Follow the Saint s-20 Read online

  Follow the Saint

  ( Saint - 20 )

  Leslie Charteris

  FOLLOW

  THE SAINT

  LESLIE CHARTERIS

  UNABRIDGED

  PAN BOOKS LTD : LONDON

  First published 1939 by Hodder & Stoughton Ltd.

  This edition published 1961 by Pan Books Ltd.,

  8 Headfort Place, London, S.W.1.

  2nd Printing 1962

  3rd Printing 1963

  4tb Printing 1964

  THE CHARACTERS IN THIS BOOK ARE ENTIRELY

  IMAGINARY AND HAVE NO RELATION TO ANY

  LIVING PERSON

  Printed in Great Britain by Cox and Wyman Ltd., London, Reading and Fakenham

  PART 1: THE MIRACLE TEA PARTY

  I

  THIS STORY starts with four wild coincidences; so we may as well admit them at once and get it over with, and then there will be no more argument. The chronicler makes no apologies for them. A lot of much more far-fetched coin­cidences have been allowed to happen without protest in the history of the world, and all that can be done about it is to relate them exactly as they took place. And if it should be objected that these particular coincidences led to the down­fall of sundry criminals who might otherwise never have been detected, it must be pointed out that at least half the convicts at present taking a cure in the cooler were caught that way.

  Chief Inspector Claud Eustace Teal sat in a tea shoppe that was not much more than a powerful stone's throw from Scotland Yard. Dispassionately considered, it was quite a suitable target for stone-throwing, being one of those dens of ghastly chintz-curtained cheerfulness which stand as grisly omens of what the English-speaking races can expect from a few more generations of purity and hygiene; but Mr Teal held it in a sort of affection born of habit.

  He had finished his tea, and he sat glancing over a news­paper. And in order that there may be positively no decep­tion about this, it must be admitted at once that not even the most enthusiastic advocate of temperance would have chosen him as an advertisement of the place that he was in. Mr Teal, in fact, who even at his best suffered from certain physical disadvantages which made it permanently impossible for him to model for a statue of Dancing Spring, was at that moment not even in the running for a picture of Mellow Autumn. His round pink pace had a distinctly muddy tinge under its roseate bloom; the champing of his jaws on the inevitable wodge of spearmint was visibly listless; and his china-blue eyes contained an expression of joyless but stoical endurance. He looked, to speak with complete candour, rather like a discontented cow with a toothache.

  After a while he put the newspaper aside and simply sat, gazing mournfully into space. It was a Sunday afternoon, and at that rather late hour he had the place to himself, except for a vacant-faced waitress who sat in a corner knitting some garment in a peculiarly dreadful shade of mustard yellow. A small radio on the mantelpiece, strategically placed between a vase of artificial flowers and a bowl of wax fruit, was emitting strains of that singularly lugubrious and eviscerated music which supplies the theme song of modern romance. Mr Teal appeared to be enduring that infliction in the same spirit as Job might have endured the development of his sixtysecond boil. He looked as if he was only waiting for someone to come along and relieve him of the cares of the Universe.

  Someone did come along, but not with that intention. The crash of the door opening made Mr Teal's overwrought nerves wince; and when he saw who it was he closed his eyes for a moment in sheer agony. For although Mr William Kennedy was easily the most popular of the Assistant Com­missioners, his vast and jovial personality was approximately the last thing that a man in Mr Teal's condition is able to appreciate.

  "Hullo, laddie!" he roared, in a voice that boomed through the room like a gale. "What's the matter? You look like a cold poached egg left over from yesterday's breakfast. What are you doing—thinking about the Saint?"

  Mr Teal started as if an electric current had been applied to his posterior. He had expected the worst, but this was worse than that. If anything could have been said to fill his cup of suffering to the brim, that something had been said. Mr Teal now looked as if there was nothing left except for him to find some suitably awful spot in which to die.

