The Saint and Mr Teal (Once More the Saint) Read online

  "Mr. Stride asked me to bring a note over to you," she said.

  He held out his hand, without taking his eyes from her face. Unhurriedly he ripped open the envelope-it contained nothing but a blank sheet of paper. Deliber­ately he tore it into four pieces and laid them on a table.

  "Perhaps," he said, "it was more important that a note should bring you over to me."

  Then for the first time he saw Toby Halidom, and his face changed.

  "What are you doing here?" he inquired coldly.

  The young man was faintly taken aback.

  "I just buzzed over with Miss Berwick," he said. "Thought she might like some company, and all that."

  "You may go."

  There was an acid, drawling incisiveness in Osman's voice that was too dispassionate to be rude. It staggered Halidom with the half-sensed menace of it.

  "I asked Mr. Halidom to come with me," said Laura, striving to keep a sudden breathlessness out of her voice. "We shall be going back together."

  "Did-er-your stepfather suggest that arrange­ment ?"

  "No. Toby just thought he'd come."

  "Really!" Osman laughed softly, an almost in­audible chuckle that made the girl shiver unaccount­ably. "Really!" He turned away, a movement that came after his temporary motionlessness with a force that was subtly sinister. "Really!" The joke seemed to amuse him. He strolled away down the room, the cigarette smouldering between his fingers, and turned again at a place where the dim lights left him almost in darkness. The cigarette end glowed like a hot ruby against the grey smudge of his shirt front in the gloom -they could not see his thick fingers touching bells that had men always waiting to answer them. "How very romantic, my dear Halidom! The perfect knight-errant!"

  Toby Halidom flushed dully at the sneer. Something in the atmosphere of the interview was getting under his skin, in spite of the healthy unimaginativeness of his instincts.

  "Well, Laura, let's be getting along," he said, and heard the note of strain in his own assumed heartiness.

  Osman's ghostly chuckle whispered again out of the shadows, but he said nothing. Halidom turned abruptly to the door, opened it, and stopped dead. There were three of Osman's crew outside, crowded impassively across the opening.

  Toby faced the Egyptian with clenched fists.

  "What's the idea, Osman?" he demanded bluntly.

  Abdul moved an inch or two from his position, so that his broad fleshy face stood out like a disembodied mask of evil under one of the rose-shaded light globes.

  "The idea, Halidom, is that Laura is staying here with me-and you are not."

  "You lousy nigger --"

  Halidom leapt at the mask like a young tiger-cat, but he was stopped short in less than a foot. Sinewy brown arms caught his arms from behind, twisted and pinioned them expertly.

  Osman stepped forward slowly.

  "Did you say something, Halidom?'

  "I called you a lousy nigger," retorted Toby de­fiantly. "You heard me all right. Shall I say it again?"

  "Do."

  Osman's voice was sleek, but his hands were shaking. His face had gone a dead white, save only for the scarred red circles on his cheeks. Toby swallowed, and flung up his head.

  "You foul, slimy --"

  Osman's fist smacked the last word back into his teeth.

  "If you had remembered your manners, Halidom, your fate might have been very different," he said; and it was obvious that he was only controlling himself momentarily, by an effort of will that brought beads of perspiration to the whiteness of his forehead. " But that is one word you cannot use. There was another man who used it many years ago-perhaps you would like to see him ?"

  He spoke to Ali purringly, in Arabic, and the man disappeared. Halidom was struggling like a maniac.

  "You can't get away with this, you ugly swine --"

  "No?"

  Osman struck him again; and then, after a moment's pause, deliberately spat in his face. Laura cried out and flung herself forward, but one of the men caught her instantly. Osman sauntered over to her and tilted up her chin in his bloated hands.

  "You're a spitfire too, are you, my dear? That makes it all the more interesting. I'm good at taming spitfires. In a moment I'll show you one of my tamed ones.

  You shall see me tame Halidom in the same way-and you too."

  He looked round as the seaman returned with his secretary. Clements was in a pitiful state-Osman had withheld the needle from him all that day, as he had threatened to do, and the slavering creature that tottered into the room made even Halidom's blood run cold.

