The Saint vs Scotland Yard (The Holy Terror) Page 7

  Chapter X

  To Mr. Teal, who in those days knew the Saint's habits almost as well as he knew his own, it was merely axiomatic that breakfast and Simon Templar coincided somewhere be­tween the hours of 11 a.m. and 1 p.m.; and therefore it is not surprising that the visit which he paid to 7, Upper Berkeley Mews on one historic morning resulted in a severe shock to his system. For a few moments after the door had been opened to him he stood bovinely rooted to the mat, looking like some watcher of the skies who has just seen the Great Bear turn a back-somersault and march rapidly over the horizon in column of all fours. And when he had pulled himself together, he followed the Saint into the sitting-room with the air of a man who is not at all certain that there is no basin of water balanced over the door to await his entrance.

  "Have some gum, old dear," invited the Saint hospitably; and Mr. Teal stopped by the table and blinked at him.

  "What's the idea?" he demanded suspiciously.

  The Saint looked perplexed.

  "What idea, brother?"

  "Is your clock fast, or haven't you been to bed yet?"

  Simon grinned.

  "Neither. I'm going to travel, and Pat and I have got to push out and book passages and arrange for international overdrafts and all that sort of thing." He waved towards Patri­cia Holm, who was smoking a cigarette over The Times. "Pat, you have met Claud Eustace, haven't you? Made his pile in Consolidated Gas. Mr. Teal, Miss Holm. Miss Holm, Mr. Teal. Consider yourselves divorced."

  Teal picked up the packet of spearmint that sat sedately in the centre of the table, and put it down again uneasily. He produced another packet from his own pocket.

  "Did you say you were going away?" he asked.

  "I did. I'm worn out, and I feel I need a complete rest—I did a couple of hours' work yesterday, and at my time of life . . ."

  "Where were you going?"

  The Saint shrugged.

  "Doubtless Thomas Cook will provide. We thought of some nice warm islands. It may be the Canaries, the Balearic or Little by Little ——"

  "And what about the Scorpion?"

  "Oh yes, the Scorpion . . . Well, you can have him all to yourself now, Claud."

  Simon glanced towards the mantelpiece, and the detective followed his gaze. There was a raw puncture in the panelling where a stiletto had recently reposed, but the papers that had been pinned there were gone. The Saint took the sheaf from his pocket.

  "I was just going to beetle along and pay my income tax," he said airily. "Are you walking Hanover Square way?"

  Teal looked at him thoughtfully, and it may be recorded to the credit of the detective's somnolently cyclopean self-control that not a muscle of his face moved.

  "Yes, I'll go with you—I expect you'll be wanting a drink," he said; and then his eyes fell on the Saint's wrist.

  He motioned frantically at it.

  "Did you sprain that trying to get the last drops out of the barrel?" he inquired.

  Simon pulled down his sleeve.

  "As a matter of fact, it was a burn," he said.

  "The Scorpion?"

  "Patricia."

  Teal's eyes descended one millimetre. He looked at the girl, and she smiled at him in a seraphic way which made the detective's internal organs wriggle. Previously, he had been wont to console himself with the reflection that that peculiarly exasperating kind of sweetness in the smile was the original and unalienable copyright of one lone face out of all the faces in the wide world. He returned his gaze to the Saint.

  "Domestic strife?" he queried, and Simon assumed an expres­sion of pained reproach.

  "We aren't married," he said.

  Patricia flicked her cigarette into the fireplace and came over. She tucked one hand into the belt of her plain tweed suit, and laid the other on Simon Templar's shoulder. And she continued to smile seraphically upon the detective.

  "You see, we were being buried alive," she explained simply.

  "All down in the—er—what's-its of the earth," said the Saint.

  "Simon hadn't got his knife, but he remembered his cigarette-lighter just in time. He couldn't reach it himself, so I had to do it. And he never made a sound—I never knew till afterwards ——''

  "It was a minor detail," said the Saint.

  He twitched a small photograph from his pocket and passed it to Teal.

