The Saint and Mr Teal (Once More the Saint) Read online

  The Saint and Mr Teal (Once More the Saint)

  Leslie Charteris

  THE SAINT AND MR. TEAL Leslie Charteris

  CONTENTS

  THE GOLD STANDARD THE MAN FROM ST. LOUIS THE DEATH PENALTY

  PART I THE GOLD STANDARD

  CHAPTER I SIMON TEMPLAR landed in England when the news of Brian Quell's murder was on the streets. He read the brief notice of the killing in an evening paper which he bought in Newhaven, but it added scarcely anything to what he already knew.

  Brian Quell died in Paris, and died drunk; which would probably have been his own choice if he had been consulted, for the whole of his unprofitable exist­ence had been wrapped up in the pleasures of the Gay City. He was a prophet who was without honour not only in his own country and among his own family, but even among the long-suffering circle of acquaint­ances who helped him to spend his money when he had any, and endeavoured to lend him as little as pos­sible when he was broke-which was about three hun­dred days out of the year. He had arrived ten years ago as an art student, but he had long since given up any artistic pretensions that were not included in the scope of studio parties and long hair. Probably there was no real vice in him; but the life of the Left Bank is like an insidious drug, an irresistible spell to such a temperament as his, and it was very easy to slip into the stream in those days before the rapacity of Mont­martre patrons drove the tourist pioneers across the river. They knew him, and charmingly declined to cash his checks, at the Dome, the Rotonde, the Select, and all the multitudinous boîtes-de-nuit which spring up around those unassailable institutions for a short season's dizzy popularity, and sink back just as sud­denly into oblivion. Brian Quell had his fill of them all. And he died.

  The evening paper did not say he was drunk; but Simon Templar knew, for he was the last man to see Brian Quell alive.

  He heard the shot just as he had removed his shoes, as he prepared for what was left of a night's rest in the obscure little hotel near the Gare du Montparnasse which he had chosen for his sanctuary in Paris. His room was on the first floor, with a window opening onto a well at the back, and it was through this window that the sharp crack of the report came to him. The instinct of his trade made him leap for the nearest switch and snap out the lights without thinking what he was doing, and he padded back to the window in his stockinged feet. By that time he had realized that the shot could be no immediate concern of his, for the shots that kill you are the ones you don't hear. But if Simon Templar had been given to minding his own business there would never have been any stories to write about him.

  He swung his legs over the low balustrade and strolled quietly round the flat square of concrete which surrounded the ground-floor skylight that angled up in the centre of the well. Other windows opened out onto it like his own, but all of them except one were in dark­ness. The lighted window attracted him as inevitably as it would have drawn a moth; and as he went towards it he observed that it was the only one in the courtyard besides his own which had not been firmly shuttered against any breath of the fresh air which, as all the world knows, is instantly fatal to the sleeping French­man. And then the light went out.

  Simon reached the dark opening and paused there. He heard a gasping curse; and then a hoarse voice gurgled the most amazing speech that he had ever heard from the lips of a dying man.

  "A mos' unfrien'ly thing!"

  Without hesitation Simon Templar climbed into the room. He found his way to the door and turned on the lights; and it was only then that he learned that the drunken man was dying.

  Brian Quell was sprawled in the middle of the floor, propping himself up unsteadily on one elbow. There was a pool of blood on the carpet beside him, and his grubby shirt was stained red across the chest. He stared at Simon hazily.

  "A mos' unfrien'ly thing!" he repeated.

  Simon dropped on one knee at the man's side. The first glance told him that Brian Quell had only a few minutes to live, but the astonishing thing was that Quell did not know he was hurt. The shock had not sobered him at all. The liquor that reeked on his breath was playing the part of an anaesthetic, and the fumes in his brain had fuddled his senses beyond all power of comprehending such an issue.

  "Do you know who it was?" Simon asked gently.

  Quell shook his head.