  Scientists, whose restless researches leave no phenomenon unprobed, have discovered that certain persons are subject to quite disproportionately grievous reactions from stimuli which to other persons are entirely innocuous. These inor­dinate sensitivities are known as allergies. Some people are allergic to oysters, others to onions; others need only eat a strawberry to be attacked by violent pains and break out in a rash.

  Chief Inspector Teal was allergic to the Saint. But it must be admitted that this was an acquired rather than a congenital allergy. It is true that Mr Teal, on account of his profession, was theoretically required to be allergic to every kind of law breaker; but there was nothing in his implied contract with the State which required him to be pierced by such excruciat­ing pains or to break out in such a vivid erythema as he was apt to do whenever he heard the name or nickname of that incorrigible outlaw who had been christened Simon Templar.

  But the Saint was the kind of outlaw that no officer of the Law can ever have had to cope with since the Sheriff of Nottingham was pestered into apoplexy by the Robin Hood of those more limited days. There was no precedent in modern times for anything like him; and Mr Teal was con­vinced that it could only be taken as evidence of the deliberate maliciousness of Fate that out of all the other police officers who might have been chosen for the experiment the lot had fallen upon him. For there was no doubt at all in his mind that all the griefs and woes which had been visited upon him in recent years could be directly attributed to that amazing buccaneer whose unlawful excursions against evildoers had made criminal history, and yet whose legal conviction and punishment was beginning to seem as hopelessly improbable an event as the capture of a genuine and indisputable sea-serpent. Kennedy was not being deliberately cruel. It was simply his uninhibited proclamation of what was an almost automatic association of ideas to anyone who knew anything at all about Teal's professional life: that whenever Mr Teal looked as if he was in acute agony he was under­going a spell of Saint trouble. The fact that Mr Teal, as it happened, had not been thinking about the Saint at all when Kennedy came in only gave the reminder a deeper power to wound.

  "No, sir," said Mr Teal, with the flimsiest quality of restraint. "I was not thinking about the Saint. I haven't seen him for weeks; I don't know what he's doing; and what's more, I don't care."

  Kennedy raised his eyebrows.

  "Sorry, laddie. I thought from your appearance——"

  "What's wrong with my blasted appearance ?" snarled the detective, with a reckless disregard for discipline of which in normal times he would never have been capable; but Ken­nedy had no great respect for trivial formalities.

  "Blasted is right," he agreed readily. "You look like some­thing the lightning had started out to strike and then given up as a work of supererogation. What is it, then ? Have you been getting hell for falling down on that espionage business ?"

  Mr Teal was able to ignore that. It was true that he had made very little headway with the case referred to, but that was not worrying him unduly. When official secrets spring a leak, it is usually a slow job to trace the leakage to its source, and Teal was too old a hand to let himself be disturbed by the slowness of it.

  His trouble was far more intimate and personal; and the time has now come when it must be revealed.

  Mr Teal was suffering from indigestion.

  It was a complaint that had first intruded itself on his con­sciousness some weeks ago; since when its symptoms had become steadily more severe and regular, until by thi
s time he had come to regard a stomach-ache as the practically inevitable sequel to any meal he ate. Since Mr Teal's tummy constituted a very large proportion of Mr Teal, his sufferings were considerable. They made him pessimistic and depressed, and more than usually morose. His working days had become long hours of discomfort and misery, and it seemed an eternity since he had spent a really restful and dreamless night. Even now, after having forgone his Sunday dinner in penitence for the price he had had to pay for bacon and eggs at breakfast, the cream bun to whose succulent temptation he had not long ago succumbed was already beginning to give him the un­happily familiar sensation of having swallowed a live and singularly vicious crab. And this was the mortal dolour in addition to which he had had to receive a superfluous re­minder of the Saint.

  The waitress at last succeeded in gaining audience.

  "Yes," boomed Kennedy. "Tea. Strong tea. And about half a ton of hot buttered crumpets."

  Mr Teal closed his eyes again as another excruciating cramp curled through him.

  In his darkened loneliness he became aware that the music had been interrupted and the radio was talking.

