Alias the Saint (The Saint Series) Page 2

  —Leslie Charteris

  1

  When Long Harry came out of Pentonville Prison, he was not expecting to be welcomed by a cohort of friends. At the worst he had reckoned an emissary of the Prisoners’ Aid Society would be the most he would have to deal with, and consequently the sight of the plump and ponderous Chief Inspector Teal lounging somnolently against a lamp-post a few yards from the prison gates was an unwelcome surprise.

  Pulling his hat down over his eyes, Harry tactfully began to stroll in the opposite direction, but Inspector Teal was not so lightly to be deprived of the pleasure of renewing his acquaintance with an old customer.

  He hitched himself off his lamp-post, and came up with Long Harry in a few slothful strides that nevertheless managed to convey him over the intervening ground in a surprisingly short space of time.

  His hand fell on Harry’s shoulder, and the yegg pulled up and faced about uneasily.

  “I want you, Harry,” said Mr Teal, whose sense of humour was sometimes lacking in good taste.

  Harry shuffled his feet.

  “You’ve got nothing on me, Mr Teal,” he said defensively.

  “I want you, Harry,” repeated Mr Teal sleepily, “to come along to the Corner House and have some breakfast with me, and then we’ll have a little talk.”

  Harry said he had had breakfast, but Mr Teal was not so easily to be put off.

  “If you won’t eat yourself,” he said, “you can watch me and listen,” he added, with unconscious humour.

  As he spoke he was gently shepherding Harry back past the prison gates to a diminutive car that was drawn up by the kerb.

  They passed down Caledonian Road in silence. Mr Teal had the gift of investing his silences with a peculiarly disturbing quality, and Long Harry became more and more unhappy as the miles ticked over on the speedometer in front of him.

  “I suppose,” said Harry, breaking a period of almost intolerable suspense as they turned round Park Crescent into Portland Place, “I suppose you aren’t thinking I had anything to do with that Regent Street job?”

  “I’ve stopped thinking about that,” said Mr Teal, “since I became certain.”

  “That’s like you flatties,” complained Harry bitterly. “Let a man do his time and not say a word, and then wait for him outside the prison to shop him for another stretch.”

  Mr Teal said nothing. They whizzed down Regent Street in another spell of silence.

  “It isn’t even a fair charge,” said Harry presently with an injured air. “I’ve got a beautiful alibi for you.”

  “You always have,” said Mr Teal, without resentment. “I’ve never known you to disappoint me yet!”

  They sat over bacon and eggs in Coventry Street, and Inspector Teal then condescended to relieve some of Harry’s apprehensions by explaining the reason for his hospitality.

  “I want you,” said Mr Teal, in his sleepy way, “to tell me a little story about a man named Connell. I’ve got an idea he’s a particular friend of yours.”

  The other’s face twisted up in a vicious grin.

  “Connell,” snarled Long Harry, “is a—”

  “Yes?” prompted Mr Teal drowsily.

  Harry’s clenched fist opened slowly. His vicious grin became cunning, then mask-like.

  “Connell,” said Harry softly, “is a man I’ve met occasionally. I can’t tell you more about him than that, Mr Teal.”

  The detective sighed.

  “Sure you can’t?”

  Harry shook his head.

  “You know I’m always ready to help you when I can, Mr Teal,” he said speciously, “but I don’t know anything about Connell.”

  Mr Teal looked sceptical.

  “Except,” said Harry slowly, “that I’ve a good idea he was the squealer who shopped me for the Bayswater joke.”

  “You let me down over Bayswater,” said Mr Teal reproachfully. “I never thought you carried a cosh around with you.”

  “Nor do I,” said Harry. “Listen!”

  He leant forward across the table.

  “You and me, Mr Teal,” he said, “have met pretty often—on business, as you might say. Now, you know I’m a respectable burglar. You’ve never caught me with a cosh, let alone a gun, yet. You’ve put me away six times, and I don’t mind admitting now that I asked for the whole half-dozen, but I swear to you I never went near Bayswater that night.”

