The Saint in Action (2 page)

“It’s awfully good of you,” Graham began weakly; and the Saint grinned and stood up.

“We always try to oblige our customers,” he said.

He picked up the bundle of bonds and stuffed them into his own pocket. On the way out he looked in at the dining room to wrinkle his nose at Patricia.

“You’ll have to button your own boots,” he said. “I’m tottering out for an hour or so to do my Boy Scout act. Where’s my bugle?”

He thought of it no more seriously than that, as a mildly amusing interlude to pass the morning between a late breakfast and a cocktail before lunch. The last idea in his head was that he might be setting out on an adventure whose brief intensity would rank with the wildest of his many immortal escapades; and perhaps if it had not been for all those other adventures he might have missed this one altogether. But the heritage of those other adventures was an instinct, the habit of a lifetime, a sixth sense too subtle to define, that fell imperceptibly and unconsciously into tune with the swift smoky rhythm of danger; and that queer intuition caught him like an electric current as the long shining Hirondel purred close to the address that Graham had given him. It caught him quicker than his mind could work—so quickly that before he could analyze his thoughts he had smacked the gear lever down into second, whipped the car behind the cover of a crawling taxi and whirled out of sight of the building around the next corner.

II

“That was the house,” Graham protested. “You just passed it.”

“I know,” said the Saint.

He locked the hand brake as the car pulled in to the curb, and turned to look back at the corner they had just taken. The movement was automatic, although he knew that he couldn’t see the entrance of the house from where they had stopped; but in his memory he could see it as clearly as if the angle of the building which hid it from his eyes had been made of glass—the whole little tableau that had blazed those high-voltage danger signals into his brain.

Not that there had been anything sensational about it, anything that would have had that instantaneous and dynamic effect on the average man’s reactions. Just seven or eight assorted citizens of various but quite ordinary and unexciting shapes and sizes, loafing and gaping inanely about the pavement, with the door of the house which Simon had been making for as a kind of vague focus linking them roughly together. A constable in uniform standing beside the door, and a rotund, pink-faced man in a bowler hat who had emerged from the hall to speak to him at the very moment when the Saint’s eye was grasping the general outlines of the scene. Nothing startling or prodigious; but it was enough to keep the Saint sitting there with his eyes keen and intent while he went over the details in his mind. Perhaps it was the memory of that round man with a face like a slightly apoplectic cherub, who had come out to speak to the policeman… .

Graham was staring at him perplexedly.

“What’s the matter?” he asked.

The Saint looked at him almost without seeing him, and a faint aimless smile touched his lips.

“Nothing,” he said. “Can you drive a car?”

“Fairly well.”

“Drive this one. She’s a bit of a handful, so you’d better take it easy. Don’t put your foot down too quickly, or you’ll find yourself a mile or two ahead of yourself.”

“But–-“

“Go back to my place. You’ll find a girl there—name of Patricia Holm. I’ll phone her and tell her you’re on your way. She’ll give you a drink and prattle to you till I get back. I’d like to pay this call alone.”

“But–-“

Simon swung his legs over the side and pushed himself off onto the pavement.

“That seems to be quite a favourite word of yours,” he remarked. “On your way, brother. You can tell me all about it presently.”

He stood and watched the Hirondel take a leap forward like a goosed antelope and then crawl on up the road with a very mystified young man clinging grimly to the steering wheel; and then he turned into a convenient tobacconist’s and put a call through to Patricia.

“I’m sending my Boy Scout material back for you to look after,” he said. “Feed him some ginger ale and keep him happy till I get back. I wouldn’t flirt with him too much, because I think he’s a rather earnest soul. And if there should be any inquiries tell Orace to hide him in the oven and don’t let anybody know we’ve got him.”

“Does this mean you’re getting into trouble again?” she demanded ominously. “Because if you are–-“

“Darling, I am about to have a conference with the vicar about the patterns for the next sewing bee,” said the Saint and hung up the receiver.

