The Saint Goes On (6 page)

“You’ve been quick,” she said, making conversation when she ought to have been making love.

“I was out on a job, and I had to ring up the office from just round the corner, so they told me to come along,” Simon explained, wiping his whiskers on his sleeve. He had spent three hours putting on that ragged growth, and every hair was so carefully planted that its falsehood could not have been detected at much closer quarters than he was ever likely to get to with Miss Weagle. He glanced at the little heap of gems, which Miss Weagle had been packing into another cardboard box lined with cotton-wool. “Are these them?” he asked.

Miss Weagle admitted coyly that those were them. Simon surveyed them disinterestedly, scratching his chin.

“If you’ll just finish packing them up, miss,” he said, “I’ll take ‘em along now.”

“Take them along?” she repeated in surprise.

“Yes, miss. It’s a new rule. Everything of this kind that we cover has to be examined and sealed in our office, and sent off from there. It’s on account of all these insurance frauds they’ve been having lately.”

The illicit passion which Miss Weagle seemed to have been conceiving for him appeared to wane.

“Mr. Enderby has been dealing with your firm for a long time,” she began with some asperity.

“I know, miss; but the firm can’t make one rule for one customer and another for another. It’s just a formality as far as you’re concerned, but them’s my orders. I’m a new man in this district, and I can’t afford to take a chance on my own responsibility. I’ll give you a receipt for ‘em, and they’re covered from the moment they leave your hands.”

He sat down at the desk and wrote out the receipt on a blank sheet of paper, licking his pencil between every word. The Saint was an incomparable artist in characterisation at any time, but he had rarely practised his art under such a steady tension as he did then, for he had no means of knowing how soon the real insurance company’s agent would arrive, or how long Mr. Enderby’s appointment would keep him. But he completed the performance without a trace of hurry, and watched Miss Weagle tucking a layer of tissue over the last row of jewels.

“The value is twenty-seven thousand six hundred and fifty pounds,” she said coldly.

“I’ll make a note of it, miss,” said the Saint, and did so.

She finished packing the box, and he picked it up. He still had to get away with it.

“You doing anything particular next Saturday?” he asked, gazing at her with a hint of wistfulness.

“The idea!” said Miss Weagle haughtily
“Do you like Greta Garbo?”

This was different.

“Oh,” said Miss Weagle.

She wriggled. Simon had rarely witnessed such a revolting spectacle.

“Meet me at Piccadilly Circus at half-past one,” he said.

“All right.”

Simon stuffed the box into one of the pockets of his sober and unimaginative black suit, and went to the door. From the door, he blew a juicy kiss through the fringe of fungus which overhung his mouth, and departed with a wink that left her giggling kittenishly-and he was out of the building before she even looked at the receipt he had left behind, and discovered that his signature was undecipherable and there was no insurance company whatever mentioned on it. …

It was not by any means the most brilliant and dashing robbery that the Saint had ever committed, but it had a pure outrageous perfection of coincidence that atoned for all its shortcomings in the way of gore. And he knew, without the slightest diminution of the scapegrace beatitude that was performing a hilarious massage over his insides, that nothing on earth could have been more scientifically calculated to fan up the flames of vengeance on every side of him than what he had just done.

What he may not have foreseen was the speed with which the inevitable vengeance would move towards him.

Still wearing his deep-sea moustache and melancholy exterior, he walked west to New Oxford Street and entered a business stationer’s. He bought a roll of gummed paper tape, with which he made a secure parcel of Mr. Enderby’s brown cardboard box, and a penny label which he addressed to Joshua Pond, Esq., Poste Restante, Harwich. Then he went to the nearest post-office and entrusted twenty-seven thousand six hundred and fifty pounds to the care of His Majesty’s mails.

Two hours later he crossed Piccadilly from the Green Park underground station, and a vision of slim fair-haired loveliness turned round from a shop window as he swung in towards her.

“Were you waiting for somebody?” he asked gravely.

Her eyes, as blue as his own, smiled at him uncertainly.

“I was waiting for a bold bad brigand called the Saint, who doesn’t know how to keep out of trouble. Have you seen him?”

