The Saint and Mr. Teal (The Saint Series) Page 23
“You have admitted that you went out to the Luxor on the night in question with the intention of assaulting Osman?”
“I’ve never denied it,” said the Saint.
“Why, if you were so anxious to take the law into your own hands, did you confine your attentions to the deceased?”
“Because I’d heard of him, and I hadn’t heard of Stride. Mr Smithson-Smith told me about Osman—that’s already been given in evidence.”
“And you,” said counsel, with deliberate irony, “were immediately filled with such a passion for justice that you couldn’t sleep until you had thrashed this monster that Osman was represented to you to be?”
“I thought it would be rather a rag,” said the Saint, with a perfectly straight face.
“It has been suggested that you were the man who branded Osman five years ago—was that also intended to be rather a rag?”
“I never met the man before in my life.”
“You have heard Galbraith Stride say that you told him that you had done that?”
“He must be dotty,” said the Saint—a reply that earned him a three-minute lecture from the learned judge.
In his closing speech, the counsel for the Crown suggested that the difficulty might not be so great as it appeared.
“In this case,” he said, “the only discrepancies which you need to take into consideration are those between the evidence given by Mr Clements and Mr Templar, and the story told by the prisoner. It is my submission to you that the defence has in no way succeeded in shaking the credibility of those two witnesses, and when you remember, in discarding the evidence of the prisoner, that it is not supported by any other witness at any point, and that the only alternative to discarding it as the fantastic story of a man lying desperately to save his neck is to regard all the stories of all the other witnesses as nothing short of deliberate conspiracy to send an innocent man to the gallows—then, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, in my humble submission, there is only one conclusion at which any reasonable person can arrive.”
The jury was away for three hours, but to the reporters in the crowded press seats it was a foregone conclusion. The finger-prints of Galbraith Stride had been found on the gun, and that seemed to clinch it.
So they found him guilty as we know, and the warders had to hold him up when the judge put on the black cap.
9
Three weeks later an early post brought Toby Halidom a letter.
He was awake to receive it; for during that night the story as it concerned him had dragged through its last intolerable lap. It was the end of three weeks of dreadful waiting—three weeks in which the lines of strain that had marked themselves on the face he loved had been etched in indelible lines of acid on his own memory. It was not that either of them bore any more affection for the man who had made his infamous bargain with Abdul Osman, and who was now awaiting the final irrevocable summons of the Law; Galbraith Stride had placed himself beyond that, but they had known him personally, eaten at his table, seen him walking and talking as a human being of the same race as themselves instead of the impersonal deformed specimen in a glass case which the criminologists were already making of him, and they would not have been human themselves if that period of waiting for the relentless march of the Law had not preyed on their waking and sleeping hours like an intermittent nightmare. And that night had been the last and worst of all.
At midnight Toby had seen Laura sent to bed by a kindly doctor with a draught which would send her the sleep that could not have come naturally, and he had gone back to his bachelor apartment to get what rest he could. All her sufferings had been his by sympathy: he had seen her stared at in the court by goggle-eyed vampires with no better use for their time than to regale themselves with the free entertainment provided for them by her ordeal, had read with a new-found disgust the sensational journalism that was inevitably splurged on the case, and seen press photographers descending on her like a pack of hounds every time she left the court. He had knocked down one who was too importunate, and it had given him some relief. But the rest of it had remained, and it had been made no easier by the sudden inaccessibility of the one man who might have been able to help him. Simon Templar had been as elusive as a phantom; a couple of days after the case, Chief Inspector Teal, who came down with a watching brief, told him that the Saint had gone abroad.
Toby had slept fitfully until six o’clock, and had woken up unrested. He got up and brewed himself a cup of tea, and paced restlessly up and down his tiny sitting-room. The clatter of the postman’s knock on his front door was a kind of relief: anything that would serve to distract his mind for a few minutes was welcome.
He went out and found that single letter. It bore a Spanish stamp, and was postmarked from Barcelona.
My dear Toby,
I know you’ve been thinking some hard things about me since I became so obstinately impossible to lay hands on during the trial of Galbraith Stride. Will you understand that I only did what I thought was best, and what I think in the future you also will see the best thing for you both?
You will remember that at our last meeting, after the police court proceedings, you told me what was on your mind, and I could only give you the vaguest possible comfort. I didn’t want to try you too highly then, because not all of us are born to be self-appointed judges and executioners, and what you didn’t know you couldn’t possibly be tempted to reveal. We agreed that it would be better if you knew nothing until it was all over, and that Laura must never know.
Well, that time has nearly come, and it has been brought much nearer by a cable I had this morning, which removes the last reason I might have had for keeping silent. Clements is dead.
And he, Toby, was the man who killed Abdul Osman.
I know all the things you’ve been thinking. That confession you made in the saloon, when you told me that you had done it, wasn’t quite such a foolish thing as I tried to make you believe, and perhaps you never did wholly believe it. Perhaps even now there are moments when you wonder…You couldn’t ask her, of course. Well, that’s one shadow I can take away from your young lives.
