12 The Saint in London (The Misfortunes of Mr Teal) Page 9

  "I like 'em that way," said the Saint slowly. "You know me, Claud. I never cared for this mass-production stuff. I've always believed in encouraging individual enterprise------"

  "It's a good job I watched you encouraging it,"

  said the detective grimly. "With your reputation, you wouldn't have stood much chance if you'd been caught trying to pass a counterfeit note." A wrinkle of belated regret for a lost opportunity creased his forehead as that last poignant thought entrenched itself in his mind. "Perhaps I wouldn't have been in such a hurry to take it away from you if I'd remembered that before," he added candidly.

  The Saint smiled; but the smile was only on his lips.

  "You have the friendliest inspirations, dear old bird," he remarked amiably. "Why not give it back? There's still time; and I see you've got lots of your old school pals around."

  "I've got something else to do," said Mr. Teal. He squared his shoulders, and his mouth set in a line along which many things might have been read. "If I want to ask you anything more about this, I'll know where to find you," he said and turned brusquely away towards the door of the club.

  As he did so, the other man who had been kicking his heels in the middle background roused out of his vague detachment and went after him. The second pair of detectives who had been strolling closer drifted unobtrusively into the same route. There was nothing dramatic, nothing outwardly sensational about it; but it had the mechanical precision of a manoeuvre by a well-drilled squad of soldiers. For one or two brief seconds the three men who had appeared so surprisingly out of the empty night were clustered at the doorway like bees alighting at the entrance of a hive; and then they had filtered through, without fuss or ostentation, as if they had never been there. The door was closed again, and the broken lights and shadows of the street were so still that the patter of swelling raindrops on the parched pavements could be heard like a rustle of leaves in the absence of any other sound.

  Simon put his cigarette to his lips, with his eyes fixed on the blank door, and drained it of the last slow inhalation. He dropped it between his fingers and shifted the toe of a polished patent-leather shoe, blotting it out. The evening had done its stuff. It had provided the wherewithal. . . . He put his hands in his trouser pockets and felt the lightness which had been left there by the twenty shillings' worth of good silver which he had paid out in exchange for that confiscated scrap of forged Bank of England paper; and he remembered a bewitching face and the shadow of fear which had come and gone in its brown eyes. But at that moment he was at a loss to know what he could do.

  And then an awful noise broke the silence behind him. It was a frightful clattering consumptive hiccough which turned into a continuous sobbing rattle in which all the primeval anguish of ancient iron and steel was orchestrated into one grinding medley of discords. The taxi which had brought Adventure's offering had started up again.

  Simon Templar turned. He had been mad for years, and it was much too late in life to begin striving after sanity. His face was dazzlingly seraphic as he looked up at the rehabilimented driver, who was settling stoically into his seat.

  "Does this happen to be your own cab, brother?" he asked.

  "Yes, guv'nor," said the man. "Jer wanter buy it?"

  "That's exactly what I do want," said the Saint.

  II

  The DRIVER gaped down at him with a feeble fish-like grin--handsomer men than he had been smitten in the same way when their facetious witticisms were taken literally.

  "Wot?" he said weakly, expressing the ultimate essence of cosmic doubt in the one irreducible monosyllable which philosophers have sought in vain for centuries.

  "I want to buy your cab," said the Saint. "I'm collecting specimens for a museum. What's the price?"

  "Five 'undred quid, guv'nor, an' it's yours,"

  stated the proud owner, clinging hysterically to his joke.

  Simon took out his billfold and counted out five crackling banknotes. The driver crawled down from his box with glazed eyes and clutched at one rusty mudguard for support.

  "You ain't arf pulling me leg, are yer?" he said.

  Simon folded the notes and pushed them into his hand.

  "Take those round to a bank in the morning and see how your leg feels," he advised and took out another note as an afterthought. "Will a fiver buy your coat and cap as well?"

  "Blimey, guv'nor," replied the driver, unbuttoning again with sudden vigour, "you could 'ave me shirt an' trousers as well for arf that."

  The Saint stood for a moment and watched the happily bereaved driver veering somewhat light-headedly out of view; and then, beside him, Hoppy Uniatz groped audibly for comprehension.

