“What else was he doing?” The Saint laughed.
“He was risking the ruin of his digestion with some of Ye Fine Olde Englishe Cookinge which is more deadly than bullets even if it doesn’t taste much different,” he said. “But it may have been worth it. There was a parcel shoved into a bloke’s overcoat pocket some time when I was sweating through my second pound of waterlogged cabbage, just like Sunny Jim said it would be, and I trailed the happy recipient to his lair. I suppose I was rather lucky to be listening outside his door just when he was telling his secretary to get an insurance hound over to inspect the boodle—By the way, have you ever seen a woman with a face like a stoat and George Robey eyebrows wriggling seductively? This secretary—”
“Do you mean you—”
“That’s just what I do mean, old darling. I toddled straight into the office when this bloke went out, and introduced myself as the insurance hound summoned as aforesaid in Chapter One. And I got out of Hatton Garden with a packet of boodle valued at twenty-seven thousand six hundred and fifty quid, which ought to keep the wolf from the door for another day or two.” The glint of changeless mischief in his eyes was its own infinite elaboration of the theme. “But it’ll bring a lot of other wolves around that’ll want rather more getting rid of, and I expect we can look forward to fun and games.”
She nodded.
“They’ve started,” she said soberly. “There’s a reception committee waiting for you.”
He was quite still for a moment, but the edge of humour in his gaze was altered only to become keener and more subtly dangerous.
“How many?”
“One.”
His brows sloped up in a hair-line of devil-may-care delight that she knew only too well—a contour of impenitent Saintliness that had made trouble-hunting its profession too long to be disturbed when the trouble came unasked.
“Not poor old Claud Eustace again?” he said.
“No. It’s that new fellow—the Trenchard product. I’ve been waiting here three-quarters of an hour to catch you as you came along and tell you. Sam Outrell gave me the wire.”
6
The Saint was unperturbed. He had removed the walrus moustache which had whiffled so realistically before Miss Weagle, and with it the rosy complexion and melancholy aspect on which it had bloomed with such lifelike aptness. The costume which he had worn on that occasion had also been put away, in the well-stocked wardrobe of another pied-à-terre which he rented under another of his multitudinous aliases for precisely those skilful changes of identity. He had left the plodding inconspicuous gait of his character in the same place. In a light grey suit which looked as if it had only that morning been unpacked from the tailor’s box, and a soft hat canted impudently over one eye, he had a debonair and disreputable elegance which made the deputation of welcome settle into clammily hostile attention.
“I was waiting for you,” said Junior Inspector Pryke damply.
“No one would have thought it,” said the Saint, with a casual smile. “Do I look like your fairy godmother?” Pryke was not amused.
“Shall we go up to your rooms?” he suggested, and Simon’s gaze rested on him blandly.
“What for, Desmond?” He leaned one elbow on the desk at his side, and brought the wooden-faced janitor into the party with a shift of his lazy smile. “You can’t shock Sam Outrell—he knew me before you ever did. And Miss Holm is quite broadminded, too. By the way, have you met Miss Holm? Pat, this is Miss Desdemona Pryke, the Pride of the YWCA—”
“I’d rather see you alone, if you don’t mind,” said the detective.
He was beginning to go a trifle white about the mouth, and Simon’s eyes marked the symptom with a wicked glitter of unhallowed mischief. It was a glitter that Mr Teal would have recognized only too easily, if he had been there to see it, but for once that long-suffering waist-line of the Law was not its victim.
“What for?” Simon repeated, with a puzzled politeness that was about as cosy and reliable as a tent on the edge of a drifting iceberg. “If you’ve got anything to say to me that this audience can’t hear, I’m afraid you’re shinning up the wrong leg. I’m not that sort of a girl.”
“I know perfectly well what I want to say,” retorted Pryke chalkily.
“Then I hope you’ll say it,” murmured the Saint properly. “Come along, now, Desmond—let’s get it over with. Make a clean breast of it—as the bishop said to the actress. Unmask the Public School Soul. What’s the matter?”
