The Saint and Mr. Teal (The Saint Series) Page 22

  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 farther.

  “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.

  8

  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 alley-way 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 further 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 cheerfully, 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 recognised 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 the 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 on to the deck, out into the night air that was cool and fresh with the enduring sweetness of the sea. The motor-boat 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 motor-boat, 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 a 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.

  “But in the eyes of the law he was murdered. In the eyes of the law he was a citizen who had every right to live, who could have called for policemen paid for by every citizen to protect him if he’d ever been threatened, who could have been guiltless for ever in the eyes of the law until his crimes could have been proved according to the niggling rules of evidence to twelve bamboozled half-wits by a parade of blathering lawyers. And the man who killed him will be sentenced to death according to the law.

  “That man was Galbraith Stride.”

  They were staring at him, intent and motionless.

  “I know what you thought, Toby,” said the Saint. “You burst into the saloon with murder in your heart, and saw Osman dead, and Laura with the gun close to her hand. You could only think
for the moment that she had done it, and you made a rather foolish and rather splendid confession to me with some wild idea of shielding her. If I had any medals hung around me I’d give you one. But you certainly weren’t in your right mind, because it never occurred to you to ask what Stride was doing there, or where Laura found the gun.

  “Laura, I don’t want to make it any harder for you, but there is one thing you must know. Every word that Osman told you was true. Galbraith Stride himself was just such a man as Osman. He has never been such a power for evil, perhaps, but that’s only because he wasn’t big enough. He was certainly no better. Their trades were the same, and they met here to divide their kingdoms. Osman won the division because he was just a shade more unscrupulous, and Stride sent you to him in accordance with their bargain.

  “You might like to think that Stride repented at the last moment and came over to try and save you, but I’m afraid even that isn’t true. He killed Osman for a much more sordid reason, which the police will hear about in due time.”

  Even in the darkness he could see their eyes fixed on him. It was Laura Berwick who spoke for them both.

  “Who are you?” she asked, and Simon was silent only for a second.

  “I am Simon Templar, known as the Saint—you may have heard of me. I am my own law, and I have sentenced many men who were lesser pestilences than Abdul Osman or Galbraith Stride…Oh, I know what you’re thinking. The police will also think it for a little while. I did come here tonight to kill Abdul Osman, but I wasn’t quick enough.”

  He stood up, and swung himself lightly back on to the gangway. His deft fingers cast off the painter and tossed it into the boat, and without another word he went up to the deck and down again to the saloon.

  They sentenced Galbraith Stride for the murder of Abdul Osman on the first day of November, just over a month after these events had been recorded, after a trial that lasted four days.

  One of the documents that played a considerable part in bringing the jury to their verdict was a sealed letter that was produced by a London solicitor at the inquest. It was addressed in Abdul Osman’s own heavy sprawling calligraphy:

  To the Coroner: to be handed to him in the event of my death in suspicious circumstances within the next three months.

  Inside was a comprehensive survey of Galbraith Stride’s illicit activities that made the police open their eyes. It was typewritten, but the concluding paragraph was in Osman’s own handwriting.

  This is written in the expectation of a meeting between Stride and myself at which our respective spheres of influence are to be agreed on and mutually limited. If any “accident” should happen to me during this conference, therefore, the man responsible will certainly be Galbraith Stride, whom I should only expect to violate our truce as he has violated every other bargain he has ever made.

  Abdul Osman

  The defence made a valiant effort to save their case by making great play with the fact that the notorious Simon Templar was not only in the district, but was actually on board the Luxor when the murder was committed, but the judge promptly repressed all questions that were not directly concerned with the circumstances of the murder.

  “The police,” he said, “have charged Galbraith Stride with the murder, and I cannot have alternative murderers dragged in at this stage of the proceedings. We are here to decide whether the prisoner, Galbraith Stride, is guilty or not guilty, and if he should eventually be found not guilty it will be open to the police to bring charges against such other persons as they think fit.”

  There was also, somewhat inconsistently, an attempt on the part of the defence to represent their client as a repentant hero hastening to rescue his step-daughter from her fate. The case for the prosecution lasted two days, and this happened when the Crown’s position was rapidly becoming unassailable. And then Clements was called, and that finished it.

