The Saint Plays with Fire (The Saint Series) Page 18

  “Algy,” said the Saint, with profound respect, “I don’t wonder you got into the Cabinet. With your gift for making a collection of plain goddam lies sound like an archbishop’s sermon, the only thing I can’t understand is why they didn’t make you Prime Minister.”

  Conviction hardened on Mr Teal like the new carapace on a moulted lobster. His eyes held on the Saint with dourly triumphant tenacity.

  “I’ll tell you why Lady Valerie was frightened of you,” he said. “I expect she was thinking of what happened to Kennet and Windlay. She knew you were trying to make trouble for Mr Luker and Mr Fairweather, and since she was a friend of theirs—”

  “Was Kennet a friend of theirs?” asked the Saint pungently.

  Fairweather said, with solemn and unshakable pomposity, “He was a guest in my house. I think that should be sufficient answer.”

  Teal nodded implacably.

  “You’ve pulled the wool over my eyes often enough, Templar, but you can’t do it this time. What’s the use of bluffing? There’s enough circumstantial evidence already to put you away for a long time. If you want to be smart you won’t make things any worse for yourself. Tell me what’s happened to Lady Valerie Woodchester, and you may get off with eighteen months.”

  The Saint looked at him for several seconds. And then he laughed out loud.

  “You poor pin-brained boob,” he said.

  The detective’s face did not change.

  “That won’t—”

  “Won’t do me any good?” Simon completed the sentence for him. “Well, I’m not interested, I’m not trying to do myself good—I don’t have to. I’m trying to do you some. You need it. Have you gone so completely daft that you’ve lost your memory? Have you ever known me to threaten, beat up, bump off, or otherwise raise hell with women? Have you ever had even the slightest reason to suspect me of it? But because you’re too bat-eyed and pig-headed to see any further than the pimples on the end of your own nose, you want to believe that I’ve turned myself into an ogre for Lady Valerie’s special benefit. What you need—”

  “I don’t need any of—”

  “You need plenty.” The Saint was cool, unflurried, but his curt sentences were edged like knives. “According to some ancient law which it doesn’t look as if you’d ever heard of, a man in this country is presumed innocent until he can be proved guilty. Why don’t you try being just half as credulous with me as you are with Algy? Because he was once a member of His Majesty’s immortal Government. You pitiful cretin! In other words, he made his living for years out of making lies sound like sententious platitudes. Have you ever started to criticise what he’s just told you? Lady Valerie wasn’t home, and hadn’t been home, when he phoned to check up on a lunch date. ‘Knowing that this was an extra ordinary departure from her normal habits—’ ”

  “I heard what Mr Fairweather said.”

  “And you gulped it down! This is the guy who knew Lady Valerie well. He didn’t just assume that she’d been out on an all-party night and forgotten to come home. He ‘puzzled over it with some seriousness.’ Well, I don’t want to be unkind about the girl, and I don’t even ask you to believe me, but I’ll bet you five thousand quid to fourpence that if you check back on her record you’ll find that she’s often done things like that before. Algy never thought of that. His ‘anxieties at once became graver’—so grave that he dropped in here to ask me, a comparative stranger, what I thought about it. And while we’re on the subject of lunch dates, I’ll give you something else. Algy tells you that he had this date with Lady Valerie, and naturally you believe him. Well, he’s got his ideas mixed. He didn’t have this date—I had it. Now would you like to think that over for yourself, or shall I go on helping you?”

  There was a candour, an ardent sincerity in the Saint’s voice that would have arrested most listeners. Mr Teal was visibly shaken. In spite of himself, a new doubt joined the mad saraband that was taking place in his fevered brain. Certainly he had found it hard to believe that the Saint had done any harm to Lady Valerie: even he had to admit that such a crime would have been out of character. On the other hand, he found it equally hard to believe that such obviously respectable members of Society as Luker and Fairweather could be involved in any sinister motives. If he arrested the Saint after a speech that carried conviction, experience indicated that he would probably end up by making himself look highly ridiculous, but on the other hand experience also indicated that he usually ended up by looking quite ridiculous enough when he left the Saint at large. It was one of those situations in which Mr Teal habitually felt himself drowning in the turgid waters of an unfathomable Weltschmerz.