  The man fell on his knees at Osman's feet, slobbering and moaning unintelligibly; and Osman caught him by the hair and dragged him upright.

  "Do you see this, Halidom? This is a man who used to call me a dirty nigger. Once upon a time he was just like you-strong, straight, insolent. He feared nothing, and despised me because I wasn't another stupid Englishman like himself. But then, one day, someone introduced him to the needle-the little prick that brings so much courage and cleverness for a while. Have you ever tried it, Halidom? You haven't even thought of it. You've been too busy playing cricket and being called a fine fellow because you could play it well. But you will try it. Oh, no, not voluntarily, perhaps-but the effects will be just the same. You will feel big, strong, clever, a fine fellow, until the drug wears off, and then you will feel very tired. Then I shall give you some more, and again you will feel fine and big and strong. And so we shall go on; you will want a little more each time, but I shall give you just the right amount, until"- in a sudden spasm of savagery he shook Clements by the handful of hair that he was still holding-"until you are bigger and stronger than ever-a finer fellow than you have ever been-like this thing here!"

  He thrust the man away; but Clements was back as soon as he had recovered his balance, clutching Osman's hand, kissing it, fawning over it in a trembling abject-ness that was nauseating.

  "That will be pleasant for you, Halidom, won't it?"

  Toby was staring at Clements with an incredulous loathing that turned his stomach sick.

  "You filthy swine --"

  "I have found, Halidom," said Osman, staring at him steadily, "that the needle is an excellent help for taming your kind. But my little whip also does its share-especially in the beginning, when there are moments of open rebellion. Would you like to see that as well?"

  He touched a concealed spring, and a section of the panelling sprang open. Clements darted forward as he saw it, but Osman pushed the enfeebled body away easily with one hand and sent it sprawling. Inside the cupboard that was disclosed they could see a couple of hypodermic syringes set in gleaming nickelled racks, with a row of tiny glass phials beside them; but Osman left those alone. He took out a short leather whip, so thick at the base that it was difficult to see where it joined the handle, and tapering to a point in which there was a thin hard knot.

  "An excellent instrument," Osman said, "which has helped to drive a proper sense of respect into the man you see."

  He ran the lash through his fingers thoughtfully, gazing down at the grovelling creature by his feet. Something in the sight of that last triumph of his, that living completeness of humiliation, seemed to snap the thread of his gloating self-control. With his thick lips twisting back wolfishly, he leapt at Halidom and slashed twice at his face; then he turned and dragged Clements up again, holding him pinned against the wall with a hand grasping his throat.

  "Look at them, Clements!" he screamed. "Look at them!" He forced the man's livid face round towards Toby and Laura. "Can you see them-or are you too hungry for the needle? They're white-white-the colour you were so proud of! And you're not ashamed, are you? I've thrashed you often enough before my blacks-you're used to that-but how do you like your own people to see what you've sunk to ? Look at them, I tell you. A white man and a white girl-staring at you- despising you-and even that doesn't give you enough self-respect to stand up for yourself. Bah!"

  He stepped back and sent the whip hi
ssing about the man's thin shoulders; and then he came close to Halidom again.

  "And that," he said hoarsely-"that is what you will be like, Halidom."

  His mouth was drooling at the corners, his fingers twitching with the intensity of his passion. Toby looked him in the eyes.

  "You'll never get away with this," he said, as quietly as he could. "Stride knows we're here, and as soon as he gets worried about Laura --"

  Abdul Osman laughed harshly.

  "My dear Halidom, you're mistaken. Stride sent Laura to me-to stay! He did not send you, but I imagine your disappearance will be a relief to him- if you had been left on his hands he might not have known what to do with you. By this time he is making his preparations to leave."

  "I don't believe it!" cried the girl. "Toby-it can't be true-he's lying --"

  Osman looked at her.

  "It doesn't matter to me what you believe," he said silkily. "Doubtless you will be convinced in course of time."

