The Saint Meets his Match (The Saint Series) Page 4

  With a sigh he climbed out and pulled on his dressing-gown. One glance at the line between the star-shaped split in the window and the scar in the plaster was enough to show that the shot had come in at a wide angle. The Saint sighed again. Perhaps his estimate of himself had been wrong. It seemed as if there was something else which annoyed him even more than to be interrupted after business hours—and that was to be taken for a fool.

  He glanced round the room, and selected a battered pickelhaube—relic of a grimmer warfare than that. Then he switched off the light. Returning to the window, he knelt down so that he was below the level of the sill, and raised the lower sash. On one side of this opening he displayed the pickelhaube, looped over the back of a chair, which he edged into position with his foot, and awaited developments with a kindly interest.

  The mews was deserted, and there were no pedestrians visible at the entrance in Berkeley Square at that moment, but he could pick out the shadowy bulk of a big saloon car parked in the cul-de-sac of the mews itself, and the second shot from it impinged accurately upon the pickelhaube with a noise like that of a dull gong.

  Neither of the shots from outside had been accompanied by a report, but Simon Templar, since acquiring the right to be as noisy as he pleased, had ceased to be of such a retiring disposition. He emptied his automatic without stealth, and crammed in a fresh magazine as he raced down the stairs.

  His servant met him in the hall.

  “Count ten, and then open the front door—but lie flat on the ground when you do it,” snapped the Saint, and vanished into the sitting-room without explaining how this feat of contortion was to be performed.

  He was edging back the window curtains when the door began to open.

  He had no fear for the man who was opening it, for there were so few flies on Orace that even a short-sighted man would have had no excuse for mistaking him for a Chilean mule. Neither had he any fear of the agile gunman who was upsetting his evening. Either the car was an ordinary car, in which case the gunman was winged if Simon Templar had ever learnt anything about the art of shooting up automobiles, or the car was an extraordinary car, lined throughout with half-inch nickel steel, in which case the gunman was probably not winged. And, either way, if it came to a fight…

  “Joke!” murmured the Saint, and lowered his head again quickly.

  Ordinary guns he was prepared for, and ready to take on any time. Not that he particularly fancied himself with guns, but he reckoned he could just about pull his weight in most kinds of rough stuff. But there was another kind of gun before tackling which Simon Templar always paused to take a deep breath and recite rapidly the verse from the hymn which contains a line about shelters from the stormy blast, and it was undoubtedly a specimen of that kind of gun which was spluttering a horizontal hailstorm of lead sufficiently close to his direction to be appreciably unpleasant.

  Taking the breath, and postponing the recitation to a later date, Simon put up his head again, and as he did so the fire ceased, and the car picked up speed with a rush and swooped round into the emptiness of Berkeley Square.

  The Saint, standing at the corner of the mews and trying to draw a bead on one of the departing tyres as the car turned into Mount Street, was briskly arrested.

  “Don’t be a bigger fool than you can help,” he snarled, and the constable, recognising him, released him with a stammered apology.

  “It was a car, sir—”

  “You amaze me,” said the Saint, in awe. “I thought it was a team of racing camels. Get the number down in your book.”

  The policeman obeyed, and Simon, with a shrug, turned and shouldered his way back to the house through the nucleus of a gaping crowd.

  He found Orace dabbing an ear with a stained handkerchief.

  “Hurt?”

  “Nossir—just a splinter of wood. They were firin’ low.”

  “It’s more painful through the stomach,” said the Saint enigmatically, and went on upstairs.

  The pursuit of the car from which the machine-gun had been fired wasn’t Simon Templar’s business. It could be carried on just as effectively by the regulars—or just as ineffectively, for the number-plates were certain to have been changed. But it made the Saint think.

  When the Assistant Commissioner called in later for the story, however, Simon showed no signs of perturbation.

  “It was Budd’s idea, of course. He’s seen service in Chicago. But machine-guns in the streets of London are nothing new on me—I’ve had it happen before. There’s no blamed originality in this racket, that’s the trouble.”