  He glowered at Simon with a smouldering malevolence which he hoped would help to disguise the sinking foundations of his assurance.

  “You’re wasting your time,” he said, but a keen ear could have detected the first loss of dominance in his voice, like the flattening note of a bell that has begun to crack. “Mr Fairweather’s suspicions sound quite reasonable to me—”

  “Suspicions?” The Saint was lethally sardonic. “Why don’t you call them certainties and have done with it? That’s what they’d look like to anyone who hadn’t got such a one-track mind as yours. So Algy had a date with Lady Valerie for lunch. But he hasn’t shown any signs of impatience to push along to the Savoy and see if she’s waiting for him. He didn’t even go there first and see whether she turned up before he came here to see me. And he still doesn’t have to wait and make sure she isn’t there before he backs up this charge against me. He knows damn well she isn’t going to be there! And how do you think he gets so damn sure about that?”

  Teal’s mouth opened a little. After a moment he turned his head. And for the first time he looked hard and invitingly at Mr Fairweather.

  Mr Fairweather’s chins wobbled with the working of his Adam’s apple like rolls of soft raspberry jelly.

  “Really,” he stuttered, “Mr Templar’s insinuations are so preposterous…I…I…Really, Inspector, you ought to…to do something to…um…”

  “I quite understand, sir.” Teal was polite and respectful, but his gum was starting on a new and interesting voyage. “At the same times if you gave me an explanation—”

  “I should think the explanation would be obvious,” Fairweather said stuffily. “If your imagination is unable to cope with such a simple problem, the Chief Commissioner might be interested to hear about it.”

  Had he been a better psychologist he would have known that that was the last thing he should have said. Mr Teal was still acutely conscious that he was addressing a former Cabinet Minister, but the set of his jaw took on an obstinate heaviness.

  “I beg your pardon, sir,” he said, “but the Chief Commissioner expects me to obtain definite statements in support of my imagination.”

  “Rubbish!” snorted Fairweather. “If you propose to treat me like a suspected criminal—”

  “If you persist in this attitude, sir,” Teal said courageously, “you may force me to do so.”

  Fairweather simply gaped at him.

  And a great grandiose galumptious grin spread itself like Elysian honey over Simon Templar’s eternal soul. The tables were turned completely. Fairweather was in the full centre of Teal’s attention now—not himself. And Fairweather had assisted nobly in putting himself there. The moment contained all the refined ingredients of immortality. It shone with an austere magnificence that eclipsed every other consideration with its epic splendour. The Saint lay back in a chair and gave himself up to the exquisite absorption of its ambrosial glory.

  And then the telephone bell rang again.

  The Saint sat up, but this time Teal did not hesitate. Still preoccupied but still efficient, almost mechanically he picked up the microphone.

  “Hullo,” he said, and then. “Yes, speaking…”

  Simon knew that he lied. He was simply playing back the trick that Simon had shown him before. But the circumstances were not quite the same. This call had come through on one o
f those exceptionally powerful connections that sometimes happen, and the raised voice of the speaker at the other end of the line did everything else that was necessary to produce a volume of sound in the receiver that was faintly but clearly audible across the room. Quite unmistakably it had said, “Is dat you, boss?”

  Simon started to get up, spurred faster than thought by an irresistible premonition. But the agitation which had lent its penetrating pitch to Mr Uniatz’s discordant voice was too quick for him. Hoppy’s next utterance came through with the shattering clarity of a radio broadcast. “Listen, boss—de goil’s got away!”

  3

  Teal put down the telephone with a sharp clunk of concentrated viciousness. Any reversal of emotion that he had suffered before was a childish tantrum compared with this. The Saint had not only been on the verge of making a monkey out of him for the second time in an hour—he had lured him on to the brink of affronting Fairweather in a way that might easily have cost him his job into the bargain. Whatever sentient faculties Mr Teal possessed at that moment were merely a curried hash of boiling vitriol. His face was congested to a deep shade of heliotrope, but his nostrils were livid with the whiteness of a berserk passion that would have been fuelled rather than assuaged by buckets of human blood.

