The Saint on Guard (The Saint Series) Page 12

  So the newsreel ran through the Saint’s mind and finished, and the projection-room was dark and silent again.

  And he was still looking at Barbara Sinclair, lifting the cigarette to his mouth again, with his eyes very blue and quiet and unchanging.

  He was very sorry, more sorry than it was easily endurable to be, and it was all so stupid and wasteful, but that was how things really happened, and sometimes you had to know it.

  The clock in his head went on all the time.

  And it was no damn good giving her a second thought, because you couldn’t change anything.

  Because life was like that, and sometimes you were stuck with it.

  And stories just didn’t end that way, because there was always a miracle at the last moment, but this wasn’t a story.

  And that was that.

  He said, “It doesn’t make very much difference, because I know already.”

  “What do you know?” she asked, looking at him with empty eyes.

  He strolled across the room and sat down again in an armchair beside the bookcase that was crowned with the bouquet of chrysanthemums. He felt curiously tired, but it was a tiredness of the spirit and nothing to do with the mind or body.

  “I know practically everything,” he said. “Including the name of the master mind you’re trying to protect. Suppose I tell you all about it.”

  14

  “We begin,” said the Saint, after a little pause, “with the stealing of a three hundred thousand dollar shipment of iridium at Nashville, Tennessee, not so long ago, and our first two murders—Comrades Smith and Gobbovitch, or whatever their names were, who got a load of lead in their lunch baskets.”

  “I know all that,” she said, with a gesture of her slender hands that might have been an effort to brush away the vision that came behind his words.

  “I expect you do,” said the Saint. “But we ought to begin at the beginning. Because this robbery really opened the way for the black market. It actually created a sudden and very serious shortage. And then the manufacturers who use the stuff, who were suddenly caught short like that, were informed that they could still get supplies—at a price. Some of them were in a spot where they were glad enough to get it at almost any price.”

  He glanced again into the jet-black eyes that were fastened on him, and he was still sorry, but he was only more sure.

  “The black market salesman, no doubt, had inside information about who was most badly in need of his merchandise. Two of these guys were the late Mr Linnet, and Mr Milton Ourley. There may have been others, but I don’t happen to know about them. I know that Linnet had some misgivings about selling out his country for the benefit of your private angel, but the Ourley Magneto Company was not so fussy.”

  He looked at his watch and checked it by the other clock in his mind.

  “Meanwhile, I had decided to stick my delicate nose in. I made a statement to the newspapers that I was going to clean up this black market, and I said I already knew plenty that would make it unhappy for the operators. It was a damn lie. I didn’t know a thing. But I figured that it might scare the operators into trying to cool me off, which might give me a chance to get a line on them, or it might encourage somebody to come and sing to me a little for any one of various reasons. It isn’t the newest trick in the world, but it often works. This worked. It brought me a little bird named Titania Ourley. Maybe you know her.”

  Barbara Sinclair licked her lips.

  “I’ve met her.”

  “Titania sang me a little song about her husband, whom she said she had overheard talking to Gabriel Linnet about their dealing with the black market. She seemed to think I ought to investigate him. A most unwifely idea, but that wasn’t my business. At her suggestion, I went out to Oyster Bay to meet and talk to Milton. Unfortunately, it became rapidly clear that Milton and I were not destined to form a great and beautiful friendship. And he didn’t want to talk to me at all. In fact, he practically threw me out on my ear.”

  Simon leaned his head back and looked at the ceiling, as if he could see pictures there.

  “I made one rather tragic mistake first, though. I dropped an unfinished quotation that somebody must have finished after I left. Because anyone who heard it finished would have known that I expected Linnet to sing—if he hadn’t started singing already. And they would have had a good idea that I was on my way to see Linnet then. Which was very tragic indeed for Gabriel.” He blew a carefully constructed smoke-ring. “I did go to Linnet’s, of course, and there I met you. And in due course you gave me a very attractive invitation.”

  She bowed her head over her hands clenched together between her knees.

  “Soon after this,” he added, “Fernack was called by some mysterious amateur sleuth who reported that I’d been seen breaking into Linnet’s place. There was also some mention of noises like a fight going on inside.”

  “I didn’t phone anybody except the boy I had a date with. I told you I had to break a date.”

  “You couldn’t have called anybody else by mistake, could you? You couldn’t have called your treacherous friend to report that I was duly hooked and under control, so the rest of the plot could go into production as scheduled.”

  She made no reply except to look up at him again. Tears glistened under her long lashes.

  “Anyway,” he said, “I came to my senses almost in time, left you with the check for a souvenir, and beat it back to Linnet’s nearly fast enough to be in at the death. Quite an unpleasant death. They tied a rope around his neck, and his eyeballs were popping and his tongue sticking out. You should have seen him. It would have made you proud of your team.”

  He stood up and stretched himself a little.