  "From the Scorpion's passport," he said, "I found it in a drawer of his desk. That was before he caught me with as neat a trick as I've come across—the armchairs in his study will repay a sleuth-like investigation, Claud. Then, if you pass on to the cellars, you'll find a piece of cement flooring that had only just begun to floor. Pat and I are supposed to be under there. Which reminds me—if you decide to dig down in the hope of finding us, you'll find my second-best boiled shirt somewhere in the depths. We had to leave it behind. I don't know if you've ever noticed it, but I can give you my word that even the most pliant rubber dickey rattles like a suit of armour when you're trying to move quietly."

  For a space the detective stared at him.

  Then he took out a notebook.

  It was, in its way, one of the most heroic things he ever did.

  "Where is this place?" he asked.

  "Twenty-eight, Mallaby Road, Arrer. The name is Wilfred Garniman. And about that shirt—if you had it washed at the place where they do yours before you go toddling round the night clubs, and sent it on to me at Palma, I expect I could find a place to burn it. And I've got some old boots upstairs which I thought maybe you might like——"

  Teal replaced his notebook and pencil.

  "I don't want to ask too many questions," he said. "But if Garniman knows you got away——"

  Simon shook his head.

  "Wilfred does not know. He went out to fetch some water to dilute the concrete, and we moved while he was away. Later on I saw him carting out the surplus earth and dumping it on the gardening notes. When you were playing on the sands of Southend in a pair of pink shrimping drawers, Teal, did you ever notice that you can always dig more out of a hole than you can put back in it? Wilfred had quite enough mud left over to make him happy."

  Teal nodded.

  "That's all I wanted," he said, and the Saint smiled.

  "Perhaps we can give you a lift," he suggested politely.

  They drove to Hanover Square in the Saint's car. The Saint was in form. Teal knew that by the way he drove. Teal was not happy about it. Teal was even less happy when the Saint insisted on being escorted into the office.

  "I insist on having police protection," he said. "Scorpions I can manage, but when it comes to tax collectors . . . Not that there's a great difference. The same threatening letters, the same merciless bleeding of the honest toiler, the same bleary

  "All right," said Teal wearily.

  He climbed out of the car, and followed behind Patricia; and so they climbed to the general office. At the high counter which had been erected to protect the clerks from the savage assaults of their victims the Saint halted, and clamoured in a loud voice to be ushered into the presence of Mr. Delborn.

  Presently a scared little man came to the barrier.

  "You wish to see Mr. Delborn, sir?"

  "I do."

  "Yes, sir. What is your business, sir?"

  "I'm a burglar," said the Saint innocently.

  "Yes, sir. What did you wish to see Mr. Delborn about, sir?"

  "About the payment of my income tax, Algernon. I will see Mr. Delborn himself and nobody else; and if I don't see him at once, I shall not only refuse to pay a penny of my tax, but I shall also take this hideous office to pieces and hide it in various drains belonging to the London County Council. By the way, do you know Chief Inspector Teal? Mr. Teal, Mr.Veal. Mr. Veal——"

  "Will you take a seat, sir?"

  "Certainly," said the Saint.

  He was half-way down the stairs when Teal caught him.

  "Look here, Templar," said the detective, breathing heavily through the nose, "I don't care if you have got
the Scorpion in your pocket, but if this is your idea of being funny——"

  Simon put down the chair and scratched his head.

  "I was only obeying instructions," he said plaintively. "I admit it seemed rather odd, but I thought maybe Lionel hadn't got a spare seat in his office."

  Teal and Patricia between them got him as far as the top of the stairs where he put the chair down, sat on it, and refused to move.

  "I'm going home," said Patricia finally.

  "Bring some oranges back with you," said the Saint. "And don't forget your knitting. What time do the early doors open?"

  The situation was only saved by the return of the harassed clerk.

  "Mr. Delborn will see you, sir."

  He led the way through the general office and opened a door at the end.

  "What name, sir?"

  "Ghandi," said the Saint, and stalked into the room.

