The Saint and Mr. Teal (The Saint Series) Page 7

  “Well, what are you getting at?” grated the big man.

  “Just checking up,” said the Saint equably. “So you know how we got here. And I found that King’s Messenger in the other room—that’s what first confirmed what we were up against. Anyone making gold is one of the things the Secret Service sits and waits for all year round: one day the discovery is going to be genuine, and the first news of it would send the international exchanges crazy. There’d be the most frightful panic in history, and any Government has got to be watching for it. That King’s Messenger had the news—you were lucky to get him.”

  The big man was silent again, but his face was pale and pasty.

  “Two murders, Jones, that were your very own handiwork,” said the Saint, “And then—the professor. Accidental, of course. But very unfortunate. Because it means that you’re the only man left alive who knows this tremendous secret.”

  Simon actually looked away. But he had no idea what he looked at. The whole of his faculties were concentrated on the features which were still pinned in the borders of his field of vision, watching with every sense in his body for the answer to the question that he could not possibly ask. That one thing had to be known before anything else could be done, and there was only one way to know it. He bluffed, as he had bluffed once before, without a tremor of his voice or a flicker of his eyes…

  And the most impressive thing about the big man’s expression was that it did not change. The big man took the Saint’s casual assertion into his store of knowledge without the slightest symptom of surprise. It signified nothing more to him than one more superfluous blow on the head of a nail that was already driven deep enough. He glared at the Saint, and the gun in the Saint’s hand, without any movement beyond a mechanical moistening of his lips, intent only on watching for the chance to fight that seemed infinitely improbable…And the Saint tapped the ash from his cigarette and looked at the big man again.

  “I got nearly everything out of Dr Quell before you interrupted us,” he said, clinching the assertion of utter certainty. “It was clever of you to wheedle Quell’s process out of him bit by bit—and very useful that you had enough scientific knowledge to understand it. I suppose Quell’s sphere of service was running out about this time, anyway—you’d have got rid of him yourself even if there’d been no accident. A very sound and prudent policy for a Master Mind, Jones, but just a shade too dangerous when the scheme springs a leak like me.”

  “Cut it short,” snarled the big man. “What more d’you want? The gold’s there—”

  “Yes, the gold’s certainly there,” said the Saint dispassionately. “And in about ten minutes the police will be here to gape at it. I’m afraid that can’t be helped. I’d like to get rich quick myself, but I’ve realised tonight that there’s one way of doing it which is too dangerous for any man to tackle. And you don’t realise it, Jones—that’s the trouble. So we can’t take any risks.”

  “No?”

  “No.” Simon gazed at the big man with eyes that were very clear, and hard as polished flints. “You see, that secret’s too big a thing to be left with you. There’s too much dynamite tied up in it. And yet the police couldn’t do anything worth a damn. They’re bound by the law, and it’s just possible you might beat a murder rap. I don’t know how the evidence might look in front of a jury, and of course my reputation’s rather shop-soiled, and you may be a member of parliament for all I know…Are you following me, Jones? The police couldn’t make you part with your secret—”

  “Neither could you.”

  “Have your own way. As it happens, I’m not trying. But with a reputation like mine it’d be a bad business for me to shoot you. On the other hand, there could always be another accident—before the police arrived.”

  The man called Jones stood with his arms hanging loosely at his sides, staring at the Saint unblinkingly. In those last few minutes he had gone suddenly quiet: the snarl had faded out of his voice and left a more restrained level of grim interrogation. His chin was sunken tensely on his powerful chest, and under the thick black eyebrows his eyes were focusing on the Saint with the stony brightness of brown marble.

  He hunched his muscular shoulders abruptly—it was the only movement he made.

  “Is that a threat?” he asked.

  “No.” Simon was just as quiet. “It’s a promise. When the police arrive they’re going to find that there’s been another accident. And the fact will be that you, Jones, also fell against that machine.”

