The Saint Meets his Match (The Saint Series) Page 16

  “And so—the tumult and the shouting dies, the sinners and the Saints depart.”

  The cork of the bottle popped under his expert manipulation, and the luxurious fittings of the car provided glasses. The liquor gurgled out in the dimness.

  “An inferior poison, as compared with beer, but perhaps more warming,” he said.

  They drank gratefully, and felt the cold recede from the radiant trickle of Three Star. And then the Saint gave her a cigarette and lighted one for himself.

  “Where did you tell the chauffeur to drive?” she asked.

  “Reading. We can go on to London from there in the morning: I don’t want too many people to know all our movements. Teal found my Sloane Street address quickly enough, but it was never my best hidey-hole. I’ve got another little place in Chelsea that I’ll swear he’s never even dreamed about. You can make that your home, and I’ll go back to Upper Berkeley Mews quite openly, just to annoy Claud Eustace. I might even ring him up and ask him to toddle over and chew some gum with me.”

  He could see her face in the faint glow as she drew at her cigarette.

  “I suppose the Saints have to depart?” she said.

  He struck a match to see her better, and his eyebrows went up with the trickle of smoke he exhaled.

  “Why?”

  She hesitated. Then—

  “I thought you meant you were cutting out.”

  “Jill, you should know me better than that!”

  “But I never knew that this kind of thing was in your line.”

  “The righting of injustice, the strafing of the ungodly, and the succouring of a damsel in distress? Oh, Jill!…Did you ever hear of Galahad?”

  “Ye-es.”

  “My stage name,” said the Saint.

  The match went out, and he leaned back on the cushions. His strength was sweeping back into him like a steady stream. He had already made certain that his ankle was not broken, and that was all that had really worried him. In a couple of days he would be prancing around like a puppy off the leash. He was almost satisfied.

  “Of course,” he murmured, “we have been criminally careless. We have been persistently bumping off the very birds who might have saved us a lot of trouble. I admit Essenden bumped himself off, but that was due to a misunderstanding. It’s the principle of the thing. Jill, if we’re going to vindicate Papa, we’re going to have to be awful careful we don’t bounce Number Three on the programme before he’s sung his song.”

  “We shall.”

  “And then,” said the Saint dreamily, “you’ll have your hands full looking after that boyfriend back in Gee, Wis., won’t you?”

  There was silence.

  Then she said, “And you?”

  “Oh,” said the Saint, “you won’t want me there, will you?”

  She laughed.

  “Won’t you be going back to someone?”

  “Who knows!”

  The Saint’s cigarette-end reddened to a long inhalation, and faded.

  “You butted in where you shouldn’t have butted in,” he said. “This story started mostly as a joke, as I told you one time. I always have been crazy. But I certainly didn’t mean to get landed into all this. Since I’m here, I’m enjoying myself, but the entertainment was not among those listed for this season. However, here we are, and here is nobody else, and I always believe in making the best of a good job. Possibly you noticed the tendency at breakfast yesterday.”

  “Oh!” said the girl.

  “There is,” said the Saint firmly, “a piffling idea abroad among the sub-hominoids of Suburbia that a man may not kiss a girl for no other reason than that he simply wants to kiss her. Now that is obviously absurd, because although you’ve just saved my life I’m going to kiss you very passionately for no other reason than that I want to—and you are going to like it.”

  2

  Inspector Teal arrived at Essenden Towers later, before the servants returned from their ball, and found four blasphemous men in the library. His great regret ever afterwards was that, in spite of the extraordinary circumstances of their discovery and their known reputations, he could never find a substantial charge to bring against them in connection with that night’s mystery. It was even more suspicious because the stories they told were perfectly true, and they could not be made to contradict either themselves or each other under the most searching examination. Besides which, there were many scraps of circumstantial evidence to bear them out. And it is not a crime for four gangsters, however notorious, to be the guests of a peer.

