Saint Intervenes (11 page)

Teal
thumbed the pages of a cheap pocket diary, although
he had no need to
remind himself of dates.

“This
is Wednesday,” he said. “You can say that Thursday
begins any
time after midnight. I’ll be here at twelve o’clock
myself, and I’ll stay
here till midnight tomorrow.”

Mr. Teal
was worried more than he would have cared to
admit. The idea that
even such a satanic ingenuity as he
knew the Saint to possess could contrive
a way of stealing
anything from under the eyes of a police guard who had
been
forewarned that he was coming for it was obviously fantastic.
It belonged
to sensational fiction, to the improbable world of
Ars
è
ne Lupin. Ars
è
ne
Lupin would have disguised himself
as Chief Inspector Teal or the Chief
Commissioner, and
walked out with the crown under his arm; but Teal knew
that such
miracles of impersonation only happened in the
romances of
unscrupulous and reader-cheating authors. Yet
he knew the Saint too
well, he had crossed swords too often with that amazing brigand of the
twentieth century, to derive
any solid consolation from that thought.

When he
came back to the hotel that night, he checked
over his defences as
seriously as if he had been guarding the
emperor of a great
European power from threatened assassination
. There were men
posted at the entrances of the hotel,
and one at a strategic point in the
lobby which covered the
stairs and elevators. A Flying Squad car
stood outside. Every
member of the hotel staff who would be
serving the Prince
during the next twenty-four hours had been investigated. A
burly detective paced the corridor outside the Prince’s suite,
and two
more equally efficient men were posted inside. Teal
added himself to the
last number. The £100,000 crown of Cherkessia reposed in a velvet-lined box on
a table in the
sitting-room of the suite—Teal had unsuccessfully
attempted
more than once to induce Prince Schamyl to authorise its
removal to
a safe-deposit or even to Scotland Yard itself.

“Where
is the necessity?” inquired the Prince blankly.
“You have your
detectives everywhere. Are you afraid that
they will be unable to
cope with this absurd criminal?”

Teal had
no answer. He was afraid—there was a gloomy
premonition creeping
around his brain that the Saint could
not have helped foreseeing all his precautions, and
therefore
must have discovered a loophole
long in advance. That was
the reason
why he had studiously withheld even a rumour of
the Saint’s threat from the Press, for he had his own stolid
vanity. But he could not tell the Prince that. He
glowered
morosely at the private
detective who had been added to the contingent by the Southshire Insurance
Company, a brawny
broken-nosed
individual with a moustache like the handlebars of a bicycle, who was pruning
his nails with a penknife
in the
corner. He began to ask himself whether those battered
and belligerently whiskered features could by any
feat of
make-up have been imposed
with putty and spirit gum on the
face
of the Saint or any of his known associates; and then
the detective looked up and encountered his
devouring stare
with symptoms of such
pardonable alarm that Teal hastily
averted his eyes.

“Surely,”
said the Prince, who still appeared to be striving
to get his bearings,
“if you are really anticipating an attack
from this criminal,
and he is so well known to you, his
movements are being watched?”

“I
wish I could say they were,” said Teal glumly. “As
soon as
that postcard arrived I went after him myself, but
he appears to have
left the country. Anyhow, he went down
to Hanworth last
night, where he keeps an aeroplane, and
went off in it; and he
hasn’t been back since. Probably he’s
only fixing up an alibi——
”

Even as he
uttered the theory, the vision of a helicopter
flashed into his mind.
The hotel was a large tall building,
with the latest type of autogiro it
might have been possible
to land and take off there. Teal had a sudden
wild desire to
post more detectives on the roof—even to ask for special
aeroplanes
to patrol the skies over the hotel. He laughed himself
out of the
aeroplanes, but he went downstairs and picked
up one of the men he
had posted in the lobby.

“Go up
and watch the roof,” he ordered. “I’ll send some-on
e to
relieve you at eight o’clock.”

The man
nodded obediently and went off, but he gave
Teal a queer look in
parting which made the detective realise
how deeply the Saint
superstition had got into his system.
 
The realisation did not make Mr. Teal any better
pleased
with himself, and his manner when he returned to the royal
suite was
almost surly.

“We’d
better watch in turns,” he said. “There are twenty-four hours to go,
and the Saint may be banking on waiting
until near the end of
the time when we’re all tired and
thinking of giving it up.”

Schamyl
yawned.

“I am
going to bed,” he said. “If anything happens, you
may inform
me.”

Teal
watched the departure of the lean blackhawk figure,
and wished he could
have shared the Prince’s tolerant boredom with the whole business. One of the
detectives who
watched the crown, at a sign from Teal, curled up on the
settee and
closed his eyes. The private watchdog of the
Southshire Insurance
lolled back in his chair; very soon his
mouth fell open, and a
soporific buzzing emanated from his
throat and caused his handlebar
moustaches to vibrate in
unison.