  "I dunno. Never saw him before in my life. Called himself Jones. Silly sora name, isnit? Jones. . . . An' he tole me Binks can make gold!"

  "Where did you meet him, old chap? Can you tell me what he looked like?"

  "I dunno. Been all over place. Everywhere you could gerra drink. Man with a silly sora face. Never seen him before in my life. Silly ole Jones." The dying man wagged his head solemnly. "An' he did a mos' unfrien'ly thing. Tried to shoot me! A mos' unfrien'ly thing." Quell giggled feebly. "An' he saysh Binks can make gold. Thash funny, isnit?"

  Simon looked round the room. There was no trace of the man who had called himself Jones-nothing but an ashtray that had been freshly emptied. Obviously the killer had stayed long enough to obliterate all evi­dence of his visit; obviously, too, his victim had been temporarily paralyzed, so that the murderer had be­lieved that he was already dead.

  There was a telephone by the door, and for a moment Simon Templar gazed at it and wondered if it was his duty to ring for assistance. The last thing on earth that he wanted was an interview even with the most un­suspecting police officer, but that consideration would not have weighed with him for an instant if he had not known that all the doctors in France could have done nothing for the man who was dying in his arms and did not know it.

  "Why did Jones try to shoot you?" he asked, and Brian Quell grinned at him vacuously.

  "Becaush he said Binksh could --"

  The repetition choked off in the man's throat. His eyes wavered over Simon's face stupidly; then they dilated with the first and last stunned realization of the truth, only for one horrible dumb second before the end.. . .

  Simon read the dead man's name from the tailor's tab inside the breast pocket of his coat and went softly back to his room. The other windows on the courtyard remained shrouded in darkness. If anyone else had heard the shot it must have been attributed to a passing taxi; but there is a difference between the cough of an engine and the crack of an automatic about which the trained ear can never be mistaken. If it had not been for Simon Templar's familiarity with that subtle dis­tinction, a coup might have been inscribed in the annals of crime which would have shaken Europe from end to end-but Simon could not see so far ahead that night.

  He left Paris early the following morning. It was unlikely that the murder would be discovered before the afternoon; for it is an axiom of the Quarter that early rising is a purely bourgeois conceit, and one of the few failings of the French hotel keepers is that they feel none of that divine impulse to dictate the manner of life of their clientele which has from time immemorial made Great Britain the Mecca of holiday makers from every corner of the globe. Simon Templar had rarely witnessed a violent death about which he had so clear a conscience, and yet he knew that it would have been foolish to stay. It was one of the penalties of his fame that he had no more chance of convincing any well-informed policeman that he was a law-abiding citizen than he had of being elected President of the United States. So he went back to England, where he was more unpopular than anywhere else in Europe.

  If it is true that there is some occult urge which draws a murderer back to the scene of his crime, it must have been an infinitely more potent force which brought Simon Templar back across the Channel to the scene of more light-hearted misdemeanours than Scotland Yard had ever before endured from the disproportionate sense of humour
of any one outlaw. It was not so many years since he had first formulated the idea of making it his life work to register himself in the popular eye as something akin to a public institution; and yet in that short space of time his dossier in the Records Office had swollen to a saga of debonair lawlessness that made Chief Inspector Claud Eustace Teal speechless to contemplate. The absurd little sketch of a skeleton figure graced with a symbolic halo, that impudent signature with which Simon Templar endorsed all his crimes, had spread the terror of the Saint into every outpost of the underworld and crashed rudely into the placid meanderings of all those illustrious members of the Criminal Investigation Department who had hitherto been content to justify their employment as guardians of the law by perfecting themselves in the time-honoured sport of persuading deluded shop assistants to sell them a bar of chocolate one minute later than the lawful hours for such transactions. The Robin Hood of Modern Crime they called him in the headlines, and extolled his virtues in the same paragraph as they reviled the C.I.D. for failing to lay him by the heels; which only shows you what newspapers can do for democracy. He had become an accepted incident in current affairs, like Wheat Quotas and the League of Nations, only much more interesting. He stood for a vengeance that struck swiftly and without mercy, for a gay defiance of all dreary and mechanical things.