  "... and this amazing tea is not only guaranteed to relieve indigestion immediately, but to effect a complete and permanent cure," said a clear young voice with a beautiful Oxford accent. "Every day we are receiving fresh testimonials——"

  "My God," said Teal with a shudder, "where is that Eric-or-Little-by-Little drivelling from?"

  "Radio Calvados," answered Kennedy. "One of the new continental stations. They go to work every Sunday. I sup­pose we shall have to put up with it as long as the BBC refuses to produce anything but string quartets and instructive talks on Sundays."

  "Miracle Tea" said Eric, continuing little by little. "Remember that name. Miracle Tea. Obtainable from all high-class chemists, or direct by post from the Miracle Tea Company, 909 Victoria Street, London. Buy some Miracle Tea tonight !. . . And now we shall conclude this programme with our signature song— Tea for You."

  Mr Teal held on to his stomach as the anguishing parody proceeded to rend the air.

  "Miracle Tea!" he rasped savagely. "What'll they think of next? As if tea could cure indigestion! Pah!"

  The way he said "Pah!" almost blew his front teeth out; and Kennedy glanced at him discerningly.

  "Oh, so that's the trouble, is it ? The mystery is solved."

  "I didn't say——"

  Kennedy grinned at him.

  The door of the tea shoppe opened again, to admit Inspector Peters, Kennedy's chief assistant.

  "Sorry I was so long, sir," he apologized, taking the vacant chair at their table. "The man was out——"

  "Never mind that," said Kennedy. "Teal's got indiges­tion."

  "You can fix that with a bit of bicarb," said Peters helpfully.

  "So long as it isn't something more serious," said Kennedy, reaching for the freshly-arrived plate of hot buttered crumpets with a hand like a leg of mutton and the air of massive confidence which can only be achieved by a man of herculean physique who knows that his interior would never dare to give him any backchat. "I've been noticing his face lately. I must say I've been worried about it, but I didn't like to mention it before he brought it up."

  "You mean the twitching ?" asked Peters.

  "Not so much the twitching as the jaundiced colour. It looks bad to me."

  "Damn it," began Teal explosively.

  "Acid," pronounced Kennedy, engulfing crumpets. "That's generally the beginning of the trouble. Too much acid swilling around the lining of your stomach, and where are you ? In next to no time you're a walking mass of gastric ulcers. You know what happens when a gastric ulcer eats into a blood vessel ?"

  "You bleed to death ?" asked Peters interestedly.

  "Like a shot," said Kennedy, apparently unaware of the fact that Teal was starting to simmer and splutter like a pan full of hot grease. "It's even worse when the ulcer makes a whacking great hole in the wall of the stomach and your dinner falls through into the abdominal cavity...."

  Mr Teal clung to his chair and wished that he had been born deaf.

  It was no consolation at all to him to recall that it had actually been the Saint himself who had started the fashion of making familiar and even disgusting comments on the shape and dimensions of the stomach under discussion, a fashion which Mr Teal's own colleagues, to their eternal disgrace, had been surprisingly quick to adopt. And now that it had been revealed that his recent irritability had been caused by acute indigestion, the joke would take a new lease of life. It is a curious but undeniable fact that a man may have a head­ache or a toothache or an earache and receive nothing but sympathy from those about him; but let his stomach ache and all he can expect is facetiousness of the most callous and offensive kind. Mr Teal's stomach was a magnificently well-developed organ, measuring more inches from east to west than he cared to calculate and he was perhaps excessively sensitive about it; but in its present condition the most faintly flippant reference to it was exquisite torment.

  He stood up.

  "Will you excuse me, sir?" he said, with as much dignity as he could muster. "I've got a job to do this evening."

  "Don't forget to buy some Miracle Tea on your way home," was Kennedy's farewell.