Chief
Inspector Teal paced up and down the room, fash
ioning a wodge of
chewing gum into endless intricate shapes
with his teeth and
tongue. The exercise did not fully succeed
in soothing his
nerves. His brain was haunted by memories
of the buccaneer whom
he knew only too well—the rakish
carving of the brown handsome face, the
mockery of aston
ishingly clear blue eyes, the gay smile that came so
easily to
the lips, the satirical humour of the gentle dangerous
voice.

He had
seen all those things too often ever to forget them—
had been deceived,
maddened, dared, defied, and outwitted
by them in too many
adventures to believe that their owner
would ever be guilty
of an empty hoax. And the thought
that the Saint was roving at large that
night was not comfort
ing. The air above Middlesex had literally
swallowed him up, and he might have been anywhere between Berlin and
that very
room.

When the
dawn came Teal was still awake. The private
detective’s handlebars
ceased vibrating with a final snort; the
officer on the couch
woke up, and the one who had kept the
night watch took his place. Teal
himself was far too wrought
up to think of seizing his own chance to
rest. Ten o’clock ar
rived before the Prince’s breakfast, and
Schamyl came through
from his bedroom as the waiter was laying the
table.

He peered
into the box where the crown was packed, and
stroked his beard with
an ironical glint in his eyes.

“This
is very strange, Inspector,” he remarked. “The crown
has not
been stolen! Can it be that your criminal has broken
his promise?”

With some
effort, Teal kept his retort to himself. While
the Prince attacked
his eggs with a healthy appetite, Teal
sipped a cup of coffee
and munched on a slice of toast. For
the hundredth time he surveyed the
potentialities of the apart
ment. The bedroom and the sitting-room opened
on either
side of a tiny private hall, with the bathroom in
between.
The hall had a door into the corridor, outside which
another
detective was posted; there was no other entrance or exit ex
cept the
open windows overlooking Hyde Park, through
which the morning sun
was streaming. The possibility of
secret panels or passages was absurd. The
furniture was
modernistically plain, expensive, and comfortable. There
was
a chesterfield, three armchairs, a couple of smaller chairs, a
writing
desk, the centre table on which breakfast was laid,
and a small side
table on which stood the box containing the
crown of Cherkessia.
Not even a very small thief could have
secreted himself in
or behind any of the articles. Nor could
he plausibly slip
through the guards outside. Therefore, if he
was to make good his
boast, it seemed as if he must be inside already; and Teal’s eyes turned again
to the moustached rep
resentative of the Southshire Insurance
Company. He would have given much for a legitimate excuse to seize the handle
bars of
that battle-scarred sleuth, one in each hand, and haul
heftily on them; and
he was malevolently deliberating whether
such a manoeuvre
could be justified in the emergency when the interruption came.

It was
provided by Peter Quentin, who stood at another
window of the hotel
vertically above the Prince’s suite, dang
ling a curious
egg-shaped object at the end of a length of
cotton. When it hung
just an inch above Schamyl’s window,
he took up a yard of slack and swung
the egg-shaped object
cautiously outwards. As it started to swing
back, he dropped
the slack, and the egg plunged through the Prince’s open
window and
broke the cotton in the jerk that ended its tra
jectory.

Chief
Inspector Teal did not know this. He only heard the
crash behind him, and
swung around to see a pool of milky
fluid spreading around a scattering of
broken glass on the
floor. Without stopping to think he made a dive towards
it, and a gush of dense black smoke burst from the milky pool like a flame and
struck him full in the face.

He choked
and gasped, and groped around in a moment of utter blindness. In another
instant the whole room was filled
with a jet-black fog. The shouts and
stumblings of the
other men in the room came to him as if through a film of
cotton-wool
as he lumbered sightlessly towards the table
where the crown had
stood. He cannoned into it and ran over
its surface with
frantic hands. The box was not standing there any longer. In a sudden panic of
fear he dropped to his knees
and began to feel all over the floor around
the table… .

He had
already made sure that the box had not been knocked over on to the floor in the
confusion, when the
smoke in his lungs forced him to stagger coughing and
retch
ing to the door. The corridor outside was black with the
same smoke,
and in the distance he could hear the tinkling
of fire alarms. A man
collided with him in the blackness, and
Teal grabbed him in a
vicious grip.

“Tell
me your name,” he snarled.

“Mason,
sir,” came the reply; and Teal recognised the
voice of the detective
he had posted in the corridor.

His chest
heaved painfully.

“What
happened?”

“I
don’t know, sir. The door—opened from the inside—
one of those damn
smoke-bombs thrown out—started all
this. Couldn’t see—any more, sir.”

“Let’s
get some air,” gasped Teal.

They
reeled along the corridor for what seemed to be miles
before the smoke
thinned out, and after a while they reached
a haven where an open
corridor window reduced it to no
more than a thin grey mist. Red-eyed and
panting, they
stared at one another.

“He’s
done it,” said Teal huskily.

That was
the bitter fact he had to face; and he knew with
out further
investigation, even without the futile routine
search that had to
follow, that he would never see the crown
of Cherkessia again.