If further pictorial detail is required, it may be provided by mentioning that the Saint was wearing a light grey suit and a silk shirt, both of which showed no traces of ever having been worn before, and an unwary angel might have been pardoned for turning round and hurriedly overhauling its own conscience after getting one glimpse of the radiant innocence of his face.
But most of these interesting points were wasted on the single-track minds of the two men in the doorway. Their retinas, certainly, registered a photographic impression of the general homoscape, but the spotlight of their attention merely oscillated momentarily over the broader features of the picture, and settled back in focus on the salient factor of the whole scenery—the starkly-fashioned chunk of blued steel that stared unwinkingly into the exact centre of the six-inch space between them, only too plainly ready and eager to concentrate its entire affection upon whichever of them first put in a bid for the monopoly.
“Make yourselves at home, boys,” murmured the Saint. “Perrigo, you may close the door—how did you leave Frankie, by the way?”
Perrigo, with one hand dumbly obedient on the knob, started as if he had received an electric shock. The casual question needled with such an uncanny precision slick into the very core of things that he stared back at the Saint in the dim beginnings of a kind of vengeful terror.
“What do you know about Frankie?” he croaked.
“This and that,” said the Saint, nonchalantly unhelpful. “Carry on shutting the door, brother, and afterwards you may keep on talking.” He listened to the click of the latch, and spilled a quantity of cigarette-ash on to Mr Elberman’s priceless carpet. “It was tough on your pal being bumped off in Durban,” he continued conversationally, as if he had no other object but to put his victims at their ease. “Also, in my opinion, unnecessary. I know Frankie was inclined to be cagey, but I think a clever man could have found out what ship he was sailing home on without sending a man out to South Africa to spy on him…Come in, boys, come in. Sit down. Have a drink. I want you to feel happy.”
“Who are you?” snarled Perrigo.
Simon shifted his mocking gaze to Elberman.
“Do you know, Isadore?” he asked.
Elberman shook his head, moistening his lips mechanically.
Simon smiled, and stood up. “Sit down,” he said.
He ushered the two men forcefully into chairs, relieving Perrigo of a shooting-iron during the process. And then he put his back to the fire and leaned against the mantelpiece, spinning his gun gently round one finger hooked in the trigger-guard.
“I might deceive you,” he said with disarming candour, “but I won’t. I am the Saint.” He absorbed the reflex ripples of expression that jerked over the seated men, and smiled again. “Yes—I’m the guy you’ve been wanting to meet all these years. I am the man with the load of mischief. I,” said the Saint, who was partial to the personal pronoun, and apt to become loquacious when he found that it could start a good sentence, “am the Holy Terror, and the only thing for you boys to do is to try and look pleased about it. I’m on the point of taking a longish holiday, and my bank balance is just a few pounds shy of the amount I’d fixed for my pension. You may not have heard anything about it before, but you are going to make a donation to the fund.”
The two men digested his speech in silence. It took them a little time, which the Saint did not begrudge them. He always enjoyed these moments. He allowed the gist of the idea to percolate deeply into their brains, timing the seconds by the regular spinning of his gun. There were six of them. Then—
“What d’you want?” snarled Perrigo.
“Diamonds,” said the Saint succinctly.
“What diamonds?”
Perrigo’s voice cracked on the question. The boil of belligerent animosity within him split through the thin overlay of puzzlement in which he tried to clothe his words, and tore the flimsy bluff to shreds. And the Saint’s eyes danced.
“The illicit diamonds,” he said, “which Frankie Hormer was bringing over by arrangement with Isadore. The diamonds for which Isadore double-crossed Frankie and took you into partnership, my pet. The boodle that you’ve got on your person right now, pretty Perrigo!”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“No? Then perhaps Isadore will explain.”
Again the Saint’s bantering attention transferred itself to the owner of the house, but Elberman said nothing.
And Simon shook his head sadly.
