14 The Saint Goes On Page 2

  And there he halted again, one step inside the room, with his eyes bulging out of their sockets and the last tattered remnants of his traditional pose of sleepiness falling off him like autumn leaves from a tree, staring at what he saw as if he felt that the final vestiges of sanity were reeling away from his overheated mind.

  II the body of Sunny Jim Fasson was no longer there. That was the brain-staggering fact which Chief Inspector Teal had to assimilate. It had simply ceased to exist. For all the immediate evidence which Teal's reddening gaze could pick up to the contrary, Sunny Jim Fasson might never have lived there, might never have been interviewed there, and might never have been shot there. The ultimate abysses of interplanetary space could not have been more innocent of any part of Sunny Jim Fasson than that shabby one-room flatlet as Teal saw it then. There could hardly have been much less trace of Sunny Jim if he had never been born.

  And instead of that, there was someone else sitting in the chair where the bullet had hit Sunny Jim-a man whose mere recollection was enough to raise Chief Inspector Teal's blood-pressure to apoplectic heights, a man whose appearance on that spot, at that precise catastrophic moment, turned what might have been an ordinary baffling mystery into something that made Mr. Teal's voice fail him absolutely for several seconds.

  "Stand up, Saint," he got out at last, in a choking gurgle. "I want you!"

  The man peeled himself nonchalantly up from the armchair, and managed to convey the impression that he was merely following a course which he had chosen for himself long ago, rather than that he was obeying an order. And Mr. Teal glowered at him unblinkingly over every inch of that leisured rise.

  To anyone unfamiliar with the dim beginnings and cumulative ramifications of the feud between those two (if anyone so benighted can be imagined to exist in the civilised world) Mr. Teal's glower might justifiably have seemed to lack much of the god-like impartiality which ought to smooth the features of a conscientious detective. It was a glower that had no connection with any detached survey of a situation, any abstract weighing of clues and conundrums. It was, to describe it economically, the kind of glower on which eggs can be fried. It was as calorifically biased and unfriendly as a glower can be.

  The Saint didn't seem to notice it. He came upright, a lean wide-shouldered figure in a light grey suit which had a swashbuckling elegance that nothing Inspector Pryke wore would ever have, and met the detective's torrid glare with cool and quizzical blue eyes.

  "Hullo, Claud," he murmured. "What are you doing here?"

  The detective looked up at him dourly-Teal was not nearly so short as his increasing middle-aged girth made him appear, but he had to look up when the Saint stood beside him.

  "I want to know what you're doing here," he retorted.

  "I came to pay a call on Sunny Jim," said the Saint calmly.

  "But he doesn't seem to be here-or did you get here first and knock him off?"

  There were times when Mr. Teal could exercise an almost superhuman restraint.

  "I'm hoping to find out who got here first," he said grimly. "Sunny Jim has been murdered."

  The Saint raised one eyebrow.

  "It sounds awfully exciting," he remarked; and his bantering eyes wandered over to Pryke. "Is this the bloke who did it?"

  "This is Junior Inspector Pryke, of C Division," said Mr. Teal formally; and the Saint registered ingenuous surprise.

  "Is it really?" he murmured. "I didn't know they'd put trousers on the Women Police."

  Chief Inspector Teal swallowed hastily; and it is a regrettable fact that a fraction of the inclement ferocity faded momentarily out of his glare. There was no lawful or official reason whatsoever for this tempering of his displeasure, but it was the very first time in his life that he had seen any excuse for the Saint's peculiar sense of humour. He masticated his gum silently for a couple of seconds that gave him time to recover the attitude of mountainous boredom which he was always praying for strength to maintain in the Saint's presence. But his relief was only temporary.

  "I suppose you're going to tell me you came to see Fasson just to ask him what he thought about the weather," he said.

  "Certainly not," said the Saint blandly. "I wouldn't try to deceive you, Claud. I blew in to see if he knew anything about some diamond bracelets that a bird called Peabody lost this afternoon. I might have pointed out to him that Peabody is very upset about losing those jools. I might have tried to show him the error of his ways, and done my best to persuade him that they ought to be sent back. Or something. But I can't say that I thought of shooting him."

