The Saint Steps In (The Saint Series) Read online

  The wire hummed voicelessly for a second.

  “What happened?”

  “Somebody used his head for a drum and broke it.”

  “Where was this?”

  “At Calvin Gray’s place, just a little while ago. I found the body. He was following Madeline Gray, wasn’t he?”

  “Yes.”

  “And me, too.”

  “I didn’t know about that. If I’d known you knew her—” Schindler didn’t go on. He said, “Have you called the police?”

  “No. But I’ve got an FBI man coming down. There’s more to this than just a murder.”

  “Just the same, if there’s been a murder we’ll have to notify the police.”

  “I suppose so. I’ll call them.”

  “Better let me do it. I know the Chief. And I’ll be right over.”

  “You know the place?”

  “Yes. I’ll see you in a few minutes.”

  Simon hung up.

  “I’m afraid you’re going to be hostess to a real convention of detectives,” he said. “You’d better put a blue light outside and get out the cuspidors.”

  “You know this man Schindler?” said the girl.

  “I’ve known him for years. And whatever dirty work is going on, he isn’t part of it. But anybody could have hired him to check up on you, on some pretext or other. I’m just hoping this will give us another lead. We’ll see. Meanwhile—don’t you think a drink would do you a bit of good?”

  He went into the kitchen to organise a cocktail, and the girl followed him in there and watched him.

  Presently she said, “You’ve been very sweet, trying to take everything out of my hands. But now, I’ve got to know. Do you think there’s any chance of finding Daddy?”

  “There’s always a chance of anything,” he replied, stirring his mixture methodically. “But this won’t be easy. This is an awful quiet neck of the woods. Two or three men could easily come here and pull a job, and get away again without ever being seen by anyone within miles of here.”

  Her eyes were stony and searching.

  “If you’re keeping anything back, I’ve got a right to know it. What do you think the truth is?”

  He put down the shaker and faced her bluntly, and yet as kindly as he could.

  “I think that I’m entirely responsible for whatever has happened to your father. I still don’t know what makes it tick. But there’s a pattern. Look. You’ve had incidental sabotage and threats. They didn’t stop you. Last night, I began to think that kidnapping your father, and the attempt to kidnap you, were a sort of co-ordinated manoeuvre—they could have been timed to happen about the same time, and you’d both have disappeared the same night, only in different places. But that doesn’t work.”

  “Why?”

  “The note you got in the Shoreham. ‘Don’t try to see Imberline.’ Your appointment with Imberline was a phony, a plant to take you to a place where you could be kidnapped. Therefore, why try to stop you keeping the appointment? Only for one reason. The Ungodly were still trying to weasel on their ungodliness. They still didn’t want to go right in up to their ears. But you weren’t scared off. You spoke to me. They told me to mind my own business, but they must have guessed even then that I wouldn’t. They still might have thought they could put on some act and scare you off, but when I crashed on to the battlefield even that last hope was shot. At last they had to start really playing for keeps. You did all that when you dragged me in, and now it remains to be seen whether I can make it worthwhile.”

  His lips set in a sardonic fighting line. “I’m sorry, kid, but at the moment that’s how I think it is.”

  He was taking more blame than he need have, for it was obvious that a kidnapping of Calvin Gray could not have followed so quickly unless the plans had been laid in advance and there had been men waiting in the vicinity of Stamford who only needed a telephone call to set them in motion, but it made him feel better to take all the responsibility he could inflict on himself. It helped to build up a strength of cold anger that was some antidote to a groping helplessness which was not his fault.

  But the girl didn’t break. She said steadily, “Then you think they meant to leave me—”

  “So that you’d play ball for fear of what might happen to your father. They weren’t actually ready to tie you both up and work on you with hot irons. The threat and the war of nerves might have done the trick. Which is another thing that doesn’t quite seem to fit the Nazi angle. Any good heel heiler like Karl would have seen it the more straightforward way. But now—I don’t know.”

