The Saint versus Scotland Yard (The Saint Series) Page 8

  “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 eyes—”

  “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 five-pence 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.

  THE MILLION POUND DAY

  INTRODUCTION

  Not very long ago I received a letter from a faithful follower of this series who had just discovered, it seemed with some distress, that the Saint was getting older.

  “In Meet the Tiger,” she wrote, “you say that the Saint is 26, and in one of the latest books he has aged to 35, and at that rate Patricia must be somewhere around 27 or 29, and that is not a nic
e age for a heroine. She should always be about 20, and the Saint should remain 26. They shouldn’t age, because what are you going to do when the Saint gets about 40 and Patricia is nearly 30?”

  This is not at all an easy question to answer, even apart from its slightly frantic arithmetic. It was, incidentally, a mild shock to an old gaffer like myself to learn that such comparatively adolescent years as the early thirties were regarded in some quarters as coming perilously close to the borders of senile decay.

  Well, I thought, let us pretend that Patricia is thirty (she is ageing a little slower than the Saint, of course, skipping a birthday here and there with a feminine agility which my correspondent, being of the same sex, tactfully takes for granted). She will be, I tried to think, almost an Old Hag. But the only conclusion that this led to was that I myself must have quite a weakness for the company of Old Hags; which couldn’t possibly be the right answer.

  So the best I could do was to point out, as a matter of inexorable mathematics, that since all of the Saint’s adventures have taken a definite period of time to happen, and since several of them had already called on him for a good deal of ground work before the points at which I began to chronicle them, and since I hoped that there were many other adventures yet to come, any such Peter Pan chronology as she suggested would ultimately lead to a transparent absurdity.

  My own conception is diametrically opposite. I have never been able to see why a fictional character should not grow up, mature, and develop, the same as anyone else. The same, if you like, as his biographer. The only adequate reason is that—so far as I know—no other fictional character in modern times has survived a sufficient number of years for these changes to be clearly observable. I must confess that a lot of my own selfish pleasure in the Saint has been in watching him grow up.

  The book from which this story is taken, The Holy Terror, will always be one of my favourites. Perhaps I have done better since, at times, but not so much better that I am ashamed of the comparison. I am not so sure about the seven that went before it. For this was the first book in which I really felt that I had been able to bring him into three dimensions. It may have been in the nick of time, for I also feel that this was when the Saint himself took a long stride towards his own future.

  —Leslie Charteris (1939)

  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 muscle-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 readied 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.

  The footfalls were so soft that he was not surprised that he had not heard them before. At the moment when he picked them up they could only have been a few yards away, and to anyone less keen of hearing they would still have been inaudible. But the Saint heard them—heard the long-striding ghostly sureness of them padding over the macadam—and a second tingle of eerie understanding crawled over his scalp and glissaded down his spine like a needle-spray of ice-cold water. For the feet that made those sounds were human, but the feet were bare…

  And the man turned the corner.

  Simon saw him as clearly as he had seen the first—more clearly.

  He stood huge and straight in the opening of the lane, gazing ahead into the darkness. The wan light in the sky fell evenly across the broad black primitive-featured face, and stippled glistening silver high-lights on the gigantic ebony limbs. Except for a loosely knotted loin-cloth he was naked, and the gleaming surfaces of his tremendous chest shifted rhythmically to the mighty movements of his breathing. And the third and last thrill
of comprehension slithered clammily into the small of the Saint’s back as he saw all these things—as he saw the savage ruthlessness of purpose behind the mere physical presence of that magnificent brute-man, sensed the primeval lust of cruelty in the parting of the thick lips and the glitter of the eyes. Almost he seemed to smell the sickly stench of rotting jungles seeping its fetid breath into the clean cold air of that English dawn, swelling in hot stifling waves about the figure of the pursuing beast that had taken the continents and the centuries in its bare-foot loping stride.

  And while Simon watched, fascinated, the eyes of the negro fell on the sprawling figure that lay in the middle of the lane, and he stepped forward with a snarl of a beast rumbling in his throat.

  And it was then that the Saint, with an effort which was as much physical as mental, tore from his mind the steely tentacles of the hypnotic spell that had held him paralysed for those few seconds—and also moved.

  “Good morning,” spoke the Saint politely, but that was the last polite speech he made that day. No one who had ever heard him talk had any illusions about the Saint’s opinion of Simon Templar’s physical prowess, and no one who had ever seen him fight had ever seriously questioned the accuracy of those opinions: but this was the kind of occasion on which the Saint knew that the paths of glory lead but to the grave. Which may help to explain why, after that single preliminary concession to the requirements of his manual of etiquette, he heaved the volume over the horizon and proceeded to lapse from grace in no uncertain manner.

  After all, that encyclopedia of all the social virtues, though it had some cheering and helpful suggestions to offer on the subject of addressing letters to archdeacons, placing Grand Lamas in the correct relation of precedence to Herzegovinian Grossherzöge, and declining invitations to open bazaars in aid of Homes for Ichthyotic Vulcaniser’s Mates, had never even envisaged such a situation as that which was then up for inspection, and the Saint figured that the rules allowed him a free hand.