“You may be the hell of a bright conspirator, Isadore,” he remarked, “but you seem to be the odd man out of this conversazione. Pardon me while I do my Wild West stuff.”
He unbuttoned his coat and took a length of light cord from an inside pocket. There was a running bowline ready at one end of it; he crossed to Elberman’s chair and dropped the noose over his head, letting it settle down to his waist. With a brisk yank and a couple of twists he had the man’s arms pinioned to his sides and the complete exhibit attached to the chair, finishing off with a pair of non-skid knots. He performed the entire operation with his left hand, and the gun in his right hand never ceased to keep the situation under effective control.
Then he returned to Perrigo.
“Where are they, sweetheart?” he inquired laconically, and the man tightened up a vicious lower lip.
“They’re where you won’t find them,” he said.
Simon shrugged.
“The place does not exist,” he said.
His glance quartered Perrigo with leisurely approbation—north to south, east to west. Somewhere in the area it covered was a hundred thousand pounds’ worth of crystallised carbon, which wouldn’t take up much room. A search through the man’s pockets would only have taken a few seconds, but the Saint rather liked being clever. And sometimes he had inspirations of uncanny brilliance.
“Your trousers and coat don’t match,” he said abruptly.
The inspiration grew larger, whizzing out of the back of beyond with the acceleration of something off Daytona Beach, and the jump that Perrigo gave kicked it slap into the immediate urgent present.
“And I’ll bet Frankie Hormer’s don’t, either,” said the Saint.
The words came out in a snap.
And then he laughed. He couldn’t help it. His long shot had gone welting through the bull’s-eye with point-blank accuracy, and the scoring of the hit was registered on Perrigo’s face as plainly as if a battery of coloured lamps had lighted up and a steam organ had begun to play Down among the Dead Men to celebrate the event.
“What’s the joke?” demanded Perrigo harshly, and Simon pulled himself together.
“Let me reconstruct it. Diamonds are precious things—especially when they’re the kind about which possession is the whole ten points of the law. If you’re packing a load of that variety around with you, you don’t take chances with ’em. You keep ’em as close to you as they’ll go. You don’t even carry them in your pockets, because pockets have their dangers. You sew them into your clothes. Frankie did, anyway. Wait a minute!” The Saint was working back like lightning over the ground he knew. He grabbed another thread and hauled it out of the skein—and it matched. “Why didn’t you cut the diamonds out of Frankie’s clothes? If you had time to trade clothes, you had time to do that. Then it must have been because it was dangerous. Why so? Because Frankie was dead! Because you didn’t want to leave a clue to your motive. You killed Frankie, and—Hold the line, Perrigo!” The gangster was coming out of his chair, but Simon’s gun checked him half-way. “You killed Frankie,” said the Saint, “and you changed your coat for his.”
Perrigo relaxed slowly.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.
“You do. You’re three minutes late with your bluff. The train has pulled out and left you in the gentleman’s cloakroom. Where you have no right to be. Take off that coat!”
Perrigo hesitated for a moment, and then, sullenly, he obeyed.
He threw the garment dow
n at the Saint’s feet, and Simon dropped on one knee. With the flat of his hand he went padding over every inch of the coat, feeling for the patch of tell-tale hardness that would indicate the whereabouts of Frankie Hormer’s half-million-dollar cargo.
That was the sort of happy harvest that it was an unadulterated pleasure for the Saint to reap—the kind in which you just winked at the ears, and they hopped down off their stalks and marched in an orderly fashion into the barn. It made him feel at peace with the world…Down the sleeves he went, with tingling fingers, and over the lapels…Almost like lifting shoe-laces out of a blind beggar’s tray, it was…He went along the bottom of the coat and up the back. He turned the pockets inside out, and investigated a wallet which he found in one of them.