  "How did you know he was shot?" Teal cut in.

  "My dear fathead, I don't. I merely said that I didn't think of shooting him. Was he shot?"

  Teal hesitated for a moment, studying him with that deceptively bovine gaze.

  "Yes, he was shot."

  "When?"

  "Just now."

  The bantering blue eyes had an impish twinkle.

  "You must have been doing some fast detecting," said the Saint. "Or did somebody tell you?"

  Mr. Teal frowned at him, shifting his gum from tooth to tooth till he got it lodged behind his wisdoms. His sluggish glance travelled once again over that keen sunburned face, handsome as Lucifer and lighted with an indescribable glimmer of devil-may-care mockery; and he wondered if there would ever be any peace for him so long as he was in the employment of the Law and that amazing buccaneer was on the other side.

  For Simon Templar was the incalculable outlaw for whom the routines of criminal investigation had no precedents. He belonged to no water-tight classification, followed no rules but his own, fitted into no definite category in the official scheme of things. He was the Saint: a creation of his own, comparable to nothing but himself. From time to time, desperate creatures of that nebulously frontiered stratosphere commonly called "the Underworld" had gone forth vowing unprintable revenge, and had come back empty-handed-when they came back at all. Many times, Chief Inspector Claud Eustace Teal had thought that all his ambitions would be fulfilled if he could see the Saint safely locked away behind the bars of Larkstone Prison-and yet some of his most spectacular coups could never have been made without the Saint's assistance. And in spite of all the wrath that had been directed on him from these diametrically antagonistic quarters, the Saint had still gone on, a terror to the underworld and a thorn in the side of Scotland Yard, a gay crusader in modern dress who returned from his lawless raids with more booty than any adventurer had ever found before him.

  And with all these memories freshened in his mind during that slothful survey, almost against his will, Chief Inspector Teal found himself impotent to believe that the High Fence could be merely another alias of the man before him. It was not psychologically possible. Whatever else could be said about him, the Saint was not a man who sat spinning webs and weaving complex but static mysteries. Everything that he did was active: he would go out to break up the web and take his illicit plunder from the man who wove it, but he wouldn't spin. . . . And yet there was the evidence of Teal's own flabbergasted senses, there in that room, to be explained away; and Mr. Teal had suffered too much at the Saint's hands to feel that there could ever be any comfortable certainty in the wide world when that incorrigible free-booter was around.

  He clasped his pudgy hands behind his back and said: "Sunny Jim was shot in this room less than five minutes ago. Somebody opened the door and shot him while I was talking to him. He was shot just in time to stop him telling me something I very much wanted to hear. And I want to know what you were doing at that time."

  The Saint smiled rather mildly.

  "Is that an invitation or a threat?" he inquired.

  "It's whichever you like to make it," Teal answered grimly. "Sunny Jim didn't shoot himself, and I'm going to find out who did it."

  "I'm sure you are, Claud," said the Saint cordially. "You always do find out these things, with that marvellous brain of yours. . . . Have you thought of the High Fence?"

  Teal nodde
d.

  "I have."

  "What do you know about the High Fence?" demanded Pryke suspiciously.

  Simon took out a cigarette-case and looked at him equably.

  "This and that. I've been looking for him for some time, you know."

  "What do you want with the High Fence, Saint?" asked Mr. Teal.

  Simon Templar glanced with unwontedly passionless eyes at the chair where Sunny Jim had stopped talking, and smiled with his lips. He lighted a cigarette.

  "The High Fence has killed two men," he said. "Wouldn't you like a chance to see him in the dock at the Old Bailey?"

  "That isn't all of it," answered the detective stubbornly. "You know as well as I do that the High Fence is supposed to keep a lot of the stuff he buys together, and ship it out of the country in big loads. And they say he keeps a lot of cash in hand as well-for buying,"

  The glimmer of mockery in the Saint's eyes crisped up into an instant of undiluted wickedness.

  "Teal, this is all news to me!"

  "You're a liar," said the detective flatly.