  This annoyed Teal, because he was unable to find any trace of the principal actors in the mystery. And even a minor scapegoat would have been better than none.

  He went down through the wine-cellar and found the flooded cave. When the waters had subsided, an extensive search was made with electric torches, but still the extent of the cavern and the source of its strange subterranean tides could not be discovered. And no human eyes ever saw Lord Essenden again.

  It was late the following afternoon when a sleepless, but not more than ordinarily sleepy, Chief Inspector Teal returned to Scotland Yard to prepare his report.

  “I don’t suppose Essenden will ever be seen again,” he told the Assistant Commissioner gloomily.

  “He was murdered, of course?”

  “Probably he was. But how are we ever going to prove that if we can’t produce the body? You know the law as well as I do.”

  Cullis rasped his chin.

  “Waldstein first, then Essenden. There must be a connecting link somewhere.”

  “Of course there is. Trelawney believes that her father was framed, and she’s out to get the men who did it. Her idea is that there was a ring of first-class crooks working in with an accomplice right inside this building. Sir Francis Trelawney was the man they wanted here, though—and they couldn’t get him. What was more, he was getting hotter on their trail every day. So he had to go. He was framed, with the help of their police accomplice, and we know the rest. That’s her story, and somehow or other she’s made the Saint believe it.”

  “But that’s ridiculous! There were only two people concerned in the show that really put the finger on Sir Francis Trelawney. The Chief Commissioner was one, and I was the other. I told Templar the story myself. If you’re suggesting that one of us was taking graft from Waldstein—”

  “I’m suggesting nothing,” said Teal. “I’m just telling you the tale we’re up against.”

  Cullis frowned.

  “It’s a tale that’s making more trouble for us than we’ve had for years—there was another leading article in the Record this evening,” he said sourly. “Something has got to be done about it, or the Chief will be wanting resignations all round. If there’s anything at all on Trelawney’s side, there’ll be a clue to it in the Records Office somewhere—if we can only find it…”

  Teal nodded.

  “It would help us if we could,” he said. “She’ll be going after this accomplice in the Yard itself next, and if we knew whom she was going to pick on, we’d be ready for her. I wouldn’t be worrying so much if the Saint wasn’t in it, but when I see his trade-mark anywhere I know there’s going to be no bluff about the trouble. I wouldn’t put it above him to kidnap the Chief Commissioner single-handed and flood out Records with back numbers of the Vie Parisienne.”

  “He’d have to be a clever man to do it,” said Cullis, who had no sense of humour.

  “The Saint is a clever man.”

  Cullis grunted.

  “I’ll go through that Trelawney dossier again myself,” he said. That dossier was put before Mr Assistant Commissioner Cullis the very next day, and he spent a whole twelve hours with it, neglecting all other business.

  This record of Jill Trelawney was of great interest to Mr Cullis, for it dealt with the career of that dangerous lady for some time before she had burst open London as the leader of the Angels of Doom. It went back, in fact, to the event which had led to the creation of the Angels—the time
when Sir Francis Trelawney, her father, himself at one time Assistant Commissioner, had been detected almost in the act of betraying his position and submitting to bribery and corruption. And after his death, which some said was directly due to his discovery and disgrace, had come the Angels of Doom, with his daughter at their head…

  As he went through that dossier, Cullis remembered the day, nearly three years ago, when he himself, then only a superintendent, had helped to bring home the charge—the day in Paris when he had gone there with the Chief Commissioner to watch Sir Francis in the very act of betraying a police secret.

  And Cullis remembered the day after that. An afternoon in Scotland Yard when, in the presence of Trelawney and the Chief Commissioner, he had opened a box taken from the Chancery Lane Safe Deposit, and had found in it a bundle of new five-pound notes which it had been possible to trace back directly to Waldstein. He remembered Trelawney’s protestations—that he had never put the notes in the strong-box, that he had never seen them before, and that he could not explain how they came to be there at all. And the Chief Commissioner’s cold, accusing eyes…

  All these memories came back to Cullis as he went through page after page of the dossier, and they were still with him when he went home late that night. For although Teal was humanly inclined to spread himself on the subject of his pet aversion, there was no doubt even in Cullis’s mind that the Saint was a factor to be reckoned with, and anyone might have been pardoned for wondering what was going to happen next.