  “You ought to have told that to the court,” said Mr Teal.

  “Look here,” persisted Harry with charming simplicity. “You remember pulling me in, don’t you? Well, had I got an alibi? Did I say anything about an alibi? You know I didn’t. Now, I ask you, Mr Teal, have you ever known me to be pulled in for a job of work that I really did and me not have an alibi ready?”

  Mr Teal’s eyes were half closed, and he appeared to be taking no notice. That pose of lazy boredom was his one affectation.

  “The whole thing was a frame-up from start to finish,” repeated Harry, “and you ought to know it, Mr Teal. I never used a cosh in my life, and I never did a porch job, anyway. And the man might have died, from what the papers said. Then I’d have been hanged. Maybe I was meant to be hanged, but Connell—”

  Mr Teal’s eyes suddenly opened very wide.

  “What are you going to do to Connell?” he asked.

  Harry relaxed.

  “Well, when I see him,” he said, “maybe I’ll stand him a drink, and maybe I won’t. Who knows?”

  “And when I take you again,” said Mr Teal, “maybe you’ll get a lifer, and maybe you’ll hang. Who knows about that, either?”

  It was an unsatisfactory interview from all points of view, and Mr Teal, who had dragged himself out of bed at half-past five that morning in order to bring it about, was pardonably annoyed.

  He got back to his room at Scotland Yard about half-past nine, and his assistant found him in an unpleasant mood.

  “I’ve been thinking,” began the recently promoted Sergeant Barrow, and Mr Teal cut him short with a ferocious glare.

  “Why?” demanded Mr Teal unkindly. “I’m sure it hurts you, and you know I’ve always told you to take care of yourself.”

  “I’ve been thinking about the Camberwell Post Office hold-up,” insisted the younger man aggrievedly. “Now couldn’t that man Horring have been in it?”

  “He could,” agreed Mr Teal carefully, “if they hadn’t hanged him at Wandsworth the week before. Go away and rest. You’ll be getting brain fever if you go on thinking like this.”

  After that, Mr Teal felt better.

  “And on your way down,” he called after the retreating sergeant as the door closed, “tell Sergeant Jones I want him!”

  There is a special department at Scotland Yard whose sole function is to indulge its curiosity, and the facts which it brings to light are strange and various. Some of them are gleaned from the reports of patrolling constables, who are instructed to note down any unusual happenings which they observe on their beats. Others are gleaned by painstaking subterranean investigation.

  No plain van draws up outside a house at night and proceeds to discharge its cargo without the fact being reported; no man moves suddenly from a bed-sitting-room in Bermondsey to a service flat in Jermyn Street without arousing the interest of this inquisitive department; no man becomes a regular frequenter of the hotels and restaurants in the West End which are shared as a meeting-ground by London society, foreign millionaires, crooks both home-bred and imported, and that curious fraternity which, without coming into conflict with the law, contrives to live in luxury by its wits and the generosity of its relatives, without this prying department interesting itself in the subject.

  Of this department, Sergeant Jones was an esteemed ornament. He spent his life in a maze of card indexes, turning over the disjointed and apparently insignificant reports which came in to him from time to time, sorting the wheat from the chaff, filing away accredited information, and requesting the further investigation of those facts which seemed to h
im to require it.

  Sometimes the threads he followed led nowhere. Sometimes, by devious means, they were linked up with other threads, which in their turn tangled up again with yet more threads. And then, perhaps, a house would be surrounded, a couple of detectives would enter, and in a few moments some very surprised men would be hustled unostentatiously into a waiting taxi and removed to a place where they would have leisure to wonder how the seemingly undetectable had been detected.

  “Sit down, Jones,” said Mr Teal, settling himself comfortably in the big swivel chair behind his desk and closing his eyes, “and tell me all about Vanney’s.” Sergeant Jones sat down. He was a long, lanky man, with sandy hair and a large nose.

