The Saint versus Scotland Yard (The Saint Series) Page 15

  He picked up a telephone directory, found a place, and thrust the book under Teal’s oscillating eyes.

  “There’s the number,” he said. “Mayfair three two three O. Check it up for yourself now, and save yourself the trouble of telling me I’m just ringing up an accomplice.”

  He left the detective blinking at the volume, and went to the telephone.

  Teal read off the number, put down the book, and pulled at his collar.

  Once again the situation had passed out of his control. He gazed at the Saint purply, and the beginnings of a despondent weariness pouched up under his eyes. It was starting to be borne in upon him, with a preposterous certitude, that he had just been listening to something more than bluff. And the irony of it made him want to burst into tears. It was unfair. It was brutal. It outraged every cannon of logic and justice. He knew his case was watertight, knew that against the evidence he could put into a witness-box there could simply be no human way of escape—he could have sworn it on the rack, and would have gone to his death still swearing it. And he knew that it wasn’t going to work.

  Through a haze of almost homicidal futility, he heard the Saint speaking.

  “Oh, is that you, Signor Ravelli?…Simon Templar speaking. Listen: there’s some weird eruption going on in the brains of Scotland Yard. Some crime or other was committed somewhere tonight, and for some blithering reason they seem to think I was mixed up in it. I’m sorry to have to stop you on your way to bed, but a fat policeman has just barged in here—”

  “Give me that telephone!” snarled Teal.

  He snatched the instrument away and rammed the receiver against his ear.

  “Hullo!” he barked. “This is Chief Inspector Teal, Criminal Investigation Department, speaking. I have every reason to believe that this man Templar was concerned in a murder which took place in Hampstead shortly after four o’clock this morning. He’s tried to tell me some cock-and-bull story about…What?…But damn it…I beg your pardon, sir, but I definitely know…From twelve o’clock till half-past four?…But…But…But oh, hell, I…No, sir, I said…But he…Who?…”

  The diaphragm of the receiver clacked and chattered and Teal’s round red face sagged sickly.

  And then:

  “All right, sir. Thank you very much, sir,” he said in a strangled voice, and slammed the microphone back on its bracket.

  The Saint smoothed his hair.

  “We might get on to Beppo next,” he suggested hopefully. “He’s staying at the Berkeley. Then you can have a word with Prince d’Ombria—”

  “Can I?” Teal had eaten wormwood, and his voice was thick and raw with the bitterness of it. “Well, I haven’t got time. I know when I’m licked. I know where I am when half a dozen princes and ambassadors will go into the witness-box and swear that you’re chasing them round the equator at the very moment when I know that I’m talking to you here in this room. I don’t even ask how you worked it. I expect you rang up the President of the United States and got him to fix it for you. But I’ll be seeing you another time—don’t worry.”

  He hitched his coat round, and grabbed up his hat.

  “Bye-bye,” sang the Saint.

  “And you remember this,” Teal gulped out. “I’m not through with you yet. You’re not going to sit back on your laurels. You wouldn’t. And that’s what’s going to be the finish of you. You’ll be up to something else soon enough—and maybe you won’t have the entire Italian Diplomatic Service primed to lie you out of it next time. From this minute, you’re not even going to blow your nose without I know it. I’ll have you watched closer than the Crown Jewels, and the next mistake you make is going to be the last.”

  “Cheerio, dear heart,” said the Saint, and heard the vicious bang of the front door before he sank back into his chair in hysterics of helpless laughter.

  But the epilogue of that story was not written until some weeks later, when a registered packet bearing an Italian postmark was delivered at No. 7, Upper Berkeley Mews.

  Simon opened it after breakfast.

  First came a smaller envelope, which contained a draft on the Bank of Italy for a sum whose proportions made even Simon Templar blink.

  And then he took out a small shagreen case, and turned it over curiously. He pressed his thumbnail into the little spring catch, and the lid flew up and left him staring.

  Patricia put a hand on his shoulder.

  “What is it?” she asked, and the Saint looked at her.

  “It’s the medallion of the Order of the Annunziata—and I think we shall both have to have new hats on this,” he said.

  THE MELANCHOLY JOURNEY OF MR TEAL

  CHAPTER 1

  Now there was a day when the Saint went quite mad.

  Of course, one might with considerable justification say that he always had been mad, anyway, so that the metamorphosis suggested by that first sentence would be difficult for the ordinary observer to discover. Patricia Holm said so, quite definitely, and the Saint only smiled.

  “Neverwithstanding,” he said, “I am convinced that the season is ripe for Isadore to make his contribution to our bank balance.”

  “You must be potty,” said his lady, for the second time, and the Saint nodded blandly.

  “I am. That was the everlasting fact with which we started the day’s philosophy and meditation. If you remember—”

  Patricia looked at the calendar on the wall, and her sweet lips came together in the obstinate little line that her man knew so well.

  “Exactly six months ago,” she said, “Teal was in here giving such a slick imitation of the sorest man on earth that anyone might have thought it was no impersonation at all. Two of his best men have been hanging around outside for twenty-four hours a day ever since. They’re out there now. If you think six months is as far as his memory will go—”

  “I don’t.”