  But the next morning there seemed to be no more reason to wonder, for when Cullis arrived at the Yard and went up to his office he found Chief Inspector Teal waiting for him there, and there was something in Teal’s lugubrious countenance which foreboded bad news, and, since Cullis’s mind was full of Jill Trelawney, he was not so surprised as he might have been when he discovered what that bad news was.

  “Weren’t you the last man to handle that Trelawney dossier?” asked Teal, coming straight to the point.

  Cullis nodded.

  “I should think so. I had it out all yesterday afternoon.”

  “I believe you returned it to Records yourself?”

  “That’s right,” said Cullis. “It was late when I left, and I turned it in on my way out.”

  Teal jerked his thumb at the Commissioner’s desk.

  “Take a look,” he said.

  The folder was there, with its neat label. Cullis opened it and was moved to a profane exclamation.

  The first thing that met his eye was a sheet of paper bearing a sketch like many others that he had seen before, and one line of writing: With compliments and thanks.

  Under the note was a blank sheet of paper. Under the blank sheet the third was also blank. There were twenty-seven blank sheets altogether—he counted them.

  “When was this discovered?”

  “About an hour ago,” said Teal. “I sent down for the file myself to look something up. You’ll find that every sheet relating to the original Trelawney affair has been taken. The rest has been left, and the bulk made up with those blank sheets.”

  “But it’s impossible!” snapped Cullis.

  “Absolutely,” agreed Teal acidly. “And yet it’s been done.”

  The trials that he had been enduring of late had not improved the detective’s temper.

  “No one could raid Scotland Yard,” Cullis persisted. “Was there any sign of the files having been tampered with?”

  “None at all.”

  “Then it must have been someone in the building—somebody actually in the Records Office.”

  Teal extracted a battered piece of gum from his mouth as if he disliked the taste of it. Or it may have been something else that he disliked.

  “If we go on making progress at this rate,” he said morbidly, “one of the stunt newspapers will be running us as modern reincarnations of Sherlock Holmes.”

  Cullis scowled.

  “That doesn’t get us much further. Even if someone in the Records Office was responsible, it might have been any one of a dozen men you could name.”

  Teal shrugged.

  “And which?” he asked tersely.

  “There’ll be an inquiry, of course.”

  “And what will that find out? We know the Angels had a lot of money, and I know the Saint still has. Suppose they’ve bought someone actually in the Yard, why should it be one man more than another?” Teal reached out a slothful arm and picked up one of the blank sheets. It was creased down the centre, as were other sheets. Teal shuffled the pile together and folded them over the crease. “They’d go into a man’s breast pocket,” he said. “It’s cheap and ordinary paper—the kind they use in a few hundred offices. We shan’t find any clue there.”

  He picked up the note.

  “What do you make of that?” asked Cullis.

  “It’s almost the same handwriting as the note they left on Essenden in Paris, isn’t it?”

  “Not exactly the same, though. But the writing was disguised, anyway. A man can’t write a disguised hand as consistently as he writes his own natural fist.”

  “Man?” queried Cullis sharply.

  “Simon Templar,” said Teal sleepily. “I’ll swear he wrote that note to Essenden in Paris, anyway.”

  “And this one?”

  “Simon Templar,” said Teal, somewhat inconsequently, “is a very clever young man.”

  Cullis looked at him. He remembered that the feud between Chief Inspector Teal and the Saint was one of the epic legends of the Force. There had been truces from time to time—truces and breezy interludes—but the fundamental feud had never finished. And if anything had been wanting to reawaken in Teal’s expansive breast the ambition to be the first man to lag Simon Templar, it should have been supplied to him on the night in London, such a very short time ago, when the Saint had baulked him of a coveted prey by a trick which a babe in arms should have spotted and which a middle-aged police constable had somehow failed to spot.

