The Saint Meets his Match (The Saint Series) Page 19

  He waggled his automatic perilously with every question.

  Gugliemi reached behind him, but the Saint was a little quicker. He reached out and caught the Italian’s wrist in time, and Gugliemi dropped his gun with a yelp of pain. Simon pushed him away and picked it up.

  “And what are your views,” asked the Saint conversationally, “on the subject of supralapsarianism? They should be valuable. Only a few hours ago—”

  “All right,” snarled Gugliemi. “I find you Mees Trelawney. Only put that gun away.”

  “Not till I know you aren’t going to pull any more slapstick comedy, sweetheart,” said the Saint “Where is she?”

  “Upstairs.”

  “Dear—me!” The automatic nuzzled again in Gugliemi’s fancy waistcoat. “I hope you haven’t been forgetting your manners?”

  “I will show you.”

  “You certainly will,” said the Saint pleasantly. “But I’m afraid that if you have been forgetting your manners, I shall be forced to do things to you which will be not only painful, but permanently discouraging…Lead on, Rudolph.”

  Gugliemi led on, and the Saint followed him into the upper room. He saw the light that came to the girl’s eyes as he entered, and bowed to her with a laugh—the entrance happened too obviously upon its cue, and anything like that was bliss and beauty for the Saint, who was nothing if not melodramatic. And he turned again to the Italian.

  “Remove the whatnots,” he ordered operatically.

  Gugliemi bent shakily to obey. The straps fell from the girl’s wrists, then from her ankles.

  “And now, Jill, has the specimen behind this tie-pin been getting what you might call uppish?”

  “He was—”

  “Ah-ha!” The Saint revolved his automatic. “I don’t want to be premature, Antonio, but this looks bad for your matrimonial prospects. If you remember what I was saying just now—”

  “But you got here in time,” Jill protested. “What are you going to do?”

  “Oh!” said the Saint, almost reluctantly, “Hasn’t he been really nasty?”

  “Not really.”

  The Saint sighed.

  “The old story-book again,” he murmured unhappily. “You know, I’ve always wondered what would happen if the hero missed his train and blew in half an hour too late. And I suppose we shall never know…But what was the idea?”

  She told him, exactly as Gugliemi had told her, while the Italian stood pallidly silent under the continued menace of the Saint’s automatic. And when, at the end of the story, Simon turned suddenly on him, Gugliemi almost jumped out of his skin.

  “You really mean to tell me the police passed you that yarn?” demanded the Saint. “And you expect me to believe it?”

  “But it is true, sair.”

  “Which policeman?” inquired the Saint sceptically.

  “A big man—with a moustache—like this—”

  Gugliemi frowned down his eyebrows, twisted his mouth, and thrust out his jaw in a caricature which the Saint recognised at once. So did Jill.

  “Cullis!”

  Simon sat down on the bed, regarding the Italian with a thoughtful air.

  “But how did you get here?” Jill was asking.

  “Oh, I breezed along,” said the Saint. “As a matter of fact, I was coming round to see you. My respectable friend thought he’d like to meet you, so I was sent off to bring you along. Just as I turned the corner by the studio I saw you get into a car and drive away. There wasn’t a taxi in sight to give chase in, and in the circumstances I couldn’t raise happy hell in the street. But I nailed down the number of the decamping dim-box, and then it was easy enough to find out who the owner was.”

  “But how did you do that?”

  “I consulted a clairvoyant,” said the Saint, “and he told me at once. It took a bit of time, though. However, I got the man just as he was putting the car away in the garage. He was persuaded to talk—”

  “You made him talk?”

  “I hypnotised him,” said the Saint blandly, “and he talked. Then I came right along here.”

  The girl shook her head ruefully.

  “I’m luckier than I deserve to be. If I’d thought I should ever live to fall for a gag like that—”

  “It’s an old gag because it’s a good one, darling. Given the right staging, it never fails. So I shouldn’t take it too much to heart. And now let’s go home, shall we?”

  He stood up, and Jill Trelawney was at a loss for anything more to say at that moment. She could only think of one feeble remark.

  “But what are we going to do with—this?”

  She indicated Gugliemi, and Simon looked at the man as if he had never seen him before.

  “I’ll take him back to Upper Berkeley Mews,” he said. “I think I’d like to have a little private talk with him; that break of yours might turn out to be the most useful thing you ever did.”

  And take Gugliemi he did, with one hand holding the man’s arm and another jamming the muzzle of the automatic into his ribs, all the way from Lambeth to the studio in Chelsea, in a taxi-cab which they were lucky enough to find as soon as they emerged onto the main road. He left Jill at the studio, saying that he would return in an hour, and he himself went on in the taxi with Gugliemi to Upper Berkeley Mews.

  He was as good as his word. It was almost exactly an hour later when she heard his key in the lock, and the next moment he walked in, as calm and unperturbed as if nothing of any interest whatever had happened that evening.

  By that time she had collected her wits, and she was ready for him.

  “Did you have a good talk?” she inquired.

  “Charming,” said the Saint, stretching himself out on the sofa and lighting a cigarette. “What about a brace of those kippers I brought this morning? My respectable friend gave me a slap-up dinner, but I’ve still got room for some good plain food.”

