The Saint and Mr. Teal: Formerly Called "Once More the Saint" (23 page)

“No, I didn’t,” he said shortly. “A fool bungled it. I have no time for fools.”

Stride mopped his forehead.

“It’s on my nerves, Osman. He’s been on the Claudette, admitted who he was-who knows what he’ll do next ? I tell you —”

“You may tell me all you want to in a few minutes,” said Osman suavely. “I have some business to attend to first-if you will excuse me.” He turned to the seaman. “Ali, send Trape to me.”

The Arab touched his forehead and disappeared, and Osman elbowed his secretary aside and helped himself from an inlaid brass cigarette box on the table. All his self-possession had returned, and somehow his heavy tranquillity was more inhuman than his raving anger.

Presently the Arab came back with Trape. Osman gazed at him unwinkingly for some seconds, and then he spoke.

“I have no time for fools,” he repeated.

Young Harry Trape was sullen and frightened. The ways of violence were not new to him-he had been in prison three times, and once they would have flogged him with a nine-thonged lash if the doctors had not said he was too weak to endure the punishment. Young Harry had a grievance: he had not only been knocked out by the Saint and tied up in a stuffy sack, but he had been viciously kicked both unknowingly and knowingly by the man he had tried to serve, and he felt he had much to complain about. He had come to the saloon prepared to complain, but the snake-like impassiveness of the unblinking stare that fastened on his face held him mute and strangely terrified.

“You are a fool, Trape,” said Osman, almost benevolently, “and I don’t think I require your services any longer. Ali will take you back to St. Mary’s in the speedboat. You will give up your room at Tregarthen’s, make a parcel of all the cocaine you have and post it to the usual address, and then you will take yourself, your friend, and your luggage back to the speedboat, which will take you both to Penzance immediately. Your money will be waiting for you in London. You may go.”

“Yes, sir,” said Trape throatily.

He left the saloon quickly. The seaman was about to follow him, but Osman stayed him with a gesture.

“It will not really be necessary to go to Penzance, Ali,” he remarked deliberately; and the man nodded and went out.

Stride’s bloodshot eyes stared at the Egyptian.

”‘My God-you’re a cold-blooded devil!” he half gasped.

Osman chuckled wheezily.

“Oh, no, not cold-blooded, my dear Stride! You ought to know that. Far from it. But a dead fool is a safe fool, and I believe in safety first. But not coldblooded. There are times when my flesh burns like fire- have I not told you?”

Galbraith Stride shuddered in spite of himself, for he knew what Osman meant.

“I came to see you about that,” he said jerkily.

“Ah! You have decided?”

Stride nodded. He sat down at the table, helped himself with nervous fingers from the inlaid cigarette box. The secretary stood by, ignored by both.

It was a strange venue for a peace conference, but that was what it was-and it explained also the terror which had come to Galbraith Stride that afternoon on the sunny deck of his yacht, the terror that had looked at him out of two cold reckless eyes that were as blue as the sea. Each of those two men was a power in an underground world of ugly happenings, though in their personal contact there was no question about which was the dominating personality. Even as Abdul Osman’s tentacles of vice reached from Shanghai to Constantinople, so did Galbraith Stride’s stretch from London south to the borders of the Adriatic and out west across the ocean to Rio.

Looking at Abdul Osman, one could build about him just such a mastery, but there was nothing about Galbraith Stride to show the truth. And yet it was true. Somehow, out of the restless cunning that evolved from the cowardice of his ineffectual physique, Stride had built up that subterranean kingdom and held it together, unknown to his stepdaughter, unknown to the police, unknown even to the princelings of his noisome empire, who communicated with him only through that silent Ramón Almido who passed as Stride’s secretary. And thus, with the growth of both their dominions, it had come to a conference that must leave one of them supreme. Abdul Osman’s insatiable lust for power dictated it, for Stride would have been content with his own boundaries. And with it, in the first meeting between them, had come to Abdul Osman the knowledge that he was Stride’s master, that he need not be generous in treating for terms. The spectacle of Stride’s uneasiness was another sop to Osman’s pride.

