14 The Saint Goes On Page 6

  His finger was twitching over the trigger; and the Saint sighed.

  He felt rather sorry for Junior Inspector Pryke. While he disliked the man's face, and his voice, and his clothes, and almost everything else about him, he had not actually plumbed such implacable depths of hatred as to wish him to turn himself into a horrible example which would be held up for the disgusted inspection of students of the Police College for the next decade. But it seemed as if this was the only ambition Desmond Pryke had to fulfil, and he had left no stone unturned in his efforts to achieve it. From permitting himself to be lured into an argument on comparative gastrometry to that final howler of pulling a gun to enforce an ordinary arrest, Junior Inspector Pryke had run doggedly through the complete catalogue of Things A Young Policeman Should Not Do; but it was not Simon Templar's fault.

  The Saint shrugged.

  "Okay, Desmond," he murmured. "If that's the way you feel about it, I can't stop you. I've done my best. But don't come around asking me for a pension when they drum you out of the Force."

  He put on his hat, and pulled the brim out to the perfect piratical tilt. There was not a shadow of misgiving in the smile that he gave Patricia, and he saw no reason for there to be a shadow.

  "Be seein' ya, keed," he said. "Don't worry-I'll be back for dinner. But I'm afraid Desdemona is going to have a pain in her little turn-turn before then."

  He sauntered out unhurriedly into Stratton Street, and himself hailed the nearest taxi. Pryke put away his gun and climbed in after him. The cab turned into Piccadilly with a burden of internal silence that was almost broken by the exuberance of its own one-sided rancour.

  Simon's nostrils detected a curious sweet scent in the air he was breathing. Ever the genial optimist, he tried to thaw out the polar obmutescence with a fresh turn of pleasant gossip.

  "That perfume you're using, Desmond," he said. "I don't think I've come across it before. What's it called-Pansy's Promise? Or is it Quelques Tantes?"

  "You wait till we get to the station," said the detective, with sweltering monotony. "Perhaps you won't feel so funny then."

  "Perhaps I won't," Simon agreed languidly. "And perhaps you won't look so funny."

  He yawned. The cab, with all its windows tightly closed, was warm and stuffy; and the conversational limitations of Inspector Pryke were also conducive to slumber.

  The Saint closed his eyes. He felt limp and bored, and his brain was starting to wander in a most remarkable and disjointed manner. It was all rather voluptuous and dreamy, like sinking away in some Elysian hop-joint. . . . Suddenly he felt faintly sick.

  He sat up, with a tremendous effort. A message was trying to get through to his brain, but it seemed to be muffled in layer after layer of cotton-wool. His chest was labouring, and he could feel his heart pounding at a crazy speed. The face of Junior Inspector Pryke stared back at him through a kind of violet haze. Pryke's chest was heaving also, and his mouth was open: it crossed the Saint's mind that he looked like an agitated fish. . . . Then everything within his blurring vision whirled round like a top, and the blood roared in his ears like a thousand waterfalls. The message that had been trying to break through to him flashed in at last, and he made a convulsive lunge towards the window behind the driver's impassive back; but he never reached it. It seemed as if the bottom fell out of the world, and he went plunging down through fold after fold of numbing silence, down and down through cold green clouds of that curious perfume into an infinity of utter nothingness. . . .

  VII There was a decanter and three sherry-glasses on the table-and one of the glasses was untouched. They had been set out there more than an hour ago; and the decanter was nearly empty.

  Patricia Holm wandered restlessly about the living-room. Her face was quiet and untroubled, but she couldn't relax and sit down. The dark had come down; and the view of the Green Park from the tall windows was hidden by a grey-blue veil in which the yellow specks of the street lamps shone brighter than the stars, and the lights of cars travelling up and down the Mall gleamed like flocks of dawdling comets. She drew the curtains, for something to do, and stole her thirty-seventh glance at the clock. It was a couple of minutes after nine.

  "What's happened to him?" she said.

  Mr. Uniatz shook his head. He stretched out a spade-shaped hand for the decanter, and completed his solo conquest of its contents.

