The Saint and Mr. Teal (The Saint Series)

by Leslie Charteris

  “How could we get a machine-gun?” asked Orping sceptically.

  “We couldn’t—not yet,” said Goldman. “But we can get a rifle, can’t we? And half the houses in that street are boarding-houses or apartments, ain’t they? We’ll get him—maybe tomorrow.”

  The simple feasibility of the idea impressed itself gradually on Ted Orping. He nodded.

  “I’ll do it,” he said.

  “You won’t,” said Tex Goldman, without emotion. “With a rifle, it wants a guy who can shoot. Tope can shoot, and I’ll be wanting you for another job.”

  Extraordinarily enough, this was no less than the truth. During the Great War, Basher Tope had found himself pressed into the army with the coming of conscription, and had actually contrived to spend nearly six months of his service outside the military prisons which opened their doors to him as automatically as had the civil prisons with which he was so familiar. The only good mark on his military record was that he had passed his musketry courses with flying colours. It was a rather unexpected accomplishment to find a man like that, but good shots are born a thousand times more often than they are made. Basher Tope had the gift, and Tex Goldman selected him uncompromisingly for the second assault.

  He appeared in Manson Place that afternoon, wearing a stained black suit and hat and an impressive beard. In the fourth house which he tried he secured a front bed-sitting room on the ground floor from which he had a perfect view of Simon Templar’s front door. He called himself Schwartz, a traveller for a Leipzig firm of publishers, and spoke English so badly that his Hoxton accent was undetectable among the dense clutter of other accents with which his guttural speech was interspersed. He said he required a room only for two days and could not stand hotels.

  Unfortunately for him, he discarded his beard in the privacy of his room before he went to bed that night. Simon Templar, scanning the street from behind drawn curtains through a pair of field-glasses, saw him through the window and knew what to expect.

  “Tex isn’t wasting any time,” he said.

  His reply to the threat called for two curious articles of which at least one is not an ordinary purchasable commodity, but a closed car had been standing near his back door in the mews all day, and he knew it would not be easy to go out and do his shopping.

  He telephoned to an hotel, and to a firm of removers, and at half-past four a motor van drew up outside his front door and two men in green baize aprons disembarked and rang the bell. They were admitted, and a few minutes later they came out again with a large wardrobe trunk. It was loaded into the van, and delivered half an hour later to the hotel. Simon stepped out of it in his room, went unnoticed down the stairs, and in due course was shown up to his room again.

  It stands to the credit of his remarkable knowledge of queer markets that he was able to make his purchases in a very short time.

  At half-past ten the following morning another van drew up outside the Saint’s house. This time the men unloaded a large packing-case, and carried it inside. Half an hour later they brought it out again, and Basher Tope, at his window, did not notice that it appeared to be just as heavy when it came out as when it went in.

  He stole a few minutes from his post to telephone Tex Goldman.

  “Templar seems to be moving out,” he said. “’E sent orf some luggage and a packin’-case.”

  “I thought he would,” said Goldman, with satisfaction. “Get back to your window and see you don’t miss him.”

  There was a fast car outside the door of the house where Basher Tope had found his lodgings, waiting to take its part in his escape as soon as his job was done. The landlady came up to his room after lunch, and he paid her bill and muttered something about leaving that night. That left him free to depart at any time he pleased without exciting attention, and his task seemed easy. The fast car was only provided in case of unforeseen accidents.

  There was certainly an accident, and it was certainly unforeseen.

  Shortly afterwards Clem Enright, in a new brown-check suit and a bowler hat, called round with a message.

  “The boss says you’re to get ’im before eight o’clock, an’ ’e don’t care ’ow yer do it.”

  “I’ll get ’im if it’s possible,” growled Tope.

  Clem Enright found him unresponsive to a line of conversation about “real men like you an’ me wot means to get wot we goes after,” and departed huffily in a few minutes. There was a shabby loafer knocking his pipe out on the bumpers of the car as Enright came out, but Clem paid him no attention. Basher Tope had not noticed him, though he had been hanging around there for half an hour.