Pryke’s hands clenched spasmodically at his sides.
“Do you know a man called Enderby?”
“Never heard of him,” said the Saint unblushingly. “What does he do—bore the holes in spaghetti, or something?”
“At about ten minutes to three this afternoon,” said Pryke, with his studiously smooth University accent burring jaggedly at the edges, “a man entered his office, falsely representing himself to be an agent of the Southshire Insurance Company, and took away about twenty-seven thousand pounds’ worth of precious stones.”
Simon raised his eyebrows.
“It sounds like a tough afternoon for Comrade Enderby,” he remarked. “But why come and tell me? D’you mean you want me to try and help you recover these jools?”
The Antarctic effrontery of his innocence would have left nothing visible in a thermometer but a shrunken globule of congealed quicksilver. It was a demonstration of absolute vacuum in the space used by the normal citizen for storing his conscience that left its audience momentarily speechless. Taking his first ration of that brass-necked Saintliness which had greyed so many of the hairs in Chief Inspector Teal’s dwindling crop, Desmond Pryke turned from white to pink, and then back to white again.
“I want to know what you were doing at that time,” he said.
“Me?” Simon took out his cigarette-case. “I was at the Plaza, watching a Mickey Mouse. But what on earth has that got to do with poor old Enderby and his jools?”
Suddenly the detective’s hand shot out and grabbed him by the wrist.
“That’s what you’ve got to do with it. That scar on your forearm. Miss Weagle—Mr Enderby’s secretary—saw it on this fake insurance agent’s arm when he picked up the parcel of stones. It was part of the description she gave us!”
Simon looked down at his wrist in silence for a moment, the cigarette he had chosen poised forgotten in mid-air, gazing at the tail of the furrowed scar that showed beyond the edge of his cuff. It was a souvenir he carried from quite a different adventure, and he had usually remembered to keep it covered when he was disguised. He realized that he had under-estimated both the eyesight of Miss Weagle and the resourcefulness of Junior Inspector Pryke, but when he raised his eyes again they were still bantering and untroubled.
“Yes, I’ve got a scar there—but I expect lots of other people have, too. What else did this Weagle dame say in her description?”
“Nothing that couldn’t be covered by a good disguise,” said Pryke, with a new note of triumph in his voice. “Now are you coming along quietly?”
“Certainly not,” said the Saint.
The detective’s eyes narrowed.
“Do you know what happens if you resist a police officer?”
“Surely,” said the Saint, supple and lazy. “The police officer gets a thick ear.”
Pryke let go his wrist, and shoved his hands into his pockets.
“Do you want me to have you taken away by force?” he asked.
“I shouldn’t want you to try anything so silly, Desmond,” said the Saint. He put the cigarette between his lips and struck a match with a flick of his thumb-nail, without looking at it. “The squad hasn’t been hatched yet that could take me away by force without a good deal of commotion, and you know it. You’d get more publicity than a Hollywood divorce—or is that what you’re wanting?”
“I’m simply carrying out my orders—”
“Whose orders?”
“That’s none of your business,” Pryke got out throug
h his teeth.
“I think it is,” said the Saint mildly. “After all, I’m the blushing victim of this persecution. Besides, Desmond, I don’t believe you. I think you’re misguided. You’re behind the times. How long have you been here waiting for me?”
“I’m not here to be cross-examined by you,” spluttered the detective furiously.
“I’m not cross-examining you, Desmond. I’m trying to lead you into the paths of reason. But you don’t have to answer that one if it hurts. How long has this petunia-blossom been here, Sam?”
The janitor glanced mechanically at the clock.
“Since about four o’clock, sir.”
“Has it received any message—a telephone call, or anything like that?”
“No, sir.”
“Nobody’s come in and spoken to it?”
“No, sir.”
“In fact, it’s just been sitting around here all on its ownsome, like the last rose of summer—”
Junior Inspector Pryke thrust himself up between them, along the desk, till his chest was almost touching the Saint’s. His hands were thrust into his pockets so savagely that the coat was stretched down in long creases from his shoulders.
