The Happy Highwayman (The Saint Series) Page 11

“You wouldn’t know, darling,” said the Saint gently.

  That was all he said at the time but at the same moment he resolved that he would invest five of his shillings in an admission to Mr Elliot Vascoe’s exhibition. Certain things were indubitably Ordained…

  He arrived just after the official opening, on the first day. The rooms in which the exhibition was being held were crowded with aspiring and perspiring socialites, lured there either in the hope of collecting one of Mr Vascoe’s bacchanalian invitations to dinner, or because they hoped to be recognized by other socialites, or because they hoped to be mistaken for connoisseurs of Art, or just because they hadn’t the courage to let anyone think that they couldn’t spend five shillings on charity just as easily as anyone else. Simon Templar shouldered his way through them until he sighted Vascoe. He had done some thinking since he drove Meryl home, and it had only confirmed him in his conviction that Nemesis was due to overtake Mr Vascoe at last. At the same time, Simon saw no reason why he shouldn’t deal himself in on the party.

  With Vascoe and Meryl was a tall and immaculately dressed young man with a pink face whose amiable stupidity was accentuated by a chin that began too late and a forehead that stopped too soon. Simon had no difficulty in identifying him as the Comte de Beaucroix, and that was how Meryl introduced him before Vascoe turned round and recognised his unwelcome visitor.

  “How did you get in here?” he brayed.

  “Through the front door,” said the Saint genially. “I put down my five bob, and they told me to walk right in. It’s a public exhibition, I believe. Did you come in on a free pass?”

  Vascoe recovered himself with difficulty, but his large face remained an ugly purple.

  “Come to have a look round, have you?” he asked offensively. “Well, you can look as much as you like. I flatter myself this place is burglar-proof.”

  Meryl turned white, and the Count tittered. Other guests who were within earshot hovered expectantly—some of them, one might have thought, hopefully. But if they were waiting for a prompt and swift outbreak of violence, or even a sharp and candid repartee, they were doomed to disappointment. The Saint smiled with unruffled good humour.

  “Burglar-proof, is it?” he said tolerantly. “You really think it’s burglar-proof. Well, well, well!’’ He patted Mr Vascoe’s bald head affectionately. “Now I’ll tell you what I’ll do, Fatty. I’ll bet you five thousand pounds it’s burgled within a week.”

  For a moment Vascoe seemed to be in a tangle with his own vocal chords. He could only stand there and gasp like a fish.

  “You…you have the effrontery to come here and tell me you’re going to burgle my house?” he spluttered. “You…you ruffian! I’ll have you handed over to the police! I never heard of such…such…such…”

  “I haven’t committed any crime yet, that I know of,” said the Saint patiently. “I’m simply offering you a sporting bet. Of course, if you’re frightened of losing—”

  “Such damned insolence!” howled Vascoe furiously. “I’ve got detectives here—”

  He looked wildly around for them.

  “Or if five thousand quid is too much for you…” Simon continued imperturbably.

  “I’ll take your five thousand pounds,” Vascoe retorted viciously. “If you’ve got that much money. I’d be glad to break you as well as see you sent to jail. And if anything happens after this, the police will know who to look for!”

  “That will be quite a chance for them,” said the Saint. “And now, in the circumstances, I think we ought to have a stakeholder.”

  He scanned the circle of faces that had gathered round them, and singled out a dark cadaverous-looking man who was absorbing the scene from the background with an air of disillusioned melancholy.

  “I see Morgan Dean of the Daily Mail over there,” he said. “Suppose we each give him our cheques for five thousand pounds. He can pay them into his own bank and write a cheque for ten thousand when the bet’s settled. Then there won’t be any difficulty about the winner collecting. What about it, Dean?”

  The columnist rubbed his chin.

  “Sure,” he drawled lugubriously. “My bank’ll probably die of shock, but I’ll chance it.”