  Simon Templar only required the street to himself for a couple of minutes to do what he had to do, but it took him all that time to get it.

  He had left the house in the packing-case in which he had returned to it, but one of his purchases had gone in with him and had not come out again. Patricia Holm stayed there to attend to it.

  The shabby loafer shuffled out of Manson Place a quarter of an hour after Enright had gone, and in three-quarters of an hour more, by devious routes, he became Simon Templar again. It was as Simon Templar that he rang up Chief Inspector Teal.

  “If you’ve any time to spare, Claud, you might like to get the man who shot your policeman. He’s staying in Manson Place, and his present job is to murder me.”

  “Whereabouts is he?” asked the detective eagerly, and Simon grinned into the mouthpiece.

  “What’s lighting-up time these days? About seven-thirty, isn’t it?…Well, why don’t you blow down to Queen’s Gate about then? Hang around the corner of Manson Place and watch for the excitement.”

  Basher Tope had a boring afternoon, sitting in his window with a loaded rifle on his knee and his eyes glued to the green-painted door out of which he expected his target to emerge. The twilight came down while he watched, and a lamplighter went round the cul-de-sac to confirm the fact that it was getting near the time limit that Tex Goldman had given him.

  And then, at seven-thirty exactly, a ground floor window in the Saint’s house suddenly sprang into a square of light.

  Basher Tope leaned forward. He could see clearly into the room, which looked like a dining-room. At one end of the table with his back to the window, he could see the head and shoulders of a man in a grey suit who seemed to be absorbed in a book.

  Basher Tope turned sideways, and cuddled the stock of the gun slowly into his right shoulder.

  A knock came on the door of his room. It made him jump, although he knew the door was locked.

  “’Oo’s that?” he grunted.

  “A gentleman called Smith rang up, Mr Schwarz,” said his landlady’s voice. “He told me to ask you when’s Mr Brown going out.”

  It was a prearranged message, and it showed that Tex Goldman was getting impatient. Basher Tope showed his teeth.

  “Tell ’im ’e go out now.”

  He listened to the woman’s footsteps receding along the hall, and nestled his cheek once more against the stock of his rifle. Carefully he aligned the sights, the foresight exactly splitting the V of the back-sight, and the tip of it resting steadily at six o’clock on a point just below where the Saint’s left shoulder-blade should have been. His forefinger tightened on the trigger…

  Plop!

  He could see the dark hole made by the bullet, and his target flopped forward. Even so he fired two more shots to make certain—one more to the heart, one to the back of the head. Then he unscrewed the silencer rapidly, folded the gun over its central hinge, and packed it away in a plain black hand-bag. He unlocked the door and went out to the waiting car. The engine answered the self-starter instantly.

  Chief Inspector Teal idly watched the car turn into Queen’s Gate, and then he found Simon Templar beside him.

  “Well?” prompted the detective.

  “That was Basher Tope,” said the Saint casually, jerking a thumb after the retreating car. “He’s just killed me.”

  “What d’you mean—he’s jus
t killed you?” snapped the detective. “Why didn’t you—”

  “I mean, he thinks he has. As a matter of fact, he’s pumped three bullets into a tailor’s dummy with an old coat of mine on, and it fell over when Pat pulled a string. It’s too bad about Basher.”

  Teal looked down towards the Saint’s house and saw three splintery stars in the glass of the lighted window. It seemed as if he was about to say something, but he never said it. The crash of an explosion hit the left side of his face like a blow, and he turned quickly. Less than a hundred yards up Queen’s Gate he saw the car that had carried the bearded man away swerving wildly across the road, and the whole of one shattered side of it seemed to be hanging loose.

  The car jumped the kerb, ran across the pavement, and piled itself up with a second crash against a strip of area railings that bent over like reeds under the impact. Passers-by began running towards it, but Teal stood where he was. His baby-blue eyes returned to the Saint’s face.

  “What does that mean?” he asked.