  “Then what are you thinking?”

  The Saint lighted his second cigarette, and blew a streamer of smoke towards the ceiling. His blue eyes laughed.

  “I think,” he answered carefully, “that Claud Eustace is just getting set for his come-back. I think he’s just finished nursing the flea I shot into his ear last time so tenderly that it’s now big and bloodthirsty enough to annihilate anything smaller than an elephant—and maybe that plus. And I’m darned sure that if we lie low much longer, Claud Eustace will be getting ideas into his head, which would be very bad for him indeed.”

  “But—”

  “There are,” said the Saint, “no buts. I had a look at my pass-book yesterday, and it seems to be one of the eternal verities of this uncertain life that I could this day write a cheque for ninety-six thousand, two hundred and forty-seven pounds, eleven shillings, and four-pence—and have it honoured. Which is very nice, but just not quite nice enough. When I started this racket, I promised myself I wasn’t coming out with one penny less than a hundred thousand pounds. I didn’t say I’d come out even then, but I did think that when I reached that figure I might sit down for a bit and consider the possible advantages of respectability. And I feel that the time is getting ripe for me to have that think.”

  This was after a certain breakfast. Half a dozen volumes might be written around nothing else but those after-breakfast séances in Upper Berkeley Mews. They occupied most of the early afternoon in days of leisure, for the Saint had his own opinions about the correct hours for meals, and they were the times when ninety per cent of his coups were schemed. Towards noon the Saint would arise like a giant refreshed, robe himself in furiously patterned foulard, and enter with an immense earnestness of concentration upon the task of shattering his fast. And after that had been accomplished in a properly solemn silence, Simon Templar lighted a cigarette, slanted his eyebrows, shifted back his ears, and metaphorically rolled up his sleeves and looked around for something to knock sideways. A new day—or what was left of it—loomed up on his horizon like a fresh world waiting to be conquered, and the Saint stanced himself to sail into it
with an irrepressible impetuosity of hair-brained devilment that was never too tired or short-winded to lavish itself on the minutest detail as cheerfully and generously as it would have spread itself over the most momentous affair in the whole solar system.

  And in those moods of reckless unrepentance he smiled with shameless Saintliness right into that stubborn alignment of his lady’s mouth, challenged it, teased it, dared it, laughed it into confusion, kissed it in a way that would have melted the mouth of a marble statue, and won her again and again, as he always would, into his own inimitable madness. As he said then…

  “There’s money and trouble to be had for the asking,” said the Saint, when it was all over. “And what more could anyone want, old dear?…More trouble even than that, maybe. Well, I heard last night that Claud Eustace was also interested in Isadore, though I haven’t the foggiest idea how much he knows. Tell me, Pat, old sweetheart, isn’t it our cue?”

  And Patricia sighed.

  When Frankie Hormer landed at Southampton, he figured that his arrival was as secret as human ingenuity could make it. Even Detective Inspector Peters, who had been waiting for him for years, on and off, knew nothing about it—and he was at Southampton at the time. Frankie walked straight past him, securely hidden behind a beard which had sprouted to very respectable dimensions since he last set foot in England, and showed a passport made out in a name that his godfathers and godmother had never thought of. Admittedly, there had been a little difficulty with the tall dark man who had entered his life in Johannesburg and followed him all the way to Durban—inconspicuously, but not quite inconspicuously enough. But Frankie had dealt with that intrusion the night before he sailed. He carried two guns, and knew how to use them both.

  And after that had been settled, the only man who should have known anything at all was Elberman, the genial little fellow who had financed the expedition at a staggering rate of interest, and who had personally procured the passport aforementioned, which was absolutely indistinguishable from the genuine article although it had never been inside the Foreign Office in its life.

  Frankie had made that trip a number of times before—often enough to acquire a fairly extensive knowledge of the possible pitfalls. And this time he was reckoning to clean up, and he was taking no chances. The man from Johannesburg had bothered him more than a little, but the voyage back to England had given him time to forget that. And in the train that was speeding him towards Waterloo, Frankie thought ahead into a pleasant and peaceful future—with a chalet in Switzerland, probably, and a villa on the Riviera thrown in, and an endless immunity from the anxieties that are inseparable from what those who have never tried to earn it call “easy money.”

  And so, perhaps, his vigilance relaxed a trifle on the last lap of the journey—which was a pity, because he was quite a likeable man in spite of his sins. Perrigo got him somewhere between Southampton and Waterloo—Perrigo of the big coarse hands that were so quick and skilful with the knife. Thus Frankie Hormer enters the story and departs, and two men have been killed in the first four pages, which is good going.

  Of this, Simon Templar knew nothing at the moment. His absorbing interest in Mr Perrigo, and particularly in Mr Perrigo’s trousers, developed a little later. But he knew a whole lot of other things closely connected with the dramatis personnæ already introduced, for it was part of the Saint’s business to know something about everything that was happening in certain circles, and on the strength of that he went after Isadore Elberman in quest of further information.