He lighted a cigarette as he sauntered down to the corner and across the street towards the house which he had been meaning to visit. The scene was still more or less the same, one or two new idle citizens having joined the small accumulation of inquisitive loafers, and one or two of the old congregation having grown tired of gaping at nothing and moved off. The policeman still stood majestically by the door, although the man in the bowler hat no longer obstructed the opening. The policeman moved a little to do some obstructing of his own as the Saint ambled up the steps.

“Do you live here, sir?”

“No,” said the Saint amiably. “Do you?”

The constable gazed at him woodenly.

“Who do you want to see?”

“I should like to see Chief Inspector Teal,” Simon told him impressively. “He’s expecting me.”

The policeman studied him suspiciously for a moment; but the Saint was very impressive. He looked like a man whom a chief inspector might have been expecting. He might equally well have been expected by a prime minister, a film actress or a man who trained budgereegahs to play the trombone; but the constable was not a sufficiently profound thinker to take this universal view. He turned and led the way into the house, and Simon followed him. They went through the hall, which had the empty and sanitary and freshly painted air common to all houses which have been recently converted into flats, and through the half-open door of a ground-floor flat a strip of curl-papered female goggled at them morbidly as they went by. At the top of the empty and sanitary and freshly painted stairs the door of another flat was ajar, with another policeman standing beside it.

“Someone to see the inspector,” said the first policeman and, having discharged his duty, went downstairs again to resume his vigil.

The second policeman opened the door, and they went into the hall of the flat. Almost opposite the entrance was the open door of the living room; and as the Saint reached it he saw four men moving about. There was a man fiddling with a camera on a tripod near the door, and across the room another man was poring over the furniture with a bottle of grey powder and a camel-hair brush and a magnifying glass. A tall, thin, melancholy-looking man with a large notebook stood a little way apart, sucking the end of a pencil; and the man with the bowler hat and the figure like an inverted egg whom Simon had seen from his car was peering over his shoulder at what had been written down.

It was on the last of these men that the Saint’s eyes rested as he entered the room. He remained indifferent to the other stares that swivelled round to greet him with bovine curiosity, waiting until the bowler hat tilted towards him. And as it did so a warm and friendly smile established itself on the Saint’s face.

“What ho, Claud Eustace,” he said affably.

The china-blue eyes under the brim of the bowler hat grew larger and rounder as they assimilated the shock of identification. In them even a man with the firmest intentions of believing nothing but good of his fellow men would have found it hard to discern any of that spontaneous cordiality and cheer with which a well-mannered wanderer in the great wilderness of life should have returned the greeting of a brother voyager. To be precise they looked as if their owner had just discovered that he was in the act of absent-mindedly swallowing a live toad.

A rich tint of sun-kissed plum mantled the face below the eyes; and the man seemed to quiver a little, like a volcano seeking for some means of self-expression. After one or two awful seconds he found it.

“What the hell are you doing here?” blared Chief Inspector Claud Eustace Teal.

III

It must be admitted in Mr Teal’s defence that he was not normally a man who blared or whose eyes tended to perform strange antics. Left to himself he would have been a placid and even-tempered soul, with all the sluggish equanimity appropriate to his girth; and as a matter of fact he had, during his earlier years with the Criminal Investigation Department, developed a pose of exaggerated sleepiness and perpetual boredom of which he was extremely proud. It was the advent of the Saint on Mr Teal’s halcyon horizon which had changed all that and made the detective an embittered and an apoplectic man.

Not that there was one single crime on the record, one microscopic molecule of a misdemeanour, for which Chief Inspector Teal could have taken official action against the Saint. That was a great deal of the trouble, and the realization of it did nothing to brighten the skies above the detective’s well-worn and carefully laundered bowler. But it sometimes seemed to Mr Teal that all the griefs and misfortunes that had afflicted him in recent years could be directly traced to the exploits of that incredible outlaw who had danced so long and so derisively just beyond Mr Teal’s legal reach— who had mocked him, baffled him, cheated him, eluded him, brought down upon him the not entirely justified censure of his superiors and set him more insoluble problems than any other man alive. Perhaps it was some of these acid memories that welled up into the detective’s weary brain and stimulated that spontaneous outburst of feeling. For wherever the Saint went there was trouble, and trouble of a kind with which Mr Teal had grown miserably familiar.