  “What did you talk to Gugliemi about?” she persisted.

  “About Judas Iscariot.”

  “Don’t be funny.”

  “But I’m dead serious, Jill. In that famous name you have the whole conversation in a nutshell. He didn’t take much persuading, either, and we parted bosom friends.”

  “Do you mind giving me some straight talk? What’s this game you’re playing now?”

  Simon grinned.

  “That,” he said, “must still be one of my own particular secrets. But I can satisfy you about Gugliemi, who has a very kind heart when you dig down to it, although his methods are rather low. In fact, I gather that he was really getting quite fond of you before I arrived and spoilt his evening.”

  “I quite believe that,” said the girl grimly.

  “Joking apart,” said the Saint, “he’s an interesting psychological specimen: I’d figured that in the first few minutes. He was quite ready to put you out of the way in his own fashion—for a fee—since he had been told that you were a political nuisance. But I had a much better story to tell him. I didn’t even have to beat him up, which I was quite prepared to do. I took him into my confidence. I dosed him with a bottle of Chianti I found lying around. I told him he’d been humbugged all the way down the line, and I was able to produce a bit of evidence to convince him.”

  “What evidence was that?”

  “Never mind. But he was really quite ready to be convinced, because, as I said, you’d made a great impression on him. And when he saw what the game was, what with his native chivalry and another litre of Chianti and my persuasive tongue, he switched right round the other way. And now I believe he’d go out after Cullis with a gun in each hand and a stiletto behind his ear if you asked him to. Did you know his first name was Duodecimo? That’s a jolly sort of name, that is. We were getting as matey as that before the end…The really interesting point is our Assistant Commissioner’s psychology.”

  The girl was lighting a cigarette.

  “Go on,” she said.

  “You see his point,” said the Saint. “You’re getting troublesome,
so Cullis employs Gugliemi to hump you off. If Gugliemi doesn’t get caught, so much the better. If he does get caught, and tries to tell anyone that the Assistant Commissioner employed him to take you for a ride, they’d just think he was raving. It was really beautifully simple. My respectable friend will just love that story.”

  The girl looked at him curiously.

  “Who is this respectable friend you keep talking about?”

  “Auntie Ethel,” said the Saint lucidly. “She has a very fine sense of humour. For instance, she simply roared over the story of those papers that were taken from the Records Office.”

  Jill Trelawney watched him with narrowed eyes. She had not seen him in this mood before, and it annoyed her. When they had joined forces in Birmingham, and throughout the adventures which followed—even in the earlier days of bitter warfare—everything had been perfectly straight and above-board. But now the Saint was starting to collect an aura of mystery about him, and she realised, almost with a shock, that in spite of the fantastic manner in which he played his part there was something very solid behind his fooling.

  She had always been used to being in the lead. The Angels of Doom had followed her blindly. But Simon Templar had challenged her from the very beginning, and from the very moment when he had elected to catapult them into a preposterous partnership he had been quietly but steadily usurping her place. And now, when he calmly produced a dark secret which he would not allow her to share, while he knew everything that he needed to know about her, she felt that she had fallen into a definitely subordinate position. And the bullet was a tough one for her to chew.

  But the Saint’s manner indicated no feelings of triumph, or even of self-satisfaction, which was really so surprising that it made the situation still more irritating to her. If he had been ordinarily smug about it she could have dealt with him. But he had a copyright kind of smugness that was unanswerable…

  “The papers,” said Jill deliberately, taking up his remark after it had hung in the air for some seconds, “which you took from the Records Office.”

  “Oh, no,” said the Saint. “The papers which Cullis took from the Records Office!”

  She was startled into an incredulous exclamation.

  “Cullis?” she repeated.

  Simon nodded.

  “Yes. The night before last I was up all night watching his house. He lives in Hampstead, which is a dangerous thing for a man like that to do, in a house which stands all by itself with a garden all round. French windows to his study, too. I sat shivering in the dew behind a bush, and watched him when he came in. I didn’t know then what the papers were, of course, but I gathered from his expression that they were something pretty big. Next morning I heard about Records Office being robbed, and I guessed what it was.”

  “You never told me how you learnt that.”

  “Through the clairvoyant I mentioned before,” said the Saint fluently. “A very useful man. You ought to meet him…Last night I went down and did my burglary. I had to do the drain-pipe work I mentioned and get in on the first floor, because there were some very useful burglar alarms all over the downstairs window—a new kind that you can’t disconnect—and I duly collected the papers, as you saw. You see, Cullis is getting the wind up.”

  Jill Trelawney gazed at him without speaking.

  “Cullis is getting the wind up,” repeated the Saint comfortably. “Our blithe and burbling Mr Cullis is feeling the draught in the most southerly quarter of his B.V.D.’s. He’s already afraid of the inquiry on your father being reopened, so he abstracted certain important papers from your dossier. And he knows you’re dangerous, so he employed Duodecimo to move you off the map. Yes, I think we could say poetically that our Mr Cullis is soaring rapidly aloft in the wings of an upward gale.”

  “I see,” said Jill softly.