  "I dunno," he said feebly. "Maybe he couldn't shake de diddo. Dey come dat way, sometimes."

  "He's been arrested before," she said. "It's never kept him as long as this. If anything had gone wrong, he ought to have got word through to us somehow."

  Mr. Uniatz chewed desperately at his poisonous cigar. He wanted to be helpful. As we have already explained, he was not naturally hot on the higher flights of the intellect; but on such an occasion as this he was not the man to shirk his obligations. The deep creases in his rudimentary forehead bore their own witness to the torture he was enduring from these unaccustomed stresses on his brain.

  "Maybe he's on his way, right now," he hazarded encouragingly.

  Patricia threw herself into a chair. It was another restless movement, rather than an attempt to rest.

  "That's not enough, Hoppy." She was thinking aloud, mechanically, more for the anaesthetic effect of actual speech than with any hope of coaxing something useful out of her companion. "If anything's gone wrong, we've got to be ready for it. We've got to pick up our own cue. He'd expect us to find the answer. Suppose he isn't on his way-what has he done?"

  "He's got de ice," said Mr. Uniatz, vaguely.

  "I don't know whether he's got it now. Probably he parked it somewhere on his way here. That's what he'd have done if he was expecting trouble. Sometimes he simply puts things in the mail-sends them to a hotel or a poste restante somewhere, and picks them up later on when it's all clear. Usually they aren't even addressed to his own name."

  Hoppy frowned.

  "But if dey ain't addressed to his own name," he said, "how does he pick dem up?"

  "Well, when he goes to pick them up, he gives the name that they were addressed to," explained Patricia kindly.

  Mr. Uniatz nodded. He had always been lost in admiration of the Saint's intellectual gifts, and this solution was only one more justification of his faith. Obviously a guy who could work out things like that in his own head had got what it takes.

  "But this time we don't know where he's sent them, or what name he addressed them to," she said.

  The tentative expression of pleased complacency faded away from Hoppy's face, and the flutings of honest effort crowded themselves once more into the restricted space between his eyebrows and his hair. He was too loyal to give way to the feeling that this was an unnecessary complication, invented simply to make things more difficult for him; but he wished people wouldn't ask him to tackle problems like that. Reaching again for the decanter and finding it empty, he glowered at it plaintively, like a trusted friend who had done him a gratuitous injury.

  "So what?" he said, passing the buck with an air of profound reluctance.

  "I must know what's happened to him," said Patricia steadily.

  She got up and lighted a cigarette. Twice more she paced out the length of the room with her supple boyish stride; and then with a sudden resolution she slipped into the chair by the telephone, and dialled Teal's private number.

  He was at home. In a few moments his drowsy voice came over the wire.

  "Who's that?"

  "This is Patricia Holm." Her voice was as cool and careless as the Saint's own. "Haven't you finished with Simon yet? We're waiting for him to join us for dinner, and I'm getting hungry and Hoppy is getting away with all the sherry."

  "I don't know what you mean," he answered suspiciously.

  "You ought to know, Claud."

  He didn't seem to know. She explained. He was silent for so long that she thought she had been cut off; and then his suspicious perplexity came through again in the same lethargic monotone.

  "I'll ring you ag
ain in a few minutes," he said.

  She sat on at the table, smoking her cigarette without enjoyment, playing a noiseless tattoo with her fingertips on the smooth green bakelite of the instrument. Over on the other side of the room, Hoppy Uniatz discovered the untouched glass which had been reserved for the Saint, and drew it cautiously towards him.

  In five minutes the telephone bell rang.

  "They don't know anything about it at Scotland Yard or Market Street," Teal informed her. "And it's the first I've heard of it myself. Is this another of your family jokes, or what?"

  "I'm not joking," said Patricia, and there was a sudden chill in her eyes which would have made the statement superfluous if Teal could have seen her. "Pryke took him away about half-past five. It was a perfectly ridiculous charge, but he wouldn't listen to reason. It couldn't possibly have kept the Saint as long as this."

  The wire was silent again for a second or two. She could visualise the detective sucking his chewing gum more plainly than television could have shown him.

  "I'll come round and see you," he said.