  “Whatever it comes to,” she said, “I’ll be as tough as I can. I’m all right now. I promise.”

  He grinned, with one of his sudden carefree flashes of unreserved comradeship that could make people feel as if they had been elected to a unique and exclusive fraternity, and his hand rested briefly and lightly on her shoulder.

  “You always were all right, Madeline,” he said. “You just wanted a little time to find your feet in this racket.”

  He was impatient for the convoy that he was expecting to arrive. Even though he would be equally impatient with the routines that would have to be gone through, they would give a temporary air of positive action which he needed.

  It was a long half-hour before the first car crunched into the driveway and Ray Schindler hauled his not inconsiderable bulk out of it. He had sparse white hair and Mephistophelian black eyebrows and an amused inquisitive nose which gave him an absurdly appropriate resemblance to the late Edgar Wallace.

  Simon went out to meet him, and they shook hands as another car drove in and disgorged a big ruddy man in loose tweeds with an ancient fedora tilted on the back of his head. Schindler introduced them.

  “This is Chief Wayvern—Mr Templar.”

  “Well,” Wayvern said impersonally, “what’s this all about?”

  Simon told the complete story as brief as he could, leaving out all speculation, while they walked to the place where the funny little man had so abruptly ceased to be funny. They stood and looked down at him in his final foolishness.

  “That’s Angert all right,” Schindler said grimly.

  Wayvern moved carefully to the body and made a superficial examination without disturbing it. Then he stepped back and turned to the two satellites who had trailed him with a load of equipment.

  “Get started, boys,” he said. “But don’t move him until the doctor’s seen him. He said he’d be here in a few minutes.”

  One of his men began to set up a camera, and Wayvern took a cigar out of his vest pocket and tilted his hat even further back.

  “You say this man was working for you, Ray, keeping an eye on Madeline Gray?”

  “That’s right. He went to Washington the night before last to pick her up. But I didn’t know about any of these other things that Simon has told you. This client who came to me said that Miss Gray had said that she was being blackmailed, and they wanted to help her. But Miss Gray had made this person promise not to tell the police. Coming to me was a dodge to get around that. At least, that was the story. I was commissioned to put a man on to watch Miss Gray and get a report on everyone who came in contact with her.”

  “Who was this client?” Simon asked.

  “I called my office in New York to make sure of the name and address. Here it is.”

  Schindler took a slip of paper from, his pocket and handed it to Wayvern.

  “Miss Diana Barry,” Wayvern said, reading off the paper.

  “What did she look like?” asked the Saint.

  “A big tall girl…beautiful figure…blonde…blue eyes…very well dressed and well spoken…”

  Simon kept his face studiously blank, but he had been wondering how long it would be before Andrea Quennel crossed his path again.

  CHAPTER FOUR:

  HOW SIMON TEMPLAR STUDIED BIOGRAPHY, AND WALTER DEVAN CAME VISITING

  1

  The FBI man from New Haven, whose name was Jetterick, said, “This Mrs Cook
says she served Mr Gray’s dinner at seven-thirty, and then she washed up and went home about nine. At that time he was reading a book in the living-room.”

  “He didn’t say anything about going out?” Madeline put in.

  “No.”

  “Was there any reason why he should?” asked the Saint.

  There wasn’t any answer to that.

  Simon had told his story two or three times over—the last time for it to be laboriously taken down as a statement. Both of them had answered innumerable questions.

  Madeline Gray had said, “I don’t know anyone called Diana Barry, and I don’t know anyone who fits that description. And I’m not being blackmailed.”

  Jetterick had phoned the description and address through to New York for investigation.

  A police doctor had seen Angert, confirmed the Saint’s diagnosis subject to a post-mortem, and gone away again. The remains of Sylvester Angert had gone away, too, riding in a closed van which arrived later. Photographs had been taken, and fingerprints. The laboratory had been gone over with powders and magnifying glasses. Even then, men were working meticulously through the rest of the house.

  “You’re quite sure about Mrs Cook?” Wayvern asked.

