The car moved slowly forward again, and the Saint pulled himself cautiously up onto his toes and fingertips. The gatekeeper was temporarily blinded by the headlights; and Simon knew that that was his only chance. Once the car had passed within the walls, the odds on his being spotted would leap up to twenty-five to one; and having travelled so far, he had no urge to gamble his hopes of success on any bet like that.
The gateway was the vulnerable point in the fortifications, with a bare yard of masonry rising over it. As the car passed underneath, Simon set his teeth, gathered his cracking muscles, and jumped. He caught the top of the stonework, and wriggled over with an effort that seemed to split his sinews.
He found himself on a sort of narrow balcony that spanned the archway and disappeared into the turrets on each side. In the courtyard below him he could see the car swinging round to pull up beside a massive door over which a hanging lantern swayed in the slight breeze. The car stopped, and the prince stepped quickly out; as he did so, the door was flung open, and a broad beam of light cast the grotesquely elongated shadow of a footman down the steps. The prince stepped inside, pulling off his gloves; and the door dosed.
Simon's eye roved thoughtfully up the walls above the door. Higher up he could see a narrow streak of light sneaking through a gap in the curtains of a window: while he watched, the window next to it suddenly appeared in a yellow square of radiance.
'Which seems to be our next stop,' opined the Saint.
He moved along to the turret on his left, and found a flight of spiral stone stairs running upwards and downwards from the minute landing where he stood. After a second's cogitation, he decided on the upward flight, and emerged onto a broader promenade which ran round the entire perimeter of the walls.
Simon kissed his hand to the unknown architect of that invaluable veranda, and hustled round it as quickly as he dared. A matter of three minutes brought him to a point which he judged to be vertically over the lighted windows; leaning dizzily over the battlements, he was able to make out a dimly illuminated sill. And right under his hands he could feel the thick, gnarled tendrils of a growth of ivy that must have been digging itself in since the days of Charlemagne.
With the slow beginnings of a Saintly smile touching his lips, Simon flexed his arms, took a firm grip on the nearest tentacles, and swung his legs over the low balustrade.
And it was at that moment that he heard the scream.
It was the most dreadful shriek that he had ever heard. Shrill, quavering, and heart-sickening, it pealed out from beneath him and went wailing round the empty courtyard in horrible strident agony. It was a scream that gurgled out of a retching throat that had lost all control—the shuddering brute cry of a man crucified beyond the endurance of human flesh and blood. It tingled up into the Saint's scalp like a stream of electric needles and numbed his belly with a frozen nausea.
2
For a space of four or five seconds that haunting cadence quivered in the air; and then silence came blanketing down again upon the castle—a silence throbbing with the blood-chilling terror of that awful cry.
The Saint loosed one hand and wiped a smear of clammy perspiration from his forehead. He had never reckoned himself to be afflicted with an unduly sensitive set of nerves, but there was something about that scream which liquefied the marrow in his bones: He knew that only one thing could have caused it—the pitiless application of a fiendish refinement of torture which he would never have believed existed. Recalling his flippant reflections on the subject of mediaeval dungeon frolics, he found the theme less funny than it had seemed a quarter of an hour ago.
His heart was beating a little faster as he worked his way down the wall. He went down as quickly as he dared, swinging recklessly from hand-hold to hand-hold and praying consistently as he descended.
Down in that lighted room below him things were blowing up an eighty miles an hour for the showdown which he had laboriously arranged to attend in person. Down there was being disentangled the enigma of the sardine can, and he wanted a front fauteuil for the climax. He figured that he had earned it Only with that tantalizing bait in view had be been able to deny himself the pleasure of picking up Rudolf by the hoosits and punting him halfway to Potsdam. And the thought that he might be missing the smallest detail of the unravelling sent him slithering down the scarp at a pace that would have made a monkey's hair turn grey.
A dead strand of creeper snapped under his