  “Then we’re all set,” said the Saint, taking out his chequebook. “Unless Mr Vascoe wants to back out—”

  Mr Vascoe stared venomously from face to face. It was dawning on him that he was in a corner. If he had seen the faintest encouragement anywhere to laugh off the situation, he would have grabbed at the opportunity with both hands but he looked for the encouragement in vain. He hadn’t a single real friend in the room, and he was realist enough to know it. Already be could see heads being put together, could hear whispers…He knew just what would be said if he backed down…and Morgan Dean would put the story on the front page…

  Vascoe drew himself up, and a malignant glitter came into his small eyes.

  “It suits me,” he said swaggeringly. “Mr Dean will have my cheque this afternoon.”

  He stalked away, still fuming, and Morgan Dean’s sad face came closer to the Saint.

  “Son,” he said, “I like a good story as much as anyone. And I like you. And nobody’d cheer louder than me if Vascoe took a toss. But don’t you think you’ve bitten off more than you can chew? I know how much Vascoe loves you, and I’d say he’d almost be glad to spend five thousand pounds to see you in jail. Besides, it wouldn’t do you any good. You couldn’t sell stuff like this.”

  “You could sell it without the slightest trouble,” Simon contradicted him. “There are any number of collectors who aren’t particular how they make their collections, and who don’t care if they can’t show them to the public. And I’ve never been in jail, anyway—one ought to try everything once.”

  He spent the next hour going slowly round the exhibition, making careful notes about the exhibits in his catalogue, while Vascoe watched him with his rage rising to the brink of apoplexy. He also examined all the windows and showcases, taking measurements and drawing diagrams with a darkly conspiratorial air, and only appearing to notice the existence of the two obvious detectives who followed him everywhere when he politely asked them not to breathe so heavily down his neck.

  Teal saw the headlines, and nearly blew all the windows out of Scotland Yard. He burst into the Saint’s apartment like a whirling dervish.

  “What’s the meaning of this?” he bugled brassily, thrusting a crumpled copy of the Daily Mail under the Saint’s nose. “Come on—what is it?”

  Simon looked at the quivering paper.

  “‘Film Star Says She Prefers Love,’” he read from it innocently. “Well, I suppose it means just that Claud. Some people are funny that way.”

  “I mean this!” blared the detective, dabbing at Morgan Dean’s headline with a stubby forefinger. “I’ve warned you once, Templar, and if you try to win this bet I’ll get you for it if it’s the last thing I do!”

  The Saint lighted a cigarette and leaned back.

  “Aren’t you being just a little bit hasty?” he inquired reasonably, but his blue eyes were twinkling with imps of mockery that sent cold shivers up and down the detective’s spine. “All I’ve done is to bet that there’ll be a burglary at Vascoe’s within a week. It may be unusual, but is it criminal? If I were an insurance company—”

  “You aren’t an insurance company,” Teal said pungently. “But you wouldn’t make a bet like that if you thought there was any risk of losing it.”

  “That’s true. But that still doesn’t make me a burglar. Maybe I was hoping to put the idea into somebody else’s head. Now if you want to give your nasty suspicious mind something useful to work on, why don’t you find out something about Vascoe’s insurance?”

  For a moment the audacity of the suggestion took Teal’s breath away. And then incredulity returned to his rescue.

  “Yes—and see if I can catch him burgling his own house so he can lose five thousand pounds!” he hooted. “Do you know what would happen if I let my suspic
ious mind have its own way? I’d have you arrested as a suspected person and keep you locked up for the rest of the week!”

  The Saint nodded enthusiastically.

  “Why don’t you do that?” he suggested. “It’d give me a gorgeous alibi.”

  Teal glared at him thoughtfully. The temptation to take the Saint at his word was almost overpowering. But the tantalizing twinkle in the Saint’s eyes, and the memory of many past encounters with the satanic guile of that debonair freebooter filled Teal’s heated brain with a gnawing uneasiness that paralysed him. The Saint must have considered that contingency: if Teal carried out his threat, he might be doing the very thing that the Saint expected and wanted him to do—he might be walking straight into a baited trap that would elevate him to new pinnacles of ridiculousness before it turned him loose. The thought made him go hot and cold all over.

  Which was exactly what Simon meant it to do.