  8

  The big man leapt forward as he finished speaking. Simon knew that that was coming—he was ready and waiting for it. There was no other way about it, and he had been prepared for it ever since one question had been answered. He had never intended to shoot after they returned to the laboratory, whatever happened, but he snatched his gun away out of range of the wild grab that Jones made for it, and tossed it neatly across to Patricia. She caught it at her knees, and the Saint slipped under the big man’s arms and jammed him against the door. For an instant they strained against each other face to face, and the Saint drew a deep breath and spoke over his shoulder.

  “Don’t shoot, Pat,” he said. “Get over in the corner and stay out of the way. The gun’s for you to get out with if anything goes wrong.”

  The big man heaved up off the door in a mighty jerk, and hurled the Saint back with all the impetus of his superior weight. He shook off the Saint’s grip with a writhing effort of his arms—Simon felt the man’s biceps cording under his hands before the grip was broken, and knew that he was taking on nothing easy. The force of his opponent’s rush drove him to within a yard of the deadly steel dome; then he recovered his balance, and stopped the man with a couple of half-arm jolts to the stomach that thudded into their mark like pistons hitting a sandbag. Jones grunted, and went back on his heels, dropping his hands to guard, and the Saint shot out a snake-like left for the exposed chin. The big man took it on the side of his jaw, deliberately, and snatched at the flying wrist as the blow landed.

  His fingers closed on it like iron clamps, twisting spitefully. He had every ounce of the strength that his build indicated, and he was as hard as teak all over—the Saint had felt that when he landed with those two staggering blows that would have broken most men in the middle. What was more, he had been trained in a school of fighting that knew its stuff: he never gave the Saint a chance to make a boxing match of it. Simon swerved away from the dome and kicked up his knee, but the big man edged back. The Saint’s left arm was clamped in an agonising arm-lock, and he was wrenched ruthlessly round again towards the dome. The leverage of the hold was bearing him down to his knees; then with a swift, terrific kick he straightened his legs under him and swung his right fist over in a smashing blow at the back of the man’s neck. The man coughed, and crumpled to his hands and knees, and Simon tore his wrist out of the grip and fell on top of him.

  They rolled over together, with the Saint groping for a toe-hold. One of the big man’s insteps came under the palm of his hand, and he hauled it up and bent it over with a brutal efficiency that made his victim gasp. But the big man was wise to that one—the hold only hurt him for a couple of seconds, before he flung it off with a mighty squirm of his body that pitched the Saint over on his face. In an instant the big man’s legs were scissoring for a clasp round the Saint’s neck and shoulders, and his hands were clamping again on the Saint’s wrist. Simon heard his muscles creaking as he strained against the backward pressure that was slowly straightening his arm. Once that arm was locked out straight from the shoulder, with the elbow over the big man’s knee-joint, he would have to move like a supercharged eel to get away before a bone was snapped like dry wood. He fought it desperately, but it was his one arm against the big man’s two, and he knew he was losing inch by inch. His free hand clawed for a nerve centre under one of the thighs that were crushing his chest: he found it, and saw the big man wince, but the remorseless straightening of his arm went on. In the last desperate moment that he had
, he struggled to break the nutcracker grip around his upper body. One of the big man’s shoes came off in his hand, and with a triumphant laugh he piled all his strength into another toe-twist. The man squeaked and kicked, and Simon broke away. As he came up on all fours, the other rolled away. They leapt up simultaneously and circled round each other, breathing heavily.

  “Thanks for the fight,” said the Saint shortly. “I never cared for cold-blooded killings.”

  For answer the big man came forward off his toes like a charging bull, but he had not moved six inches before the Saint’s swift dash reached him. Again those pile-driving fists jarred on the weak spot just below the other’s breast-bone. Jones grabbed for a strangle-hold, but the drumming of iron knuckles on his solar plexus made him stagger backwards and cover up with his elbows. His mouth opened against the protest of his paralysed lungs, and his face went white and puffy. Simon drove him to the door, and held off warily. He knew that the big man was badly hurt, but perhaps his helplessness looked a little too realistic…The Saint feinted with a left to the head, and in a second the big man was bear-hugging him in a wild rush that almost carried him off his feet.