  “Well, I was duly arrested by the doughty Inspector Fernack, and it took me until this morning to get out of his clutches. I went to your apartment, and there I met Humpty and Dumpty and a certain piece of luggage. And, of course, we had our reunion. I suppose I should have been able to solve the whole story then, but I guess you still had me slightly dazzled. Because there were two lovely clues, and they were completely contradictory. First, the pyjamas in your closet—”

  “You told me—”

  “I know. They didn’t have initials on them. But I could tell things by just looking at them…And then there was that precious portmanteau of iridium.”

  “I told you how that got there.”

  “But you didn’t tell me about the initials. You saw how the combination lock worked out when I opened it, didn’t you?”

  “No.”

  “Three very important letters, and you didn’t notice them,” he said reprovingly.

  “I wasn’t looking.”

  “You were hanging over my shoulder and watching everything I did. You couldn’t have missed seeing them.”

  “I wasn’t looking at that.”

  “Besides which, I asked you if the initials O. S. M. meant anything to you.”

  “They don’t.”

  The Saint took out another cigarette and lighted it from the butt of the last.

  “M. S. O.,” he said, “in reverse. A subtle touch. But nothing to make a reasonably bright guy rupture a brain cell. In other words, our dear mutual friend.”

  There was a silence.

  The Saint wandered towards the window. It was getting darker, and the skyscraper silhouettes around them were losing their sharpness against the velvet off-blue of the sky. He stood there for a moment or two, looking out.

  “M. S. O.,” he repeated. “Milton S. Ourley. So nice and simple…And I still had to put it together. You ought to have saved me all that trouble.”

  “I told you—”

  “I know. You’d tell me when you felt like it. But it’s too late for that now. Maybe it was always too late…But there was a time when the suspects were very vague. I even wasted a few minutes suspecting you. Oh, not as an active killer—I couldn’t really visualise you garrotting Gabriel with your own strong hands, and besides a police surgeo
n decided soon afterwards that Gabriel was getting the tourniquet on his tonsils at about the time when you would have been trying to persuade an unfriendly head waiter that it wasn’t your fault if your host sneaked out without paying for dinner. And also I’d collided with Cokey in the meantime. But somebody sent Cokey, and somebody sent Varetti—at least, I’m guessing that it was that fugitive from a tango tournament who rescued Cokey after I’d tied him up. It could conceivably have been you who was the master mind, but after some profound meditation I decided you just didn’t have that much brain.”

  Her eyes smouldered like tar pits as she glared at him, and he realised that things happened to her beauty under stress.

  He had a fleeting instant of wondering whether it was right for him to destroy so much loveliness piece by piece as he was doing, even to achieve what he had to achieve.

  Then he thought about nameless men dying in foxholes or plunging out of the sky in flaming fortresses, and knew that it was still all right.

  He said, “Believe it or not, I thought about Titania too. She makes sillier noises than you do, but she’s a lot shrewder and tougher. I could see Milton with a mistress as ornamental as you, and I could see him going to all these lengths to get back a little of his own life. But I could just as well see Titania taking the last colossal step to get rid of Milton, whom she hates and despises, and at the same time make herself even richer and stronger than before. But what was wrong with that was that if she’d had the real master mind cunning she wouldn’t have stuck her neck out so far. She wouldn’t have been so specific, and she wouldn’t have dragged Linnet in. She wouldn’t have made it so easy for the suspicion to be transferred to herself. So that was something else that didn’t connect. I could see her as a phenomenally vicious and nasty woman with a great hate and jealousy in her complicated brain, but she wasn’t subtle enough…All that’s just a lot of wordage now, of course, because I know all the answers.”

  “You’re just talking,” she said.

  His lean face was untouched and impassive.

  “I know the answers, and I can practically prove them. The police will put the rest of it together. There’s only one person who could have done all these things. Who stole Uttershaw’s iridium, and created the shortage at the same time as he set up his own black market with inside information. Who had Gabriel Linnet killed, because I was too damn smart and couldn’t keep my stupid mouth shut. Who fixed you up for me, to make sure I wouldn’t have an alibi for that murder. Who left that suitcase at your apartment, and who sent Varetti and Walsh with a key to pick it up, and who let them out of your closet a little while ago and sent them off to the Algonquin to pick it up again.”

  He smiled pleasantly at her, sipping his cigarette again while he measured her for his penultimate thrust.

  “And,” he said, “I know who’s been planning to kill you at any convenient moment now, besides killing me.”

  He would never have believed that a face like hers could have looked so bleached and frozen.

  “Now I know you must be insane,” she breathed.

  He shook his head sadly.

  “No, dear. Not any more insane than your beloved, who is very sane indeed. Sane enough to know that this is too hot now to take any more chances on you, because you know too much anyhow and you might still change your mind.” The Saint’s voice was utterly passionless and level, and his mind felt as if it were standing alone in the middle of a great empty hall. “Your life is running out while you’re stalling, darling. And it doesn’t make a bit of difference, because I did see those pyjamas.”