  And there he stopped.

  For the first time in his life, Simon Templar stood frozen into a kind of paralysis of sheer incredulous startlement.

  In its own genre, that moment was the supremely flabber­gasting instant of his life. Battle, murder, and sudden death of all kinds and varieties notwithstanding, the most hectic mo­ments of the most earth-shaking cataclysms in which he had been involved paled their ineffectual fires beside the eye-shriv­elling dazzle of that second. And the Saint stood utterly still, with every shadow of expression wiped from his face, momentarily robbed of even his facile power of speech, simply staring.

  For the man at the desk was Wilfred Garniman.

  Wilfred Garniman himself, exactly as the Saint had seen him on that very first expedition to Harrow—black-coated, black-tied, the perfect office gentleman with a fifty-two-inch waist. Wilfred Garniman sitting there in a breathless immobil­ity that matched the Saint's, but with the prosperous colour draining from his face and his coarse lips going grey.

  And then the Saint found his voice.

  "Oh, it's you, Wilfred, is it?" The words trickled very softly into the deathly silence. "And this is Simon Templar speaking —not a ghost. I declined to turn into a ghost, even though I was buried. And Patricia Holm did the same. She's outside at this very moment, if you'd like to see her. And so is Chief Inspector Teal—with your photograph in his pocket. . . . Do you know that this is very tough on me, sweetheart? I've promised you to Teal, and I ought to be killing you myself. Buried Pat alive, you did—or you meant to. ... And you're the greasy swine that's been pestering me to pay your knock-kneed taxes. No wonder you took to Scorping in your spare time. I wouldn't mind betting you began in this very office, and the capital you started with was the things you wormed out of people under the disguise of official inquiries. . . . And I came in to give you one thousand, three hundred and thirty-seven pounds, nineteen and fivepence of your own money, all out of the strong-box under that very interesting chair, Wilfred——"

  He saw the beginning of the movement that Garniman made, and hurled himself sideways. The bullet actually skinned one of his lower ribs, though he did not know it until later. He swerved into the heavy desk, and got his hands under the edge. For one weird instant he looked from a range of two yards into the eyes of Wilfred Garniman, who was in the act of rising out of his chair. Garniman's automatic was swinging round for a second shot, and the thunder of the first seemed to still be hanging in the air. And behind him Simon heard the rattle of the door.

  And then—to say that he tipped the desk over would be absurd. To have done anything so feeble would have been a sentence of death pronounced simultaneously upon Patricia Holm and Claud Eustace Teal and himself—at least. The Saint knew that.

  But as the others burst into the room, it seemed as if the Saint gathered up the whole desk in his two hands, from the precarious hold that he had on it, and flung it hugely and terrifically into the wall; and Wilfred Garniman was carried before it like a great bloated fly before a cannon-ball. . . .And, really, that was that. . . .

  The story of the Old Bailey trial reached Palma about six weeks later, in an ancient newspaper which Patricia Holm produced one morning.

  Simon Templar was not at all interested in the story; but he was vastly interested in an illustration thereto which he dis­covered at the top of the page. The Press photographer had done his worst; and Chief Inspector Teal, the hero of the case, caught unawares in the very act of inserting some fresh chew­ing gum in his mouth as he stepped out on to the pavement of Newgate Street, was featured looking almost libellously like an infuriated codfish afflicted with some strange uvular growth.

  Simon clipped out the portrait and pasted it neatly at the head of a large plain postcard. Underneath it he wrote:

  Claud Eustace Teal, when overjoyed,

  Wiggled his dexter adenoid;

  For well-bred policemen think it rude

  To show their tonsils in the nude.

  "That ought to come like a ray of sunshine into Claud's dreary life," said the Saint, surveying his handiwork.

  He may have been right; for the postcard was delivered in error to an Assistant Commissioner who was gifted with a particularly acid tongue, and it is certain that Teal did not hear the last of it for many days.