And then there were other times when you thought I’d done it myself. Toby, old lad, you may have gathered some idea of my views on the Englishman and Public School Man legend, but here’s where I make an everlasting exception in your case. You rose to something much bigger then—something that makes me sorry you’ll always have that Public School background behind you in your ordinary life, and go on to become a highly respected county magistrate, chairman of the golf club, and member of the Athenaeum. But even though it wasn’t necessary I think a hell of a lot of the loyalty that kept you from breathing a word of it when they were grilling you in the box.
You figured to yourself that it was Galbraith Stride who sold Laura and I who saved her, and therefore even if I perjured myself to hell you had a debt to me that would never let you speak. And now, Toby, you’ve got to show yourself just as big a man to the memory of that poor devil who died the other day.
This is exactly what happened.
I arrived on the Claudette just as you and Laura were pushing off from the other side. I heard your boat buzzing away, and thought nothing of it at the time. I was after Galbraith Stride and Abdul Osman at the same time. You know all about me, and all the things I’ve done in the name of what I think is justice. I had decided that both Osman and Stride were far too foul to live any longer. I’ve killed men before, many of them—it didn’t mean anything like the same thing to me as it would have to you. I meant to carry the pair of them off on the Puffin, rope them together with half a ton of lead for ballast, and drop them quietly into the sea away off beyond Round Island where there’s forty fathoms of water and they could swing there on the tides till the lobsters had finished with them. There’d have been no bungling about it, no fuss, and I’d have had a peach of an alibi waiting back on St Mary’s for me if there hadn’t been other things doing that night which upset all my plans.
Osman was telling the truth about Stride’s bargain—I could tell that at once. You remember that the torn note they found in the saloon, the one Laura was sent over with, was just a blank sheet of paper? Wasn’t that proof enough? You saw it later, but I was looking down right over Osman’s shoulder, and I saw it the minute he opened it.
You know what happened up to the time you were taken out of the saloon. Then Abdul started trying his sheik stuff on Laura, as you’ve been told. The only other person there was Clements—the man Abdul forgot—the man everyone always forgot. And Clements, crazed with the need for the drug that Abdul had broken him in to—he had been kept without it all day, as he told me afterwards, just for one of those spiteful whims of torture that Abdul’s pleasant imagination was always producing—Clements’s only idea was to take advantage of the confusion and help himself from the cupboard where the stuff was kept. I could see him stumbling towards it like a madman, and it seemed that that was the cue for me to butt in at last.
I’d started out unarmed—recent notoriety has made me rather cautious about running the risk of letting anyone catch me within miles of a gun—but Stride had an automatic when I captured him, and I’d shoved it away in a hip pocket that wasn’t designed for a quick draw, after considering for some moments whether I should pitch it into the sea. I wanted it badly then, and I was trying to get hold of it with one hand while I held the skylight propped up with the other, when Clements pulled his big scene.
He’d got his hands into the cupboard, and there was an automatic there. He touched it, actually picked it up—heaven knows why. And then he looked round. Laura had just fainted, and Abdul was clawing at her.
I told you that I was my own judge and jury, but there are some things which even I will not presume to judge. You may say that Clements had every reason to hate Osman, that even he might know that Osman’s death, whatever it cost him, would mean the end of a slavery that was worse than any hangman. You may say that Osman’s demonstration on him that night before your eyes fanned his hate to a furnace that even the fear of being deprived of his drug could not quell. Or perhaps, Toby, you may like to think that even in that broken wreck of a man that Osman had made of him there was a lingering spark of the man that Clements had been before, a spark that had been awakened into a faint flame of new courage by that last brutal humiliation which you saw, a spark that even in his hopeless soul could feel the shame of that final outrage which he had been left to witness. You will think what you like, and so shall I. I shall only tell you what I saw.
Clements turned round, with the gun. His face was under the light, and it had a look—I can’t say of hate or rage—a look of sudden peace that was almost glorious. He stepped up to Abdul Osman and shot him through the heart, and stood quite still and watched him fall, and then he dropped the gun—it just happened to fall near Laura, that’s all—and went back to the cupboard. And I should like to say that he didn’t stagger back like a starving animal, as he had gone there at first: he went quite slowly, quite quietly, though I could see that every one of his nerves was a white-hot wire of agony with his hunger for that poison.
Well, it seemed as if the inquest was the next thing, and I didn’t want it to be held on any of us at the same time, with that heathen crew roused by the shot. I dashed round and locked them up pronto, after heaving the skylight wide open and dumping Galbraith bodily in to get him out of the way—he was still sleeping peacefully from the clout I’d given him on the jaw, and wasn’t likely to make any trouble for some time.
