'This way.'
The oval imprint of Renway's flashlight flickered over the dark spludge of a shrub growing in a cleft beside the path: suddenly Renway's own silhouette appeared in the shrinking circle of light, and Simon realized that the Treasury official was going down on all fours and beginning to wriggle into the bush, presenting a well-rounded posterior which might have proved an irresistible and fatal temptation to an aggrieved ex-service civil servant. The Saint, however, having suffered no especial unkindness from the government, followed him dutifully in the same manner and discovered that he could stand upright again on the other side of the opening in the cliff. At the same time he saw the torches of the other men again, heading downwards into the dark as if on a long stairway.
Thirty feet lower down the steps levelled off into an uneven floor. Simon saw the gleam of dark waters in the light of Renway's torch and realized that he was at the foot of a huge natural cave. The lights of the other men were clustered a few yards away--Simon heard a clunk of wood and metal and the soft plash of an oar.
'The only other way to the sea is under water,' Renway explained, his thin voice echoing hollowly. 'You can see it at low neap tides, but at this time of year it's always covered.'
It was on the tip of the Saint's tongue to make some facetious remark about submarines when Renway lifted his torch a little, and Simon saw a shining black whaleback of steel curving out of the water a couple of dozen feet from where they stood, and knew that his flippancy could only have seemed ridiculous beside the truth.
'Did you catch that with a rod and line?' he asked, after a considerable silence.
'It was ostensibly purchased by a French film company six months ago,' Renway said prosaically.
'And who's going to run it?'
'Petrowitz--he was a U-boat officer during the war. The rest of the crew had to be trained. It was more difficult to obtain torpedoes--in case anything should come to the rescue which was too big for you to drive off, you understand. But we succeeded.'
The Saint put his hands in his pockets. His face was chiselled bronze masked by the dark.
'I get it,' he said softly. 'The gold is taken on board that little beauty. And then you go down to the bottom and nobody ever sees you any more.
And then when you turn up again somewhere in South America------'
'We come back here,' said Renway. 'There are certain reasons why this is one of the last places where anyone would ever expect to find us.'
Simon admitted it. From Renway's point of view, it must have loomed out as one of the most cunning certainties of crime. And the Saint was quite cold-bloodedly aware that if he failed to separate himself from the picnic in time, it would still be true.
The party of men in the rowboat had reached the submarine and were climbing out.
'My information is that the gold will be leaving Croydon about eight o'clock,' Renway said in a matter-of-fact tone. 'Perhaps you'd like to check over your aeroplane--there are one or two things I want to talk over with Petrowitz.'
The Saint did not want to check over any aeroplane, but there was something else he very much wanted to do. He found his way back up the stairway with Renway's torch and wriggled out again through the hole in the cliff--the last glimpse he had of that strange scene was the lights glinting on the water far below him and the shadows moving over the dull sheen of the submarine's arched back. Renway had certainly spared no effort or expense to provide all the most modern and sensational accessories of melodrama, he reflected as he retraced his tracks to the house, what with electrified wire fences, stolen aeroplanes landing by night, bombs, secret panels, caves, submarines, and unshaven desperadoes; but he found the actuality less humorous than he would have found the same recital in a book. Simon had long had a theory that the most dangerous criminal would be a man who helped himself to some of the vast fund of daring ingenuity expended upon his problems by hordes of detective-story writers; and Sir Hugo Renway's establishment looked more like a detective story come to life than anything the Saint, had ever seen.
The dawn was lightening as he found his way into the library and went directly to the safe. He knelt down in front of it and unrolled a neat leather wallet which he took from a pocket in his voluminous flying coat--the instruments in that wallet were the latest and most ingenious in the world, and would in themselves have been sufficient to earn him a long term of imprisonment, without any other evidence, if Mr. Teal had caught him with them. The safe was also one of the latest and most useful models, but it was at a grave disadvantage. Being an inanimate object, it couldn't change its methods of defense so nimbly as the Saint could vary his attack. Besides which, the Saint was prepared to boast that he could make any professional peterman look like a two-year-old infant playing with a rubber crowbar when it came to safe-opening. He worked with unhurried speed and had the door open in twenty minutes; and then he carefully rolled up his kit and put it away again before he turned to an examination of the interior.
He had already charted out enough evidence within the thirty-acre confines of March House to have hanged a regiment, but there were still one or two important items missing. He found one useful article very quickly, in a small heap of correspondence on one of the shelves--it was a letter which in itself was no evidence of anything, but it was addressed to Sir Hugo Renway and signed by Manuel Enrique. Simon put it away in his pocket and went on with his search. He opened a japanned deed box and found it crammed with banknotes and bearer bonds: that was not evidence at all, but it was the sort of thing which Simon Templar was always pleased to find, and he was just tipping it out when he heard the rattle of the door handle behind him.
The Saint moved like a cat touched with a high-voltage wire. In what seemed like one connected movement, he scooped the bundle of currency and bonds into his pocket, shoved the deed box back on its shelf, swung the door of the safe, and leapt behind the nearest set of curtains; and then Renway came into the room.
He walked straight across to the safe, fishing out the key from his waistcoat pocket; but the door opened as soon as he touched the handle, and he froze into an instant's dreadful immobility. Then he fell on his knees and dragged out the empty deed box. . . .
Simon stepped quietly out from behind the curtains, so that he was between Renway and the door.
'Don't cry, Mother Hubbard,' he said.
IX
RENWAY got to his feet and looked down the barrel of the Saint's gun. His face was pasty, but the lipless gash of a mouth was almost inhumanly steady.