  The structural alterations along the south side of Upper Berkeley Mews, which had recently been providing the Saint with as much exercise as he wanted, were now completed, and by means of a slight elaboration of his original scheme, he was able to enter and leave his home without in any way disturbing the stolid vigil of the two plain-clothes men who prowled before his front door, day and night, in a variety of disguises which afforded him continuous entertainment.

  At nine o’clock that night he went upstairs to his bedroom, slid back the tall pier-glass which adorned one wall, and stepped into a narrow dimly-lighted passage, closing the panel again behind him. Thus with his feet making no sound on the thick felt matting that was laid over the floor, he passed down the corridor between the back of the mews and the dummy wall which he had built with his own hands, through numbers 5 and 3—which highly desirable residences had already been re-let to two impeccably respectable tenants who never knew that their landlord had a secret right-of-way through their homes. So the Saint came (through the false back of a wardrobe) into the bedroom of No. 1, which was occupied by the chauffeur of a Mr Joshua Pond, who was the owner of No. 104, Berkeley Square, which adjoined the corner of the mews. Mr Pond was not otherwise known to the police as Simon Templar, but he would have been if the police had been clever enough to discover the fact. And the Saint left No. 1, Upper Berkeley Mews through another cupboard in the room at which he had entered it, and reappeared out of a similar cupboard in one of the bathrooms of No. 104, Berkeley Square, and so became a free man again, while Chief Inspector Teal’s watchers went on patrolling Upper Berkeley Mews in an ineffable magnificence of futility which can’t really have done them any harm.

  This was one of the things that Perrigo didn’t know, and the possibility that the Saint might have any business with Isadore Elberman that night was another.

  Perrigo had got what he wanted. It had been easier than he had expected, for Frankie Hormer had made the mistake of occupying a reserved compartment all by himself on the boat train. Perrigo walked in on him with some gold braid pinned to his overcoat and a guard’s cap on his head, and took him by surprise. The trouble had started at Waterloo—a detective had recognised him in the station, and he had only just managed to make his getaway.

  He reached Elberman’s house at Regent’s Park by a roundabout route, and morsed out the prearranged signal on the bell with feverish haste. The entrance of the house was at the back, in a little courtyard which contained the doorways of four other houses that also overlooked the Park. While he waited for the summons to be answered, Perrigo’s eyes searched the shadows with the unsleeping instinct of his calling. But he did not see the Saint, for the simple reason that the Saint was at that moment slipping through a first-floor window on the Park side.

  Elberman himself opened the door, and recognised his visitor.

  “You’re late,” he said.

  His pale bird-like face, behind the owlish spectacles, expressed no more agitation than his voice. He merely stated the fact—a perkily unemotional little man.

  “I had to run for it at Waterloo,” said Perrigo shortly.

  He pushed into the hall, and shed his overcoat while Elberman barred the door behind him. Divested of that voluminous garment, he seemed even huskier than when he was wearing it. His jaw was square and pugnacious, and his nose had been broken years ago.

  Elberman came back and looked up at him inquiringly.

  “You weren’t followed?”

  “Not far.”

  “Everything else all right?”

  Perrigo grunted a curt affirmative. He clapped his hat on a peg and thrust out his jaw.

  “What you’re talking about’s O.K.,” he said. “It’s the follow-up that’s not Jake. When Henderson hears about Frankie, he’ll remember the way I ran—and there’s a warrant for me over that Hammersmith job already.”

  “You killed Frankie?”

  All Elberman’s questions were phrased in the same way: they were flat statements, with the slightest of perfunctory interrogation marks tacked on to the last syllable.

  “Had to,” Perrigo said briefly. “Let’s get on—I want a drink.”

  He was as barren of emotion as Elberman, but for a different reason. Habit had a hand in Perrigo’s callousness. In the course of his chequered career he had been one of Chicago’s star torpedoes, until a spot of trouble that could not be squared had forced him to jump the Canadian border and thence remove himself from the American contine
nt. There were fourteen notches on his gun—but he was not by nature a boastful man.

  Elberman led the way up the stairs, and Perrigo followed at his shoulder.

  “Did you get that ticket?”

  “Yes, I got you a berth. It’s on the Berengaria. She sails tomorrow afternoon. You’re in a hurry to leave?”

  “I’ll say I am. I guess it’s safe for me to go back now, and I know a dealer in Detroit who’ll give me a good price for my share. I’ll get enough to give me a big start, and I’ll make it grow. There’s no money in this durned country.”

  Elberman shrugged, and opened a door.

  He took two paces into the room, and Perrigo took one. And then and there the pair of them halted in their tracks like a Punch and Judy show whose operator has heard the lunch-hour siren, the muscles of their jaws going limp with sheer incredulous astonishment.

  CHAPTER 2

  “Come right in, boys,” said the Saint breezily.

  He reclined gracefully in Isadore Elberman’s own sacrosanct armchair. Between the fingers of one hand was a freshly lighted cigarette; the fingers of the other hand curved round the butt of a .38 lead-pump that looked as if it could do everything the makers claimed for it and then some. It was as unsociable-looking a piece of armament as Perrigo had ever seen—and he knew what he was talking about. The sight of it kept his hands straight down and flaccid at his sides, as innocuous as the fists of something out of a waxwork exhibition.