“What a different conclusion there might have been if we had not both simultaneously thought of depositing the same letters with our solicitors!” said Osman reflectively. “To think that if either of us died suddenly there would be left instructions to the police to investigate carefully the alibi of the. other! Quite a dramatic handicap, isn’t it?”

Stride licked his lips.

“That’s the only part of the bargain you’ve kept,” he said. “Why, I’ve just heard you admit that your men have been landing cocaine here.”

“I took the liberty of assuming our agreement to be a foregone conclusion,” said Osman smoothly. Then his voice took on a harsher tone. “Stride, there’s only one way out for you. For the last two years my agents have been steadily accumulating evidence against you- evidence which would prove absorbing reading to your good friends at Scotland Yard. That is the possibility for which you were not prepared, and it’s too late now for you to think of laying the same trap for me. In another month that evidence can be brought to the point where it would certainly send you to prison for the rest of your life. You see, it was so much easier for me than for the police-they did not know whom to suspect, whereas I knew, and only had to prove it.”

Stride had heard that before, and he did not take much notice.

“And so,” continued Osman, “I make you the very fine offer of your liberty; and in return for that you retire from business and I marry Miss Laura.”

Stride started up.

“That’s not what you said!” he blurted. “You said if I-if I gave you Laura-you’d retire from Turkey and —”

“I changed my mind,” said Osman calmly. “Why should I give? I was foolish. I hold all the cards. I am tired of arguing. As soon as this Simon Templar is on board I wish to leave-the year is getting late, and I can’t stand your winters. Why should I make concessions?” He spat-straight to the priceless carpet, an inch from his visitor’s polished shoes. “Stride, you were a fool to meet me yourself. If you had dealt with me through your clever Mr. Almido I might have had some respect for you. You are not sufficiently important to look at-it shows me too plainly which of us is going to get his own way.”

He spoke curtly, and, oddly enough for him, with a lack of apparent conceit that made his speech deadly in its emphasis. And Stride knew that Osman spoke only the truth. Yet, even then, if certain things had not happened …

“You are afraid of the Saint, Stride,” said Osman, reading the other’s thoughts. “You are more afraid of him perhaps than you are of prison. You did not know that he knew you, but now that you know, you want nothing more than to run away and hide in some place where he can’t find you. Well, you can go. I shouldn’t stand in your way, my dear Stride.”

The other did not answer. Something had broken in the core of his resistance-a thing which only a psychologist who knew the workings of his mind, and the almost superstitious fear which the name of the Saint could still drive into many consciences, could have understood. He sat huddled in a kind of collapse; and Osman looked at him and chuckled again.

“I shall expect a note to tell me that you agree by ten o’clock tonight. You will send it across by hand- and who could be better employed to deliver it than Miss Laura?”

Galbraith Stride stood up and went out without a word

CHAPTER VI

SIMON TEMPLAR saw young Harry Trape and his com panion carrying their suitcases down to the quay and thought they were trying to catch the Scillonian, which was scheduled to sail for the mainland at 4:15. He watched their descent rather wistfully, from the hillside where he was walking, for it was his impression that they had got off much too lightly. He was not to know that Abdul Osman had himself decided to dispense with their existence according to the laws of a strictly oriental code by which the penalty of failure was death; but if he had known, the situation would have appealed to his sense of humour even more than the memory of his recent treatment of young Harry.

At the same time, their departure solved at least one problem, for it definitely relieved Mr. Smithson Smith of further anxiety about the good name of has hotel.

It was past six o’clock when the Saint came back to the village, for the solution of the mystery of an overloaded basket of towels had suddenly dawned on him, and he had set out to visit a few likely spots on the coast in the hope of finding further evidence. He had failed in that, but he remained convinced that his surmise was right.

“It was an ingenious method of smuggling dope,” he told Patricia. “Nobody’s thinking about anything like that here-if they see a strange ship loafing around, their only suspicion is that it may be another French poacher setting lobster pots in forbidden waters, and if the boat looked ritzy enough they simply wouldn’t think at all. The sea party would dump sacks of it somewhere among the rocks, and the Heavenly Twins would fetch it home bit by bit in their basket without attracting any attention. Then they pack it in a suitcase and take it over to Penzance with their other stuff, and there isn’t even a customs officer to ask if they’ve got a bottle of scent. Which is probably what they’re doing now-I wish we could have arranged a sticky farewell for them.”