  "It's not my fault, sir," Chief Inspector Teal stated gloomily, in an interview which he had with the assist­ant commissioner. "We aren't in the Saint's class, and some day I suppose we shall have to admit it. If this was a republic we should make him dictator and get some sleep."

  The commissioner frowned. He was one of the last survivors of the old military school of police chiefs, a distinguished soldier of unimpeachable integrity; but he laboured under the disadvantage of expecting professional law breakers to parade for judgment as meekly as the casual defaulters he had been accustomed to dealing with in Pondicherry.

  "About two months ago," he said, "you told me that the Saint's arrest was only a matter of hours. It was something to do with illicit diamonds, wasn't it?"

  "It was," Teal said grimly.

  He was never likely to forget the incident. Neither, it seemed, were his superiors. Gunner Perrigo was the culprit in that case, and the police had certainly got their man. The only trouble was that Simon Templar had got him first. Perrigo had been duly hanged on the very morning of this conversation, but his illicit diamonds had never been heard of again.

  "It should have been possible to form a charge," in­sisted the commissioner, plucking his iron-grey moustache nervously. He disapproved of Teal's attitude altogether, but the plump detective was an important officer.

  "It might be, if there were no lawyers," said Teal. "If I went into a witness box and talked about illicit diamonds I should be bawled out of court. We know the diamonds existed, but who's going to prove it to a jury? Frankie Hormer could have talked about them, but Perrigo gave him the works. Perrigo could have talked, but he didn't-and now he's dead. And the Saint got away with them out of England, and that's the end of it. If I could lay my hands on him tomorrow I'd have no more hope of proving he'd ever possessed any illicit diamonds than I'd have of running the Pope for bigamy. We could charge him with obstructing and assaulting the police in the execution of their duty, but what in heaven's name's the use of running the Saint for a milk-and-water rap like that? It'd be the biggest joke that Fleet Street's had on us for years."

  "Did you learn all the facts about his last stunt in Germany ?"

  "Yes. I did. And it just came through yesterday that the German police aren't in a hurry to prosecute. There's some big name involved, and they've got the wind up. If I was expecting anything else, I was betting the Saint would be hustling back here and getting ready to dare them to try and extradite him from his own country-he's pulled that one on me before."

  The commissioner sniffed.

  "I suppose if he did come back, you'd want me to head a deputation of welcome," he said scathingly.

  "I've done everything that any officer could do in the circumstances, sir," said Teal. "If the Saint came back this afternoon, and I met him on the doorstep of this building, I'd have to pass the time of day with him -and like it. You know the law as well as I do. We couldn't ask him any more embarrassing questions than if he had had a good time abroad, and how was his aunt's rheumatism when he last heard from her. They don't want detectives here any longer-what they need is a staff of hypnotists and faith healers."

  The commissioner fidgeted with a pencil.

  "If the Saint came back, I should certainly expect to see some change in our methods," he remarked pointedly; and then the telephone on his desk buzzed.

  He picked up the receiver, and then passed it across to Teal.

  "For you, Inspector," he said curtly.

  Teal took over the instrument.

  "Saint returns to England," clicked the voice on the wire. "A report from Newhaven states that a man answering to Simon Templar's description landed from the Isle of Sheppey this afternoon. He was subsequently traced to a hotel in the town --"

  "Don't talk to me like a fourth-rate newspaper," snarled Teal. "What have they done with him?"

  "On the instructions of the chief constable, he is being detained pending advice from London."

  Teal put the receiver carefully back on its bracket.