  "What kinda joke is dis, boss?" he asked; and the Saint pulled himself together.

  "It'll grow on you as the years go by, Hoppy,"; he said kindly.

  He was pulling on the driver's big grubby overcoat and winding the nondescript muffler round his neck with the speed and efficiency of a quick-change artist between scenes. In the emptiness of the street there was no one to see him. His black felt hat came off and was dumped into Hoppy's hands; the driver's peaked cap took its place. For a moment Hoppy saw the dark clean-cut face blithe and buccaneering under the shade of the cap, the white teeth glinting in a smile that had no respect for any impossibilities.

  "You won't be able to stay here and share it with me," said the Saint. "I've got another job for you. Get hold of this address: 26 Abbot's Yard, Chelsea. You'd better take a taxi--but not this one. Go straight there and make yourself at home. There's a bottle of Scotch in the pantry; and here's the key. We're going to throw a party!"

  "Okay, boss," said Mr. Uniatz dimly.

  He took the key, stowed it away in his pocket, and without another word hoofed phlegmatically away in the direction of Piccadilly. It would be untrue to say that he had grasped the point with inspired intuition; but certain nouns and verbs had conglomerated in his mind to indicate a course of action, and therefore he was taking it. His brain, which was a small and loosely knit organization of nerve endings accustomed to directing such simple activities as eating, sleeping, and shooting off guns, was not adapted to the higher mysteries of inductive speculation; but it had a protective affinity for the line of least resistance. If the Saint required him to go to Chelsea and look for a bottle of Scotch, that was jake with him. . . .

  And, heading on his way with that plodding single-mindedness in which Lot's wife was so unfortunately lacking, he did not see the Saint climb into the driver's seat and steer his museum specimen up the road; nor did he see any of the other enlightening things which happened in that district shortly afterwards.

  Chief Inspector Teal came out of the Barnyard Club and looked up and down the street.

  "You and Henderson can go home," he said to one of the men with him. "I shan't need you any more tonight."

  He put up a hand to stop the ancient taxi which came crawling hopefully towards them at that moment, and as it stopped he turned to the two people who had been added to his party since he entered the club.

  "Get in," he ordered briefly.

  He watched his prisoners embark with stoli< vigilance--the raid had not by any means been as successful as he had hoped, and he would not know how much he had got out of it until the two arrests had been questioned. The other detective followed them in, and Teal paused to direct the driver to Cannon Row police station. Then he also got in and settled his bulk on the other folding seat, facing his captives.

  The taxi jolted away with a hideous clanking of gears, and Mr. Teal pulled out a large silver watch and calculated his expectation of sleep. The other detective inspected his fingernails and nibbled a peeling scrap of cuticle on his thumb. The two prisoners sat in silence--the girl whose pound note Simon Templar had changed, and a dark florid man whose shirtfront sported a large square emerald which no arbiter of fashion could have approved. Mr. Teal did not even look at them. His hands lay primly on his knees, and his plump face was torpid, inscrutable, unworried. The ca
se might be solved that night, or it might wait a year for solution. It made no difference to him. The relentless dogged routine which he represented took little account of time, and it had very few of the sensational brilliancies and hectic pursuits beloved of writers of fiction: it was a matter of taking up one trivial clue, following it with mechanical logic until it led no further, dropping it and patiently picking up the next; and usually the net was completed some day, and a man was prosaically caught. Except when the man for whom the net was woven happened to be the Saint ... A slight frown crossed Teal's round red face as that unwelcome reflection obtruded itself in his train of thought; and then the taxi, which for some minutes past had been puffing more and more wearily, finally expired with a last senile wheeze and would travel no farther.

  Teal looked round with a scowl of more immediate irritation; and the driver climbed down and opened the bonnet of the machine. They were in a dingy narrow street which Teal did not recognize, for he had not been paying any attention to the route. He put his head out of the window.

  "What's the matter?" he asked.

  "Dunno yet," grunted the driver, still groping in the bowels of his antediluvian engine.

  Teal fidgeted through a few minutes of silence and then turned to his subordinate.