  “They seem to think you’re important.”

  “There’s certainly some personal bias against me,” admitted the Saint innocently. “I was expecting a demonstration—I had further words with Jill Trelawney yesterday. Cigarette?”

  “Thanks.”

  The Commissioner helped himself. He was a grizzled, hard-featured man who had worked his way up from the very bottom of the ladder, and he had all the taciturn abruptness common to men who have risen in the world by nothing but a relentless devotion to the ambition of rising in the world.

  “How did she strike you?”

  “She didn’t,” said the Saint perversely. “I think she would have, though, but for the low cunning with which I made my escape. She’s a sweet child.”

  “Charming,” agreed the Commissioner ironically. “So gentle! Such endearing ways!”

  “Ever meet her?”

  “No. I knew her father, of course.”

  Simon grinned.

  “He never made any friendly advance towards me,” he murmured. “But of course there was some prejudice against me at the time. Tell me that story again—from the inside.”

  Cullis settled himself.

  “The inside is that Trelawney swore all along that he’d been framed,” he said. “It’s not such an inside, anyway, because he told exactly the same tale at the inquiry. After all, that was the only defence open to him: he was caught so red-handed that no one could have thought out any other explanation except that he was guilty.”

  “The story?”

  “Police plans were leaking out; raids falling flat regularly. Something had to be done. The Chief Commissioner took a chance on myself and another Superintendent—we had the longest service records—and arranged for us to lead a surprise raid on a Thursday night. On Thursday morning he let it get round the Yard that the raid was to take place on Saturday. We raided on Thursday without any fuss, roped in a gang that had slipped us twice before, and kept everyone on the premises, including the men who made the raid. They were officially supposed to be on leave. Therefore there was nobody left at the Yard, except the Chief, who knew that the raid was over. We had one man sitting over the telephone and another over the letter-box. First post on Friday morning, a letter came in. Just one word, typewritten: ‘Saturday.’ It was on official paper, with the heading cut off, and the experts put it under the microscope and traced it to the typewriter in Trelawney’s office.”

  “Which anyone might have used.”

  “It was postmarked Windsor. Trelawney went down to Windsor for a consultation on Thursday afternoon—and he went alone.”

  “Flimsy,” said the Saint. “An accomplice might have posted it.”

  Cullis nodded.

  “I know it wasn’t any good by itself. But it was a clue. Nobody saw the letter but the Chief and myself. We watched Trelawney ourselves. We were after Waldstein then. He was always slippery, and at that time we reckoned he was vanishing an average of one girl a week through the Pan-European Concert Agency, which was one of his most profitable incarnations. But he was clever, and he never appeared in person, and there was never a line of evidence. Then I had the inspiration. I suggested to the Chief that he went to Trelawney with the story that one of Waldstein’s men had squealed. He saw the point, and agreed. He told the tale to Trelawney, as he’d naturally have told him anything else in the way of business that he was pleased about. Waldstein was in Paris, and the
Chief said that the Sûreté had arranged to intercept any letters, telegrams, or telephone calls addressed to him, so that no one could warn him, and one of our men was going over to arrest him the next morning. And the next morning, bright and early, Trelawney chartered a special aeroplane and set off for Paris.”

  “No!”

  “He did. The Chief and I, having been waiting for just that, chased him in a faster aeroplane, and trailed him all the way from Le Bourget to Waldstein’s hotel. Then, when we’d heard him ask for Waldstein at the office, the Chief tapped him on the shoulder.”

  “And?”

  “He’d got his story pat. Gosh, I’ve never met such a nerve! He just blinked a bit when he first saw the Chief and me, but from then on he never batted an eyelid. We went into a private room, and the Chief told him the game was up.”

  “What game?” asks Trelawney.

  “What are you doing here?” asks the Chief.

  “What you told me to do,” says Trelawney.

  “I never told you to come here,” says the Chief.