  “Absolutely,” Madeline said. “We’ve known her for years and years, and I don’t think she’s ever been out of Stamford. It won’t take you a minute to find out all about her.”

  Jetterick rubbed his clean hard chin and said, “There haven’t been any threats before, Miss Gray?”

  “No. Only the notes in Washington, that we told you about.”

  “You said that your father was pretty well off, didn’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “But so far there hasn’t been any demand for ransom.”

  “Kidnapping for ransom,” Simon mentioned, “doesn’t tie in with two or three attempts to sabotage a laboratory.”

  “Was the sabotage proved? Were the local police told about it?”

  “Of course,” said the girl. “But they didn’t find anything.”

  “We did what we could,” Wayvern said.

  “Accidents do happen in chemical laboratories, don’t they?”

  “Sometimes. But—”

  “Didn’t your father ever stay out at night, Miss Gray? You understand, I have to be practical about this. I don’t want to suggest anything that might offend you, but he hadn’t been gone very long. Why shouldn’t he have gone to New York…met some friends…decided to stay over in town…”

  “You know as much as we do,” said the Saint. “I’ve told you the whole story as I have it. You still have to account for the attempt to kidnap Miss Gray in Washington, the shot that was fired at me in the Shoreham, Karl Morgen prancing in and out of the picture, and the very dead Mr Angert. But you take it your own way from here.”

  Jetterick looked at him with philosophical detachment.

  “If it were anyone else but you,” he said, “I’d have given you more trouble than I have. I admit you make it sound like a case. But I have to think of everything. I’m understaffed and overworked, anyway. However, we are covering everything we can. We’ve got Morgen’s description, and we’ll get some of his fingerprints from the laboratory. We’ve got the gun you took from him to check on. We’ll keep working on every clue there is.”

  “Isn’t there anything I can do?” Madeline asked.

  “Get me a photograph and give me a description of your father. We’ll notify him as missing. If you do not receive any communication about him, that’ll give us something more to work on. Until then, I can’t make any promises. There’s a lot of space on this continent, and if a man is deliberately being hidden he can take a lot of finding.”

  The FBI man didn’t mean to be unkind. He was just sticking to his job, and his textbooks hadn’t encouraged the emotional approach to criminology. But Simon could see the girl stiffen herself to take it, and liked the way she did it. She hadn’t just been making talk; she was all right now.

  “I’ll get you a picture,” she said very evenly, and went out of the room. Jetterick leafed over the notes he had taken.

  Wayvern made another examination of Angert’s wallet, which Simon had turned over. He picked out the snapshot of the young man in uniform, and shifted the long-dead stump of his cigar to the corner of his mouth.

  “Know anything about this, Ray?”

  “Yes,” Schindler said. “That’s his son. Or was, rather. He was killed in the Solomons.”

  “No chance of Angert having had any queer sympathies, then?” Jetterick suggested.

  “Not in a million years,” Schindler said with conviction. “He was crazy about that boy. Besides that, Angert worked for me on and off over a period of ten years, and I’d vouch for him anywhere. He was just caught in the middle, the same as I was.”

  “That’s what it seems like,” admitted Jetterick. “But I still don’t get it. If Morgen was working for the same outfit as this woman who hired you, what would he kill Angert for?”

  The same riddle had been distracting the Saint’s attention for a long time, but he still kept silent about his ace in the hole. No doubt it was most reprehensible of him, but he had always been rather weak on the ethics of such matters. He had called in the FBI for their obvious usefulness, and the local police out of necessity, but he had no idea at all of retiring into the background of the case. On the contrary, he felt that his own activity was only just beginning. And Andrea Quennel was an angle to which he felt he had a special kind of proprietary claim.

  Madeline Gray came back and said to the other three, “You’d better have some lunch with us while your men are finishing up.”

  They were drinking coffee when there was a phone call for Jetterick from New York.

  When he returned to the table his pleasantly commonplace face was stoical.