  “A very clever young man,” said Teal.

  “Have you any idea where he is now?”

  “He’s in London, living in his own home. I saw him last night.”

  “You saw him?” exclaimed Cullis incredulously. “But—”

  “Need we have any more of that?” asked Teal wearily. “I’m tired of being told I ought to arrest him. I’m tired of explaining that we can’t do anything against him in England for robbing Essenden in Paris. And I’m tired of explaining that you can suspect what you like about him and Jill having been at Essenden’s the night Essenden disappeared. But you can’t prove anything, and Simon Templar knows it. He can admit anything he likes in private conversations with me, but that evidence disappears the moment I walk out into the street again. He’s made a fool of me once, and I’m not going to give him the chance of making a fool of me again by charging me with unlawful arrest. Don’t you know that the Saint has never yet been inside?” he added.

  “With his record?”

  “He hasn’t got a record,” said Teal. “He’s a suspicious character, and an absconding policeman, but that’s the worst you can say about him without paying damages for slander—except for that affair in Paris, which we can’t do anything about. Once upon a time there were other things we could have held him for, but he got a pardon and wiped all those things out. Heavens above, sir,” Teal broke out, in a kind of helpless exasperation, “haven’t I spent years of my life trying to find something I could put on the Saint? I’ve had men he’s beaten up, in the old days, and he’s told me himself he did it, and I couldn’t make one of them say a word against him—not a word we could have acted on, I mean. I’ve had the Saint on the run, once, with a bundle of evidence against him all tied up in my office and a real warrant in my pocket, and then he went and saved a royal train and had all his sins forgiven. I’ve stood and watched him blow a man to blazes, and I haven’t been able to prove it to this day. I’m not a miracle man, and I’m not even a convincing liar. I’ll tell the world the Saint has beate
n me in every game I know and some I’d never heard of before I met him, and I’ll try to smile while I’m saying it. But I won’t even try to tell a deaf-and-dumb half-wit that I could pull the Saint in tomorrow and have him sent down for so much as seven days in the second division, because I know all I should get would be the horse-laugh.”

  “But he’s known to be an associate of Trelawney’s.”

  “And what then?”

  “He was Trelawney’s accomplice at Essenden’s.”

  “Accomplice?” queried Teal patiently.

  “He was with her. He must know where she’s hiding now.”

  “Of course he must. But who’s going to prove that in a court of law? We shouldn’t do anything by pulling him in, even if we could. No, our best hope is to go on watching him and hoping that sooner or later he’ll lead us to Jill Trelawney. And I can’t help thinking that that’s not much of a hope—with a man like Simon Templar.”

  Cullis’s eyes returned to the ransacked dossier.

  “The Chief will have to be told about this,” he said.

  “I’ve already told him,” said Teal. “He was all set to turn Scotland Yard inside out, only I was able to persuade him not to. I’d like a chance to do something on my own before the whole world hears what fools we are.”

  He stood up. He had been seated in the Assistant Commissioner’s chair throughout the interview, leaning back and chewing gum as if the office belonged to him; for Mr Teal was a very privileged person. His extraordinarily apathetic acceptance of that morning’s startling discovery puzzled his Chief. It is not every day that important papers are abstracted without trace from the Records Office, yet Teal seemed as wearily resigned to the fact as if he had only had to inform the Commissioner that a plumber had been arrested the previous night for being drunk and disorderly in the Old Kent Road. Cullis was puzzled, for he seemed to detect a thread of melancholy fatalism behind the few remarks that Teal had made on the subject.

  “I’ll be getting along,” Teal said glumly.

  Cullis stood by the window with three deep furrows of thought in his forehead. As Teal reached the door he roused out of his abstracted concentration.