  He stared at the Saint with all the necessary symptoms of a return of his unfriendly glower, and added: "I know what your game is. You know the High Fence; but you don't know what he does with the stuff he's bought, or where he keeps his money. That's all you want to find out before you do anything about putting him in the dock at the Old Bailey on a charge of murder. And when that time comes, you'll buy a new car and pay some more cash into your bank balance. That's all the interest you have in these two men who've been killed."

  "I can't get around to feeling that either of them is an irreparable loss," Simon admitted candidly. "But what's all this dramatic lecture leading to?"

  "It's leading to this," said Teal relentlessly. "There's a law about what you're doing, and it's called being an accessory after the fact."

  Simon aligned both eyebrows. The sheer unblushing impudence of his ingenuousness brought a premonitory tinge of violet into the detective's complexion even before he spoke.

  "I suppose you know what you're talking about, Claud," he drawled. "But I don't. And if you want to make that speech again in a court of law, they'll want you to produce a certain amount of proof. It's an old legal custom." Only for the second time in that interview, Simon looked straight at him instead of smiling right through him. "There's a lot of laws about what you're doing; and they're called slander, and defamation of character, and"

  "I don't care what they're called!"

  "But you've got to care," said the Saint reasonably. "After all, you're telling me that a bloke's been shot, and that I did it, or I know something about it. Well, let's begin at the beginning. Let's be sure the bloke's dead. Where's his body?"

  In spite of certain superficial resemblances, it can be fairly positively stated that Chief Inspector Teal had never, even in some distant incarnation, been a balloon. But if he had been, and the point of a pin had been strategically applied to the most delicate part of his rotundity, it would have had practically the same effect as the Saint's innocently mooted question. Something that had been holding out his chest seemed to deflate, leaving behind it an expanding and exasperating void. He felt as if someone had unscrewed his navel and his stomach had fallen out.

  The cigar which had slipped stupidly out of Sunny Jim's mouth when the bullet hit him was lying on the carpet in front of him, tainting the room with an acrid smell of singeing wool. Teal put his foot on it. It was his only concrete assurance that the whole fantastic affair hadn't been a grotesque hallucination-that the overworked brain which had struggled through so many of the Saint's shattering surprises hadn't finally weighed its anchor and gone wallowing off into senile monsoons of delirious delusion. His lips thinned out in an effort of self-control which touched the borders of homicidal fever.

  "That's what I want to know," he said. "The body was here when I went out. When I came in again it had disappeared- and you were here instead. And I think you know something about it."

  "My dear Claud," Simon protested, "what d'you think I am-a sort of amateur body-snatcher?"

  "I think you're a"

  Simon raised his hand.

  "Hush," he said, with a nervous glance at Inspector Pryke. "Not before the lady."

  Teal gulped.

  "I think"

  "The trouble is," said the Saint, "that you don't. Here you are shooting off your mouth about a body, and nobody knows whether it exists. You wonder whether I could have shot Sunny Jim, when you don't even know whether he's dead. You hint at pinching me for being an accessory after the fact, and you can't produce the fact that I'm supposed to be an accessory to."

  "I can prove"

  "You can't. You can't prove anything, except your own daftness. You're doing that now. You ask me what's happened to Sunny Jim's body, with the idea that I must have done some thing with it. But if you can't produce this body, how d'you know it ever was a body? How d'you know it didn't get up and walk out while you were away? How d'you know any crime's been committed at all?" The Saint's lean forefinger shot out and tapped the detective peremptorily on the waistcoat, just above his watch-chain. "You're going to make a prize idiot of yourself again, Claud, if you aren't very careful; and one of these days I shall be very angry with you. I put up with the hell of a lot of persecution from you----"

  "Will you stop that?" barked Mr. Teal, jerking his tummy hysterically back from the prodding finger.

  The Saint smiled.

  "I am stopping it, dear old pumpkin," he pointed out. "I've just told you that my patience is all wore out. I'm not taking any more. Now you go ahead and think out your move. Do you take a chance on running me in for murdering a bloke that nobody can prove was murdered, and stealing a corpse that nobody can prove is a corpse-or do you 'phone for your photographers and finger-print fakers and leave me out of it?"