  He was a very different man from the whimpering wreck who had suffered all the indignities that Osman’s warped brain could think of to heap upon him. From the moment of Osman’s death he had become free of the supplies of cocaine that were stocked in that concealed cupboard in the saloon: he had used them liberally to maintain himself in the normal state that he would never be able to return to again without the help of drugs, keeping their existence secret until the case was transferred to the mainland and he could secure proper treatment. But there was no treatment that could give him back the flame of life, and so the police surgeon told him.

  “Honestly, Clements, if I’d been told that a man could develop the resistance to the stuff that you’ve got, so that he would require the doses that you require to keep him normal, without killing himself, I shouldn’t have believed it. You must have had the constitution of an ox before you started that…that—”

  “Folly?” queried Clements with a flicker of expression passing over his wasted features. “Yes, I used to be pretty strong, once.”

  “There’s no cure for what you’ve got,” said the doctor bluntly; for he was still a young man, an old Rugger blue, and some of the things that he saw in his practice hurt him.

  But Clements only smiled. He knew that the poisons they were pumping into him six times a day to keep him human would kill him within a matter of weeks, but he could not have lasted much longer anyway. And he had one thing to finish before he died.

  He went into the witness-box steady-nerved, with his head erect and the sparkle of cocaine in his eyes. The needle that the young doctor had rammed into his arm half an hour before had done that, but that was not in evidence. They knew he was a cocaine addict of course—he told them the whole story of his association with Abdul Osman, without sparing himself. The defence remembered this when their turn came to cross-examine.

  “In view of these sufferings which you endured at the hands of the dead man,” counsel put it to him, “didn’t you ever feel you would like to kill him?”

  “Often,” said Clements calmly. “But that would have cut off my supplies of the drug.”

  “Wouldn’t it be quite conceivable, then,” counsel continued, persuasively, “that if you had killed him you would be particularly anxious to keep yourself out of the hands of the police at any cost?”

  Just for that moment the witness’s eyes flashed.

  “You’d better ask the doctor,” he said. “He’ll tell you that I shall probably be dead in a couple of months anyway. Why should I waste my last days of life coming here to tell you lies? It would make no difference to me if you sentenced me to death today.”

  Counsel consulted his notes.

  “You had never met Galbraith Stride before?”

  “Never.”

  Then came the attempt to represent the killing as an act in the defence of a girl’s honour.

  “I have told the court already,” said Clements with that terribly patient calm of a man for whom time has no more meaning, which somehow set him apart from the reproof that would immediately have descended upon any ordinary witness who attempted to make a speech from the box, “that nothing of the sort was suggested. Miss Berwick had fainted, and during the time that she was being attacked I was only occupied with taking advantage of the confusion to get at Osman’s supply of cocaine. I cannot make any excuses for that—no one who has been spared that craving can understand how it overrules all other considerations until it has been satisfied. Deprived of it, I was not a man—I was a hungry animal. I went to the cabinet and gave myself an injection and sat down to allow the drug time to take effect. When I looked up Galbraith Stride was there. He had a pistol in his hand, and he appeared to have been drinking. He said, ‘Wait a minute, Osman. She’s worth more than that. I’m damned if I’ll let you have her and get rid of me as well. You can make another choice. If you take her, we’ll divide things differently.’ Osman flew into a rage and tried to hit him. Stride fired, and Osman fell. I thought Stride was going to fire again, and I caught hold of the nearest weapon I could find—a brass vase—and hit him with it. I hadn’t much strength, but luckily
it struck him on the chin and knocked him out.”

  “And it was you who went over to St Mary’s and informed Sergeant Hancock what had happened?”

  ‘‘Yes.”

  “On your own initiative?”

  “Entirely.”

  “I suggest that Templar said ‘Look here, Osman’s dead, and there’s no need for us to get into trouble. Let’s go over to Sergeant Hancock and tell him that Stride did it.’”

  “That is absurd.”

  “You remember the statement that Stride made to Sergeant Hancock when he was arrested?”

  “Fairly well.”

  “You will recall, perhaps, that Stride described how he was attacked in his cabin on the Claudette by this man Templar, and that significant mention of a knife that was alleged to have been thrown into a door. Did you hear Sergeant Hancock give evidence that he examined the door in the saloon of the Claudette, and found the mark of a knife having been driven deeply into it?”

  “Yes.”

  “How would you account for that?”

  “If you ask me I should say that a man like Stride might well have foreseen the possibility of accidents, and he could easily have prepared that mark to substantiate his story in case of trouble.”

  It was on this point that the greatest weakness of the case for the prosecution seemed to rest. Simon Templar was recalled before the end, and his evidence re-examined.