  “When I put you in the cooler,” Teal proclaimed loudly, “you’re going to stay there for more than a week.”

  He stormed out of the apartment and went to interview Vascoe.

  “With your permission, sir,” he said, “I’d like to post enough men round this house to make it impossible for a mouse to get in.”

  Vascoe shook his head.

  “I haven’t asked for protection,” he said coldly. “If you did that, the Saint would be forced to abandon the attempt. I should prefer him to make it. The Ingerbeck Agency is already employed to protect my collection. There are two armed guards in the house all day, and another man on duty all night. And the place is fitted with the latest burglar alarms. The only way it could be successfully robbed would be by an armed gang, and we know that the Saint doesn’t work that way. No, Inspector. Let him get in. He won’t find it so easy to get out again. And then I’ll be glad to send for you.”

  Teal argued, but Vascoe was obstinate. He almost succeeded in convincing the detective of the soundness of his reasoning. There would be no triumph or glory in merely preventing the Saint from getting near the house, but to catch him red-handed would be something else again. Nevertheless, Teal would have felt happier if he could have convinced himself that the Saint was possible to catch.

  “At least, you’d better let me post one of my own men outside,” he said.

  “You will do nothing of the sort,” Vascoe said curtly. “The Saint would recognize him a mile off. The police have had plenty of opportunities to catch him before this, and I don’t remember your making any brilliant use of them.”

  Teal left the house in an even sourer temper than he had entered it, and if he had been a private individual he would have assured himself that anything that happened to Vascoe or his art treasures would be richly deserved. Unfortunately his duty didn’t allow him to dispose of the matter so easily. He had another stormy interview with the Assistant Commissioner, who for the first time in history was sympathetic.

  “You’ve done everything you could, Mr Teal,” he said. “If Vascoe refuses to give us any assistance, he can’t expect much.”

  “The trouble is that if anything goes wrong, that won’t stop him squawking,” Teal said gloomily.

  Of all the persons concerned, Simon Templar was probably the most untroubled. For two days he peacefully followed the trivial round of his normal law-abiding life, and the plain-clothes men whom Teal had set to watch him, in spite of his instructions, grew bored with their vigil.

  At about two o’clock in the morning of the third day his telephone rang.

  “This is Miss Vascoe’s chauffeur, sir,” said the caller. “She couldn’t reach a telephone herself, so she asked me to speak to you. She said that she must see you.”

  Simon’s blood ran a shade faster—he had been half expecting such a caller.

  “When and where?” he asked crisply.

  “If you can be in Regent’s Park near the Zoo entrance in an hour’s time, sir—she’ll get there as soon as she has a chance to slip away.”

  “Tell her I’ll be there,” said the Saint.

  He hung up the instrument and looked out of the window. On the opposite pavement, a man paced wearily up and down as he had done for two nights before, wondering why he should have been chosen for a job that kept him out of bed to so little purpose.

  But on this particular night the monotony of the sleuth’s existence was destined to be relieved. He followed his quarry on a brief walk which led to Soho and into one of the many night haunts which crowd a certain section of that fevered district, where the Saint was promptly ushered to a favoured table by a beaming head waiter. The sleuth, being an unknown and unprofitable-looking stranger, was ungraciously hustled into an obscure corner. The Saint sipped a drink and watched the dancing for a few minutes, and then got up and sauntered back through the darkened room towards the exit. The sleuth, noting with a practised eye that he had still left three-quarters of his drink and a fresh packet of cigarettes on the table, and that he had neither asked for nor paid a bill, made the obvious deduction and waited without anxiety for his return. After a quarter of an hour he began to have faint doubts of his wisdom, after half an hour he began to sweat, and in forty-five minutes he was in a panic. The lavatory attendant didn’t remember noticing the Saint, and certainly he wasn’t in sight when the detective arrived; the doorman was quite certain that he had gone out nearly an hour ago, because he had left him ten shillings to pay the waiter.

  An angry and somewhat uncomfortable sleuth went back to the Saint’s address and waited for some time in agony before the object of his attention came home. As soon as he was relieved at eight o’clock, he telephoned headquarters to report the tragedy, but by then it was too late.