  "See if you can find out where we are, Durham," he said. "We can't sit here all night."

  The other detective opened the door on his side and got down. Seen in fuller perspective, the road in which they had stopped was even more unprepossessing than it had looked through the windows. One thing about it at least was certain--no other taxi was likely to come cruising along it in the hope of picking up a fare.

  Durham walked up to the driver, who was still half buried in his machinery and seemed ready to remain in that position indefinitely, like a modern Indian fakir trying out a novel method of mortifying the flesh.

  "Where's the nearest taxi rank?" he asked.

  "Nearest one I know is at Victoria Station-- that's abaht ten minnits' walk," said the man. "Arf a sec, guv'nor--I think p'raps she'll go now."

  He went round to the front and swung the handle. The taxi did go. It went better than Sergeant Durham had ever expected.

  Confronting the seething wrath of Chief Inspector Teal later, he was unable to give any satisfactory explanation of what happened to him. He knew that the driver straightened up and walked round to resume his post at the wheel; but he did

  not notice that the man reached his seat quicker than any other taxi driver in Durham's experience had ever known to complete such a manoeuvre. And in any case, Sergeant Durham was not expecting to be left behind.

  But that was what indubitably happened to him. At one moment, a practical hard-headed detective, secure in his faith in the commonplace facts of life, he was putting out his hand to open the door of the cab; in the next moment, the handle had been whisked away from under his very fingertips, and he was staring open-mouthed at the retreating stern of the vehicle as it faded noisily away down the road. The only other fact he had presence of mind enough to grasp was that its tail light was out so that he could not read the number--which, as Mr. Teal later pointed out to him, was not useful.

  Chief Inspector Teal, however, had not yet got down to that unprofitable post-mortem. The jerk with which the taxi started off flung him forward into the arms of his captives and some distance was travelled before he could disentangle himself. He rapped violently on the partition window, without securing any response. More distance was covered before he got it open and unleashed his voice into the din of the thumping engine.

  "You fool!" he shouted. "You've left the other man behind!"

  "Wot?" said the driver, without turning his head or slackening speed.

  "You've left the other man behind, you damned Idiot!" Mr. Teal bawled furiously.

  "Behind wot?" yelled the driver, taking a cor-ner on two wheels.

  Mr. Teal hauled himself up from the corner into which the sudden lurch had thrown him, and thrust his face through the opening.

  "Stop the cab, will you?" he bellowed at the top of his voice.

  The driver shook his head and reeled round another corner.

  "You'll 'ave to talk lahder, guv'nor," he said. "I'm a bit 'ard of 'earing."

  Teal clung savagely to the strap, and his rubicund complexion took on a tinge of heliotrope. He put a hand through the window, grasped the man's collar, and shook him viciously.

  "Stop, I said!" he roared past the driver's ea "Stop, or I'll break your bloody neck!"

  "Wot did you say abaht my neck?" demanded the driver.

  Thousands of things which he had not said, but which he had a sudden yearning to say, combined with multitudinous other observations on the anatomy of the man and his ancestors, flooded into the detective's overheated mind; but at that moment he felt rather than heard a movement behind him and turned round quickly. The florid man had seen heaven-sent opportunity in the accident, and Teal was just in time to dodge the savage blow that was aimed at his head.

  The struggle that followed was short and onesided. Mr. Teal's temper had been considerably shortened in the last few minutes, and he had a good deal of experience in handling refractory prisoners. In about six seconds he had the man securely handcuffed to one of the hand grips inside the cab, and as an added precaution he manacled the girl in the same way. Then, with his wrath in no way relieved by those six seconds of violent exercise, he turned again to resume his vendetta with the driver.

  But the taxi was already slowing down. Filling his lungs, Teal devoted one delicious instant to a rapid selection of the words in which he would blast the chauffeur off the face of the earth; and then the cab stopped, and his vocabulary stuck in his gullet. For without a word the driver bowed over the wheel and buried his face in his arms. His shoulders heaved. Mr. Teal could scarcely believe what he heard. It sounded like a sob.

  "Hey," said Mr. Teal, tentatively.

  The driver did not move.