“Will you be quiet?” he blazed quiveringly. “I’ve stood as much as I can—”
“As the bishop said to the actress.”
“Are you coming along with me,” fumed the detective, “or am I going to have you dragged out?”
Simon shook his head.
“You miss the idea, Desmond.” He tapped the other firmly on the lower chest with his forefinger, and raised his eyebrows. “Hullo,” he remarked, “your stomach hasn’t got nearly so much bounce in it as dear old Teal’s.”
“Never mind my stomach!” Pryke almost screamed.
“I don’t mind it,” said the Saint generously. “I admit I haven’t seen it in all its naked loveliness, but in its veiled state, at this distance, there seems to be nothing offensive about it.”
The noise that Pryke made can only be likened to that of a kettle coming to the boil.
“I’ll hear that another time,” he said. “Simon Templar, I am taking you into custody—”
“But I’m trying to show you that that’s exactly what you mustn’t do, Desmond,” said the Saint patiently. “It would be fatal. Here you are, a rising young officer on the threshold of your career, trying to pull a flivver that’ll set you back four years’ seniority. I can’t let you do it. Why don’t you curb the excessive zeal, Rosebud, and listen to reason? I can tell you exactly what’s happened.”
“I can tell you exactly what’s going to happen—”
“It was like this,” continued the Saint, as if the interruption had not merely fallen on deaf ears, but had failed miserably in its effort to occur at all. “This guy Enderby was robbed, as you say. Or he thought he was. Or, still more exactly, his secretary thought he was. A bloke calling himself an insurance agent blew into the office, and breezed out again with a parcel of jools. On account of various complications, the secretary was led to believe that this insurance agent was a fake, and the jools had been pinched. Filled with the same misguided zeal that’s pulling the buttons of that horrible waistcoat of yours, Desmond, she called the police. Hearing of this, you came puffing round to see me, with your waistcoat bursting with pride and your brain addled with all the uncomplimentary fairy-tales that Claud Eustace Teal has told you about me.”
“Who said so?”
“I did. It’s a sort of clairvoyant gift of mine. But you must listen to the rest of it. You come blowing round here, and wait for me from four o’clock onwards. Pepped up with the idea of scoring a solo triumph, you haven’t said anything to anyone about your scheme. Consequently, you don’t know what’s happened since you left headquarters. Which is this. Shortly after the secretary female called for the police, Comrade Enderby himself returned to the office, the shemozzle was explained to him, he explained the shemozzle, and the long and the short of it was that the insurance agent was found to be perfectly genuine, the whole misunderstanding was cleared up, the whole false alarm exposed, and it was discovered that there was nothing to arrest anybody for—least of all me.”
“What makes you think that?”
Simon took in a lungful of tobacco smoke, and inhaled through his nose with a slight smile. What made him think that? It was obvious. It was the fundamental formula on which fifty per cent of his reputation had been built up.
A man was robbed. Ninety-eight times out of a hundred, the fact was never published at all. But if ever, through some misguided agent, or during a spasm of temporary but understandable insanity on the part of the victim himself, the fact happened to be published, that same victim, as soon as he discovered the accident or came to his senses, was the first and most energetic on the field to explain away the problem with which Scotland Yard had been faced—for the simple reason that there would be things much harder to explain away if the robber were ever detected.
And the bereavement of Mr Enderby was so perfectly on all fours with the formula that, with the horns of the dilemma touched in, it would have looked like a purple cow. There was no answer to it. So Mr Enderby had been robbed of some jewels? Well, could he give a description of the jewels, so that if they were recovered…How did the Saint know? He smiled, with unusual tolerance.