  PART II

  The Million Pound Day

  Chapter 1

  The scream pealed out at such point-blank range, and was strangled so swiftly and suddenly, that Simon Templar opened his eyes and wondered for a moment whether he had dreamed it.

  The darkness inside the car was impenetrable; and outside, through the thin mist that a light frost had etched upon the windows, he could distinguish nothing but the dull shadows of a few trees silhouetted against the flat pallor of the sky. A glance at the luminous dial of his wrist-watch showed that it was a quarter to five; he had slept barely two hours.

  A week-end visit to some friends who lived on the remote margin of Cornwall, about thirteen inches from Land's End, had terminated a little more than seven hours earlier, when the Saint, feeling slightly limp after three days in the company of two young souls who were convalescing from a recent honey­moon, had pulled out his car to make the best of a clear night road back to London. A few miles beyond Basingstoke he had backed into a side lane for a cigarette, a sandwich, and a nap. The cigarette and the sandwich he had had; but the nap should have lasted until the hands of his watch met at six-thirty and the sky was white and clear with the morning—he had fixed that time for himself, and had known that his eyes would not open one minute later.

  And they hadn't. But they shouldn't have opened one min­ute earlier, either. . . . And the Saint sat for a second or two without moving, straining his ears into the stillness for the faintest whisper of sound that might answer the question in his mind, and driving his memory backwards into those last blank moments of sleep to recall the sound that had woken him. And then, with a quick stealthy movement, he turned the handle of the door and slipped out into the road.

  Before that, he had realised that that scream could never have been shaped in his imagination. The sheer shrieking horror of it still rang between his eardrums and his brain; the hideous high-pitched sob on which it had died seemed still to be quivering on the air. And the muffled patter of running feet which had reached him as he listened had served only to confirm what he already knew.

  He stood in the shadow of the car with the cold damp smell of the dawn in his nostrils, and heard the footsteps coming closer. They were coming towards him down the main road— now that he was outside the car, they tapped into his brain with an unmistakable clearness. He heard them so distinctly, in the utter silence that lay all around, that he felt he could almost see the man who had made them. And he knew that that was the man who had screamed. The same stark terror that had gone shuddering through the very core of the scream was beating out the wild tattoo of those running feet—the same stomach-sinking dread translated into terms of muscular reaction. For the feet were not running as a man ordinarily runs. They were kicking, blinding, stumbling, hammering along in the mad mu
scle-binding heart-bursting flight of a man whose reason has tottered and cracked before a vision of all the tortures of the Pit. ...

  Simon felt the hairs on the nape of his neck prickling. In another instant he could hear the gasping agony of the man's breathing, but he stayed waiting where he was. He had moved a little way from the car, and now he was crouched right by the corner of the lane, less than a yard from the road, com­pletely hidden in the blackness under the hedge.

  The most elementary process of deduction told him that no man would run like that unless the terror that drove him on was close upon his heels—-and no man would have screamed like that unless he had felt cold upon his shoulder the clutch­ing hand of an intolerable doom. Therefore the Saint waited.

  And then the man reached the corner of the lane.

  Simon got one glimpse of him—a man of middle height and build, coatless, with his head back and his fists working. Under the feebly lightening sky his face showed thin and hollow-cheeked, pointed at the chin by a small peaked beard, the eyes starting from their sockets.

  He was done in—finished. He must have been finished two hundred yards back. But as he reached the corner the ultimate end came. His feet blundered again, and he plunged as if a trip-wire had caught him across the knees. And then it must have been the last instinct of the hunted animal that made him turn and reel round into the little lane; and the Saint's strong arms caught him as he fell.

  The man stared up into the Saint's face. His lips tried to shape a word, but the breath whistled voicelessly in his throat. And then his eyes closed and his body went limp, and Simon lowered him gently to the ground.

  The Saint straightened up again, and vanished once more into the gloom. The slow bleaching of the sky seemed only to intensify the blackness that sheltered him, while beyond the shadows a faint light was beginning to pick out the details of the road. And Simon heard the coming of the second man.