“Claud!” said the Saint reprovingly. “Is that nice? Is it kind? Is that the way your dear old mother would like to hear you speak?”

“Never mind my mother–-“

“How could I, Claud? I never met her. How’s she getting on?”

Mr Teal swallowed and turned towards the policeman who had brought Simon in.

“What did you let him in for?” he demanded in a voice of fearful menace.

The policeman swayed slightly before the blast.

“Richards brought him up, sir. I understood you were expecting him–-“

“And so you are, Claud,” said the Saint. “Why be so bashful about it?”

Teal stared at him malevolently.

“Why should I be expecting you?”

“Because you always are. It’s a habit. Whenever anybody does anything you come and unbosom yourself to me. Whenever any crime’s been committed I did it. So just for once I thought I’d come and see you and save you the trouble of coming to see me. Pretty decent of me, I call it.”

“How did you know a crime had been committed?”

“It was deduction,” said the Saint. “You see, I happened to be ambling along by here when I saw a policeman at the door and a small crowd outside and your intellectual features leering out of the door to say something to the said cop; so I went into a teashop and had a small cup of cocoa while I thought it over. I admit that the first idea that crossed my mind was that you’d been thrown out—I mean that you’d retired from the force and gone in for art, and that you were holding an exhibition of your works, and that the crowd outside was waiting for the doors to open, and that you were telling the cop to keep them in order for a bit because you couldn’t find your false beard. It was only after some remarkable brain work that I avoided falling into this error. Gradually the real solution dawned on me–-“

“Now you mention it,” Teal said ominously, “why did you happen to be ambling along here?”

“Why shouldn’t I, Claud? I have to amble somewhere, and they say this is a free country. There are several thousands of other people ambling around Chelsea, but do you rush out into the streets and grab them and ask them why?”

Mr Teal’s pudgy fists clenched inside his pockets. Tt was happening again—the same as it always had. He set out to be a detective, and some evil spirit turned him into a clown. It wasn’t his fault. It was the fault of that debonair, mocking, lazily smiling Mephistopheles who was misnamed the Saint, who seemed to have been born with the uncanny gift of paralyzing the detective’s trained and native caution and luring him into howling gaucheries that made Mr Teal go hot and cold when he thought about them. And the more often it happened, the more easily it happened next time. There was an awful fatefulness about it that made Mr Teal want to burst into tears.

He took hold of himself doggedly, glowering up at the Saint with a concentrated uncharitableness that would have made a lion think twice before biting him.

“Well,” he said with a restraint that made the veins stand out on his forehead, “what do you want here?”

“I just thought I’d drop in and see how you were getting on with your detecting. Quite a jolly little murder it looks, too, if I may say so.”

For the first time since the casual glance he had taken round the room when he came in his cool gaze went back to the crumpled shape on the floor.

It lay on the floor, close to the fireplace and a side table on which stood a bottle of whisky and a siphon— the body of what seemed to have been a man of medium size and build, wearing an ordinary dark suit. His hair looked as if it might have been a pale gingery colour; but it was difficult to be sure about that, because there was not much of it that was not clotted with the blood that had flowed from his smashed skull and spread in a pool over the carpet. There was not much of the back of his head left at all, as a matter of fact, for the smashing had been carried out very methodically and with the obvious intention of making sure that there would never be any need to repeat the dose. A little distance away lay the instrument with which the smashing had been done: it looked like an ordinary cheap hammer, and the wooden handle was so clean that it might well have been bought new for the purpose.

The rest of the room was in disorder. Books had been pulled out of their shelves, the carpet was wrinkled as if it had been pulled up to examine the floor underneath, cushions had been taken out of the chairs, and there were gashes in the upholstery. All the drawers of the desk were open; one of them had been pulled right out and left on the floor, and another was upturned on the table. A mass of papers was scattered around like a stage snowfall. A yard from the dead man’s right hand a tumbler lay on its side at the edge of a pool of moisture where its contents had soaked into the carpet.