  “The Chief says Trelawney went a bit white then, but I never noticed it. Anyway, Trelawney’s story was that he’d been called up by the Chief early that morning and told to go over and attend to Waldstein himself, as there was some difficulty with the French police, and Waldstein was likely to get away during the argument. We asked him why he hadn’t gone to the Quai d’Orsay first, to present his papers, and he said the Chief had told him to get Waldstein first and argue afterwards.”

  “Well?”

  Cullis shrugged.

  “After that, it was all over.”

  “Don’t see it,” said the Saint. “If Trelawney was guilty, why should he tell that story to the very man who would know at once that it wasn’t true?”

  “Brains,” said the Assistant Commissioner. “He’d thought out the possibility of being caught, and he’d got his defence ready—a frame-up. That story was the best he could have told. It prepared his ground for when we opened his safe-deposit and found, among others, banknotes that were traced to Waldstein.”

  “How did he account for those?”

  “He couldn’t.”

  “And afterwards?”

  “The Chief decided not to make a public scandal of it. For one thing, it would have been difficult to get a conviction, even on that evidence, because we couldn’t bring Waldstein into it. Waldstein, in the eyes of the ignorant world, was a perfectly respectable citizen and is the same to this day. So there wasn’t any lawful reason why he shouldn’t have given Trelawney money. Still, Trelawney was asked for his resignation, and he died a month afterwards. I don’t like thinking about that part of it—it isn’t pleasant to think that I was indirectly responsible, even if he was a grafter.”

  Simon reached for an ash-tray.

  “And yet,” he said, “it seems rather a fluke. Why should Waldstein have been the right bait? And why should Trelawney have walked into the trap so easily?”

  Cullis shrugged again.

  “Waldstein was the sort of man who might have been the right bait. We took a chance. If it had failed, we’d have had to think of something else. But if Waldstein was the right bait, Trelawney was bound to walk into the trap. If a man takes graft, he can’t let his clients down; if he does, they can squeal on him. Waldstein being in Paris put Trelawney in a tight corner, but he had to take his chance. He didn’t know how big a chance it was. Ordinarily, you see, he might easily have got away with it. But he didn’t know that there was already some sort of evidence against him; he didn’t know he was being followed, and he couldn’t have guessed that there could be enough suspicion to lead to the opening of his safe-deposit.”

  “Had he any particular enemies?”

  “No more than the average successful policeman.”

  “No name you can remember hearing him mention?”

  Cullis tugged at an iron-grey moustache.

  “Heavens! I don’t know!”

  “No one of the name of—Essenden?”

  It was a shot in the dark, but it creased two additional wrinkles into the Commissioner’s lined forehead.

  “What made you think of that?” he asked.

  “I didn’t,” said the Saint. “It just fell out of the blue. But Jill was on her way to Essenden’s when I first met her, and that was the first time the Angels have been seen out before an arrest. Get me?”

  “But they were there to cover Dyson. Surely it’s reasonable for them to have realised that it’s easier to prevent a man being arrested than to get him away after the arrest?”

  Simon nodded.

  “I know. Still, I’m keeping an open mind.”

  He continued in communion with his open mind for some time after the Commissioner had left—and went to bed with the mind, if possible, more open than before.

  Perhaps Sir Francis Trelawney had been framed. Perhaps he had not been framed. If he had been framed, it had been brilliantly done. If he had not been framed…Well, it was quite natural that a girl like Jill Trelawney, as he estimated her, might refuse to believe it. And, either way if you looked at it from the standpoint of a law-abiding citizen and an incipient policeman to boot, the rights and wrongs of the Trelawney case made no difference to the rights and wrongs of Jill.

