“I guess she’s feelin’ kinda homesick, or something,” Sunny Jim confided to a clerk at the inquiry desk. “Whaddaya do when your wife gets moody, son?”
“I don’t really know, sir,” confessed the clerk, who was not employed to answer that kind of inquiry.
“Y’know, I always think a woman wants some kinda kick outa life when she feels that way,” mused Sunny Jim. “Some lil thing that makes her feel good with herself. A noo hat, or a fur coat, or—a diamond bracelet…That’s what she wants!” he cried, recognizing divine inspiration when it breathed on him. “A diamond bracelet! Say, what’s the best store in this town to buy a diamond bracelet?”
“Peabody’s, in Regent Street, are very good, sir,” said the clerk, after a moment’s thought.
Sunny Jim beamed.
“Ring ’em up and tell ’em to send some of their best diamond bracelets around,” he said. “I’ll have the man take ’em right up to her room, and she can pick what she likes. Say, I bet that’ll put everything right.”
Whether it put everything right or not is a question that the various parties concerned might have answered differently. The hotel was glad enough to oblige such a lavish guest, and Mr Peabody, the jeweller, was so impressed with their brief account of Mr James Fasson that he hurried round in person with six diamond bracelets in his bag. After a short discussion, Mrs Fasson chose the most expensive, a mere trifle valued at a thousand pounds, and Mr Fasson rang for a pageboy to take his cheque for that amount round to the bank to be cashed.
“You must have a drink while you’re waitin’ for your money,” said Sunny Jim, turning to a bottle and a siphon which stood on a side table.
Mr Peabody had a very small drink, and remembered nothing more for another hour, at the end of which time Mr and Mrs Fasson had left the Magnificent for ever, taking all his six diamond bracelets with them. Nor did Mr Peabody’s afternoon look any brighter when the bank on which Mr Fasson’s cheque had been drawn rang up the hotel to mention that they had never carried an account for anybody of that name.
This episode was the subject of a hurriedly assembled conference in the Assistant Commissioner’s room at New Scotland Yard.
The other two men present were Chief Inspector Claud Eustace Teal and Junior Inspector Pryke. Mr Teal, who was responsible for the conference, explained his point of view very briefly.
“Anworth and Fasson used to be fairly well acquainted, and if Anworth was using the High Fence there’s a good chance that Fasson will be using him too. I know exactly where I can lay my hands on Sunny Jim, and I want permission to try and get a squeal out of him unofficially.”
“What is your objection to having him arrested and questioned in the ordinary way?” asked the Commissioner.
“He’d have to be taken to Market Street, wouldn’t he?” meditated Teal aloud. His baby blue eyes hid themselves under studiously sleepy lids. “Well,” he said dryly, “because I don’t want him murdered.”
Junior Inspector Desmond Pryke flushed. He was one of the first graduates of Lord Trenchard’s famous Police College, and he usually gave the impression of being very well satisfied with his degree. He was dark, slim, and well-manicured, and the inventor of that classic experiment for turning gentlemen into detectives could certainly have pointed to him as a product who looked nothing like the traditional idea of a policeman. Mr Teal had been heard to thank God that there was no possibility of confusing them, but there were obvious reasons why Mr Teal was irrevocably prejudiced in favour of the old order.
“It’s in your manor, Pryke,” said the Assistant Commissioner. “What do you think?”
“I don’t see what there is to be gained by it,” said the other. “If Fasson hasn’t been too frightened by the murder of Anworth to talk anyhow—”
“What does Fasson know about the murder of Anworth?” demanded Teal quickly, for the official statements to the Press had contained certain deliberate gaps.
Pryke looked at him.
“I don’t suppose he definitely knows any more than any other outsider, but it’s common gossip in the underworld that Anworth was murdered because he was going to turn informer.”
“You look as if you spent a lot of your time picking up gossip from the underworld,” retorted Teal sarcastically. He caught the Assistant Commissioner’s chilly eye on him, and went on more politely: “In any case, sir, that’s only another reason why I don’t want to take him to a police station. I want to try and prevent him thinking that any squeal could be traced back to him.”