  “They’ve checked on that address,” he said. “It’s just one of those accommodation places. The girl’s description fits. But she didn’t leave any forwarding address. She said she’d call in for messages.”

  “I could have guessed that,” Schindler said, “as soon as I heard the rest of the story.”

  “We’re watching the place, of course. If she goes there, we’ll pick her up.”

  Simon drew on his cigarette.

  “If she hears that Sylvester was cooled off,” he remarked, “she isn’t likely to go there.”

  “That’s true. But we can try.”

  “Does she have to hear about it?” Schindler asked.

  Jetterick shrugged.

  “I don’t have to say anything. How about you, Chief?”

  “I’ll do what I can to keep it quiet,” Wayvern answered. “But I don’t promise more than twenty-four hours. These things always leak out somehow. Then the reporters are on my neck, and I have to talk.”

  “Twenty-four hours are better than nothing,” said Jetterick.

  “While we’re keeping things quiet,” said the Saint, “I wish we could pretend that Madeline hasn’t been here. The Ungodly are still looking for her. But Morgen didn’t see her, so far as I know, and I told him she was in New York. Madeline can ask Mrs Cook to stay overnight, and make up some story for her husband, so that there’s no gossip around the town. The more we can keep Madeline hidden, the less likely we are to lose her.”

  “I can tell my men they didn’t see her,” said Wayvern.

  “Besides that,” Simon went on, “she ought to have a guard. Just in case. I’ve got to go to New York this afternoon, and I can’t promise to be back tonight.”

  Jetterick grimaced.

  “If I had a man to spare,” he said, “I could divide him into six pieces and need all of them.”

  “I can take care of that,” said Wayvern.

  They all looked at each other. They seemed to have reached the end of what they could do.

  “I’m driving in to New York,” Schindler said. “I can give you a lift, Simon.”

  It was still a while before they got away.

  T
hey talked the case to pieces all the way to the city, but the Saint was guilty of keeping most of his conclusions to himself and only contributing enough to sound natural and stay with the conversation. He had had enough analysing and theorising to last him for a long time. And now he was even more restless to get his hands on the dossiers that should be on their way to meet him. Somewhere in them, he hoped, there would be a key to at least one of the puzzles that was twisting through his brain. In spite of his friendship for Ray Schindler, he was glad when the ride was over and he could feel alone and unhampered again for whatever came next.

  He was at the Roosevelt at four-thirty, and he was down to the last drop of a studiously nursed Martini when a thin grey man sat down at his table and laid a bulky envelope between them. Typed on the envelope was “Mr Sebastian Tombs.”

  “From Hamilton,” said the thin grey man dolefully.

  “God bless him,” said the Saint.

  “I hope I didn’t keep you waiting?”

  “No, I was early.” Simon signalled a waiter. “Have a drink.”

  “Thank you, no. I have ulcers.”

  “One dry Martini,” said the Saint, and turned back to the thin grey man. “Did Hamilton give you a message, too?”

  “The party you asked about is staying at the Savoy Plaza tonight.”

  “Good.”

  “If you’ll excuse me,” said the thin grey man sadly, “I must go and keep some other appointments.”

  He got up and went greyly and wispily away, a perfect nonentity, perfectly enveloped in protective colouring, whom nobody would ever notice or remember—and perfect for his place in a machine of infinite complexity.

  Simon weighed the package in his hand and teased the flap with his thumb while he tasted his second cocktail, but he decided against opening it there. At that hour, the place was getting too busy and noisy, filling up with business men intent on restoring themselves from the day’s cares of commerce, and he wanted to concentrate single-mindedly on his reading.

  He finished his drink more quickly than the last, but still with self-tantalising restraint, and put the envelope in his pocket and went out. His thoughts were working towards a quiet hotel room, a bottle of Peter Dawson, a bowl of ice, a pack of cigarettes, and a period of uninterrupted research. That may have been why he suddenly realised that he had been staring quite blankly at an open green convertible that swerved into the kerb towards him with a blonde blue-eyed goddess waving to him from behind the wheel.