The Saint and Mr. Teal (The Saint Series)

by Leslie Charteris

  “Do you know who it was?” Simon asked gently.

  Quell shook his head.

  “I dunno. Never saw him before in my life. Called himself Jones. Silly sora name, isnit? Jones…An’ he tole me Binks can make gold!”

  “Where did you meet him, old chap? Can you tell me what he looked like?”

  “I dunno. Been all over place. Everywhere you could gerra drink. Man with a silly sora face. Never seen him before in my life. Silly ole Jones.” The dying man wagged his head solemnly. “An’ he did a mos’ unfrien’ly thing. Tried to shoot me! A mos’ unfrien’ly thing.” Quell giggled feebly. “An’ he saysh Binks can make gold. Thash funny, isnit?”

  Simon looked round the room. There was no trace of the man who called himself Jones—nothing but an ash-tray that had been freshly emptied, Obviously the killer had stayed long enough to obliterate all evidence of his visit; obviously too, his victim had been temporarily paralysed, so that the murderer had believed that he was already dead.

  There was a telephone by the door, and for a moment Simon Templar gazed at it and wondered if it was his duty to ring for assistance. The last thing on earth that he wanted was an interview even with the most unsuspecting police officer, but that consideration would not have weighed with him for an instant if he had not known that all the doctors in France could have done nothing for the man who was dying in his arms and did not know it.

  “Why did Jones try to shoot you?” he asked, and Brian Quell grinned at him vacuously.

  “Because he said Binksh could—”

  The repetition choked off in the man’s throat. His eyes wavered over Simon’s face stupidly; then they dilated with the first and last stunned realisation of the truth, only for one horrible dumb second before the end…

  Simon read the dead man’s name from the tailor’s tab inside the breast pocket of his coat, and went softly back to his room. The other windows on the courtyard remained shrouded in darkness. If anyone else had heard the shot it must have been attributed to a passing taxi, but there is a difference between the cough of an engine and the crack of an automatic about which the trained ear can never be mistaken. If it had not been for Simon Templar’s familiarity with that subtle distinction, a coup might have been inscribed in the annals of crime which would have shaken Europe from end to end—but Simon could not see so far ahead that night.

  He left Paris early the following morning. It was unlikely that the murder would be discovered before the afternoon; for it is an axiom of the Quarter that early rising is a purely bourgeois conceit, and one of the few failings of the French hotel-keepers is that they feel none of that divine impulse to dictate the manner of life of their clientèle which has from time immemorial made Great Britain the Mecca of holiday makers from every corner of the globe. Simon Templar had rarely witnessed a violent death about which he had so clear a conscience, and yet he knew that it would have been foolish to stay. It was one of the penalties of his fame that he had no more chance of convincing any well-informed policeman that he was a law-abiding citizen than he had of being elected President of the United States. So he went back to England, where he was more unpopular than anywhere else in Europe.

  If it is true that there is some occult urge which draws a murderer back to the scene of his crime, it must have been an infinitely more potent force which brought Simon Templar back across the Channel to the scene of more light-hearted misdemeanours than Scotland Yard had ever before endured from the disproportionate sense of humour of any one outlaw. It was not so many years since he had first formulated the idea of making it his life work to register himself in the popular eye as something akin to a public institution, and yet in that short space of time his dossier in the Records Office had swollen to a saga of debonair lawlessness that made Chief Inspector Claud Eustace Teal speechless to contemplate. The absurd little sketch of a skeleton figure graced with a symbolic halo, that impudent signature with which Simon Templar endorsed all his crimes, had spread the terror of the Saint into every outpost of the underworld and crashed rudely into the placid meandering of all those illustrious members of the Criminal Investigation Department who had hitherto been content to justify their employment as guardians of the Law by perfecting themselves in the time-honoured sport of persuading deluded shop-assistants to sell them a bar of chocolate one minute later than the lawful hours for such transactions. The Robin Hood of Modern Crime they called him in the headlines, and extolled his virtues in the same paragraph as they reviled the CID for failing to lay him by the heels; which only shows you what newspapers can do for democracy. He had become an accepted incident in current affairs, like Wheat Quotas and the League of Nations, only much more interesting. He stood for a vengeance that struck swiftly and without mercy, for a gay defiance of all dreary and mechanical things.

