12 The Saint in London (The Misfortunes of Mr Teal)

They entered the house by another door and went down a long dark low-ceilinged corridor which led into a large panelled room lighted by small leaded windows. Simon ducked his head automatically, but found that he could just stand upright under the black oak beams which crossed the ceiling. There was a billiard table in the centre with a strip of carpet laid round it, and an open brick fireplace at one side; but the room had the musty dampness of disuse.

"March House is rather an architectural scrap-heap," Renway explained impersonally. "You're in the oldest part of it now, which goes back to the fifteenth century. I discovered this quite by accident------"

"This" was a section of panelling, about five and a half feet by three, which sprang open on invisible hinges--Simon could not see exactly what the other did to open it. Renway fumbled in the dark aperture and switched on a light.

"I don't know where the passage originally went to," he said, as they groped their way down a flight of rickety wooden stairs. "At present it leads into the cellars. There used to be an ordinary entrance from a more modern part of the house, where the kitchen is now, but I had that bricked up."

At the foot of the stairway there was a narrow stone-flagged tunnel. Renway switched on another light and they went on, bent almost double in the cramped space. At intervals there was a rough wooden buttress to carry a weak section of the roof, but for the most part the upper curve of the burrow consisted of nothing but the natural chalk. Simon Templar, who had seen the inner workings of more secret doors, rooms, and passages than any other living man, had never managed to lose the first primitive schoolboy thrill of such subterranean accessories of adventure. He followed Renway with whole-hearted enthusiasm; but there was an equally whole-hearted vigilance about him nevertheless, for the thought had crossed his mind that Sir Hugo Renway might be even more clever and efficient than he had yet begun to believe, and he had no overpowering ambition to be suddenly pushed down a well am left there to contemplate the follies of over optimism until hunger and thirst put an end to contemplation.

After about fifteen yards Renway turned a right-angled corner and disappeared; and Simon crept up in his tracks with that knife-bladed vigilance honed to a razor edge. Rounding the corner, he found himself stepping out into a fairly large stone chamber illuminated by several electric bulbs. At the distant end there was a row of beds; a cheap square of carpet was laid out on the floor, and the room was sketchily furnished with a bare wooden table in the centre, a couple of washstands, and a heterogeneous selection of chairs. Four of the men in the room were congregated at one end of the table over a game of cards; the fifth was stitching a button on his coat; the sixth was reading a newspaper. They were all turned rigidly towards the end of the tunnel; and the Saint carefully set his hands on his hips--where one of them would be within handy diving range of his gun.

"Gentlemen," Renway's high-pitched B. B. C. voice was saying, "this is Mr.--er--Tombs, who is taking Enrique's place."

None of the flat fishlike eyes acknowledged the introduction by so much as a flicker.

Renway turned to the Saint.

"You must meet Mr. Petrowitz," he said; "Mr. Jeddy . . . Mr. Pargo . . ."

He ran through a list of names, indicating their owners with curt movements of his head; and Simon, looking them over, decided that they were the ugliest gang of cutthroats that even the most rabid Bolshevik could ever hope to find gathered together in a strategic position under the house of an English aristocrat.

His decision embodied something more than pure artistic comment. The sight of those staring immobile men added the last touch to his grim understanding that if Sir Hugo Renway was mad, he was a maniac with the cold logical resolution that was needed to carry out his insane scheme. His glance fell on the newspaper which the sixth man had put down. The black-type banner line across the top of the page leapt to his eye:

SAINT STEALS ARMED AEROPLANE

It reminded him that he had not yet inquired he name of his new employer. "Are you the Saint?" he asked. Renway's lids drooped. "Yes," he said.

VIII

ACCORDING to his watch, Simon Templar stayed in hat secret cellar for about eighteen hours: with-out that evidence, he could have been fairly easily persuaded that it was about eighteen days.