  "It's a lie!" she protested again, but a chill fear had closed on her heart. "He'll go straight to the police-"

  "The police?" Osman's sinister chuckle whispered through the room. "They would be delighted to see him. You little fool! Didn't you know where his money came from? Didn't you know that all his life he's done nothing but trade in women and drugs-that I hold enough evidence to send him to prison for twenty years? You, my dear Laura, are the price of his liberty: you and-er-his retirement from business. A price that he was glad to offer, and that I was very happy to accept."

  She could not think properly, could not comprehend the whole hideous significance of what he was saying. She could not believe it; and yet, from the manner in which he said it, either it must be true or he must be mad And neither alternative opened out a gleam of hope. But she remembered the strangeness that she had seen in Galbraith Stride's eyes when he insisted that she must deliver his message herself, and she was frozen with dread before that unspeakable explanation.

  Beside her, Toby Halidom was struggling again in a blind fury of helplessness; and Osman looked at him again.

  "I shall commence your treatment very soon, my friend," he said; and then he spoke again to Ali. "Take him away and bind him carefully-I shall ring when I wish to see him again."

  Almost before he could speak, Halidom was hustled out of the room, with the girl's wild pitiful cry ringing in his ears. Rough brown hands forced him down a dark alleyway, tightened ropes round his wrists and ankles, and hurled him into an evil-smelling unlighted cabin. He heard the door locked on the outside, and was alone with a despair such as he had never dreamed of in his life, a despair haunted with visions that verged on sheer shrieking madness. There was only one hope left for him-a hope so small that it was almost worse than no hope at all. They had not troubled to search him, and there was a penknife in his pocket. If he could reach that, saw at the ropes on his wrists . . . then there would still be the locked door, and a hostile crew to break through unarmed. . . . But he was trying to get at that knife, with strange futile tears burning under his eyelids.

  Laura Berwick thought that her reason would break. The last of the swarthy seamen had released her and gone out with Toby-there was no one in the saloon but herself and Abdul Osman, and that ghastly relic of a man cowering in a corner and watching Osman's movements with blubbering hate-filled eyes. Osman did not even seem to be aware of his existence-perhaps he had grown so used to having that thing of his own creation with him that he took no more notice of him than if he had been a dog; or perhaps in the foul depths of his mind there was some spawning idea of heaping humiliation on humiliation both for the girl and his beaten slave. He edged towards her unsteadily, his glittering eyes leering with unutterable things, and she retreated from him as she would have done before a snake, until her back was to the wall and she could retreat no further.

  "Come to me, beautiful white rose!"

  His arms reached out for her. She tried to slip side­ways away from their clawing grasp, keeping her eyes out of sheer terror from looking full into that puffed lecherous face; but he caught her arm and held it with a strength greater than her own. She was drawn irresist­ibly into his hot embrace-she felt the horrible softness of his paunch against her firm young flesh, and shud­dered until mists swam before her eyes. She could not possibly endure it much longer. Her senses reeled, and she seemed to have lost all her strength. . . .

  And then, as his greedy lips found her face, her brain went out at last into merciful blackness; and she heard the shot that struck him down only as a dim part of her dream.

  CHAPTER VIII

  SIMON TEMPLAR slammed the door of the glory hole forward, twisted the key, and snapped it off short in the lock. He heard a babel of shouts and jabbering in heathen tongues break out behind it, and grinned gently. So far as he had been able to discover in a lightning reconnaissance, practically the whole of Osman's crew was congregated up there in the fo'c'sle: he had already battened down the hatch over their heads, and it would take them nothing less than an hour to break out.

  It was the moment for a speed of action that could be outdistanced by nothing less nimble than a Morality Squad discovering new vices to suppress-that speed of decision and performance in which the Saint had no equal. With the stillness of the ship still freshly bruised by the sharp thud of that single shot, it was a time when committee meetings and general philosophy had to take second place.