  “It’s not my fault, sir,” Chief Inspector Teal stated gloomily, in an interview which he had with the Assistant Commissioner. “We aren’t in the Saint’s class, and someday I suppose we shall have to admit it. If this was a republic we should make him dictator and get some sleep.”

  The Commissioner frowned. He was one of the last survivors of the old military school of police chiefs, a distinguished soldier of unimpeachable integrity, but he laboured under the disadvantage of expecting professional law-breakers to parade for judgment as meekly as the casual defaulters he had been accustomed to dealing with in Pondicherry.

  “About two months ago,” he said, “you told me that the Saint’s arrest was only a matter of hours. It was something to do with illicit diamonds, wasn’t it?”

  “It was,” Teal said grimly.

  He was never likely to forget the incident. Neither, it seemed, were his superiors. Gunner Perrigo was the culprit in that case, and the police had certainly got their man. The only trouble was that Simon Templar had got him first. Perrigo had been duly hanged on the very morning of this conversation, but his illicit diamonds had never been heard of again.

  “It should have been possible to form a charge,” insisted the Commissioner, plucking his iron-grey moustache nervously. He disapproved of Teal’s attitude altogether, but the plump detective was an important officer.

  “It might be, if there were no lawyers,” said Teal. “If I went into a witness-box and talked about illicit diamonds I should be bawled out of court. We know the diamonds existed, but who’s going to prove it to a jury? Frankie Hormer could have talked about them, but Perrigo gave him the works. Perrigo could have talked, but he didn’t—and now he’s dead. And the Saint got away with them out of England, and that’s the end of it. If I could lay my hands on him tomorrow I’d have no more hope of proving he’d ever possessed any illicit diamonds than I’d have of running the Pope for bigamy. We could charge him with obstructing and assaulting the police in the execution of their duty, but what in heaven’s name’s the use of running the Saint for a milk-and-water rap like that? It’d be the biggest joke that Fleet Street’s had on us for years.”

  “Did you learn all the facts about his last stunt in Germany?”

  “Yes. I did. And it just came through yesterday that the German police aren’t in a hurry to prosecute. There’s some big name involved, and they’ve got the wind up. If I was expecting anything else, I was betting the Saint would be hustling back here and getting ready to dare them to try and extradite him from his own country—he’s pulled that one on me before.”

  The Commissioner sniffed.

  “I suppose if he did come back you’d want me to head a deputation of welcome,” he said scathingly.

  “I’ve done everything that any officer could do in the circumstances, sir,” said Teal. “If the Saint came back this afternoon, and I met him on the doorstep of this building, I’d have to pass the time of day with him—and like it. You know the law as well as I do. We couldn’t ask him any more embarrassing questions than if he had a good time abroad, and how was his aunt’s rheumatism when he last heard from her. They don’t want detectives here any longer—what they need is a
staff of hypnotists and faith healers.”

  The Commissioner fidgeted with a pencil.

  “If the Saint came back, I should certainly expect to see some change in our methods,” he remarked pointedly: and then the telephone on his desk buzzed.

  He picked up the receiver, and then passed it across to Teal.

  “For you, Inspector,” he said curtly.

  Teal took over the instrument.

  “Saint returns to England,” clicked the voice on the wire. “A report from Newhaven states that a man answering to Simon Templar’s description landed from the Isle of Sheppey this afternoon. He was subsequently traced to an hotel in the town—”

  “Don’t talk to me like a fourth-rate newspaper,” snarled Teal. “What have you done with him?”

  “On the instructions of the Chief Constable, he is being detained pending advice from London.”

  Teal put the receiver carefully back on its bracket.

  “Well, sir, the Saint has come back,” he said glumly.