  “But didn’t you see before?” asked the Saint. “Didn’t you realise that there were really only two men concerned in catching your father—the Chief Commissioner himself, and Superintendent Cullis as was? Putting the Chief Commissioner above suspicion, we’re left with Cullis. He could have written the raid letter on your father’s typewriter. He could have telephoned the fake message which sent your father to Paris, and then taken the Chief Commissioner along to see the fun. And he was the man who took your father’s strong-box out of the safe deposit and opened it in the Yard. If Cullis was in league with Waldstein, what could have been easier than for him to pretend to discover notes which could be traced back to Waldstein in your father’s box.”

  The girl had been gazing intently at nothing in particular while the Saint released that brief theory. But now she turned suddenly with an extraordinarily keen query in her eyes.

  “When did you figure all this out?” she asked.

  “In my spare time,” said the Saint airily. “But that doesn’t matter. The thing that matters is that Assistant Commissioner Cullis has put himself in the cart. He has pulled his flivver, and you and I are the souls who are going to take the buggy ride. Partly by luck, and partly by our own good judgment, we’ve got the bulge on him—for the moment. And the letter I’m going to write to him tonight will let him know it. I’ll put it in his letterbox myself, and sit in the garden and watch him read it—it’ll be worth the rheumatism. And when he’s thoroughly digested that letter, I’m going to have an encore entertainment figured out for him that will make him feel like a small balloon that’s floated in between an infuriated porcupine and a bent pin by the time the curtain comes down!”

  2

  He left soon afterwards, without elucidating his riddle, and she was alone with her perplexity.

  She tried to compose herself for a night’s rest, but sleep would not come. She was too preoccupied with other things, and she was not a girl who could be satisfied to remain in a state of mystified expectancy. She had to take every bull by the horns. And while inactivity would have irked her no less at any other time, the vexation was now made a thousand times worse by the feeling that it implied her own retirement from a sphere of active usefulness.

  For an hour she tossed about in her bed. Sleep lay heavy on her eyes, but her brain was too restless to let her relapse into that void of contented lassitude which merges into dreams. And when, presently, she heard the chimes of a neighbouring clock striking the half-hour after midnight, she rose with a sigh, lighted a cigarette, pulled on her kimono, and went back into the studio.

  The embers of the fire still glowed in the grate; she raked them over, put on some more coal, and watched the flames lick up again into a blaze. And then she began to pace the room restlessly.

  There was a big cupboard in one corner. She saw it every time she passed in her restless pacing. It fascinated her, caught her eyes from every angle, until she was forced to stop and stare at it. Perhaps even then the germ of what she wanted to do was budding in her brain. The cupboard was locked—she had tried the door before, when she had been looking for a place to hang her clothes. What could there be inside it? She found her mind reaching out covetously towards the obvious answer. That studio was admittedly the Saint’s most secret bolt-hole. And how could a man of such flamboyantly distinctive personality and appearance be sure of keeping even the most cautious bolt-hole indefinitely secret? Only by one means…

  And almost without her conscious volition, she found herself digging a plain household screw-driver out of a drawer in the kitchen.

  The cupboard was locked, certainly, but it was the kind of lock that exists for the purposes of discouragement rather than actual hindrance. She slid the blade of the screw-driver into the gap between the two doors, and levered with a gently increasing pressure…The lock burst away from the flimsy screws that held it with less noise than the sound of a book dropped on a bare floor.

  Jill Trelawney lighted another cigarette and inspected her find.

  She knew she could only make one find that would be of any use to her. Reckless as she might be, and thoughtlessly as she might have dashed off to the rescue of an
arrested Saint without a moment’s heed for the risk to herself, in any enterprise such as she was meditating then there were sober and practical considerations to be reckoned with. She would gain nothing by throwing a single point in the game away. But if that locked cupboard provided the means of saving that single point, just in case of accidents…

  And it did.

  As the doors flew open, she looked at three complete outfits hung in a little row—a set of workman’s overalls, a suit of violently purple check and a Shaftesbury Avenue nattiness, and a filthy and ragged costume such as a down-at-heels sandwich man might wear. And neatly arranged on adjacent shelves were the shirts, socks, ties, mufflers, overcoats, hats, and shoes to complete the disguises down to the last minute detail.

  For a few seconds she surveyed the treasure trove, and then with slow deliberation, she crushed out her cigarette…

  The outfit she contrived for herself from the materials at her disposal was a heterogeneous affair, but it was the best she could do. A shabby pair of trousers, with the ends tucked up inside the legs and secured with safety-pins, fitted her passably well, but tall as she was, there was no coat in the collection that she could wear. A stained and tattered mackintosh, however, could be made to pass, with the sleeves treated in a similar manner to the legs of the trousers, and a gaudy scarf knotted about her neck would conceal the deficiencies of her costume in other respects. She pulled a tweed cap well down onto her head, tucking her hair away out of sight beneath it. From the kitchen she was able to grub out enough grime to disguise her face and hands against any casual scrutiny; her own low-heeled walking shoes were heavy enough to pass muster. And then she inspected the completed work of art in a full-length mirror, and found that it was good…