out, I must say I thought you’d been extremely clever.”
Pelton favoured her with one of his thin smiles; but the Saint’s expression was stony.
“I thought it was clever, too,” he said evenly. “But the reaction it produces in me, as you’ve gathered, isn’t one of admiration. Nor do I propose to bore you with a detailed recital of the thought processes I followed in tuning myself in to your unsavoury machinations. My reasoning was probably much the same as Ruth’s anyhow, and she presents it with so much more flattery than I ever could.”
The Saint stood up, and looked hard at the two of them for what he earnestly hoped would be the last time.
“You already know,” he said, “that I’d never have agreed to get mixed up in any of this if I’d known then what I know now. But I did get myself into it, and I’ve done what you asked. And now I’m going away to wash the nasty taste out of my mouth. As you said — it’s a rough game, Pelton. And I’m used to rough games. But your kind of rough game isn’t mine. I’m too sorry for the losers, the exploited — the little men, the cheated and chiselled of the world. Men like Nobbins.”
He paused, with his hand on the doorknob; and because he had reached the end of that episode in his life, and was about to return thankfully to being wholly his own man again, something of the old light had already begun to come back into his dark buccaneering face. There was a parting shot he couldn’t resist.
“There are many words, Pelton,” he said quietly, “for what you are. But let me put it this way. You and your job may have been made for each other, but there’s another vocation which I’m afraid you’ve missed. You would have been very good on the land... if only they’d thought up a way of spreading you!”
And the Saint shut the door and went out into the cool London night.
For a time, which may have been ten minutes or twenty or thirty, he wandered by the Thames, along the embankment near Westminster Bridge, gazing at the sluggish current of the dark waters which symbolised for him bitter adventure that would soon be only a memory like all the others. That was a consolation. There were few of those adventures that he regretted, but this was one; and the sooner it became a distant recollection, the better.
But there were other consolations, too; and a little more of that light came back into his face and into his mind, pushing aside the dark clouds that had formed there, when he thought of the return trip he would make to Kyleham that night. There was a girl there, he remembered, with summer in her hair and autumn in her eyes, and who drove a tractor with a zest that spoke volumes about her in itself, who had probably never even dreamed that such a dirty tricks department as Pelton’s even existed.
But before looking her up, as he had promised, he still had his way over the wall of Rockham’s former camp; and he felt reasonably confident that he could get into Kyleham House, and open Rockham’s safe, and close it again, and get back out of the grounds, leaving no evidence of his return, long before Pelton got there with his man from Chubbs.