  2

  The Assistant Commissioner did not head a deputation of welcome to Newhaven. Teal went down alone, with mixed feelings. He remembered that the Saint’s last action before leaving England had been to present him with a sheaf of information which had enabled him to clean up several cases that had been racking the brains of the CID for many months. He remembered also that the Saint’s penultimate action had been to threaten him with the most vicious form of blackmail that can be applied to any police officer. But Chief Inspector Teal had long since despaired of reconciling the many contradictions of his endless feud with the man who in any other path of life might have been his closest friend.

  He found Simon Templar dozing peacefully on the narrow bed of a cell in Newhaven police station. The Saint rolled up to a sitting position as the detective entered, and smiled at him cheerfully.

  “Claud Eustace himself, by the tum-tum of Tutankhamen! I thought I’d be seeing you.” Simon looked the detective over thoughtfully. “And I believe you’ve put on weight,” he said.

  Teal sank his teeth in a well-worn lump of chewing gum.

  “What have you come back for?” he asked shortly.

  On the way down he had mapped out the course of the interview minutely. He had decided that his attitude would be authoritative, restrained, distant, perfectly polite but definitely warning. He would tolerate no more nonsense. So long as the Saint was prepared to behave himself, no obstacles would be placed in his way, but if he was contemplating any further misdeeds…The official warning would be delivered thus and thus.

  And now, within thirty seconds of his entering the cell, in the first sentence he had uttered, the smooth control of the situation which he had intended to usurp from the start was sliding out of his grasp. It had always been like that. Teal proposed and the Saint disposed. There was something about the insolent self-possession of that scapegrace buccaneer that goaded the detective into faux pas for which he was never afterwards able to account.

  “As a matter of fact, old porpoise,” said the Saint, “I came back for some cigarettes. You can’t buy my favourite brand in France, and if you’ve ever endured a week of Marylands—”

  Teal took a seat on the bunk.

  “You left England in rather a hurry two months ago, didn’t you?”

  “I suppose I did,” admitted the Saint reflectively. “You see, I felt like having a good bust, and you know what I am. Impetuous. I just upped and went.”

  “Pity you didn’t stay.”

  The Saint’s blue eyes gazed out banteringly from under dark level brows.

  “Teal, is that kind? If you want to know, I was expecting a better reception than this. I was only thinking just now how upset my solicitor would be when he heard about it. Poor old chap—he’s awfully sensitive about these things. When one of his respectable and valued clients comes home to his native land, and he isn’t allowed to move two hundred yards into the interior before some flat-footed hick cop is lugging him off to the hoosegow for no earthly reason—”

  “Now you listen to me for a minute,” Teal cut in bluntly. “I didn’t come here to swap any funny talk of that sort with you. I came down to tell you how the Yard thinks you’d better behave now you’re home. You’re going loose as soon as I’ve finished with you, but if you want to stay loose you’ll take a word of advice.”

  “Shall I?”

  “That’s up to you.” The detective was plunging into his big speech half an hour before it was due, but he was going to get it through intact if it was the last thing he ever did. It was an amazing thing that even after the two months of comparative calm which he had enjoyed since the Saint left England, the gall of many defeats was as bitter on his tongue as it had ever been before. Perhaps he had a clairvoyant glimpse of the future, born out of the deepest darkness of his subconscious mind, which told him that he might as well have lectured a sun-spot about its pernicious influence on the weather. The bland smiling composure of that lean figure opposite him was fraying the edges of his nerves with all the accumulated armoury of old associations. “I’m not suggesting,” Teal said tersely. “I’m prophesying.”

  The Saint acknowledged his authority with the faintest possible flicker of one eyebrow—and yet the sardonic mockery of that minute gesture was indescribable.

  “Yeah?”