  They went back towards the gleaming dome in a fighting tangle. Simon looked over his shoulder and saw it a yard away, with its brilliant surface shining like silver around the charred blackness of the professor’s hand. The strip of wire that he had seen melted on it had left streaky trails of smeared metal down the curved sides, like the slime of a fantastic snail. The Saint saw them in an instant of photographically vivid vision in which the minutest details of that diabolical apparatus were printed for ever on his memory. There must have been tens of thousands of volts pulsing invisibly through that section of the secret process, hundreds of amperes of burning annihilation waiting to scorch through the first thing that tapped them with that crackle of blue flame and hiss of intolerable heat which he had seen once and heard again. His shoes slipped over the floor as he wrestled superhumanly against the momentum that was pressing him back towards certain death: the big man’s face was cracked in a fiendish grin, and he heard Patricia cry out…Then one of his heels tripped over the professor’s outstretched legs, and he was thrown off his balance. He put all his strength into a frantic twist of his body as he fell, and saw the dome leap up beside him, a foot away. The fall knocked half the wind out of his body, and he fought blindly away to one side. Suddenly his hands grasped empty air, and he heard Patricia cry out again.

  The splitting detonation of a shot racketed in his ears as he rolled up on one elbow. Patricia had missed, somehow, and the big man was grappling for the gun.

  Simon crawled up and flung himself forward. As he did so, the big man saw his own gun lying in the corner where the Saint had kicked it, and dived for it. Simon caught him from behind in a circling sweep, locking the big man’s arms to his sides at the elbows: but the big man had the gun. The Saint saw it curling round for a backward shot that could not help scoring somewhere; he made a wild grab at the curving wrist and caught it, jerking it up as the trigger tightened, and the shot smashed through the floor. Simon flung his left leg forward, across the big man’s stance. The steel dome was a yard away on his left He heaved sideways, across the leverage of his thigh, and sprang back…

  The man’s scream rang in his ear as he staggered away. Once again that spurt of eye-aching blue flame seared across his eyes, and turned suddenly orange. The big man had hit the dome with his shoulder, and his coat was burning: the smell of singeing cloth stung the Saint’s nostrils, and the crack of cordite sang through his head as the galvanic current clamped a dead finger convulsively on the trigger and held it there rigidly in one last aimless shot…

  “And we still don’t know his real name,” murmured the Saint.

  He pushed a handkerchief across his brow, and looked at Patricia with a crooked grin. Patricia was fingering her wrist tenderly, where the big man’s crushing grip had fastened on it. She looked back at the Saint with a pale face that was still hopelessly puzzled.

  “That’s your fault,” she said.

  “I know.” The Saint’s eyes had a mocking twist in their inscrutable blue that she couldn’t understand. “You see, when you’ve made up your mind about a thing like brother Jones’s demise, the only way is to get it over quickly. And Claud Eustace will be along soon. But I promise you, Pat, I’ve never hated killing anyone so much—and there was never anyone who’d’ve been so dangerous to my peace of mind if he’d stayed alive. If you want any excuses for it, he’d got two deliberate murders on his own hands and one more for which he was deliberately responsible, so he only got what was coming to him.”

  She waited alone in the room of death while the Saint vanished along the landing towards one of the bedrooms. It took the Saint a few minutes to repair the damage which the fight had done to his immaculate elegance, but when he had finished there was hardly a trace of it—nothing but a slight disorder that could have been caused by a brief scuffle. He used the dead man’s hairbrushes and clothes brush and wrapped a handkerchief round his hand before he touched anything. Everything went back on the dressing-table exactly as he had found it, and he returned to the girl with a ready smile.

  “Let’s finish the clean-up, Pat—I don’t know that we’ve a lot of time.”