  Mr. Teal began to feel uncomfortable. He reviewed the things he had said during his moment of exasperation. Had he been unduly harsh? Perhaps the driver really was hard of hearing. Perhaps he had some kind of sensitive complex about his neck. Mr. Teal did not wish to be unkind.

  "Hey," he said, more loudly. "What's the matter?"

  Another sob answered him. Mr. Teal ran a finger round the inside of his collar. A demonstration like that was beyond the scope of his training in first aid. He wondered what he ought to do. Hysterical women, he seemed to remember having read somewhere, were best brought to their senses by judicious firmness.

  "Hey," shouted Teal suddenly. "Sit up!"

  The driver did not sit up.

  Mr. Teal cleared his throat awkwardly. He glanced at his two prisoners. They were safely held. The grief-stricken driver's need seemed to be greater than theirs and Mr. Teal wanted to get on to Cannon Row and finish his night's work.

  He opened the door and got down into the road.

  And it was then, exactly at the moment when Chief Inspector Teal's heavy boots grounded on the tarmac, that the second remarkable incident in that ride occurred. It was a thing which handicapped Mr. Teal rather unfairly in his subsequent interview with Sergeant Durham. For as soon as he had got down, the driver, obeying his last command as belatedly as he had obeyed the former ones, did sit up. He did more than that. He lifted his foot off the clutch and simultaneously trod on the accelerator; and the taxi went rattling away and left Mr. Teal gaping foolishly after it.

  Ill

  Simon Templar drove to Lower Sloane Street before he stopped again, and then he got down and opened the door of the passenger compartment. The dark florid man glowered at him uncertainly; and Simon decided that fifty per cent of his freight had no further romantic possibilities.

  "I don't think you're going any farther with us, brother," he said.

  He produced a key from his ring, unlocked one of the handcuffs, and hauled the passenger out. The man made a lunge at him, and Simon calmly tripped him across t
he sidewalk and clipped the loose bracelet onto a bar of the nearest area railings. Then he went back to the cab and smiled at the girl.

  "I expect you'd be more comfortable without that jewelry, wouldn't you?" he murmured.

  He detached her handcuffs with the same key and used them to pinion the florid man's other wrist to a second rail.

  "I'm afraid you'll have to be the consolation prize, Theobald," he remarked and stooped to remove the square emerald from the cursing consolation's shirtfront. "You won't mind if I borrow this, will you? I've got a friend who likes this sort of thing."

  With only one other stop, which he made in Sloane Square to rekindle the rear light from which he had thoughtfully removed the bulb some time before, he drove the creaking taxi to Abbot's Yard. The tears were rolling down his cheeks, and from time to time his body was shaken by one of those racking sobs which Mr. Teal had so grievously misunderstood. It is given to every man to enjoy just so many immortal memories and no more; and the Saint liked to enjoy them when they came.

  Ten minutes later he stopped the palpitating cab in Abbot's Yard, outside the door of No. 26. Anyone else would have driven it twenty miles out of London and buried it in a field before going home, in his frantic desire to eliminate all trace of his association with it; but Simon Templar's was an inspired simplicity which amounted to genius. He knew that if the cab was found in Abbot's Yard by any prowling sleuth who could identify it, then Abbot's Yard was the last place on earth where the same sleuth would look for him and he was still smiling as he climbed down and opened the door.

  "Will you come out, fair lady?" he said.

  She got out, staring at him uncertainly; and he indicated the door of the house.

  "This is where I live--sometimes," he explained. "Don't look so surprised. Even cab drivers can be artists. I draw voluptuous nudes with engine oil on old cylinder blocks--it's supposed to be frightfully modern."

  Abbot's Yard, Chelsea, is one of those multitudinous little lanes which open off the King's Road. To say that not twenty years ago it had been a row of slum cottages would be practising a bourgeois suppressio veri: it had certainly been a slum, but it still was. If anything, Simon was inclined to think that the near-artists and synthetic Bohemians who now populated it had lowered the tone of the neighbourhood; but the studio which he rented in No. 26 had often served him well as an emergency address, and in his irregular life it was sometimes an advantage to have quarters in a district where eccentric goings-on attracted far less attention than they would have in South Kensington.