  He was there inside the quarter-hour, with his round harvest-moon face stodgy and disinterested under his shabby pot hat, chewing the same tasteless cud of chicle and listening to the story again. The repetition added nothing to the sum of his knowledge, except that there was no joke involved. When he had heard it through and asked his questions, he called Scotland Yard and Market Street police station again, only to have his inquiries answered by the same blank negatives. Junior Inspector Pryke, apparently, had left Market Street at about a quarter to four, without saying where he was going; and nothing had been heard of him since. Certainly he had not reported in with an arrest anywhere in the Metropolitan area.

  Only one thing required no explanation; and he knew that Patricia Holm knew it, by this time, as well as he knew it himself-although her recital had carefully told him nothing more than Simon Templar himself would have done.

  "The Saint was after the High Fence," he said bluntly. "He robbed Enderby this afternoon. I know it, and you know it, even if it is quite true that Enderby got on to us shortly after the alarm and swore it was all a mistake. Therefore it's obvious that Enderby is something to do with the High Fence. Maybe we can't prove it; but the High Fence knows his own men. It doesn't take much more to work out what happened."

  "I think you're jumping to a lot of conclusions," said Patricia, with Saintly sweetness, and did not deceive him for an instant.

  "Perhaps I am," he said stolidly. "But I know what I'd have done if I'd been the High Fence. I'd have heard what had happened as soon as Scotland Yard did; and I'd have watched this place. I'd have seen Pryke come in; and even that mightn't have stopped me. . . . They left here in a taxi, did they? Well, you ought to be able to work it out as well as I can."

  "You mean de High Fence puts de arm on him?" asked Mr. Uniatz, translating innuendo into an idiom that he could understand.

  Teal looked round at him with heavy-lidded eyes in which the perpetual boredom was as flimsy a sham as anyone was likely to see it.

  "If you know the answers, I expect you'll go to work on them," he said, with a stony significance of which he would have been the first to disclaim all knowledge. "I've got my own job to do. If one of you keeps in touch with this address, I'll let you know if I find out anything."

  He left a roomful of equally stony silence behind him, and went out to take a taxi to Scotland Yard.

  The High Fence had got the Saint and Junior Inspector Pryke-he had no doubts about that. He knew, although he could never prove it, that his analysis of the situation had been as mathematically accurate as any jig-saw he would ever put together could hope to be. And it was easier to put together than most problems. He would have been happier if his own course of action had been no less clearly indicated; and it disturbed him more than he could have cared to admit to realise that he was far more concerned about the fate of the Saint than he was about the fate of his own smug subordinate.

  This secondary concern, however, was settled shortly after ten o'clock, when a police constable observed a pair of feet protruding from a bush on the edge of Wimbledon Common, and used the feet to haul out the body of a man. In the first flush of instinctive optimism, the policeman thought that the body was dead, and pictured himself (with photograph and biographical note) in the headlines of a sensational murder mystery; but closer investigation showed it to be alive, and with medical assistance it was quite easily resuscitated into a healthy profane Junior Inspector of unmistakable Trenchard parentage.

  "So the High Fence didn't kill you," said Mr. Teal malignantly, when a police car had brought the salvage to Scotland Yard.

  "I thought you'd be pleased," retorted Pryke pettishly.

  He had a sick headache from the gas which had been pumped into the cab, and he was on the defensive for trouble. Mr. Teal did not disappoint him.

  "Who told you to arrest the Saint?" he inquired mucilaginously, when Pryke had given his account of the affair.

  "I didn't know I had to be told. I heard of the robbery at Enderby's, and there were grounds for believing that the Saint had a hand in it"

  "You know that Enderby has denied that there ever was a robbery, and said it was entirely a misunderstanding?"

  "Has he? That's what the Saint told me, but I didn't believe him. I knew nothing about it. I went out as soon as I received the first information, and waited for him at his flat."

  "And you had to use a gun to arrest him."

  Pryke flushed. He had thought it wiser to say nothing about that.

  "He refused to come with me," he said sulkily. "I had to do something, and I didn't want to make a scene."