There was some further discussion, through which Teal sat stolidly chewing a worn-out lump of spearmint, with his round pink face set in its habitual mask of weary patience, and eventually gained his point.
“Perhaps you had better take Inspector Pryke with you,” suggested the Commissioner, when he gave his permission.
“I should like to, sir,” said Mr Teal, with great geniality, “but I don’t know whether this can wait long enough for him to go home and change.”
Pryke adjusted the set of his coat delicately as he rose. It was undoubtedly part of a resplendent suit, being of a light fawn colour with a mauve over-check, a very different proposition from Teal’s shiny blue serge.
“I didn’t know that Police Regulations required you to look like an out-of-work rag and bone man,” he said, and Chief Inspector Teal’s complexion was tinged with purple all the way to Hyde Park Corner.
He resented having Inspector Pryke thrust upon him, partly because he resented Inspector Pryke, and partly because the High Fence had been his own individual assignment ever since Johnny Anworth put his knife and fork into that fatal plate of roast beef six weeks ago. For a lieutenant, when necessity called for one, Mr Teal preferred the morose and angular Sergeant Barrow, who had never been known to speak unless he was spoken to, and who then spoke only to utter some cow-like comment to which nobody with anything better to do need have listened. Chief Inspector Teal had none of the theoretical scientific training in criminology with which the new graduates of the Police College were pumped to offensive overflowing, but he had a background of thirty years’ hard-won experience which took the intrusion of manicured theorists uneasily, and at the entrance of the small apartment building in which Sunny Jim Fasson had been located he said so.
“I want you to keep quiet and let me do the talking,” was his instruction. “I know how I’m going to tackle Fasson, and I know how to get what I want out of him.”
Pryke fingered his MCC tie.
“Like you’ve always known how to get what you want out of the Saint?” he drawled.
Mr Teal’s lips were tightly compressed as he stumped up the narrow stairway. His seemingly interminable failure to get anything that he really wanted out of that cool, smiling devil who passed so incongruously under the name of the Saint was a thorn in his side which Inspector Pryke had twisted dexterously before. Whenever Chief Inspector Teal attempted to impress the rising generation of detectives with his superior craftsmanship, that gibe could always be brought up against him, openly or surreptitiously, and Mr Teal was getting so tired of it that it hurt. He wished, viciously, that some of the smart infants who were being pushed up under him could have as much to cope with as he had had in his time.
But Sunny Jim Fasson was quite a different problem from the blue-eyed bantering outlaw who had occupied so much of Mr Teal’s time in other days, and he felt a renewal of confidence when he saw Sunny Jim’s startled face through the slit of the opening door and wedged his foot expertly in the aperture.
“Don’t make a fuss, and nobody’s going to hurt you, Sunny,” he said.
Sunny Jim, like Johnny Anworth, was also a philosopher, in his way. He retreated into the tiny bed-sitting-room without dropping the ash from his cigar.
“What’s it about this time, Mr Teal?” he inquired, with the sang-froid of old experience.
He did not even bother to put on his cultivated American accent, which saved him considerable trouble, for he had been born in t
he Old Kent Road and had learnt all that he knew of America from the movies.
“It needn’t be about some diamond bracelets that were stolen from Peabody’s—unless you want it to be,” said Teal, with equal cold-bloodedness.
Sunny Jim raised his eyebrows. The gesture was mechanical.
“I don’t know what you mean, Mr Teal.”
“Would you know what I meant,” replied the detective, with impregnable drowsiness, “if I told you that Peabody has identified your photograph and is quite sure he can identify you, and half the Magnificent Hotel staff are ready to back him up?”
Sunny Jim had no answer to that.
“Mind you,” said Teal, carefully unwrapping a fresh slice of chewing-gum, “I said that we needn’t go into that unless you want to. If you had a little talk with me now, for instance—why, we could settle it all here in this room, and you needn’t even come with us to the station. It’d be all over and forgotten—just between ourselves.”
