The Saint in London: Originally Entitled the Misfortunes of Mr. Teal (3 page)

On either side of him, Nassen and the other sleuth licked their sores in silence. Whether they were completely satisfied with the course of events so far is not known, nor does the chronicler feel that posterity will greatly care. Simon thought kindly of other possible ways of adding to their martyrdom; but before he had made his final choice of the various forms of torment at his disposal the taxi was stopped by a traffic light at the corner of St. James’s Street, and the Saint looked through the window from a range of less than two yards full into the chubby red face and sleepy eye’ of the man without whom none of his adventures were really complete.

Before either of the other two could stop him he had slung himself forward and loosed a de-lighted yell through the open window.

“Claud Eustace, by the bed socks of Dr. Bar-nardo!” cried the Saint joyfully.

The man’s drowsy optics revolved towards the source of the sound, and, having located it, wid-ened with indescribable eloquence. For a second or two he actually stopped chewing on his gum His jaws seized up, and his portly bowler-hatted figure halted statuesquely.

There were cogent and fundamental reasons for the tableau—reasons which were carved in imperishable letters across the sluggish coagulation of emotions which Chief Inspector Claud Eustace Teal himself would have been much too diffident to call his soul. They were reasons which went ‘way back through the detective’s life to those almost unimaginably distant blissful days before anyone in England had ever heard of the Saint— the days when a policeman’s lot had been a reasonably happy one, moving through well-ordered grooves to a stolid and methodical percentage of success, and there had been no such incalculable filibuster sweeping at intervals into the peaceful scene to tie all averages in knots and ride such rings round the wrath and vengeance of Scotland Yard as had never been ridden before. They were reasons which could have been counted one by one on Mr. Teal’s grey hairs; and all of them surged out of his memory in a solid phalanx at such moments as that, when the Saint returned to England after an all-too-brief absence, and Mr. Teal saw him in London again and knew that the tale was no aearer its end than it had ever been.

All these things came back to burden Mr. Teal’s overloaded heart in that moment’s motionless stare; and then with a sigh he stepped to the window of the taxicab and faced his future stoically.

“Hullo,” he said.

The Saint’s eyebrows went up in a rising slant of mockery.

“Claud!” he protested. “Is that kind? I ask you, is that a brotherly welcome? Anyone might think you weren’t pleased to see me.”

“I’m not,” said Mr. Teal dourly. “But I shall have to see you.”

The Saint smiled.

“Hop in,” he invited hospitably. “We’re going your way.”

Teal shook his head—that is the simplest way of describing the movement, but it was such a perfunctory gesture that it simply looked as if he had thought of making it and had subsequently decided that he was too tired.

“Thanks,” he said. “I’ve got another job to do just now. And you seem to be in good company.” His baby-blue eyes, restored to their habitual affectation of sleepiness, moved over the two embarrassed men who flanked the Saint. “You know who you’re with, boys,” he told them. “Watch him.”

“Pardon me,” said the Saint hastily. “I forgot to do the honours. This specimen on my left is Snowdrop, the Rose of Peckham––”

“All right,” said Teal grimly. “I know them. And I’ll bet they’re going to wish they’d never known you—if they haven’t begun wishing it already.” The traffic light was at green again, and the hooting of impatient drivers held up behind made the detective step back from the window. “I’ll see you later,” he said and waved the taxi on.

The Saint grinned and settled back again, as the cab turned south towards the Park. That chance encounter had set the triumphal capstone on his homecoming: it was the last familiar chord of the old opening chorus, his guarantee that the old days had finally come back in all their glory. The one jarring note was in the sinister implications of Teal’s parting speech. Ever frank and open, the Saint sought to compare opinions on the subject.

“It sounds,” he murmured, “almost as if Claud Eustace had something on his mind. Didn’t it sound that way to you, Snowdrop?”

Nassen was wiping his forehead with a large white handkerchief; and he seemed deaf to the advance. His genteel sensitive soul had been bruised, and he had lost the spirit of such candid camaraderie. He put his handkerchief away and slipped an automatic from his pocket. Simon felt the muzzle probe into his ribs, and glanced down at it with one satirical eyebrow raised.

“You know, you could kill someone with that,” he said reprovingly.

“I wish it could be you,” said the Rose of Peck-ham in a tone of passionate earnestness, and relapsed into morbid silence.