  He went over the floor with keen restless eyes. Two cartridge-cases he picked up from odd corners where they had rolled away after the snap action of the recoil had spewed them out of a pistol breech. He identified them as the products of his own gun, for he had marked each of them with a nick in the base. They went into his pocket; the others, which testified to the shots which Jones had fired, he left where they lay, and added to them the souvenir which he had preserved in a match-box from his breakfast-table that morning. He searched the room once more for any other clues which he might have overlooked, and was satisfied.

  His hand fell on Patricia’s shoulder.

  “Let’s go,” he said.

  They went down to the hall. Simon left her again while he went out into the garden. His automatic, and the shells he had picked up, went deep under the earth of a neglected flower-bed, and he uprooted a clump of weeds and pressed them into a new berth where they would hide the marks of freshly-turned earth.

  “Don’t you ever want me to know what you’re up to?” asked Patricia when he came back, and the Saint took her by the arm and led her to a chair.

  “Lass, don’t you realise I’ve just committed murder? And times is not what they was. I’ve known much bigger things than this which were easy enough to get away with before Claud Eustace had quite such a life-and-death ambition to hang my scalp on his belt, but this is not once upon a time. We might have run away and left the mystery to uncover itself, but I didn’t think that was such a hot idea. I’d rather know how we stand from the start. Now sit down and let me write some more about Wilberforce Gupp—this is a great evening for brain work.”

  He propelled her gently into the chair, and sat himself down in another. An envelope and a pencil came out of his pocket, and with perfect calm and detachment, as if he were sitting in his own room at home with a few minutes to spare, the amazing Saint proceeded to scribble down and read aloud to her the epilogue of his epic.

  “Thus, on good terms with everyone,

  Nothing accomplished, nothing done,

  Sir Wilberforce, as history knows,

  Earned in due course a k-night’s repose,

  And with his fellow pioneers,

  Rose shortly to the House of Peers,

  Which nearly (but not quite) woke up

  To greet the noble Baron Gupp.

  Citizens, praise careers like his,

  Which have made England what she is,

  And prove that only Lesser Breeds

  Follow where a stuffed walrus leads.”

  He had just finished when they both heard a car swing into the drive. Feet crunched over the gravel, and heavy boots grounded on the stone outside the front door. The resonant clatter of a brass knocke
r curtly applied echoed through the house.

  Simon opened the door.

  “Claud Eustace himself!” he murmured genially. “It seems years since I last saw you, Claud. And how’s the ingrowing toe-nail?’’ He glanced past the detective’s bulky presence at the four other men who were unloading themselves and their apparatus from the police car and lining up for the entrance. “I rather thought you’d be bringing a party with you, old dear, but I don’t know that the caviar will go all the way round.”

  The detective stepped past him into the hall, and the other men followed. They were of various shapes and sizes, deficient in sex appeal but unconversationally efficient. They clumped themselves together on the mat and waited patiently for orders.

  Mr Teal faced the Saint with a certain grimness. His round pink face was rather more flushed than usual, and his baby-blue eyes were creased up into the merest slits, through which pinpoints of red danger-lights glinted like scattering embers. He knew that he had taken a chance in coming to that house at all, and the squad he had brought with him multiplied his potential regrets by more factors than he cared to think about. If this was one of the Saint’s practical jokes, Chief Inspector Teal would never hear the last of it. The whole CID would laugh itself sick—there were still giggles circulating over the gramophone-record incident—and the Assistant Commissioner’s sniff would flay him till he wanted to find a quiet place to die. And yet he had had no choice. If he was told about a murder he had to go out and investigate it, and his private doubts did not count.

  “Well?” he barked.

  “Fairly,” said the Saint. “I see you brought the homicide squad.”

  Teal nodded briefly.

  “I gathered from what you told me that a murder had been committed. Is that the case?”

  “There are certainly some dead bodies packed about the house,” admitted the Saint candidly. “In fact, the place is making a great start as a morgue. If you’re interested—”