He had been much too far away to think of an attempt to intercept the evacuation, and the idea of telegraphing a warning to the chief of police at Penzance did not appeal to him. Simon Templar had no high idea of policemen, particularly provincial ones. And as a matter of fact his mind was taken up with a graver decision than the fate of two unimportant intermediaries.

He walked along from the lifeboat station with the details of his plan filling themselves out in his imagination; and they were just about to turn into Holgate’s, the hotel at the other end of the town, when his ruminations were interrupted by a figure in uniform that appeared in his path.

“I’ve been looking for you, sir,” said the law.

The law on the Scilly Islands was represented by one Sergeant Hancock, a pensioner of the Coldstream Guards, who must have found his rank a very empty honour, for there were no common constables to salute him. In times of need he could call upon a force of eight specials recruited from among the islanders, but in normal times he had nothing to make him swollen-headed about his position. Nor did he show any signs of ever having suffered from a swollen head-a fact which made him one of the very few officers of the law whom Simon had ever been able to regard as even human. Possibly there was something in the air of the islands, that same something which makes the native islanders themselves the most friendly and hospitable people one could hope to meet, which had mellowed the character of an ex-sergeant-major to the man who had become, not only the head, but also the personal body and complete set of limbs, of the Scilly Islands Police; but certainly the Saint liked him. Simon had drunk beer with him, borrowed his fishing line and fished with it, and exchanged so many affable salutes with him that the acquaintance was in danger of becoming an historic one in the Saint’s life.

“What is it, Sergeant?” asked the Saint cheerfully. “Have I been seen dropping banana peel in the streets or pulling faces at the mayor?”

“No, it’s nothing like that. I want to know what’s been going on up at Tregarthen’s.”

“Mr. Smith has seen you, has he?”

“Yes, he came down and told me about it. I went to have a talk with those two young men, but they’d just paid their bill and gone. Then I came looking for you.”

Simon offered a cigarette.

“What did Smith tell you?”

“Well, sir, he told me that you were having a drink in the bar, and one of those fellows put dope in your beer, and you punched his nose. Then one of them came down and threw the beer away, so there was no evidence except a fly that Smith couldn’t find. And Smith said you said something about Abdul Osman, which he said he thought might be a man who has a yacht over by Tresco.”

The sergeant’s pleasant face was puzzledly serious, as well it might be. Such things simply did not happen on his well-conducted island.

Simon lighted his cigarette and thought for a moment. Abdul Osman was too big a fish for the net of a police force consisting of one man, and the only result of any interference from that official quarter would most likely be the unhappy decease of a highly amiable sergeant-a curiosity whom Simon definitely felt should be preserved for the nation. Also he recalled a story, that the sergeant had told him on their first meeting- a story so hilariously incredible that it surpassed any novelist’s wildest flights of fantasy.

A previous holder of the office once arrested a man and took him to the village lock-up, only to find that he hadn’t the keys of the lock-up with him.

“Stay here while I get my keys,” said the worthy upholder of the law sternly; and that was the last they saw of their criminal.

While Simon did not doubt for a moment that Sergeant Hancock would be incapable of such a magnificent performance as that, his faith did not extend to the ability of a village lock-up to keep Abdul Osman inside and his shipload of satellites out.

“That’s very nearly what happened, Sergeant,” he said easily. “I think their idea was to rob the hotel and get away on the boat that afternoon. Smith wasn’t drinking, so they couldn’t drug him; but with me out of the way they’d have been two to one, and he wouldn’t have stood much chance. They’d been staying in the hotel for a fortnight to get the lie of the land. I just happened to notice what they’d done to my beer.”

” But what was that about Abdul Osman ?”

“I think Smith can’t have heard that properly. He was telling me some story about a man of that name, and it must have been on his mind. When I punched this bloke’s face he threatened to call the police, and what I said was: ‘Ask your pal what he thinks of the idea first.’ Smith must have thought I said ‘Ask Abdul.’ “