  Glowering at him in a supercharged silence that strained against his ribs, Mr. Teal thought of all the things he would have liked to do, and realised that he could do none of them. He was tied up in a knot which there was no visible way of unravelling. He had seen similar knots wound round him too often to cherish any illusions on that score-had gorged his spleen too often on the maddeningly confident challenges of that debonair picaroon to hope that any amount of thought could make this one more digestible.

  It was air-tight and water-tight. It was as smooth as the Saint's languid tantalising voice. It located the one unanswerable loophole in the situation and strolled through it with as much room to spare as an ant going through the Arc de Triomphe. It was exactly the sort of thing that the Saint could always be relied upon to do.

  The knowledge soaked down into Mr. Teal's interior like a dose of molten lead. The ancient duel was embarking upon the umpteenth round of a series which seemed capable of going on into eternity; and the prospect seemed as hopeless as it had always seemed. If Mr. Teal had any formulated idea of hell, it was something exactly like that-an endless succession of insoluble riddles that he had to try to solve, while the Saint's impudent forefinger and the Assistant Commissioner's disparaging sniff worked in alternate relays to goad his thoughts away from the last relics of coherence. And there were moments when he wondered if he had already died without knowing it, and was already paying for his long-forgotten sins.

  "You can go, for the present," he said smoulderingly. "I'll find you again when I want you."

  "I'm afraid you will," said the Saint sadly, and adjusted the brim of his hat to the correct piratical angle. "Well, I'll be seein' ya, Claud Eustace. . . ." He turned his vague, unspeakably mischievous smile on to Junior Inspector Pryke, who had been standing sulkily mute since he was last noticed. "And you too, Sweet Pea," he said hopefully.

  Chief Inspector Claud Eustace Teal watched his departure with malignant gloom. It was discouragingly reminiscent of too many other Saintly exits that Mr. Teal had witnessed, and he had a very apathetic interest in the flashlight photography and finger-print dusting which he had to superintend during the next hour or
two.

  For those records were made only at the dictation of a system in which Mr. Teal was too congenitally rut-sunk to question. There was a fire escape within easy reach of the bathroom window which had more to tell than any number of photographs of an empty chair from which an unproven corpse had disappeared.

  Sunny Jim Fasson had been shot at by somebody who had opened the door of the flatlet while Mr. Teal was interrogating him, the same somebody who had found means of silencing Johnny Anworth on the verge of an identically similar squeak; after which Fasson had vanished off the face of the earth. And Teal had a seething conviction that the only living man who knew every secret of what had happened was walking free in the Saint's custom-built shoes.

  The Assistant Commissioner was very polite. "But it has possibly failed to occur to you," he commented, "that this is the sort of thing news editors pray for."

  "If you remember, sir," Pryke put in smugly, "I was against the idea from the first."

  "Quite," said the Commissioner. "Quite." He was a man who had won his appointment largely on the qualification of a distinguished career of pig-sticking and polo-playing with the Indian Army, and he was inclined to sympathise with the officer whom he regarded as a pukka sahib, like himself. "But you went with Mr. Teal, and you may know why Templar was not at least arrested on suspicion."

  "On suspicion of what?" demanded Teal wildly. "The worst you could prove is that he abetted Fasson's escape; and that means nothing, because Fasson hadn't even been arrested."

  Pryke nibbled his thumb-nail.

  "I believe that if we could account for the Saint, the rest of the mystery would be settled," he said.

  "Mr. Teal has been trying to account for the Saint for several years," the Assistant Commissioner reminded him acrimoniously.

  What Mr. Teal wanted to say would have reduced Scotland Yard to a small pool of steaming lava.

  III SIMON TEMPLAR sauntered around the corners of a couple of blocks, and presently waited by the kerb while a big grey saloon cruised slowly up towards him. As it came level, he stepped neatly on to the running-board, opened the nearest door, and sank into the seat beside the driver. As if the upholstery on which he deposited his weight had had some direct connection with the accelerator, the car picked up speed again and shot away into the traffic with its engine purring so smoothly that the leap of the speedometer needle seemed an absurd exaggeration.