“I believe I saw somebody like him sipping a glass of warm milk at a meeting of the World Federation for Encouraging Kindness to Cockroaches,” he said solemnly. “Good-looking fellow with a halo. Is that the guy?”

“What else was he doing?”

The Saint laughed.

“He was risking the ruin of his digestion with some of Ye Fine Olde Englishe Cookinge which is more deadly than bullets even if it doesn’t taste much different,” he said. “But it may have been worth it. There was a parcel shoved into a bloke’s overcoat pocket some time when I was sweating through my second pound of waterlogged cabbage, just like Sunny Jim said it would be, and I trailed the happy recipient to his lair. I suppose I was rather lucky to be listening outside his door just when he was telling his secretary to get an insurance hound over to inspect the boodle–— By the way, have you ever seen a woman with a face like a stoat and George-Robey eyebrows wriggling seductively? This secretary–-“

“Do you mean you-
“That’s just what I do mean, old darling. I toddled straight into the office when this bloke went out, and introduced my self as the insurance hound summoned as aforesaid in Chapter One. And I got out of Hatton Garden with a packet of boodle valued at twenty-seven thousand six hundred and fifty quid, which ought to keep the wolf from the door for another day or two.” The glint of changeless mischief in his eyes was its own infinite elaboration of the theme. “But it’ll bring a lot of other wolves around that’ll want rather more getting rid of; and I expect we can look forward to fun and games.”

She nodded.

“They’ve started,” she said soberly. “There’s a reception committee waiting for you.”

He was quite still for a moment; but the edge of humour in his gaze was altered only to become keener and more subtly dangerous.

“How many?”

“One.”

His brows sloped up in a hair-line of devil-may-care delight that she knew only too well-a contour of impenitent Saintliness that had made trouble-hunting its profession too long to be disturbed when the trouble came unasked.

“Not poor old Claud Eustace again?” he said.

“No. It’s that new fellow-the Trenchard product. I’ve been waiting here three quarters of an hour to catch you as you came along and tell you. Sam Outrell gave me the wire.”

VI
The Saint was unperturbed. He had removed the walrus moustache which had whiffled so realistically before Miss Weagle, and with it the roseate complexion and melancholy aspect on which it had bloomed with such lifelike aptness. The costume which he had worn on that occasion had also been put away, in the well-stocked wardrobe of another pied-a-terre which he rented under another of his multitudinous aliases for precisely those skilful changes of identity. He had left the plodding inconspicuous gait of his character in the same place. In a light grey suit which looked as if it had only that morning been unpacked from the tailor’s box, and a soft hat canted impudently over one eye, he had a debonair and disreputable elegance which made the deputation of welcome settle into clammily hostile attention.

“I was waiting for you,” said Junior Inspector Pryke damply.

“No one would have thought it,” said the Saint, with a casual smile. “Do I look like your fairy godmother?”

Pryke was not amused.

“Shall we go up to your rooms?” he suggested; and Simon’s gaze rested on him blandly.

“What for, Desmond?” He leaned one elbow on the desk at his side, and brought the wooden-faced janitor into the party with a shift of his lazy smile. “You can’t shock Sam Outrell-he knew me before you ever did. And Miss Holm is quite broad-minded, too. By the way, have you met Miss Holm? Pat, this is Miss Desdemona Pryke, the Pride of the
Y.W.C.A.–—”

“I’d rather see you alone, if you don’t mind,” said the detective.

He was beginning to go a trifle white about the mouth; and Simon’s eyes marked the symptom with a wicked glitter of unhallowed mischief. It was a glitter that Mr. Teal would have recognised only too easily, if he had been there to see it; but for once that long-suffering waist-line of the Law was not its victim.

“What for?” Simon repeated, with a puzzled politeness that was about as cosy and reliable as a tent on the edge of a drifting iceberg. “If you’ve got anything to say to me that this audience can’t hear, I’m afraid you’re shinning up the wrong leg. I’m not that sort of a girl.”

“I know perfectly well what I want to say,” retorted Pryke chalkily.

“Then I hope you’ll say it,” murmured the Saint properly. “Come along, now, Desmond-let’s get it over with. Make a clean breast of it-as the bishop said to the actress. Unmask the Public School Soul. What’s the matter?”