Simon chuckled and lighted another cigarette. The gun in his own raincoat pocket rested comfortingly across his thigh, but he saw no need to advertise his own armoury. He watched their route with patient interest—they emerged at Parliament Square, but instead of turning down to the Embankment they circled the square and went back up Victoria Street.

“I suppose you know this isn’t the way to Scotland Yard, Snowdrop?” he remarked helpfully. “This is the way you’re going first,” Nassen told him.

The Saint shrugged. They turned quickly off Victoria Street, and pulled up shortly afterwards outside a house in one of those almost stupefyingly sombre and respectable squares in the district known to its residents as Belgravia but to the vulgar public, less pretentiously, as Pimlico. Nas-sen’s colleague got out and went up the steps to ring the bell, and the Saint followed under the unnecessarily aggressive propulsion of Nassen’s gun.

The door was opened by one of the most mag-nificently majestic butlers that the Saint had ever seen. He seemed to be expecting them, for he stood aside immediately, and the Saint was led quickly through the hall into a spacious library on the ground floor.

“I will inform his lordship of your arrival,” said the butler and left them there.

Simon Templar, who had been taking in his sur-roundings with untroubled interest, turned round as the door closed.

“You ought to have told me we were going to visit a Lord, Snowdrop,” he said reproachfully.

“I’d have put on my Old Etonian suspenders and washed my neck. I know you washed your neck today, because I can see the line where you left off.”

Nassen tugged at his lower lip and simmered audibly, but his woes had passed beyond the remedy of repartee. And he was still smouldering pinkly when Lord Iveldown came in.

Lord Iveldown’s name will not go down to history in the company of Gladstone, Disraeli, or the Earl of Chatham. Probably it will not go down to history at all. He was a minor statesman whose work had never been done in the public eye, which was at least a negative blessing for a public eye which has far too much to put up with already. In plain language, which tradition forbids any statesman to use, he was one of those permanent government officials who do actually run the country while the more publicized politicians are talking about it. He was a big man inclined to paunchi-ness, with thin grey hair and pince-nez and the aura of stupendous pomposity by which the permanent government official may instantly be recognized anywhere; and the Saint, whose portrait gallery of excrescences left very little ground uncovered, recognized him at once.

He came in polishing his pince-nez and took up a position with his back to the fireplace.

“Sit down, Mr. Templar,” he said brusquely and turned to Nassen. “I take it that you failed to find what you were looking for?”

The detective nodded.

“We turned the place inside out, your Lordship, but there wasn’t a sign of it. He might have sewn it up inside a matttress or in the upholstery of a i:hair, but I don’t think he would have had time.”

“Quite,” muttered Lord Iveldown. “Quite.” He took off his pince-nez, polished them again, and looked at the Saint. “This is a serious matter, Mr. Templar,” he said. “Very serious.”

“Apparently,” agreed the Saint blandly. “Apparently.”

Lord Iveldown cleared his throat and wagged his head once or twice.

“That is why I have been obliged to adopt extraordinary measures to deal with it,” he said.

“Such as sending along a couple of fake detectives to turn my rooms inside out?” suggested the Saint languidly.

Lord Iveldown started, peered down at him, and coughed.

“Ah-hum,” he said. “You knew they were—ah —fakes?”

“My good ass,” said the Saint, lounging more snugly in his armchair, “I knew that the Metropolitan Police had lowered itself a lot by enlisting Public School men and what not, but I couldn’t quite believe that it had sunk so low as to make inspectors out of herbaceous borders like Snowdrop over there. Besides, I’m never arrested by ordinary inspectors—Chief Inspector Teal himself always comes to see me.”

“Then why did you allow Nassen to bring you here?”

“Because I figured I might as well take a gander at you and hear what you had to say. The gander,” Simon admitted frankly, “is not quite the greatest thrill I’ve had since I met Dietrich.”

Lord Iveldown cleared his throat again and expanded his stomach, clasping his hands behind his back under his coat tails and rocking slightly in the manner of a schoolmaster preparing to deal with a grave breach of the Public School Code.

“Mr. Templar,” he said heavily, “this is a serious matter. A very serious matter. A matter, I might say, of the utmost gravity. You have in your possession a volume which contains certain—ah— statements and—ah—suggestions concerning me— statements and suggestions which, I need scarcely add, are wholly without foundation––”

“As, for instance,” said the Saint gently, “the statement or suggestion that when you were Undersecretary of State for War you placed an order for thirty thousand Lewis guns with a firm whose tender was sixty per cent, higher than any other, and enlarged your own bank balance immediately afterwards.”