  Within the past five months, a complete dozen of valuable prisoners had been rescued from under the very arms of the law, long as those arms were traditionally reputed to be, and the manner of their rescue, in every case, betrayed such an exhaustive knowledge of police methods and routine that at times a complete reorganisation of the Criminal Investigation Department’s system seemed to be the only possible alternative to impotent surrender. And this, as is the way of such things, accurately coincided with one of those waves of police unpopularity and hysterical newspaper criticism which make Commissioners and Superintendents acidulated and old before their time. Clearly, it could not go on. The newspapers said so, and therefore it must have been so. And the Saint understood quite calmly and contentedly that, after the manner in which the Saint had made his debut as a law-abiding citizen, either the Angels of Doom or Simon Templar had got to come to a sudden and sticky end.

  Completely comprehending this salient fact, the Saint drank his breakfast coffee black the next morning, and sent the milk-bottle from outside his front door to an analyst. He had the report by lunch-time.

  “At least,” he told Cullis, “I’m collecting the makings of a case against the Angels.”

  “There was nothing against them before,” assented the Commissioner sarcastically.

  Simon shook his head.

  “There wasn’t. Assaulting the police, obstructing the police—I tell you, in spite of everything, you could only have got them on minor charges. But attempted murder—”

  “Or even real murder,” said Cullis cheerfully.

  2

  “Slinky” Dyson had squealed. Simon Templar had to admit that nothing but that happy windfall had enabled him to step so promptly upon the tail of the Angels of Doom. Slinky was pulled in for suspicious loitering one evening, and when they searched him they found on his person a compact leather wallet containing tools which were held to be house-breaking implements within the meaning of the Act. Simon happened to be in Marlborough Street police station at the time, and witnessed the discovery.

  “I was waiting for a friend,” said Slinky. “Honest I was.”

  “Honest you may have been,” said the Inspector heavily. “But you grew out of that years ago.”

  Shortly after Slinky had been locked up, he asked to speak to the Inspector again, and the Inspector thought the squeal sufficiently promising to fetch Teal in to hear it. And then Teal sent in the Saint.

  “I told you I was waiting for a friend,” said Slinky, “and that’s gospel. But if you’d pulled me tomorrow…I was going down to take a look at Lord Essenden’s party. I had a tip from the Angels. You’ll find the letter in my room—I put it in the Bible on the shelf over the bed. They said I was to take what
I liked, how I liked, and they’d see I made a good getaway. Now, you ain’t told me why I’m here, but I know. There’s been a scream. I don’t know why they should want to shop me, but there’s been a scream…An’ I’d take it as a favour, sir, if you’d tell me who was the screamer.”

  “I don’t know,” said the Saint truthfully. “Maybe you talk in your sleep.”

  They found the letter as Slinky had said they would find it, and it was short and to the point.

  And the Saint, acting upon it, went to Lord Essenden’s party unknown to Lord Essenden, and thus met Jill Trelawney and Stephen Weald and Pinky Budd, and what followed we know.

  After the jokes of the machine-gun and the milk, the Saint saw Slinky Dyson again, and was able to give some unhelpful information to that puzzled man.

  “There was no scream,” he said. “That is official. It was just your bad luck, Slinky.”

  Dyson scratched his head.

  “I’ll believe you, Mr Templar. It was bad luck all right. But you’ll remember my squeak, sir?”

  “You were remanded for a week, weren’t you?”

  “Yes, Mr Templar.”

  “If we let you out, will you take a job?”

  “What sort of job?” asked Slinky suspiciously.

  “Oh, not work,” said the Saint soothingly. “I wouldn’t dream of asking you to do that.”

  Slinky relaxed.

  “I’ll hear about it, Mr Templar.”

  “How much do you want for a black eye?”

  Slinky stared.

  “Beg pardon, Mr Templar?”

  “You heard me.”

  The man shifted his eyes nervously, and giggled.

  “Wh-what?”

  “I didn’t ask you to give an imitation of a consumptive Wyandotte laying a bad egg,” said the Saint patiently. “I asked how much you wanted for a black eye.”

  “You want to give me a black eye, Mr Templar?”

  “Very much indeed.”

  “What for?”

  “Five pounds.”

  “What for after that?”