  “I wore those pyjamas,” she said, “and I think your insinuations—”

  “Why not save it? I can see where you might need all those histrionics. You’ll need plenty of them for the most dead-pan audience you ever saw—the jury who’ll decide whether to give you the electric cure or burden the taxpayers with the cost of your grey uniforms and oatmeal for twenty years. Which will be quite a change from Saks Fifth Avenue and coq au vin.”

  “You—”

  “I am no gentleman,” said the Saint regretfully. “Because I know that even if you did wear those pyjamas you didn’t buy them—at least not for yourself. They would have been too big for you. They might have fitted Titania, but she would never go for any tomboy styles—she would be strictly for lace and chiffon, and lots of it. But they were also very obviously too long for Milton. Which confused me more than somewhat for quite a little while, but eventually it made sense. So the showdown is right now, and this is the very last time I can ask you which side you’re on.”

  Her lips were wooden.

  “Presently.”

  He nodded.

  “Yes. That’s what you said before.”

  “Then why don’t you go away now?”

  “Because I want to be finished with this. And I think this is a perfect time to finish.”

  He moved towards the centre table, to the ashtray which had been his first landmark of all with its litter of crumpled butts. He stirred the mess with his fingers, and picked out one stub to hold up.

  His eyes picked her up again like blued points of steel.

  “When I came in here,” he said, “I happened to notice that there was one cigarette in this ashtray that didn’t have any lipstick on it. So I was quite sure that your boyfriend was here already, and I’ve been talking to him as much as to you. Now that you’ve made your choice, and he’s listened so patiently to what I’ve got on him, we can stop playing hide-and-seek. I’m quite certain that he’s just inside the bedroom door, and I think it would be much more sociable if he came out and joined us.”

  “ ‘Journeys end in lovers’ meeting,’ ” said Allen Uttershaw, in his mild and ingratiating way. “Or would you prefer the other one—‘Journeys end in death’?”

  15

  He stepped into the room with a gun held almost diffidently in his hand, but his eyes were much too calm for carelessness, and it was noticeable that his aim appeared to be steady and accurate enough.

  “For the moment, the choice seems to be yours,” said the Saint placidly.

  He stood with his hands raised, and made no movement while Uttershaw circled cautiously around him, came up behind him, and felt over his pockets with unflurried thoroughness.

  “You might put down your cigarette,” Uttershaw said as he stepped back and circled into view again. “And if it explodes, I assure you I shall not look around.”

  The Saint smiled as he dabbed at the ashtray.

  “So Ricco told you about that one, did he? I imagine he must have been quite pained about being taken in by an old gag like that.”

  “He did seem to have a grudge against you.”

  “I’m sure he has a much worse one by now.”

  “I was wondering about that. How did it happen?”

  “I was expecting him. And I’m afraid he loused up the job again. Really, Allen, he did let you down. I bullied and badgered him until he was too bothered to keep two worries bouncing in his head at the same time, and then he dropped a couple of words which were just enough to tell me for sure that you’d be here and what you were planning to do.”

  Uttershaw smiled and nodded. It was just as though somebody were telling him about a friend of his whose record trout had gotten away because the leader broke.

  “I knew I’d been disappointed when you arrived here,” he acknowledged. “And I suppose the iridium is still safe in your room.”

  “Oh, no.”

  “What did you do with it?”

  “It never was in my room. So I hope you won’t disturb the atmosphere of my elegant estaminet by sending any more of your messengers after it. You see, after I left Barbara here I went to another luggage store and bought another bag and put the iridium in it, and I filled your bag with an assortment of sporting goods, of suitable weight and, I think, of rather an appropriate shape. Then I left the really valuable bag at a police station on the way home, to be called for later.”

  �
��Which police station?” asked Uttershaw, and suddenly his casual mien had vanished.

  Now he looked rather like a polished grey vulture, and the transformation was so slight that it was startling.

  The Saint shrugged.

  “I’m afraid it wouldn’t do you much good to know,” he said. “I told the local mandarin that they were to be delivered to our pal Inspector Fernack. I mean those two pretty green bottles in the bag. And I’m quite sure they’ve been moved by now. You might be good enough to take a precinct, but I don’t think even you could raise the troops to storm the bastilles you’d have to break into to get that dust back now.”

  He paused, and asked, “Incidentally, do you think one would have to pay income tax on a reward like your insurance company was offering? Not that tax-paying isn’t a pleasure these days, but I have to think of my budget.”

  “I imagine you would,” Uttershaw said judicially, his composure flowing back into him like a returning tide. “Did you make any other arrangements for Varetti and Walsh?”

  “Only a welcoming deputation of two of the ugliest cops I’ve seen in a long life of looking at ugly cops.”

  Uttershaw’s finely modelled face was as soberly thoughtful as if it had been concentrating on an ordinary business problem.