“They wounded two men and got away with over three thousand pounds in cash—the booking-office takings from several stations. That’s where it’s so difficult. They’ve got us guessing all the time. First it’s jeweller’s shops; then we guard those, and it’s banks. Then we watch the banks, and it’s a night club. Now it’s the Underground. We can’t possibly protect every place in London where you can find large sums of money, and they know it.”
“No more clues?”
“We’re working on several lines,” said the detective, with professional vagueness, but Simon Templar was not impressed.
“As I see it,” he said, “your trouble is to get hold of the man up top who’s producing all these smart ideas. It’s no good knocking off Green Cross boys here and there—you can always keep tabs on them in the ordinary way, and it’s just this unknown bloke who’s got control of ’em who’s making ’em dangerous for the time being.”
Teal nodded.
“That’s about it.”
“And if you did find this unknown bloke, he’d probably turn out to be so unknown that all the evidence you could get against him wouldn’t hang a mosquito.”
“That’s often the trouble,” said Teal gloomily. “But we can’t work any other way.”
“Let’s have some lunch,” said the Saint brightly.
Throughout the meal he played the perfect host with a stern devotion to the book of etiquette that Patricia could not understand. He talked about racing, beer, aeroplanes, theatres, politics, sparking-plugs, dress reform, and cancer—everything that could not be steered to any subject that the detective might find tender. Most particularly he avoided saying anything more about the Green Cross boys or their unknown leader, and more than once Teal looked sideways at him with a kind of irritated puzzlement.
It was not like the Saint to show such an elaborate desire to keep possibly painful matters out of discussion, and the symptom made Mr Teal feel a dim uneasiness.
At two o’clock he excused himself with a muttered hint of official business, and Simon accompanied him to the door. Teal twiddled his bowler hat and stared at him somnolently.
“You’re keeping something back,” he said bluntly. “I can’t make you tell me if you don’t want to, but I suppose you realise that these shootings will go on until we get the man who’s at the back of it.”
“That reminds me,” said the Saint. “Can you give me the names of all the people who’ve been shot up since the fashion started—including the policeman?”
He wrote down the names Teal gave him on the back of an envelope, and waved the detective a cheery farewell without saying anything in answer to his implied question—a fact which did not dawn clearly upon Mr Teal until he was half-way down Berkeley Street.
Simon went back to Patricia, and his eyes were gay and dangerous.
“This is where we work very fast,” he said. “London stinks in my throat, and we need a holiday. Wouldn’t you like to get hold of a ship and sail out into the great open seas?”
“But what do we do now?” she asked, and the Saint tilted his eyebrows in teasing mysteriousness.
“One item of the agenda is to have words with Clem Enright. Thank God, Corrigan told me where he hangs around when he’s not doing anything—otherwise it might have been difficult.”
He was lucky enough to find Clem Enright at his third attempt, in a public-house near Charing Cross station, but he made no fuss about his discovery. Clem Enright, in fact, did not know that it had been made.
Clem in his earlier days had haunted the public bars of the taverns where he drank, but recently, under the patronising tuition of Ted Orping, he had learned to walk quite unselfconsciously through the saloon entrance. Clem was handling more money than he had ever had in his life before, and in the daze of his new-found affluence he was an apt pupil.
He sat behind a whisky and soda—“Only bums drink beer,” insisted Ted—with his derby hat tipped cockily over one ear in what was meant to be an imitation of Ted Orping’s swagger, listening to a lecture from his hero.
“Protection,” said Ted Orping impressively. “That’s what we’re goin’ for. Protection.”
“I thought that was somethink to do wiv politics,” said Clem hazily.
“Not that sort of protection, you chump,” snarled the scornful Ted, “Who cares about that? I mean protection—like they do it in America. Ain’t you never heard of it? What I mean is, you say to a guy: ‘Here you are with a big business, an’ you never know when some gang may hold you up or chuck a bomb at you. You pay us for protection, an’ we’ll see nothing happens to you.’”
“But I thought we was doing the ’old-ups,” said Clem.
Ted Orping sighed, and spat a loose strand of tobacco through his teeth.
“Course we are, fathead. That’s just to show ’em what may happen if they don’t pay. Then when they’re all frightened, we come an’ talk about protection. We get just as much money, an’ we don’t have to work so hard.”
“Sounds all right,” said Clem.
He took a drink from his glass, and tried to conceal his grimace. He’d never cared for whisky and never would, but it cost twice as much as beer, and a toff always had the best. They were toffs now—Ted Orping said so. They owned cigarette cases, had their nails manicured, and changed their shirts twice a week.