  “I’m telling you to watch your step. We’ve put up with a good deal from you in the past. You’ve been lucky. You even earned a free pardon, once. Anyone would have thought you’d have been content to retire gracefully after that. You had your own ideas. But a piece of luck like that doesn’t come twice in any man’s lifetime. You’d made things hot enough for yourself when you went away, and you needn’t think they’ve cooled off just because you took a short holiday. I’m not saying they mightn’t cool off a bit if you took a long one. We aren’t out for any more trouble.”

  “Happy days,” drawled the Saint, “are here again. Teal, in another minute you’ll have me crying.”

  “You shouldn’t have much to cry about,” said the detective aggressively. “There’s some excuse for the sneak-thief who goes on pulling five-pound jobs. He hasn’t a chance to retire. You ought to have made a pretty good pile by this time—”

  “About a quarter of a million,” said the Saint modestly. “I admit it sounds a lot, but look at Rockefeller. He could spend that much every day.”

  “You’ve had a good run. I won’t complain about it. You’ve done me some good turns on your way, and the Commissioner is willing to set that in your favour. Why not give the game a rest?”

  The bantering blue eyes were surveying Teal steadily all the time he was speaking. Their expression was almost seraphic in its innocence—only the most captious critic, or the most overwrought inferiority complex could have found anything to complain about in their elaborate sobriety. The Saint’s face wore the register of a rapt student of theology absorbing wisdom from an archbishop.

  And yet Chief Inspector Claud Eustace Teal felt his mouth drying up in spite of the soothing stimulus of spearmint. He had the numbing sensation of fatuity of a man who has embarked on a funny story in the hope of salvaging an extempore after-dinner speech that has been falling progressively flatter with every sentence, and who realises in the middle of it that it is not going to get a laugh. His own ears began to wince painfully at the awful dampness of the platitudes that were drooling inexplicably out of his own mouth. His voice sounded like the bleat of a lost sheep crying in the wilderness. He wished he had sent someone else to Newhaven.

  “Let me know the worst,” said the Saint. “What are you leading up to? Is the Government proposing to offer me a pension and a seat in the House of Lords if I’ll retire?”

  “It isn’t. It’s offering you ten years’ free board and lodging at Parkhurst if you don’t. I shouldn’t want you to make any mistake about it. If you think you’re—”

  Simon waved his hand.

  “If you’re not careful you’ll be repeating yourself, Cla
ud,” he murmured. “Let me make the point for you. So long as I carry on like a little gentleman and go to Sunday School every week, your lordships will leave me alone. But if I should get back any of my naughty old ideas—if anyone sort of died suddenly while I was around, or some half-witted policeman lost sight of a packet of illicit diamonds and wanted to blame it on me—then it’ll be the ambition of every dick in England to lead me straight to the Old Bailey. The long-suffering police of this great country are on their mettle. Britain has awoken. The Great Empire on which the sun never sets—”

  “That’s enough of that,” yapped the detective.

  He had not intended to yap. He should have spoken in a trenchant and paralysing baritone, a voice ringing with power and determination. Something went wrong with his larynx at the crucial moment.

  He glared savagely at the Saint.

  “I’d like to know your views,” he said.

  Simon Templar stood up. There were seventy-four steel inches of him, a long lazy uncoiling of easy strength and fighting vitality tapering down from wide square shoulders. The keen tanned face of a cavalier smiled down at Teal.

  “Do you really want them, Claud?”

  “That’s what I’m here for.”

  “Then if you want the news straight from the stable, I think that speech of yours would be a knockout at the Mothers’ Union.” The Saint spread out his arms. “I can just see those kindly, wrinkled faces lighting up with the radiant dawn of a new hope—the tired souls wakening again to beauty—”

  “Is that all you’ve got to say?”

  “Very nearly, Claud. You see, your proposition doesn’t tempt me. Even if it had included the pension and the peerage, I don’t think I should have succumbed. It would make life so dull. I can’t expect you to see my point, but there it is.”

  Teal also got to his feet, under the raking twinkle of those very clear blue eyes. There was something in their mockery which he had never understood, which perhaps he would never understand. And against that something which he could not understand his jaw tightened up in grim belligerence.