When Sunny Jim Fasson was not wearing the well-trained smile from which he had earned his nickname, his face fell into a system of hard-bitten lines which drew an illuminating picture of shrewd and sharp intelligence. Those lines became visible now. So far as Sunny Jim was concerned, Teal’s speech needed no amplification, and Sunny Jim was a man who believed in the comfort and security of Mr James Fasson first, last, and in the middle. If Teal had arrived half an hour later he would have been on his way to Ostend, but as things were he recognized his best alternative health resort.
“I’m not too particular what I talk about with an old friend, Mr Teal,” he said at length.
“Do you sell your stuff to the High Fence, Sunny?” Fasson held his cigar under his nose and sniffed the aroma.
“I believe I did hear of him once,” he admitted cautiously. The appearance of bored sleepiness in Chief Inspector Teal’s eyes was always deceptive. In the last few seconds they had made a detailed inventory of the contents of the room, and had observed a torn strip of brown paper beside the waste-basket and a three-inch end of string on the carpet under the table.
“You’ve already got rid of Peabody’s diamond bracelets, haven’t you?” he said persuasively, and his somnolent eyes went back to Sunny Jim’s face and did not shift from it. “All I want to know from you is what address you put on the parcel.”
Sunny Jim put his cigar back in his mouth till the end glowed red.
“I did send off a parcel not long ago,” he confessed reminiscently. “It was addressed to—”
He never said who it was addressed to.
Mr Teal heard the shot behind him, and saw Sunny Jim’s hand jerk to his brow and his head jar with the shock of the bullet. The slam of the door followed, as Teal turned round to it in a blank stupor of incredulity. Pryke, who was nearest, had it open again when his superior reached it and Teal barged after him in a kind of incandescent daze, out on to the landing. The sheer fantastic unexpectedness of what had happened had knocked his brain momentarily out of the rhythm of conscious functioning, but he clattered down the stairs on Pryke’s heels, and actually overtook him at the door which let them out on to the street.
And having got there, he stopped, with his brain starting to work again, overwhelmed by the utter futility of what he was doing.
There was nothing sensational to be seen outside. The road presented the ordinary aspect of a minor thoroughfare in the Shepherd Market area at that time of day. There was an empty car parked on the other side of the road, a man walking by with a brief-bag, two women laden down with parcels puttering in the opposite direction, an errand-boy delivering goods from a tricycle. The commonplace affairs of the district were proceeding uninterrupted, the peace of the neighbourhood was unbroken by so much as a glimpse of any sinister figure with a smoking gun shooting off on the conventional getaway.
Teal’s dizzy gaze turned back to his subordinate.
“Did you see him?” he rasped.
“Only his back,” said Pryke helplessly. “But I haven’t the faintest idea which way he went.”
Teal strode across to the errand-boy.
“Did you see a man come rushing out of that building just now?” he barked, and the lad looked at him blankly.
“Wot sort of man, mister?”
“I don’t know,” said Teal, with a feeling that he was introducing himself as the most majestic lunatic in creation. “He’d have been running hell for leather—you must have noticed him—”
The boy shook his head.
“I ain’t seen nobody running abaht, not till you come aht yerself, mister. Wot’s the matter—’as ’e pinched something?”
Mr Teal did not enlighten him. Breathing heavily, he rejoined Junior Inspector Pryke.
“We’d better get back upstairs and see what’s happened,” he said shortly.
But he knew only too well what had happened. The murder of Johnny Anworth had been repeated, in a different guise, under his very nose—and that after he had pleaded so energetically for a chance to guard against it. He did not like to think what ecstatic sarabands of derision must have been dancing themselves silly under the smug exterior of Desmond Pryke. He clumped up the stairs and across the landing again in a dumb paroxysm of futile wrath, and went back into the flat.
And there he halted again, one step inside the room, with his eyes bulging out of their sockets and the last tattered remnants of his traditional pose of sleepiness falling off him like autumn leaves from a tree, staring at what he saw as if he felt that the final vestiges of sanity were reeling away from his overheated mind.