  "Well, sir, the Saint has come back," he said glumly,'

  CHAPTER II THE assistant commissioner did not head a deputation of welcome to Newhaven. Teal went down alone, with mixed feelings. He remembered that the Saint's last action before leaving England had been to present him with a sheaf of information which had enabled him to clean up several cases that had been racking the brains of the C.I.D. for many months. He remembered also that the Saint's penultimate action had been to threaten him with the most vicious form of blackmail that can be applied to any police officer. But Chief Inspector Teal had long since despaired of reconciling the many contradictions of his endless feud with the man who in any other path of life might have been his closest friend.

  He found Simon Templar dozing peacefully on the narrow bed of a cell in Newhaven police station. The Saint rolled up to a sitting position as the detective entered, and smiled at him cheerfully.

  "Claud Eustace himself, by the tum-tum of Tut­ankhamen! I thought I'd be seeing you." Simon looked the detective over thoughtfully. "And I believe you've put on weight," he said.

  Teal sank his teeth in a well-worn lump of chewing gum.

  "What have you come back for?" he asked shortly.

  On the way down he had mapped out the course of the interview minutely. He had decided that his attitude would be authoritative, restrained, distant, perfectly polite but definitely warning. He would tolerate no more nonsense. So long as the Saint was prepared to behave himself, no obstacles would be placed in his way; but if he was contemplating any further misdeeds . . . The official warning would be delivered thus and thus.

  And now, within thirty seconds of his entering the cell, in the first sentence he had uttered, the smooth control of the situation which he had intended to usurp from the start was sliding out of his grasp. It had always been like that. Teal proposed, and the Saint disposed. There was something about the insolent self-possession of that scapegrace buccaneer that goaded the detective into faux pas for which he was never afterwards able to account.

  "As a matter of fact, old porpoise," said the Saint, "I came back for some cigarettes. You can't buy my favourite brand in France, and if you've ever endured a week of Marylands- "

  Teal took a seat on the bunk.

  "You left England in rather a hurry two months ago, didn't you?"

  "I suppose I did," admitted the Saint reflectively. "You see, I felt like having a good bust, and you know what I am. Impetuous. I just upped and went."

  "It's a pity you didn't stay."

  The Saint's blue eyes gazed out banteringly from under dark level brows.

  "Teal, is that kind? If you want to know, I was expecting a
better reception than this. I was only thinking just now how upset my solicitor would be when he heard about it. Poor old chap-he's awfully sensitive about these things. When one of his respectable and valued clients comes home to his native land, and he isn't allowed to move two hundred yards into the interior before some flat-footed hick cop is lugging him off to the hoosegow for no earthly reason--"

  "Now you listen to me for a minute," Teal cut in bluntly. "I didn't come here to swap any funny talk of that sort with you. I came down to tell you how the Yard thinks you'd better behave now you're home. You're going loose as soon as I've finished with you, but if you want to stay loose you'll take a word of advice."

  "Shall I?"

  "That's up to you." The detective was plunging into his big speech half an hour before it was due, but he was going to get it through intact if it was the last thing he ever did. It was an amazing thing that even after the two months of comparative calm which he had enjoyed since the Saint left England, the gall of many defeats was as bitter on his tongue as it had ever been before. Perhaps he had a clairvoyant glimpse of the future, born out of the deepest darkness of his sub­conscious mind, which told him that he might as well have lectured a sun spot about its pernicious influence on the weather. The bland smiling composure of that lean figure opposite him was fraying the edges of his nerves with all the accumulated armoury of old associ­ations. "I'm not suggesting," Teal said tersely. "I'm prophesying."

  The Saint acknowledged his authority with the faint­est possible flicker of one eyebrow-and yet the sar­donic mockery of that minute gesture was indescribable.

  "Yeah?"

  "I'm telling you to watch your step. We've put up with a good deal from you in the past. You've been lucky. You even earned a free pardon, once. Anyone would have thought you'd have been content to retire gracefully after that. You had your own ideas. But a piece of luck like that doesn't come twice in any man's lifetime. You'd made things hot enough for yourself when you went away, and you needn't think they've cooled off just because you took a short holiday. I'm not saying they mightn't cool off a bit if you took a long one. We aren't out for any more trouble."