Pryke’s hands clenched spasmodically at his sides. “Do you know a man called Enderby?” “Never heard of him,” said the Saint unblushingly. “What does he do-bore the holes in spaghetti, or something?”

“At about ten minutes to three this afternoon,” said Pryke, with his studiously smooth University accent burring jaggedly at the edges, “a man entered his office, falsely representing himself to be an agent of the Southshire Insurance Company, and took away about twenty-seven thousand pounds’ worth of precious stones.”

Simon raised his eyebrows.

“It sounds like a tough afternoon for Comrade Enderby,” he remarked. “But why come and tell me? D’you mean you want me to try and help you recover these jools?”

The antarctic effrontery of his innocence would have left nothing visible in a thermometer but a shrunken globule of congealed quicksilver. It was a demonstration of absolute vacuum in the space used by the normal citizen for storing his conscience that left its audience momentarily speechless. Taking his first ration of that brass-necked Saintliness which had greyed so many of the hairs in Chief Inspector Teal’s dwindling crop, Desmond Pryke turned from white to pink, and then back to white again.

“I want to know what you were doing at the time,” he said.

“Me?” Simon took out his cigarette-case. “I was at the Plaza, watching a Mickey Mouse. But what on earth has that got to do with poor old Enderby and his jools?”

Suddenly the detective’s hand shot out and grabbed him by the wrist.

“That’s what you’ve got to do with it. That scar on your forearm. Miss Weagle-Mr. Enderby’s secretary-saw it on this fake insurance agent’s arm when he picked up the parcel of stones. It was part of the description she gave us!”

Simon looked down at his wrist in silence for a moment, the cigarette he had chosen poised forgotten in mid-air, gazing at the tail of the furrowed scar that showed beyond the edge of his cuff. It was a souvenir he carried from quite a different adventure, and he had usually remembered to keep it covered when he was disguised. He realised that he had underestimated both the eyesight of Miss Weagle and the resourcefulness of Junior Inspector Pryke; but when he raised his eyes again they were still bantering and untroubled.

“Yes, I’ve got a scar there-but I expect lots of other people have, too. What else did this Weagle dame say in her description?”

“Nothing that couldn’t be covered by a good disguise,” said Pryke, with a new note of triumph in his voice. “Now are you coming along quietly?”

“Certainly not,” said the Saint.

The detective’s eyes narrowed.

“Do you know what happens if you resist a police officer?”

“Surely,” said the Saint, supple and lazy. “The police officer gets a thick ear.”

Pryke let go his wrist, and shoved his hands into his pockets.

“Do you want me to have you taken away by force?” he asked.

“I shouldn’t want you to try anything so silly, Desmond,” said the Saint. He put the cigarette between his lips and struck a match with a flick of his thumbnail, without looking at it. “The squad hasn’t been hatched yet that could take me away by force without a good deal of commotion; and you know it. You’d get more publicity than a Hollywood divorce- or is that what you’re wanting?”

“I’m simply carrying out my orders––-“

“Whose orders?”

46

“That’s none of your business,” Pryke got out through his teeth.

“I think it is,” said the Saint mildly. “After all, I’m the blushing victim of this persecution. Besides, Desmond, I don’t believe you. I think you’re misguided. You’re behind the times. How long have you been here waiting for me?”

“I’m not here to be cross-examined by you,” spluttered the detective furiously.

“I’m not cross-examining you, Desmond. I’m trying to lead you into the paths of reason. But you don’t have to answer that one if it hurts. How long has this petunia-blossom been here, Sam?”

The janitor glanced mechanically at the clock.

“Since about four o’clock, sir.”

“Has it received any message-a telephone call, or anything like that?”

“No, sir.”

“Nobody’s come in and spoken to it?”

“No, sir.”

“In fact, it’s just been sitting around here all on its own-some, like the last rose of summer”

Junior Inspector Pryke thrust himself up between them, along the desk, till his chest was almost touching the Saint’s. His hands were thrust into his pockets so savagely that the coat was stretched down in long creases from his shoulders.

“Will you be quiet?” he blazed quiveringly. “I’ve stood asmuch as I can”

“As the bishop said to the actress.”

“Are you coming along with me,” fumed the detective, “or am I going to have you dragged out?”

Simon shook his head.