Follow the Saint (17 page)

“Go
ahead,” said the Saint impatiently. “I won’t damage little Jimmy
unless he makes trouble. If this was one of my
murdering evenings,
you don’t think I’d bump him and let
you get away, do you ? Go on and fetch
your policemen—
and we’ll see whether the boy friend can make them
believe
h
is
story!”

IV

T
HEY HAD
to wait
for some time….

After a
minute, Simon turned the prisoner over to
Hoppy and put his
Luger away under his coat. He reached
for his cigarette case again and
thoughtfully helped himself
to a smoke. With the cigarette curling blue
drifts past his
eyes, he traced again the course of the bullet that had so
nearly stamped finale on all his adventures. There was no
question
that it had been fired from outside the window—
and that also
explained the peculiarly flat sound of the shot
which had faintly
puzzled him. The cleavage lines on the few
scraps of glass remaining in the frame
supplied the last detail
of incontrovertible
proof. He devoutly hoped that the shin
ing
lights of the local constabulary would have enough
scientific knowledge to appreciate it.

Mr Uniatz,
having brilliantly performed his share of
physical activity,
appeared to have been snared again in the
unfathomable quagmires
of the Mind. The tortured grimace that had cramped itself into his countenance
indicated that
some frightful eruption was taking place in the small
core of
grey matter which formed a sort of glutinous marrow inside
his
skull. He cleared his throat, producing a noise like a piece
of sheet
iron getting between the blades of a lawn mower, and
gave the fruit of his
travail to the world.

“Boss,”
he said, “I dunno how dese mugs t’ink dey can get away wit’ it.”

“How
which mugs think they can get away with what?”
asked the Saint
somewhat vacantly.

“Dese
mugs,” said Mr Uniatz, “who are tryin’ to take us
for a
ride, like ya tell me in de pub.”

Simon had
to stretch his memory backwards almost to
breaking point to
hook up again with Mr Uniatz’s train of
thought; and when he
had finally done so he decided that it
was wisest not to
start any argument.

“Others
have made the same mistake,” he said casually,
and hoped that would
be the end of it.

Mr Uniatz
nodded sagely.

“Well,
dey all get what’s comin’ to dem,” he said with philo
sophic complacency. “When
do I give dis punk de woiks ?”

“When
do you——
What?”

“Dis
punk,” said Mr Uniatz, waving his Betsy at the
prisoner. “De mug
who takes a shot at us.”

“You
don’t,” said the Saint shortly.

The equivalent of what on
anybody else’s face would have
been a slight
frown carved its fearsome corrugations into
Hoppy’s brow.

“Ya
don’t mean he gets away wit’ it after all ?”

“We’ll
see about that.”

“Dijja
hear what he calls us ?”

“What
was that?”

“He
calls us washouts.”

“That’s
too bad.”

“Yeah,
dat’s too bad,” Mr Uniatz glowered disparagingly
at the captive.
“Maybe I better go over him wit’ a paddle foist. Just to make sure he
don’t go to sleep.”

“Leave
him alone,” said the Saint soothingly. “He’s
young, but he’ll grow
up.”

He was
watching the striped blazer with more attention
than a chance
onlooker would have realized. The young
man stood glaring at
them defiantly—not without fear, but
that was easy to explain if one wanted
to. His knuckles
tensed up involuntarily from time to time; but a
perfectly
understandable anger would account for that. Once or
twice he glanced at the strangely unreal shape of the dead girl half
hidden in
the shadows, and it was at those moments that
Simon was studying him
most intently. He saw the almost
conventionalized horror of death that takes
the place of practical thinking with those who have seen little of it, and
a bitter
disgust that might have had an equally conventional
basis. Beyond that,
the sullen scowl which disfigured the
other’s face steadily refused him the
betraying evidence that
might have made everything so much simpler.
Simon blew
placid
and meditative smoke rings to pass the time; but there
was an irking bafflement behind the cool patience of his eyes.

It took
fifteen minutes by his watch for the police to come,
which was less than he had expected.

They
arrived in the persons of a man with a waxed mous
tache, in plain
clothes, and two constables in uniform. After
them, breathless when
she saw the striped blazer still inhabited by an apparently undamaged owner,
came Rosemary Chase. In the background hovered a man who even without
his costume
could never have been mistaken for anything
but a butler.

Simon
turned with a smile.

“Glad
to see you, Inspector,” he said easily.

“Just
‘Sergeant’,” answered the plainclothes man, in a voice that sounded as if
it should have been “sergeant-
major.”

He saw the automatic that Mr
Uniatz was still holding, and
stepped forward
with a rather hollow but courageous
belligerence.

“Give
me that gun!” he said loudly.

Hoppy
ignored him, and looked inquiringly at the only man whom he took orders from;
but Simon nodded. He politely offered his own Luger as well. The Sergeant took
the two
guns, squinted at them sapiently, and stuffed them into his side pockets. He
looked relieved, and rather clever.

“I
suppose you’ve got licences for these firearms,” he said temptingly.