  "It would have made the biggest scene you're ever likely to be in, if you had got him to the station and that gun had been mentioned in the police court," Teal said caustically. "As it is, you'll be on the carpet first thing in the morning. Or will you tell the Assistant Commissioner that all this was my idea, too?"

  Pryke scowled, and said nothing.

  "Anyhow," Teal wound up, "the Saint has got to be found now. After your performance, he's technically an escaped prisoner. Since it was your arrest, you'd better do something about it."

  "What do you suggest?" asked Pryke, with treacherous humility.

  Teal, having no answer, glared at him. Everything that could be prescribed for such an emergency had been done already--every alarm issued, every feeler put out, every net spread. If he could have thought of anything more, Chief Inspector Teal would have done it himself. But there was nothing to guide him: even what had been done was a mere firing of routine shots in the dark. The taxi had disappeared, and no one had even noticed its number. Beyond any doubt, the man who had ordered its movements was the same man who had killed Johnny Anworth and Sunny Jim Fasson- who, unless something were done quickly, would be just as likely to kill Simon Templar. A man knew too much, and he died: the logical sequence was quite clearly established, but Teal found no pleasure in following it to its conclusion.

  "Since you're so damned independent of orders and regulations," he said, with excessive violence, "you might pay some attention to this man Enderby. I know he swears that the whole thing was a mistake, but I've heard of plenty of those mistakes before. There's no evidence and nothing we can charge him with, but if those stones that were stolen weren't stolen property already, I'll eat my hat. And if Enderby isn't hand in glove with the High Fence, even if he isn't the High Fence himself, I'll eat yours as well."

  Pryke shook his head.

  "I don't know that I agree. Fasson was shot as he was running out of Abbot's Yard, and when we made a house-to-house inquiry we found out that Templar had a place there under one of his aliases--------"

  "Well, what about it? I've never believed that the Saint didn't have something to do with it. I don't believe he killed Fasson; but I do believe that he got the body away from the flat where Fasson was shot, and that Fasson wasn't dead. I believe that he made Fasson talk; and that Fasso
n wasn't really killed until either the Saint let him go, or he ran away. I think Fasson told him something that made him go after Enderby, and"

  Pryke shook his head again, with an increase of confidence and patronising self-satisfaction that made Teal stop short with his gorge rising under the leaven of undutiful thoughts of murder.

  "I think you're wrong," he said.

  "Oh, I am, am I?" said Mr. Teal malevolently. "Well, what's the right answer?"

  The smug shaking of Junior Inspector Pryke's head continued until Teal could have kicked him.

  "I have a theory of my own," he said, "which I'd like to work on-unless you've got something definite that you want me to do."

  "You go ahead and work on it," replied Teal blisteringly. "When I want something definite done, I shan't ask you. In another minute you'll be telling me that the Assistant Commissioner is the High Fence."

  The other stood up, smoothing down the points of his waistcoat. In spite of the situation for which he was responsible, his uncrushable superciliousness was reviving outwardly untouched; but Teal saw that underneath it he was hot and simmering.

  "That wouldn't be so wild as some of your guesses," he said mysteriously. "I'd like to get the Saint-if anyone can be made a Chief Inspector for failing to catch him, they'd have to make a Superintendent of anyone who did it."

  "Make you a Superintendent?" jeered Teal. "With a name like yours?"

  "It's a very good name," said his junior tartly. "There was a Pryke at the Battle of Hastings."

  "I'll bet he was a damn good cook," snarled Mr. Teal.

  VIII For Simon Templar there was an indefinite period of trackless oblivion, from which he was roused now and again to dream curious dim dreams. Once the movement of the cab stopped, and he heard voices; then a door slammed, and he sunk back into the dark before his impression had more than touched the fringe of consciousness. Once he seemed to be carried over a gravel path: he heard the scrunch of stones, and felt the grip of the hands that were holding him up, but there was no power of movement in his limbs. It was too much trouble to open his eyes, and he fell asleep again almost immediately. Between those momentary stirrings of awareness, which were so dull and nebulous that they did not even stimulate a desire to amplify them, stretched a colourless void of languorous insensibility in which time had no landmarks.