  “Directors,” said Sergeant Jones, “as follows: president and managing director, James Arthur Vanney, 48, of 52 Half Moon Street; secretary, Sebastian Tombs, Esquire, of no fixed address; director, Malcolm Standish, 34, solicitor, of Lincoln’s Inn.”

  “Do we know anything about these men?”

  “Not much. Standish we know. He’s behind half the criminal cases that are defended at the Old Bailey—a lot more than his name appears in. If any big crook gets landed he sends for Standish at once. We’ve never had anything on him, but I shouldn’t be surprised if he’d made a tidy pile out of some of the cases he’s worked on. Vanney built that new house at the bottom of Half Moon Street about nine months ago. Two cars—a Rolls and a Daimler. Four servants. Does himself pretty well on the whole.”

  “Where was he before he moved into Half Moon Street?”

  “He stayed at the Savoy while the house was being built. His address was registered there as Melbourne, Victoria. Someone commissioned the architect and got the building job in hand a couple of months before Vanney arrived…That man Tombs is a bloke I’d like to know a lot more about.”

  “And so should I,” said Teal.

  He fingered his chin thoughtfully.

  “Staff?” he queried.

  “Very small. Girl secretary, name of Pamela Marlowe, and two clerks. Pamela Marlowe was Stenning’s ward.”

  Mr Teal nodded faintly to signify that the interview was at an end, and Sergeant Jones rose.

  He was leaving the room when a man brought in a small parcel.

  “One moment,” murmured Mr Teal, and the sergeant stopped by the door.

  Teal examined the packet carefully, and then held it to his ear. Then he blinked, and the ghost of a smile crossed his face.

  “How surprisingly unoriginal,” remarked Mr Teal mildly.

  Sergeant Jones came back to the desk, and Mr Teal held out the packet to him. Jones took it doubtfully.

  “Walk that round to the Explosives Department,” said Teal, “and mind you don’t drop it. You can also spend your spare time praying that it doesn’t go off before you get there!”

  2

  Vanney’s Ltd., who were vaguely described on the glass panel of their door as “Agents,” occupied a suite of offices in a new block of buildings opposite Charing Cross Station.

  There were four rooms looking out on to the Strand. A private corridor ran the length of the suite, and each room opened separately on to it, while a system of communicating doors permitted access to any room from any of the other rooms without entering the passage. The first room was a waiting-room, in the second room worked two clerks, and in the third were Tombs and Miss Marlowe. The fourth was the sanctum of James Arthur Vanney himself, a thick-set man of medium height, who actually looked short by reason of his exceptional breadth of shoulder. He was dark and bearded, sparing of speech, and gruff in manner.

  Chief Inspector Teal knocked on the door marked “Inquiries” one afternoon, and was told by the clerk who opened it that Mr Vanney was busy.

  “I’ll wait,” said Mr Teal philosophically, and the clerk appeared to be nonplussed.

  The door communicating the clerks’ room with the secretary’s office was open. Through it Mr Teal perceived a familiar back. He flowed irresistibly past the clerk, passed through the communicating door, and tapped Simon Templar’s shoulder.

  “When did you change your name to Tombs?” asked Mr Teal drowsily.

  “Quite recently,” said the Saint unabashed. “It seemed a jolly sort of name. Didn’t the clerk tell you that Mr Vanney was engaged?”

  Teal nodded.

  “He did,” he admitted, “and I said I’d wait.”

  “Mr Vanney,” persisted the Saint, “will be engaged all the afternoon.”

  “I’ve got a lot of time to spare,” said Teal calmly, “and when I get bored with waiting, you can come and talk to me.”

  “Mr Vanney,” continued the Saint pointedly, “will not be able to see you until tomorrow morning.”

  Teal extracted from his pocket a small packet done up in pink paper. From it he took a smaller packet, from which he took a thin wafer of chewing gum. With his jaws moving rhythmically, he cast a sleepy speculative eye round the room.

  “I can doss down in a corner,” he said. “Or have you a camp bed?”

  Simon Templar inspected a row of buttons on his desk, selected one, and pressed it. Mr Teal masticated in silence until a knock on the door answered the bell.