“Of course,” said the
Saint, in a voice of saccharine virtue.

He
produced certificate and permit to carry from his
pocket. Hoppy did the
same. The sergeant pored over the documents with surly suspicion for some time
before he
handed them to one of the constables to note down the
particulars.
He looked so much less clever that Simon had
difficulty in keeping a straight face. It
was as if the Official
Mind, jumping firmly
to a foregone conclusion, had spent
the
journey there developing an elegantly graduated approach
to the obvious climax, and therefore found the
entire structure staggering when the first step caved in under his feet.

A certain
awkwardness crowded itself into the scene.

With a
businesslike briskness that was only a trifle too
elaborate, the
sergeant went over to the body and brooded
over it with
portentous solemnity. He went down on his
hands and knees to
peer at the knife, without touching it. He borrowed a flashlight from one of
the constables to examine
the floor around it. He roamed about the
boathouse and
frowned into dark corners. At intervals, he cogitated.
When
he could
think of nothing else to do, he came back and faced
his audience with dogged valour.

“Well,”
he said, less aggressively, “while we’re waiting
for the doctor I’d
better take your statements.” He turned.
“You’re Mr
Forrest, sir?”

The young
man in the striped blazer nodded.

“Yes.”

“I’ve
already heard the young lady’s story, but I’d like to
hear your
version.”

Forrest
glanced quickly at the girl, and almost hesitated.
He said: “I was taking Miss Chase
home, and we saw a light moving in here. We crept up to find out what it was,
and one
of these men fired a shot at us. I
turned my torch on them
and pretended
I had a gun too, and they surrendered. We
took their guns away; and then this man started arguing and
trying to make out that somebody else had fired the
shot,
and he managed to distract my
attention and get his gun back.”

“Did you hear any noise as
you were walking along ? The
sort of noise
this—er—deceased might have made as she was
being attacked?”

“No.”

“I -
did - not hear - the - noise - of - the - deceased - being -
attacked,”
repeated one of the constables with a notebook
and pencil,
laboriously writing it down.

The
sergeant waited for him to finish, and turned to the
Saint.

“Now,
Mr Templar,” he said ominously. “Do you wish to make a statement? It
is my duty to warn you
—”

“Why?”
asked the Saint blandly.

The
sergeant did not seem to know the answer to that.

He said
gruffly: “What statement do you wish to make?”

“Just
what I told Comrade Forrest when we were arguing.
Mr Uniatz and I were
ambling around to work up a thirst,
and we saw this door open. Being rather
inquisitive and not having anything better to do, we just nosed in, and we saw
the body.
We were just taking it in when somebody fired at
us; and then Comrade
Forrest turned on the spotlight and
yelled ‘Hands up!’ or words to that
effect, so to be on the
safe side we handed up, thinking he’d fired
the first shot. Still, he looked kind of nervous when he had hold of my gun, so
I took it away from him in case it went off. Then I
told Miss Chase to go
ahead and fetch you. Incidentally, as I
tried to tell Comrade
Forrest, I’ve discovered that we were both wrong about that shooting. Somebody
else did it from
outside the window. You can see for yourself if you take a
look at the glass.”

The Saint’s voice and manner
were masterpieces of matter-
of-fact
veracity. It is often easy to tell the plain truth and be
disbelieved; but Simon’s pleasant imperturbality
left the
sergeant visibly nonplussed.
He went and inspected the
broken
glass at some length, and then he came back and
scratched his head.

“Well,”
he admitted grudgingly, “there doesn’t seem to
be much doubt about
that.”

“If
you want any more proof,” said the Saint nonchalantly,
“you
can take our guns apart. Comrade Forrest will tell you
that we haven’t done
anything to them. You’ll find the maga
zines full and the
barrels clean.”

The
sergeant adopted the suggestion with morbid eager
ness, but he shrugged
resignedly over the result.

“That
seems to be right,” he said with stoic finality. “It
looks as if
both you gentlemen were mistaken.” He went on
scrutinizing the
Saint grimly. “But it still doesn’t explain
why you were in here
with the deceased.”

“Because
I found her,” answered the Saint reasonably.
“Somebody had
to.”

The
sergeant took another glum look around. He did not
audibly acknowledge
that all his castles in the air had settled soggily back to earth, but the
morose admission was implicit in the majestic stolidity with which he tried to
keep anything
that might have been interpreted as a confession out of
his
face. He took refuge in an air of busy inscrutability, as if he
had just a
little more up his sleeve than he was prepared to share with anyone else for
the time being; but there was at
least one member of his audience who was not deceived, and who
breathed a sigh of relief at the lifting of what might have
been a dangerous suspicion.

“Better
take down some more details,” he said gruffly to
the constable with the
notebook, and turned to Rosemary
Chase. “The deceased’s name is Nora
Prescott—is that right
miss ?”

“Yes.”

“You
knew her quite well ?”

“Of
course. She was one of my father’s personal secre
taries,” said the dark girl; and the
Saint suddenly felt as if the
last knot in
the tangle had been untied.