And then, with a power-driven vacuum pump starting work on his interior, he turned the coat over and began again. He couldn’t have been mistaken. He’d been as sure of his deductions as any man can be. The aptness of them had been placarded all over the place. And never in his life before had one of those moments of inspiration led him astray. He had grown to accept the conclusions they drew and the procedures they dictated as things no less inevitable and infallible than the laws of Nature that make water run downhill and mountains sit about the world with their fat ends undermost. And now, with a direct controversion of his faith right under his groping hands, he felt as if he was seeing Niagara Falls squirting upwards into Lake Ontario, while the Peak of Teneriffe perambulated about on its head with its splayed roots waving among the clouds.
For the first search had yielded nothing at all.
And the second search produced no more.
“Is—that—really—so!” drawled the Saint.
He stared at Perrigo without goodwill, and read the sneer in the other’s eyes. It touched the rawest part of the Saint’s most personal vanity—but he didn’t tell the world.
“Thinking again?” Perrigo gibed.
“Why, yes,” said the Saint mildly. “I often do it.”
He stood up unconcernedly, fishing for his cigarette-case, and lighted another cigarette, still allowing nothing to distract the relentless aim of his automatic.
Somewhere there was a leak in the pipe, and his brain was humming out to locate it.
From Elberman there was nothing to be learned—he sat placidly where the Saint had roped him, outwardly unperturbed by what was happening, apparently satisfied to leave what small chance there was of effective opposition in the hands of Perrigo. And Elberman probably knew no more than the Saint, anyhow.
No—the secret was locked up behind the narrowed glinting eyes of Perrigo. Somewhere in the mind of that tough baby was stored the sole living human knowledge of the fate of the biggest packet of illicit diamonds ever brought into England in one batch, and Simon Templar was going to extract that knowledge if he had to carve it out with dynamite and rock-drills.
CHAPTER 3
“I heard you were clever.” Perrigo spoke again, rasping into the breach in a voice that was jagged with spiteful triumph. “Got a reputation, haven’t you? I’ll say you must have earned it.”
“Sure I did,” assented the Saint, with a gaze like twin pinpoints of blue fire.
And then a thunder of knocking on the front door drummed up through the house and froze the three of them into an instant’s bewildered immobility. It was, if the Saint had but known it at that moment, the herald of an interruption that was destined to turn that exceedingly simple adventure into the most riotous procession that the chronicler has yet been called upon to record. It was the starting-gun for the wildest of all wild-goose chases. It was, in its essence, the beginning of the Melancholy Journey of Mr Teal. If the Saint had known it, he would have chalked up the exact time on the wall and drawn a halo round it. But he did not know.
He stiffened up like a pointer, with his head cocked on one side and two short vertical lines etching in between his eyebrows. The clamorous insistence of that knocking boded no welcome visitor. There was nothing furtive or sympathetic about it—nothing that one could associate with any possible client of a receiver of stolen goods. It hammered up the stairway in an atmosphere of case-hardened determination. And then it stopped, and grimly awaited results.
Simon looked from Elberman to Perrigo, and back again. He intercepted the glances that passed between them, and gathered from them a joint nescience equal to his own. In Perrigo’s eyes there was suspicion and interrogation, in Elberman’s nothing but an answering blank.
“Throwing a party?” murmured the Saint.
In silence he inhaled from his cigarette, and flicked it backwards into the fire. Listening intently, he heard through the window on his left the single sharp pip of a motor-horn sounding on a peculiar note. And the knocking below started again.
There was no doubt about its intentions this time. It signified its uncompromising determination to be noticed, and added a rider to the effect that if it wasn’t noticed damned quickly it was perfectly prepared to bust down the door and march in regardless.
“So you’ve brought the cops, have you?” grated Perrigo.
He came recklessly out of his chair.
The obvious solution had dawned upon him a second after it dawned upon the Saint, and he acted accordingly. His interpretation was all wrong, but his reasoning process was simple.
To the Saint, however, the situation remained the same, whatever Perrigo thought. With the police outside, his gun was temporarily as useless as a piece of scrap-iron. And besides, he wanted further converse with Perrigo. Those three hundred carats of compact mazuma were still somewhere in Perrigo’s charge, and Simon Templar was not going home without them. Therefore the bluff was called. Perrigo had got to stay alive, æsthetically distressing as his continued existence might be.