  He dug into his hip pocket and dragged out a pair of handcuffs as he lurched across towards the Saint.

  “Come on,” he said in a voice that could scarcely be recognised as his own. “You can write the rest of it down in Vine Street.”

  Simon watched him approach while he thought faster than he had ever done since this story began. Why and how Valerie Woodchester had escaped, and what momentous consequences that escape might bring after it, were questions that had to be crushed out of the activity of his mind. They could be dealt with afterwards; unless he forgot them now there would be no useful afterwards in which to deal with them.

  This was a time when his fluent tongue would be no more use to him—he might as well have tried to argue Niagara to a standstill. From where he stood he could have reached a gun, but that would have been almost as useless. It would certainly have cowed Fairweather, but the paroxysm of cold rage that was propelling Teal across the floor would have kept him walking straight on into it until it blasted him down. And the Saint knew that he would never be capable of using a gun on Claud Eustace Teal for anything more than a bluff. Equally beyond doubt, he knew that he would never be capable of letting himself be handcuffed and taken to Vine Street without knowing how he was going to get out again—

  He said, “Wait a minute, Claud. You win. I’ll give you Lady Valerie.”

  It was the only thing he could have said that the detective would even have heard. It stopped Teal a yard from him, with the handcuffs held out.

  “Where is she?”

  Simon gazed at him with a sad wistful smile.

  “It’s been a good long scrap and a lot of fun, hasn’t it, Claud?” he said. “But I suppose you were bound to come out on top in the end…Oh, well, let’s make a clean sheet of it while we’re at it. Hoppy was getting excited about nothing. Lady Valerie hasn’t got away. I took her away myself, only I didn’t have time to tell him. She’s here in this apartment now, only about half a dozen yards away from you.”

  Teal gawped at him.

  “Here?”

  “Yes. You didn’t think of that, did you? Well, you’ll find her perfectly safe and sound, without even a speck of powder brushed off her nose.”

  “Where?”

  “Come through the bedroom and I’ll show you.”

  He turned away with an air of stoical resolution and sauntered steadily towards the door. Teal followed on his heels. Fairweather grasped his umbrella and followed Teal. As they entered the room, where the bed was still disordered from the Saint’s recent rising, Simon said, “You’ve always suspected that I had a collection of secret passages and things here. You were pretty close to the mark, too. This ought to amuse you.”

  He indicated a door to one side of the bed.

  Teal jerked it open. It revealed the interior of a big built-in cupboard in which an assortment of suits from the Saint’s unlimited wardrobe hung on a long rail like a file of thin soldiers.

  The Saint sat dejectedly on the side of the bed.

  “Just push the wall at the end, and it opens,” he said listlessly.

  Teal shoved himself grimly in, shouldering the rank of suits aside. Fairweather stepped up to the door and peeped in after him.

  What happened next was a succession of startling events of which Mr Fairweather’s subsequent recollections were inclined to be confused. It seemed to him that without any warning the back of his collar and the seat of his pants were seized by the grappling mechanism of a kind of bimanual travelling crane. He rose from the ground and moved forward without any effort of his own into the ulterior of the cupboard, letting out a thin plaintive squeal as he did so. Then his advancing abdomen collided with breath-taking violence with the unyielding posterior of Chief Inspector Teal; the cupboard door slammed behind him; the light overhead went out; darkness descended; there was the sound of a key turning in the lock, and after that there was as much empty and unhelpful silence as Teal’s sporadic sputtering of inspired profanity left room for…

  Simon Templar moved swiftly out of the bedroom and locked that door also after him.

