"Where are you going?" asked half the brace curtly, in Spanish; and Simon answered in the same language: "To visit a friend. He's expecting me."
"Baje usted."
Simon got out. The other guardia came round the car and attached himself again to his comrade. It was like a reunion of Siamese twins. Half the brace kept him covered while the other half searched him rapidly.
The Saint remembered that since he had left the hotel with no nefarious intent he had not even troubled to take a gun. He had only one weapon-the slim razor-edged throwing knife strapped to his left forearm under his sleeve which he would not have exchanged for all the firearms in the world-but the search was not thorough enough to discover that.
"ż Su documentación?"
Simon produced his passport. It was examined and returned to him.
"żTurista?"
"Si."
"Bueno. Siga usted."
The Saint scratched his head.
"What is this?" he inquired curiously.
"That does not concern you," replied the talking half of the brace uncommunicatively and stepped back.
Simon got into the car again and drove on thoughtfully. Certainly, now that he recollected it, the rescue of Joris Vanlinden had not been accomplished in complete silence; in fact, he remembered that one or two shots had been fired in the later stages which would doubtless have been audible for some distance; but the convention of guardias gathered on the spot seemed somewhat disproportionate to the occasion, even under an administration which has always been convinced that posting a herd of police on the scene of a past crime is an infallible method of preventing another crime being committed somewhere else. He puzzled over it for a few moments, trying to recall some other factor which seemed to have slipped his memory; and then he saw the long white wall which he had been told to look out for, and the sight temporarily diverted his mind from other problems.
He drove slowly past it, and a hundred yards farther on he came to a narrow side turning into which he backed the car. He switched off the engine, turned out the lights and returned on foot. In the middle of the wall there was a wide gateway, wide enough to admit a big car-which it probably did, for the sidewalk was cut away in front of it. The gates were solid wood, studded and bound with iron, and they filled the whole archway so that it was impossible to get a glimpse of the garden inside. In the lower part of one of the gates was a smaller door. Simon scanned it in the subdued beam of a flashlight no larger than a fountain pen, and spelled out the name on the tarnished brass plate-"Las Mariposas." It was Graner's house.
He walked on, along the wall; and when it ended he climbed over the rough wire fence of the adjoining field and worked along the other side. In this way he made a complete circuit of the property, and presently found himself in the road again. The wall ran all the way round it without a break, two feet over his head the whole time; and the Saint smiled with professional satisfaction. In the circumstances, the household seemed to have all the hallmarks of really well-organised villainy, and Simon Templar approved of well-organised villains. They made life so much more exciting.
The house itself stood in one angle of the square, so that one corner of the surrounding wall was actually formed by the walls of the house itself; but the only opening in those walls was formed by two or three barred windows on the top floor. Apart from those small apertures, the walls rose sheer from the ground for thirty feet without any break or projection that would have given foothold to a lizard. There was no hope of feloniously entering the property by that route.
He returned to the first field he had entered, and inspected the wall again from that side. He reached up to the top, and felt a closely woven mesh of barbed wire under his fingers-anyone a little shorter than himself would have had to make a jump for the grip, and would have collected a pair of badly lacerated hands for compensation.
Simon bent down and took off his shoes. He placed them side by side on top of the wall, hooked his fingers over them, and in that way drew himself up. In that way he discovered something else.
A fine copper wire ran along the top of the wall, stretched between brackets in such a way that it projected about eight inches from the wall itself and also leaned slightly towards the outside. It had been invisible until he almost put his face into it, and he only just stopped pulling himself up in time. If he had been even a little clumsy with placing his shoes on top of the wall he would have touched it. He studied it intently for a few seconds. And then he lowered himself carefully to the ground, pulled his shoes down after him, and put them on again.
Exactly what useful purpose that wire served he didn't know, but he didn't like the look of it. It certainly didn't seem strong enough to hold anyone back who intended to go through it, and it wasn't even barbed. But it was so placed that no one could even pull himself up sufficiently to see over the wall without touching the wire; certainly it was impossible to scramble over it without doing so. A ladder placed up against the wall would have touched it just the same.
It might have been connected with some system of alarms, it might even have carried a charge of high-voltage electricity, it might have fired guns or sent up rockets or played martial music; but the one certain thing of which the Saint was profoundly convinced was that it hadn't been put there for fun. He was beginning to acquire a wholesome respect for Reuben Graner which nevertheless failed to depress his spirits.
"Life," said the Saint, to his guardian angel, "is starting to look more and more entertaining."
As he stood there under the wall, allowing the full flavour of the entertainment to circulate meditatively around his palate, he became conscious of a sound on the other side of the wall. It was hardly more than a faint rustle such as a tree might have made stirring in the breeze; and then the hairs prickled instinctively on the back of his neck as he realised that there was no breeze. . . .
He listened, standing so still that he could feel the throbbing of the blood in his arteries. The rustling went on; and now that he could analyse it logically he knew that it was too abrupt and irregular to be caused by a wind. It was made by something alive, something heavy and yet stealthy moving about among shrubbery on the other side of the wall. He heard the sound of a subdued sniffing; and all at once the words of Christine Vanlinden rushed through his mind. "They hadn't let the dogs out then . . ."
He remained frozen to immobility, expecting at any moment to hear the tranquillity of the night shattered by the fierce clamour of barking; but nothing happened. He heard the muffled blare of a ship's siren away down in the harbour, and a car whined up the hill and vanished in a whispering diminuendo; but in between those sounds there was nothing but the drumming in his own ears. When at last he ventured to move, the uproar still failed to break out. Nothing broke the stillness except that occasional stealthy rustle that followed him all the way back to the road, keeping pace with him on the other side of the wall. In the unnatural muteness of that invisible following there was something eerie and horrible that set his nerves tingling.
Again he stood in front of the arched gateway, lighting a cigarette and considering the situation. Very few things seemed more certain than that it was practically impossible to get into the grounds without raising an alarm-he had discovered a fair number of reasons for that; but they only provided additional reasons for believing that there were other equally ingenious gadgets waiting on the inside of the wall for the resourceful intruder who managed to pass the first line of defence. Besides all of which, of course, there were still the dogs; and their utter and uncanny silence gave the Saint a queer chilly intuition that their purpose was not so much to give alarms as to deal in their own way with intruders. . . .