“Gross and damnable falsehoods,” persisted Lord Iveldown more loudly.

“As, for instance,” said the Saint, even more gently, “the gross and damnable falsehood that you accepted on behalf of the government a consignment of one million gas masks which technical experts had already condemned in the strongest language as worse than useless––”

“Foul and calumnious imputations,” boomed Lord Iveldown in a trembling voice, “which can easily be refuted, but which if published would nevertheless to some degree smirch a name which hitherto has not been without honour in the annals of this nation. It was only for that reason, and not because I feared that my public and private life could not stand the light of any inquiry whatever that might be directed into it, that I consented to —ah—grant you this interview.”

Simon nodded.

“Since your synthetic detectives had failed to steal that book from me,” he murmured, “it was— ah—remarkably gracious of you.”

His sardonic blue eyes, levelled over the shaft of a cigarette that slanted from between his lips like the barrel of a gun, bored into Lord Iveldown with a light of cold appraisal which made the nobleman shift his feet awkwardly.

“It was an extraordinary situation,” repeated his lordship in a resonant voice, “which necessitated extraordinary measures.” He cleared his throat, adjusted his pince-nez, and rocked on his heels again. “Mr. Templar,” he said, “let us not beat about the bush any longer. For purely personal reasons—merely, you understand, because I desire to keep my name free from common gossip—I desire to suppress these base insinuations which happen to have come into your possession; and for that reason I have accorded you this personal interview in order to ascertain what—ah—value you would place on this volume.”

“That’s rather nice of you,” said the Saint guardedly. “If, for example,” said Lord Iveldown throatily,

“a settlement of, shall we say—ah—two thousand pounds––”

He broke off at that point because suddenly the Saint had begun to laugh. It was a very quiet, very self-contained laugh—a laugh that somehow made the blood in Lord Iveldown’s hardened arteries run colder as he heard it. If there was any humour in the laugh, it did not reach the Saint’s eyes.

“If you’d mentioned two hundred thousand,” said the Saint coolly, “you would have been right on my figure.”

There was a long terrific silence in which the mere rustle of a coat sleeve would have sounded like the crash of doom. Many seconds went by before Lord Iveldown’s dry cough broke the stillness like a rattle of musketry.

“How much did you say?” he articulated hoarsely.

“I said two hundred thousand pounds.”

Those arctic blue eyes had never shifted from Lord Iveldown’s faintly empurpled face. Their glacial gaze seemed to go through him with the cold sting of a rapier blade—seemed to strip away all his bulwarks of pomposity like tissue, and hold the naked soul of the man quivering on the point like a grub on a pin.

“But that,” said Lord Iveldown tremblingly, “—that’s impossible! That’s blackmail!”

“I’m afraid it is,” said the Saint.

“You sit there, before witnesses––”

“Before all the witnesses you like to bring in. I don’t want you to miss the idea, your Lordship.] Witnesses don’t make any difference. In any ordinary case—yes. If I were only threatening to advertise your illicit love affairs, or anything like that, you could bring me to justice and your own name would quite rightly be suppressed. But in a case like this even the chief commissioner couldn’t guarantee you immunity. This isn’t just ordinary naughtiness. This is high treason.”

Simon tapped the ash from his cigarette and blew a smoke ring towards the ceiling; and once again his relentless eyes went back to Lord Ivel-down’s face. Nassen and the other detective, staring at the Saint in sullen silence, felt as if an icy wind blew through the room and goosefleshed their skin in spite of the warmth of the evening. The bantering buffoon who had goaded them to the verge of apoplexy had vanished as though he had never existed, and another man spoke with the same voice.

“The book you’re talking about,” said the Saint, in the same level dispassionate tones, “is a legacy to me, as you know, from Rayt Marius. And you know what made him a millionaire. His money was made from war and the instruments of war. All those amazing millions—the millions out of which you and others like you were paid, Lord Iveldown—were the wages of death and destruction and wholesale murder. They were coined out of blood and dishonour and famine and the agony of peaceful nations. Men—and women and children, too—were killed and tortured and maimed to find that money—the money out of which you were paid, Lord Iveldown.”