  Mr Teal walked up Victoria Street in the direction of his modest lodgings. He had no job to do at all; but it would have been physically impossible for him to have stomached another minute of the conversation he had left behind him. He walked, because he had not far to go, and the exercise helped to distract his thoughts from the feeling that his intestines were being gnawed by a colony of hungry rats. Not that the distraction was by any means complete: the rats continued their remorseless depredations. But he was able to give them only half his attention instead of the whole of it. In the circumstances it was perhaps natural that the broad­cast which had been added to his current griefs should remain vaguely present in the background of his mind. The address given had been in Victoria Street. And therefore it was per­haps not such a wild coincidence after all that he should presently have found himself gazing at a large showcard in the window of a chemist's shop which he must have been passing practically every day for the last two months.

  INDIGESTION?

  Try

  MIRACLE TEA 2 /6 a packet

  Mr Teal was not even averagely gullible; but a man in his state of mind is not fully responsible for his actions. The tribulations of the last few weeks had reduced him to a state of desperation in which he would have tried a dose of prussic acid if it had been recommended with sufficient promises of alleviating his distress.

  With a furtive glance around him, as if he was afraid of being caught in a disreputable act, he entered the shop and approached the counter, behind which stood a shifty-eyed young man in a soiled white coat.

  "A packet of Miracle Tea," said Mr Teal, lowering his voice to a mumble, although the shop was empty, as though he had been asking for some unmentionable merchandise.

  He planked down a half-crown with unconvincing defiance.

  The assistant hesitated for a moment, turned, and took an oblong yellow packet from a shelf behind him. He hesitated again, still holding it as if he was reluctant to part with it.

  "Yes, sir?" he said suggestively.

  "What d'you mean—'yes, sir?' " blared Mr Teal with the belligerence of increasing embarrassment.

  "Isn't there something else, sir ?"

  "No, there isn't anything else!" retorted the detective, whose sole remaining ambition was to get out of the place as quickly as possible with his guilty purchase. "Give me that stuff and take your money."

  He reached over and fairly snatched the yellow packet out of the young man's hand, stuffed it into his pocket, and lumbered out as if he were trying to catch a train. He was in such a hurry that he almost bowled over another customer who was just entering the shop—and this customer, for some reason, quickly averted his face.

  Mr Teal was too flustered even to notice him. He went ploddi
ng more rapidly than usual on his homeward way, feeling as if his face was a bright crimson which would announce his shame to any passerby, and never dreaming that Destiny had already grasped him firmly by the scruff of the neck.

  Five minutes later he was trudging through a narrow side street within a couple of blocks of his apartment. The coma­tose dusk of Sunday evening lay over it like a shroud: not a single other human creature was in sight, and the only sound apart from the solid tread of his own regulation boots was a patter of hurried footsteps coming up behind him. There was nothing in that to make him turn his head.... The footsteps caught up until they were almost on his heels; and then something hit him a terrific blow on the side of the head and everything dissolved into black darkness.

  II

  SIMON TEMPLAR'S views on the subject of Chief Inspector Teal, unlike Chief Inspector Teal's views on the subject of the Saint, were apt to fluctuate between very contradictory extremes. There were times when he felt that life would lose half its savour if he were deprived of the perpetual joy of dodging Teal's constant frantic efforts to put him behind bars; but there were other times when he felt that his life would be a lot less strenuous if Teal's cardinal ambition had been a little less tenacious. There had been times when he had felt sincere remorse for the more bitter humiliations which he had sometimes been compelled to inflict on Mr Teal, even though these times had been the only alternatives to his own defeat in their endless duel; there had been other times when he could have derived much satisfaction from beating Teal over the head with a heavy bar of iron with large knobs on the end.

  One thing which the Saint was certain about, however, was that his own occasional urges to assault the detective's cranium with a blunt instrument did not mean that he was at any time prepared to permit any common or garden thug to take the same liberties with that long-suffering dome.

  This was the last of the coincidences of which due warning has already been given—that Simon Templar's long sleek Hirondel chanced to be taking a short cut through the back streets of the district at that fateful hour, and whirled round a corner into the one street where it was most needed at the precise moment when Teal's ample body was spreading itself over the pavement as flat as a body of that architecture can conveniently be spread without the aid of a steam roller.