“Just the same old clairvoyant gift—working overtime for your special benefit, Desmond. But I’ll back it for anything you like to bet—even including that perfectly repulsive shirt you’re wearing. If you only got wise to yourself, you’d find that nobody wanted me arrested any more, and it’d save both of us no end of trouble. Now, why don’t you get on the phone to Headquarters, and bring yourself up to date? Let me do it for you, and then you can save your two-pence to buy yourself a bar of milk chocolate on the way home…”
He picked up the telephone on the porter’s desk, and pushed his forefinger persuasively into the initial “V” of the Victoria exchange. It was all ancient history to the Saint, an old game which had become almost stereotyped from many playings, even if with this new victim it had the semblance of a new twist to it. It hadn’t seriously occurred to him that the routine could be very different.
And then something hard and compact jabbed into his chest, and his eyes shifted over with genuine surprise from the telephone dial. There was a nickel-plated little automatic in Junior Inspector Pryke’s hand—the sort of footling lady-like weapon, Simon couldn’t help reflecting, which a man with that taste in clothes must inevitably have affected, but none the less capable of unpleasant damage at contact range. His gaze roamed up to the detective’s flaming eyes with a flicker of pained protest that for once was wholly spontaneous and tinged with a glitter of urgent curiosity.
“Put that telephone down,” said Pryke sizzlingly.
Simon put the telephone down. There was something in the other’s rabid glare which told him that disobedience might easily make Pryke do something foolish—of which the Saint had no desire to suffer the physical effects.
“My dear old daffodil,” he murmured, “have you stopped to think that that dinky little pop-gun—”
“Never mind what I think,” rasped the detective, whose range of repartee seemed to make up in venom what it lacked in variety. “If there’s any truth in what you’re saying, we can verify it when we get you to the station. But you aren’t going to run away until it has been verified. Come along!”
His finger was twitching over the trigger, and the Saint sighed.
He felt rather sorry for Junior Inspector Pryke. While he disliked the man’s face, and his voice, and his clothes, and almost everything else about him, he had not actually plumbed such implacable depths of hatred as to wish him to turn himself into a horrible example which would be held up for the disgusted inspection of students of the Police College for the next decade.
But it seemed as if this was the only ambition Desmond Pryke had to fulfil, and he had left no stone unturned in his efforts to achieve it. From permitt
ing himself to be lured into an argument on comparative gastrometry to that final howler of pulling a gun to enforce an ordinary arrest, Junior Inspector Pryke had run doggedly through the complete catalogue of Things A Young Policeman Should Not Do, but it was not Simon Templar’s fault.
The Saint shrugged.
“Okay, Desmond,” he murmured. “If that’s the way you feel about it, I can’t stop you. I’ve done my best. But don’t come round asking me for a pension when they drum you out of the Force.”
He put on his hat, and pulled the brim out to the perfect piratical tilt. There was not a shadow of misgiving in the smile that he gave Patricia, and he saw no reason for there to be a shadow.
“Be seein’ ya, keed,” he said. “Don’t worry—I’ll be back for dinner. But I’m afraid Desdemona is going to have a pain in her little tum-tum before then.”
He sauntered out unhurriedly into Stratton Street, and himself hailed the nearest taxi. Pryke put away his gun and climbed in after him. The cab turned into Piccadilly with a burden of internal silence that was almost broken by the exuberance of its own one-sided rancour.
Simon’s nostrils detected a curious sweet scent in the air he was breathing. Ever the genial optimist, he tried to thaw out the polar obmutescence with a fresh turn of pleasant gossip.
“That perfume you’re using, Desmond,” he said. “I don’t think I’ve come across it before. What’s it called—Pansy’s Promise? Or is it Quelques Tantes?”
“You wait till we get to the station,” said the detective, with sweltering monotony. “Perhaps you won’t feel so funny then.”
“Perhaps I won’t,” Simon agreed languidly. “And perhaps you won’t look so funny.”
He yawned. The cab, with all its windows tightly closed, was warm and stuffy, and the conversational limitations of Inspector Pryke were also conducive to slumber.
The Saint closed his eyes. He felt limp and bored and his brain was starting to wander in a most remarkable and disjointed manner. It was all rather voluptuous and dreamy, like sinking away in some Elysian hop-joint…Suddenly he felt faintly sick.
The Saint Goes On (The Saint Series) Page 6