Simon pocketed his gun and stood foursquare to the fact. He slipped his head under Perrigo’s smashing fist, and lammed into the gangster’s solar plexus a half-arm jolt that sogged home like a battering-ram punching into a lump of putty. Perrigo gasped and went down writhing, and the Saint grinned.
“Sing to him, Isadore,” he instructed hopefully, and went briskly out on to the landing.
That toot on the horn outside the window had been Patricia’s signal to say that something troublesome was looming up and that she was wide awake, but the first item of information was becoming increasingly self-evident. As Simon went down the stairs, the clattering on the front door broke out again, reinforced by impatient peals on the bell, and the door itself was shaking before an onslaught of ponderous shoulders as the Saint turned out the light and drew the bolts.
A small avalanche of men launched themselves at him out of the gloom. Simon hacked one of them on the shins and secured a crippling grip on the nose of another, and then someone found the switch and put the light on again, and the Saint looked along his arm and found that his fingers were firmly clamped on the proboscis of Chief Inspector Teal himself.
“Why, it’s Claud Eustace!” cried the Saint, without moving.
Teal shook the hand savagely off his nose, and wiped his streaming eyes.
“What the hell are you doing here?” he brayed.
“Playing dingbat through the daisies,” said the Saint.
All the debonair gay impudence that he possessed was glimmering around his presence like a sort of invisible aurora borealis, and the perception of it made something seethe up through the detective like a gush of boiling lava. His brows knitted down over a glare of actual malevolence.
“Yes? And where’s Perrigo?”
“He’s upstairs.”
“Since when?”
“About half an hour.”
“And when did you arrive?”
“Roughly simultaneous, I should say.”
“What for?”
“Well, if you must know,” said the Saint, “I heard a rumour that Perrigo had discovered the second rhyme to ‘Putney,’ which I wanted for a limerick I was trying to compose. I thought of an old retired colonel of Putney, who li
ved on dill pickles and chutney, till one day he tried chilis boiled with carbide, tiddy dum tiddy dum didy utney. It’s all very difficult.”
Teal unfastened his coat and signed to one of the men who were with him.
“Take him,” he ordered curtly.
Simon put his hands in his pockets and leaned against the wall with an air of injury.
“In your own words—what for?” he inquired, and a little of Chief Inspector Teal’s old pose of heavy sleepiness returned. It was an affectation on which the detective had lately been losing a lot of his grip.
“A man named Hormer, a diamond smuggler, was murdered on the train between Southampton and Waterloo this evening. Perrigo was seen at Waterloo. I want him on suspicion of having committed the murder, and I’m going to take you on suspicion of being an accessory.”
“Sorry,” said the Saint, and something about the way he said it made Teal’s baby blue eyes go dark and beady.
“Going to tell me you’ve got another alibi?”
“I am.”
“I’ll hear about that later.”
“You’ll hear about it now.” The arrogant forefinger which Teal had learned to hate as personally as if it had a separate individual existence prodded into the gibbosity of his waistline with unequivocal emphasis. “From seven o’clock till eight-fifteen I was having dinner at Dorchester House—which includes the time that train got in. I had two friends with me. I talked to the head waiter, I discussed vintages with the wine waiter, and I gave the maître d’hôtel a personal lesson in the art of making perfect crêpes suzette. Go and ask ’em. And ask your own flat-footed oaf outside my house what time he saw me come in.”
Teal champed grimly on his gum.
“I didn’t accuse you of committing the murder,” he said. “I’m having you for an accessory, and you can prove you were in Nova Scotia at the time for all that’ll help you. Tell me you’re going to prove you’re in Nova Scotia right now, and perhaps I’ll listen.”
The Saint versus Scotland Yard (The Saint Series) Page 16