  He raced down the alleyway towards the second door under which he had seen a strip of light; it was thrown open as he reached it, and an olive-skinned man in uniform, with his shirt unbuttoned, stared into his face from a range of twelve inches. In the cabin behind him, two others, apparently fellow officers, were frozen statuesquely around a table littered with cards. Just for the sharp-etched half of a second there was an utter immobility; and then Simon's fist crashed into the man's face and sent him staggering. In another second that door also was locked and the key broken.

  Simon had located only one other danger point, and that was a few steps farther down the passage. As he opened the door he saw that it was the galley, and the explanation of the light he had seen was provided by a coal-black Kano boy who was placidly peeling potatoes and humming one of his own weird melodies. The song died away in an abrupt minor as the Kano boy looked up at him with rolling eyes: Simon saluted him cheerily and turned the third key on the safe side of the door.

  Then he went aft to the saloon; and as he went he saw another door hanging drunkenly open on its mutilated hinges.

  Toby Halidom was pillowing Laura's head on one arm, babbling silly incoherent things to her. His other hand covered the doorway with the automatic that had killed Osman, and for one second Simon felt nearer death than he cared to stand at any time.

  "Put that down, you ass," he said; and then Toby recognized him and lowered the gun slowly.

  "What are you doing here?"

  "Getting you out of trouble," said the Saint briskly. "You needn't worry-the crew won't be interfering yet. I've just locked them up to keep them out of mischief."

  His gaze swept comprehensively round the room- over the body of Abdul Osman, who lay stretched out on his back, half underneath a table that he had clutched at and brought down with him in his fall, with a slowly widening red stain on his white shirt front; over the unconscious figure of Galbraith Stride; over the enslaved secretary, Clements, who sat without movement on one of the couches, his face hidden in his hands, with an empty hypodermic syringe lying where it had fallen on the dark tapestry beside him. ... He reached out and took the automatic from Halidom's unresisting fingers.

  "I don't care if I hang for it!" said the young man hysterically. "He deserved everything he got."

  Simon's eyebrows went up through one slow half-centimetre.

  "If you hang for it?" he repeated.

  "Yes. They can do what they like. I killed him-the swine. I shot him-"

  The Saint's smile, that quirk of the lips which could be so gay, so reckless, so mocking, so debonair,
so icily insolent, so maddeningly seraphic, as his mood willed it, touched his mouth and eyes with a rare gentleness that transformed him. A strange look, almost of tender­ness, touched the chiselled lines of that mad buccaneer­ing face.

  "Hang you, Toby?" he said softly. "I don't think they'll do that."

  The young man scarcely heard him. For at that mo­ment Laura's eyes opened, full of the horror of her last moment of consciousness, and saw the face of the young man bending over her with a queer little choking sob.

  "Toby!"

  She clung to him, raising herself against his shoulder, still wild-eyed with lingering nightmares; and then she shrank back as she saw Abdul Osman.

  "Toby! Did you"

  "It's all right, darling," said Halidom huskily. "He won't trouble us again."

  Then the Saint's hands touched each of their shoulders.

  "I don't think you need to stay here," he said quietly.

  He led them out onto the deck, out into the night air that was cool and fresh with the enduring sweetness of the sea. The motorboat in which they had come was still moored at the bottom of the gangway; but now the Puffin was made fast behind it, with its spread sails stirring like the wings of a grey ghost against the dark water. Between them they helped the girl down to the motorboat; and Simon sat on the half-deck and gazed aft to the seats where the other two had settled them­selves. A match flared at the end of his cigarette.

  "Will you try and listen to me?" he said, in the same quiet tone. "I know what you've been through tonight, because I was listening most of the time. There were some things I had to know before I moved-and then, when the time came for me to interfere, there wasn't much for me to do. I did what I could, and no one will stop you going back to the Claudette."

  The hand with the cigarette moved towards the Luxor's side in a faint gesture.

  "A man was killed there tonight. I've never seen any good reason for buttering up a bad name just because it's a dead one. As Toby said, he deserved everything he got-maybe more. He was a man whose money had been wrung farthing by farthing out of the ruin and degradation of more human lives than either of you can imagine. He was a man who'll leave the world a little cleaner for being dead.