2
The body of Sunny Jim Fasson was no longer there. That was the brain-staggering fact which Chief Inspector Teal had to assimilate. It had simply ceased to exist. For all the immediate evidence which Teal’s reddening gaze could pick up to the contrary, Sunny Jim Fasson might never have lived there, might never have been interviewed there, and might never have been shot there. The ultimate abysses of interplanetary space could not have been more innocent of any part of Sunny Jim Fasson than that shabby one room flatlet as Teal saw it then. There could hardly have been much less trace of Sunny Jim if he had never been born.
And instead of that, there was someone else sitting in the chair where the bullet had hit Sunny Jim—a man whose mere recollection was enough to raise Chief Inspector Teal’s blood pressure to apoplectic heights, a man whose appearance on that spot, at that precise catastrophic moment, turned what might have been an ordinary baffling mystery into something that made Mr Teal’s voice fail him absolutely for several seconds.
“Stand up, Saint,” he got out at last, in a choking gurgle. “I want you!”
The man peeled himself nonchalantly up from the arm-chair, and managed to convey the impression that he was merely following a course which he had chosen for himself long ago, rather than that he was obeying an order. And Mr Teal glowered at him unblinkingly over every inch of that leisured rise.
To anyone unfamiliar with the dim beginnings and cumulative ramifications of the feud between those two (if anyone so benighted can be imagined to exist in the civilised world) Mr Teal’s glower might justifiably have seemed to lack much of the godlike impartiality which ought to smooth the features of a conscientious detective. It was a glower that had no connection with any detached survey of a situation, any abstract weighing of clues and conundrums. It was, to describe it economically, the kind of glower on which eggs can be fried. It was as calorifically biased and unfriendly as a glower can be.
The Saint didn’t seem to notice it. He came upright, a lean, wide-shouldered figure in a light grey suit which had a swashbuckling elegance that nothing Inspector Pryke wore would ever have, and met the detective’s torrid glare with cool and quizzical blue eyes.
“Hullo, Claud,” he murmured. “What are you doing here?”
The detective looked up at him dourly—Teal was not nearly so short as his increasing middle-aged girth made him appear, but he had to look up when the Saint stood beside him.
&n
bsp; “I want to know what you’re doing here,” he retorted.
“I came to pay a call on Sunny Jim,” said the Saint calmly. “But he doesn’t seem to be here—or did you get here first and knock him off?”
There were times when Mr Teal could exercise an almost superhuman restraint.
“I’m hoping to find out who got here first,” he said grimly. “Sunny Jim has been murdered.”
The Saint raised one eyebrow.
“It sounds awfully exciting,” he remarked, and his bantering eyes wandered over to Pryke. “Is this the bloke who did it?”
“This is Junior Inspector Pryke, of C Division,” said Mr Teal formally, and the Saint registered ingenuous surprise.
“Is it really?” he murmured. “I didn’t know they’d put trousers on the Women Police.”
Chief Inspector Teal swallowed hastily, and it is a regrettable fact that a fraction of the inclement ferocity faded momentarily out of his glare. There was no lawful or official reason whatsoever for this tempering of his displeasure, but it was the very first time in his life that he had seen any excuse for the Saint’s peculiar sense of humour. He masticated his gum silently for a couple of seconds that gave him time to recover the attitude of mountainous boredom which he was always praying for strength to maintain in the Saint’s presence. But his relief was only temporary.
“I suppose you’re going to tell me you came to see Fasson just to ask him what he thought about the weather,” he said.
“Certainly not,” said the Saint blandly. “I wouldn’t try to deceive you, Claud. I blew in to see if he knew anything about some diamond bracelets that a bird called Peabody lost this afternoon. I might have pointed out to him that Peabody is very upset about losing those jools. I might have tried to show him the error of his ways, and done my best to persuade him that they ought to be sent back. Or something. But I can’t say that I thought of shooting him.”
The Saint Goes On (The Saint Series) Page 2