“This is a big thing,” said Ted, leaning sideways confidentially. “It’s goin’ to grow an’ grow—there ain’t no limits to it. An’ we’re in at the beginnin’, like the guys who started motor cars an’ wireless. An’ what are they now? Look at ’em!”
“Marconi,” hazarded Clem helpfully, “Austin, Morris, ’Enry Ford—”
“Millionaires,” said Ted. “That’s what. And why? Because they were in first. Just like we are. An’ we can be millionaires too. Ain’t Tex told you what them guys in Chicago live like? Sleepin’ in silk sheets, tickin’ off judges, an’ havin’ the mayor to dinner off gold plates. That’s what we’ll be like one day. Have another drink.”
He went to the bar to have the glasses replenished and came back to the corner where they were sitting. A barmaid began to cry “Time, please!” and Ted put his tongue out at her impudently.
“We won’t have none of this, either,” he said. “We’ll have it in our own homes, an’ nobody can say ‘Time’ there. Why, we’re better off in England, because there ain’t no Third Degree here.”
“Wot’s that mean?” asked Clem.
“Well, when you get pinched they don’t treat you friendly like they do here. They don’t just ask you a few questions which you needn’t answer, an’ then lock you up till you see the beak in the mornin’. What they do is, they take you into a room, about half a dozen bloody great coppers, an’ they make you talk—whether you know anything or not.”
Enright regarded him owlishly.
“’Ow do they do that?”
“They know how,” said Ted Orping. “There’s nothing they won’t do to make you confess. Keep you without water, bash you about, beat you with a rubber hose, grind your teeth down with a dentist’s drill—just any torture they can think of. You got to be tough to keep your trap shut when they do things like that.”
Clem Enright shuddered as Orping proceeded to explain other methods of persuasion that he had read of. Clem didn’t feel tough—not in that way. He had had his arms twisted often enough by bigger boys in his ragamuffin youth to know what acute physical pain was like, and he didn’t fancy any of its more agonising refinements.
“Time please,” said the barmaid again, and a shirt-sleeved potman began to take up the refrain as he collected glasses off the tables with every circumstance of the spiteful satisfaction which public-house employees seem to feel when they enforce that fatuous law.
“Come on,” said Ted finally. “Let’s get out of here.”
He turned his glass defiantly upside down and swaggered out of the bar, with Clem following him. On the pavement they paused.
“Where are you goin�
��?” asked Ted. “I got a date with a dame.”
He had spent three hours in a cinema the day before and learnt several new words.
“I’ll go down to the revolver range and practise a bit of shooting,” said Enright.
“Right-ho,” said Ted heartily. “You can’t get too much practice, but don’t let ’em know you got a gun of your own. See you tonight.”
They separated there, and Clem Enright walked slowly and a little unsteadily down Villiers Street. He was always conscious of his inferior toughness in the presence of Ted Orping, who had killed two men and wounded others. The weight of the automatic in his hip pocket gave him the feeling of being a genuine desperado only occasionally—at other times it seemed to bulk out under his clothes like a poached pheasant, and he went into a cold sweat at the momentary expectation of feeling a heavy hand on his shoulder and hearing familiar words of invitation murmured genially in his ear. Of late he had spent a lot of his money on ammunition at the range, and had once scored a target of twenty-four at twelve paces.
They didn’t believe he had it in him to be tough—that was the trouble. He was a good man with the brick in a smash-and-grab, and he could drive a car pretty well in an emergency, but they didn’t class him as a man to take the initiative in any violence. And it rankled. He was as good as they were, but they had never let him play a prominent part in a hold-up. He had a sense of injustice about it, and in his daydreams he lived for the glory of the day when he could demand the right to equality with them by virtue of the notch on his own gun.
Sometimes he heard in imagination the horrible grunt of the policeman whom Basher Tope had shot, the way the man clutched at his stomach and kicked like a wounded rabbit. And then the cold sweat came out on him again…He closed his eyes to the vision, and tried to think of it differently. He saw his own eyes behind the sights, his own finger curling steadily and ruthlessly round the trigger, the gun held as firmly as if in a vice—he had read plenty of the literature of his profession, and knew how it ought to be done. Then the crisp smack of the report, the jerk of the barrel, the pride and the confidence that would come…
“Hey, you!”
The rasp of a voice that seemed to be aimed straight at his ear made him start.
He looked round with his heart pumping ridiculously. He was almost opposite the range, down at the bottom of Villiers Street, and he had not noticed the approach of the car that had slipped silently down the street and pulled up so close to him that the running-board brushed his trousers.