  Now he was in it up to the neck, but he felt only an exuberant elation. As soon as Teal and Fairweather got out, which they must do in a comparatively short time, he would be a hunted man with all the nationwide networks of the Law spread out to catch him, but he only felt as if a burden had been taken off his shoulders. He had lived like that in the old days, when every man’s hand was against him and death or ignominious defeat waited for him around every carelessly turned corner, and in those days he had known life at its keenest rapture, with a fullness that men who led safe humdrum existences could never know. Now at least the issues were clean-cut and unevadable. Perhaps he had been respectable for too long…

  The telephone was ringing again. He picked it up.

  “Hi, boss,” said Mr Uniatz plaintively. “We got cut off.”

  “We didn’t,” said the Saint tersely. “That was your old friend Claud Eustace Teal you were talking to.”

  There was a long silence.

  “Did I hear what you said, boss?”

  “I hope so.”

  “You mean he hears what I say about de goil?”

  “Yes.”

  “But I ask him is he you and he says he is,” complained Hoppy, as if appalled by this revelation of the depths of perfidy to which a human being could sink.

  Words rose to Simon’s lips—short Anglo-Saxon words, colourful and expressive. But what was the use? Dull thudding noises reminiscent of an enraged crocodile lashing its tail in a wooden crate reached him through the walls. His time was short.

  “Never mind,” he said. “It’s done now. Let me talk to Patricia.”

  “She ain’t got back yet, boss. She goes out in de baby car just now to buy some more Scotch, and she is out when dis happens.”

  “When did it happen?”

  “Just two, t’ree minutes back, boss. It’s like dis. I am taking lunch up to de wren, and when I go in she says ‘Lookit, de rug is boining.’ It is boining, at dat. I go out for de extinguisher and squoit it on de fire, arid when I have been squoiting it for some time I see de broad has beat it.”

  “I suppose you left the door open for her.”

  “I dunno, boss,” said Mr Uniatz aggrievedly. He seemed to feel that Lady Valerie had taken an unfair advantage of him. “Anyway, de door is open and she has hung it on de limb. I beat it downstairs and I hear a car going off outside, and when I open de door she is lamming out of here wit’ your Daimler. So I call you up” said Mr Uniatz, conscientiously completing his narrative.

  Simon opened his cigarette case on the telephone table.

  “All right,” he said crisply. “Now listen. Hell is going to pop over this party,
and it’s going to pop at you. You’d better get out from under. Stick around till Patricia gets back, and tell her what’s happened. Then pile yourself and Orace into the pram and tell her to take you to the station. Buy tickets to Southampton and make enough fuss about it so they’ll remember you at the booking office. Come out the other side of the station with the next crop of passengers, walk back to Brooklands, get out the old kite, and fly over to Heston. Peter will be there waiting for you. Do just what he tells you. Have you got it?”

  “Ya mean we all do dis act?”

  “Yes. All three of you. Teal will trace your call as soon as he gets back into action, and Weybridge will be no place for any of you to be seen alive in. You can take the Scotch with you, so you won’t be hungry. Happy landings.”

  “Okay, boss—”

  Simon put his finger on the contact breaker.

  He lifted it again and lighted a cigarette while he dialled the number of Peter Quentin’s apartment. The dull thudding behind him seemed louder, and splintering noises were beginning to blend with it. The Saint blew smoke-rings.

  “Peter?…Good boy. This is Simon…Nothing, except that a small flock of balloons have gone up…No, but they will. In other words, Claud Eustace was here this morning to sing his theme song, as we expected, and meanwhile our protégé has pulled the bung. Hoppy rang up to tell me about it, and Teal took the call.”

  There was a pause while Peter assimilated this.

  “Which police station are you speaking from, old boy?” he inquired cautiously, at last.

  “None of them yet. But I expect they’ll all be inviting me as soon as Teal gets out of the wardrobe where I’ve got him warming up at the moment. And they won’t leave you out, either.”

  “As soon as—”

  Peter’s voice sounded faint and expiring.

  The Saint grinned.

  “Yes. Now listen, old son. Pat and Hoppy and Orace will be on their way to Heston with the Monospar at any moment, I’ve told them to pick you up there. Get on your way, and don’t leave any tracks behind you. You can take off at once and hop to Deauville; take the train to Paris, and I’ll get in touch with you later at the Hotel Raphael.”