  “In,” said the Saint briskly.

  The door opened, and a man in a plain blue serge suit and a bowler hat stood framed in the aperture.

  “George,” said the Saint, in the same brisk tone, “show this gentleman the way out.”

  Mr Teal shifted his gum round so as to give the other side of his face its full share of exercise.

  “Suppose,” he suggested languidly, “that I just had a word with you in private first?”

  The Saint shrugged.

  “I can give you two minutes exactly,” he said. “You can wait outside the door, George. Miss Marlowe, would you mind?”

  Mr Teal lounged into a chair.

  “Nice girl that,” he remarked.

  “Very,” agreed the Saint briefly. “And now let’s hear the bright, brisk business. What has fetched you to this wilderness, old watermelon?”

  Teal stretched his arms lazily.

  “I was interested,” he said. “A name like Sebastian Tombs seemed too good to be true, and when I saw you—well, I was just more interested than ever.”

  “That must have been frightfully jolly for you,” agreed the Saint carefully. “May one ask why?”

  Teal closed his eyes, but his jaws continued to maltreat Spearmint with monotonous regularity.

  “Somehow,” he said, “whenever I find you off your usual beat, I have an idea there’s a catch in it. What’s the idea this time?”

  “I have reformed,” said the Saint speciously. “Overwhelmed with the burden of my sins, and gloomily conscious of many wasted years, I have decided to go out into the great wide world and make good. These are paths of righteousness, Teal, but I can’t expect you to believe that.”

  “Then you won’t be disappointed,” said Teal languidly. “Now can I see your boss?”

  “I’m afraid not,” said the Saint. “I’ve told you he’s engaged.”

  Teal looked across at the opposite communication door. The upper pane was of frosted glass, and across this was painted the word “Private.”

  “Does he always see his visitors in the dark?” asked Teal gently.

  “Always,” said the bland Mr “Tombs.” “It’s one of his many peculiarities.”

  Mr Teal’s eyes were half closed.

  “And does he,” pursued Mr Teal, in the same tired voice, “always hang his hat and coat up in the clerks’ room? I can see your hat and coat hanging up in the corner there, and there were three hats and coats in the room I came through.”

  “That,” said the Saint fluently, “is another of his eccentricities. He says he hates to have his hat and coat hanging up in his own room.”

  Mr Teal nodded, and then he moved.

  It has already been mentioned that, for such a large and slothful man, he could, when he so desired, cover ground with a surprising turn of speed.


  He had flung open the communicating door marked “Private” before the Saint could stop him, and the lights clicked up under his thumb as Templar reached his side.

  The room was empty.

  It was sparsely but comfortably furnished, with a big knee-hole desk set crosswise in the corner by the window, a safe in the opposite corner, and a filing cabinet against one wall.

  There were two armchairs upholstered in leather, and a plain wooden armchair behind the desk. Facing the communicating door was a fireplace, and on either side of this was a tall cupboard built into the wall. There was no sign of Vanney.

  Teal leaned back against the jamb of the door, looking at the Saint’s blank face and chewing unemotionally.

  “And,” said Mr Teal, without changing the bored tone of his voice, “does Mr Vanney automatically vanish, together with his visitor, when this door is opened?”

  Simon put his hands in his pockets and settled himself comfortably in the doorway. He looked quizzically at the detective.

  “I’ve never known him do it before,” he replied calmly. “But great men are always slightly erratic in their habits. It will be an interesting little problem for you to take home with you.”

  Mr Teal removed a speck of dust from his bowler.

  “On second thoughts,” he said, “I don’t think I’ll spend the night here. Bye-bye, Saint. See you later, I expect.”

  “I’m afraid so,” said Simon affably.

  Mr Teal opened the door to find the porter standing patiently outside.

  “You may go, George,” said Teal. “I’ll find my own way out.”

  He was sauntering down the corridor when a thought struck him, and he returned. He opened the door a few inches without the formality of knocking, and poked his head in.

  Simon Templar was writing at the desk, and the girl was tapping the typewriter in the corner.