  Chief Inspector Teal’s blue eyes swept scorchingly over the company that had collected in Vascoe’s drawing-room. It consisted of Elliot Vascoe himself, Meryl, the Comte de Beaucroix, an assortment of servants, and the night guard from Ingerbeck’s.

  “I might have known what to expect,” he complained savagely. “You wouldn’t help me to prevent anything like this happening, but after it’s happened you expect me to clean up the mess. It’d serve you right if I told you to let your precious Ingerbeck do the cleaning up. If the Saint was here now—”

  He broke off, with his jaw dropping and his eyes rounding into reddened buttons of half-unbelieving wrath.

  The Saint was there. He was drifting through the door like a pirate entering a captured city, with an impotently protesting butler fluttering behind him like a flustered vulture—sauntering coolly in with a cigarette between his lips and blithe brows slanted banteringly over humorous blue eyes. He nodded to Meryl, and smiled over the rest of the congregation.

  “Hullo, souls,” he murmured. “I heard I’d won my bet, so I toddled over to make sure.”

  For a moment Vascoe himself was gripped in the general petrification, and then he stepped forward, his face crimson with fury.

  “There you are,” he burst out incoherently. “You come here—you—There’s your man, Inspector. Arrest him.”

  Teal’s mouth clamped up again.

  “You don’t have to tell me,” he said grimly.

  “And just why,” Simon inquired lazily, as the detective moved towards him, “am I supposed to be arrested?”

  “Why?” screamed the millionaire. “You…you stand there and ask why? I’ll tell you why. Because you’ve been too clever for once, Mr Smarty. You said you were going to burgle this house, and you’ve done it—and now you’re going to prison where you belong!”

  The Saint leaned back against an armchair, ignoring the handcuffs that Teal was dragging from his pocket.

  “Those are harsh words, Comrade,” he remarked reproachfully. “Very harsh. In fact, I’m not sure that they wouldn’t be actionable. I must ask my lawyer. But would anybody mind telling me what makes you so sure that I did this job?”

  “I’ll tell you why.” Teal spoke. “Last night the guard got tired of working so hard and dozed off for a while.” He shot a smoking glance a
t the wretched private detective who was trying to obliterate himself behind the larger members of the crowd. “When he woke up, somebody had opened that window, cut the alarms, opened that centre showcase, and taken about twenty thousand pounds’ worth of small stuff out of it. And that somebody couldn’t resist leaving his signature.” He jerked out a piece of Vascoe’s own notepaper, on which had been drawn a spidery skeleton figure with an elliptical halo poised at a rakish angle over its round blank head. “You wouldn’t recognize it, would you?” Teal jeered sarcastically.

  Even so, his voice was louder than it need have been. For in spite of everything, at the back of his mind there was a horrible little doubt. The Saint had tricked him so many times, had led him up the garden path so often and then left him freezing in the snow, that he couldn’t make himself believe that anything was certain. And that horrible doubt made his head swim as he saw the Saint’s critical eyes rest on the drawing.

  “Oh, yes,” said the Saint patiently. “I can see what it’s meant to be. And now I suppose you’d like me to give an account of my movements last night.”

  “If you’re thinking of putting over another of your patent alibis,” Teal said incandescently, “let me tell you before you start that I’ve already heard how you slipped the man I had watching you—just about the time that this job was done.”

  Simon nodded.

  “You see,” he said, “I had a phone message that Miss Vascoe wanted to see me very urgently, and I was to meet her at the entrance of the Zoo in Regent’s Park.”

  The girl gasped as everyone suddenly looked at her.

  “But Simon—I didn’t—”

  Her hands flew to her mouth.

  Teal’s eyes lighted with triumph as they swung back to the Saint.

  “That’s fine,” he said exultantly. “And Miss Vascoe doesn’t know anything about it. So who else is going to testify that you spent your time waiting there—the man in the moon?”

  “No,” said the Saint. “Because I didn’t go there.”

  Teal’s eyes narrowed with the fog that was starting to creep into his brain.