  Simon slid out a cigarette case. His own eyes were just as steady as Teal’s—perhaps even steadier—and he shook his head with a slow motion of great sorrow.

  “The way I figure it out, Claud,” he said, “I think you’ll find he must have had some sort of bomb on board, in case the rifle didn’t work. It must have short-circuited, or something, and gone off. It’s just too bad about him.”

  5

  Simon took Patricia back to the hotel where he had booked a suite. They went there with the comforting feeling that they were not being followed, since at that moment there was no one available to follow them, and had a cocktail in the lounge with the knowledge that it would be sheer bad luck if any of the ungodly happened to come upon them there. Temporarily they had disappeared into the wide world, so far as Tex Goldman’s information was concerned.

  This hotel was the Dorchester, where the Saint had taken two small but luxurious rooms, with bath, overlooking Hyde Park. They were commended by the fact that they were faced by no other buildings from which shots might be fired, and although they cost twelve pounds a day Simon was untroubled by the thought of what the Sunday night orators a short distance away at Marble Arch might say about his extravagance if they knew. The accommodation satisfied that instinct in him which demanded the best of everything at any price, and he was not proposing to pay for it himself.

  “It is a fascinating thought,” said the Saint, nibbling a chip potato, “that there are well over forty million living souls in this great England. If every one of them gave me sixpence, none of them would really miss it, and I should be a millionaire.”

  “You’d better start collecting,” said Patricia.

  “I’m afraid it would take too long,” said the Saint regretfully.

  “Especially when we got north of the Tweed. No—we shall have to muck along with what we can collect in lumps from just a few people. Which reminds me that it must be nearly three months since we last thought of Mr Nilder.”

  It was quite true that Simon Templar’s memory had almost lost hold of that natty and unsavoury little gentleman. Three months ago he had sent him through the post a polite intimation that a gift of about ten thousand pounds to the Actors’ Orphanage would be in order, but that had been rather more of a derisive gesture to Mr Teal than a proposal of serious dimensions. The other exciting things that had happened about that time had driven the idea out of his head, but now it came back to him out of the blue.

  He felt that a brief Interlude of change from the somewhat strenuous circumstances of his war with Tex Goldman would do him good. Ordinary gang wars, after all, were not strictly in his line. They provided a definite interest in life, and a plentiful supply of skylarking and song, but taken continuously they were a heavy diet. Simon Templar required his share of the lighter things as well.

  No one knew better than the Saint that Scotland Yard was perfectly capable of taking care of the ordinary and open forms of law-breaking. In the Saint’s various arguments with the Tex Goldman mob, he had done very little more than could have been done by any detective with an original turn of mind and an equal freedom from responsibility to the stolidly unimaginative Powers who draw princely salaries for encumbering with red tape and ballyhoo the perfectly simple process of locating ungodliness and smacking it on the nose. His self-appointed mission was far more concerned with the ugly twists of ungodliness which rarely come within the ken of Scotland Yard at all—and which, if they do come within that myopic ken, are usually found to be so studiously legal that Officialdom can find nothing to do about them.

  The profession of Mr Nilder came very fairly into that category.

  At that moment Simon Templar knew little about him. A word of information had come his way through one of the mysterious channels by which such words reached his ears. It was a word that would have meant nothing to Scotland Yard, but to the Saint it opened up an avenue of fascinating speculations which he knew he would have to explore someday. Three months ago he had seized on it blindly for a passing need, and now it seemed to him that the time was ripe for investigating it further.

  “We ought to know more about Ronald,” said the Saint.

  It was quite natural for him to turn aside like that to such a comparatively trivial affair, though his life had been called for twice in the last two days and the Green Cross boys were still combing London for him with their message of death. Numbers of beefy men were drawing their weekly pay envelopes for looking after the Green Cross boys, but he was not included in the distribution.

  Mr Ronald Nilder left London the next morning, as a matter of history—alone, and driving the modest two-year-old Buick which was the limit of his ostentation on the road, Simon Templar, also as a matter of history, went with him—though Mr Nilder did not know this.