I took you and Laura down to your motor-boat and left you—by the way, you must be a pretty hefty bird when you’re roused, for the hinges of that door you’d bust open looked as if they’d been through an earthquake. I still had to go on thinking at a speed that nearly gave me brain fever, because when you’ve got to work out alibis that weren’t prepared in advance in less than sixty seconds there isn’t much time for writing poetry. I hashed up everything I told you in the boat straight out of my head, without coffee or ice compresses, and then I left you and went back to the saloon to try and stage it to look true.
Even on the spur of the moment you see, I’d made up my mind that Clements wasn’t going to swing for what he’d done if I could possibly avoid it. Abdul had asked for it, and Abdul had got what was coming to him anyhow. Clements had simply paid off a debt of ten years of living death, and, Toby, after all, it had been Clements who actually saved your girl. I’d seen that look on his face when he shot Osman, that look which I can’t hope ever to describe to you, and which I’d rather leave out of the story and leave for you to see in your own heart if you can. There seemed to be a much more suitable victim ready to hand; Galbraith Stride who had also had it coming to him that night. The only question was whether Clements could be pulled together sufficiently to catch on.
The dope had taken effect when I got back to him, and he was more or less normal. Also he was very calm. He used practically your own words.
“They can hang me if they like,” he said. “It doesn’t matter much.”
I took him by the shoulders, and believe it or not, he could look me in the eye.
“They’re not hanging you,” I said. “They’re going to hang Galbraith Stride.”
“I don’t mind what happens,” said Clements. “I’m not sorry to have killed Osman. Do you see me? I’m only one man that he’s ruined. There were thousands of others. I’ve seen them. You haven’t been through it, and you don’t know what it means.”
“Perhaps I do,” I said. “But Galbraith Stride is only another like him.”
And I told him that I had meant to kill Stride as well that night, and who I was. Then he caught on.
“I haven’t long to live anyway,” he said. “But I should like to see this work finished.”
He wanted to shoot Stride then and there where he lay and take the rap for the two of them, but I told him there was a better way. It didn’t seem to mean much to him, but somehow I wanted to be able to think that that poor devil was going to see out the rest of his life decently in the freedom that he hadn’t known for ten years. I talked to him for twenty minutes, working out the story we were to tell, and he took it in quickly enough. Then the crew bust down the door of the glory hole and came yelling down to the saloon, and it was lucky for me Clements could swing a good line of Arabic oratory and tell ’em the facts as we’d agreed on them.
And so we told our stories as you heard them, and Galbraith Stride will hang on the day you get this.
I’ve no excuses to make to you. Deliberately and with infinite malice aforethought I arranged to frame your stepfather-in-law-to-be to the gallows, and nothing that can ever happen can make me sorry for what I did. That was a just thing as I have always seen justice and as I shall see it all my life according to a law that is bigger than all your man-made laws. But you have been taught to respect those man-made laws, so this letter will help to set your conscience free. You guessed some of it, of course, and you’re free now to say as much of it as you like. Clements is beyond your justice, but Chief Inspector Teal would like nothing better than a chance to send his sleuths trailing after me with extradition warrants overflowing from their pockets. They wouldn’t catch me, of course, but they could have lots of harmless fun trying.
If you’re interested in anything that Clements thought, after what I’ve told you, you might like to know the last th
ing I heard from him. It came to me in a letter, which he must have written when he knew that the sands had almost run out. There was just one line.
“Go on and prosper.”
Not a very Public School sentiment, Toby, you may think. Rather more melodramatic than any English Gentleman should have been. But he had come back from depths that I hope you’ll never see—from which, even if I hadn’t been on board that night he would still have saved you. You will judge him and decide what to do according to what you think of that farewell. It is only right that you should make your own choice.
If that choice is what I think it will be, we may meet again.
Ever yours,
Simon Templar.
Toby Halidom lighted a cigarette and read the letter through again, word by word. In some way it lifted a terrible load from his mind, brought him a great breath of relief in the fullness of knowledge that it gave him. And, as he read, there was a queer little smile on his lips that any Headmaster of Harrow would have been surprised to see…
He put the letter in the empty grate, set a match to it, and watched the sheets flare and curl and blacken. “Go on and prosper.”…And then, with a heart that felt suddenly light and clear, he went to the open window and leaned on the sill, looking out into the blue-grey lightening of that morning of the 22nd of November. Somewhere a clock was striking the hour of eight.
PUBLICATION HISTORY
This book sees the start of a new trend, for the Saint and Leslie Charteris were now so well established that the pressure to make a magazine sale prior to publishing in book form was easing off; “The Gold Standard” first appeared in issue No. 193 of The Thriller on 15 October 1932, under the title of “The Gold Flood,” and “The Man from St Louis” first appeared just five issues later on 19 November 1932, under the title of “The Saint—Hi-Jacker.” But “The Death Penalty” was written exclusively for this book.
This book was first published by Hodder & Stoughton in January 1933 under the title of Once More the Saint. The Americans christened it The Saint and Mr Teal when Doubleday published their first edition in May that same year. Eventually, with their sixteenth edition in October 1950, Hodder & Stoughton adopted the American title and have used it ever since.