  The preparation of successful buccaneering raids on the aforesaid members of the ungodly requires an extensive knowledge of the victims’ habits. The actual smacking of them on the nose is very spectacular and entertaining to behold, but although it is those high spots of privateering that the chronicler is happiest to record, it is still tediously true that if there were no dull periods of preparation there would be no high spots. You have to get to the top of the Eiffel Tower before you can dive off, and the elevator is often out of order.

  Simon figured it was a nice day for a drive. London was in the grip of its brief summer. From Aldgate to the Brompton Road, locked lines of grumbling traffic edged along their routes in rackety crawls of a few feet at a time, and subsided again into jammed immobility with a ceaseless belching of blue smoke and mephitic fumes—an unforgettable procession of tribute to the singular genius of the Authorities who had organised enormous gangs of workmen to dig up roads and excavate new and superfluous Underground stations at every point where their activities could set a capstone on the paralytic confusion. The slobbering sultans of Whitehall thought about the colossal tax on petrol, and rubbed their greasy hands gleefully at the idea of the tens of thousands of gallons that were being spewed out into space for the pleasure of keeping engines running between two-yards snail’s-rushes; while the perspiring public stifled in the fetid atmosphere, and wondered dumbly what it was all about—being constitutionally incapable of asking why their money should be paid into the bank balances of Traffic Commissioners nominally employed to see that such conditions should not exist. London, in short, was just the same as it always was, except for the temperature, and the Saint felt almost kindly disposed towards Mr Nilder as the dusty Buick picked up speed as they left Kingston, and he was led rapidly out into the cleaner air of Surrey.

  With these bolshevistic reflections to divert him, the Saint had an easy part to play as the hind quarters of a loose tandem that headed by the most direct road to Bursledon. Mr Nilder did not know the Saint’s car, and he did not know the Saint, and Simon made no particular effort to hide himself. After all, there is nothing very startling about two motorists trailing to the same destination at approximately the same
average speed, and the Saint did not feel furtive that morning.

  They ran into Bursledon with fifty yards between them, and there Mr Nilder’s car swung off sharply to the right down a lane that led along the backs of the many dockyards that line the river. Simon drove on across the bridge, parked at the side of the road, and returned on foot.

  He stood in the middle of the bridge and leaned his elbows on the parapet, gazing down along the lines of houseboats and miscellaneous other craft that were moored in the stream. The mingled smells of paint and tar and sea-water drifted to his nostrils down the slight sultry breeze, and he could hear the clunk of spasmodic hammering from one of the yards on his right. Somehow it brought back to him a nostalgia of other and perhaps better days when he had been free to go down to limpid tropical seas under the swelling white sails of a schooner, and his forays against the ungodly had been fought under the changing skies of forbidden pearling grounds. All at once that twist of retrospect made him envy the men he had left behind—bad men and all. And for one moment of memory he felt tired of the grubby ratting through smirched city streets which had claimed him for so long…

  And then he saw a dinghy putting out from the shore, and Mr Ronald Nilder in the stern.

  His cigarette canted up alertly, and the blue far-seeing eyes ranged out over the water. In a few moments he was able to pick out the dinghy’s objective—a trim white fifty-foot motor cruiser that rode lazily at its moorings in mid-stream. It looked fast—faster than anything else in the perspective—and at the same time it had a sweetly proportioned breadth of beam that guaranteed it seaworthy as well.

  The Saint launched himself off the parapet and strolled along to the lane down which Nilder’s car had disappeared. Wandering through the yards, he had glimpses of the cruiser which showed him Ronald Nilder’s progress in a series of illuminating snapshots. He saw the dinghy come alongside, and the oarsman holding it steady while Nilder climbed aboard. Then he saw Nilder disappearing into the cabin, and the oarsman making the dinghy fast to a cleat on the stern. Then the oarsman going forward over the cabin roof and lowering himself into the cockpit. Then Nilder appearing again beside him, having exchanged his grey homburg for a white-topped yachting cap, and not looking very nautical even then…