The man at the wheel had a hard sunburnt face that seemed faintly familiar, but the yellow-tinted tortoiseshell glasses over his eyes and the unlighted cigar in his mouth reassured him. Moreover he spoke with a strong American accent.
“Get in. Goldman wants you—quick.”
Clem leaned over, opening the door. The hope that never slept in his narrow bosom roused up and palpitated.
“Any idea wot it is?”
“I can’t tell you, but I know there’s shooting in it. Got your heater?…Good boy. Let’s keep moving.” Clem Enright leaned back and let himself relax in contemplation of the roseate dawn of his apotheosis. So it had come at last, the chance that he had been praying for. It followed so closely on the trend of his daydream that he could scarcely believe it was true. Now if only luck was with him—if the sudden fit of trembling that had seized his limbs wore off and left him as cool and steady-nerved as he had been in his dreams…
He did not notice the way they went, or give another thought or glance to the man who drove him. Again and again he lived over, in visions, a score of shootings in which he was the only surviving hero…And then, in what seemed only a few minutes, he became aware that the car had stopped and the engine was switched off. They were in one of the small side streets of Chelsea—he could identify the district by the shops he could see in the King’s Road at the end.
“Wot’s up?” he demanded. “This ain’t the place.”
“This is a special secret headquarters,” said the driver, with a scrappy smile. “You haven’t been here before.”
Clem Enright’s chest swelled as he followed his guide through the street door, along a narrow passage, and up a long flight of stairs. Special secret headquarters! He had had no notion that there was such a place. He would swear that Ted Orping had never seen it. And he was the privileged one who had been chosen for what must be an extraordinarily important mission. All at once his opinions of Ted Orping underwent a catastrophic change. They became almost pitying. A nice chap, Ted, but a bit full of himself. Liked to pretend he was bigger than he was. Plenty of muscle, of course, but you wanted more than that. Brains. Personality…
They went through a miniature hall, and passed into a spacious studio that lofted right up into the roof. It was impossible to see out for all the light came from two large skylights high up in the rafters. And then Clem heard the unmistakable click of a lock, and spun round.
His guide was leaning against the door, detaching the key from the lock and dropping it into his pocket. While Enright stared at him, fascinated, he pitched away the cigar and removed the tinted glasses which had so effectively disguised him.
“What d’you think you could pose as, Clem?” inquired the Saint chattily. “Ajax defying the lightning?”
7
Enright crouched back against a divan, with his eyes distending as if they were being inflated by a couple of power pumps.
“Wot’s the idea?” he croaked.
“Just words,” answered Simon urbanely. “Words, words, words, as the Swan of Avon used to tell his pals when Ann Hathaway had one of her off days.”
He took out his cigarette case and selected a cigarette sauntering across the room with his level gaze fixed on Clem Enright all the time. There was something terrifying to the Cockney about that unswerving and passionless stare. In a flash of unspeakable fear, Clem remembered his gun and reached for it, and his stomach seemed to turn to water when he found that it was no longer at his hip.
Simon produced it from his own pocket.
“I borrowed it, Clem,” he explained easily. “You haven’t got a licence for it, and that’s a serious offence. Besides, it might have chipped the wallpaper if you missed me.”
He was right in front of Enright then, and the edge of the divan was directly behind the man’s knees. Simon gave him a gentle push, and the Cockney sat down with a bump.
“Now we can talk,” said the Saint.
He lighted his cigarette deliberately while Clem watched him with scared and shrinking eyes. And then that very clear and level gaze found Enright’s face again.
“This racket of yours is over, Clem,” said the Saint quietly. “I’m cleaning it up today. As far as you’re concerned, it’s just a question whether we should hand you over to the police or give you a run for it.”
“I ain’t never done nuffink guv’nor!” Enright whined. “Strite I ain’t—”
“Straight you certainly aren’t,” answered the Saint calmly. “But we didn’t bring you here to discuss that. We brought you here because there’s something we want you to do, and the only interesting point is how long it’s going to take to persuade you to do it. Have you ever heard of the Third Degree?”
Enright cringed away with his face going white.
“Yer can’t do that to me!” he yelped. “Yer can’t—”
“We can only try,” said the Saint mildly.
He opened a cupboard and proceeded to lay out on the table a life-preserver, a short length of rubber hose, a large pair of pincers, and an instrument that looked very like a thumbscrew but was actually a patent tin-opener. As he produced each item he weighed it in his hand, tested it meditatively, and gave Enright every chance to visualise its employment before he put it down.
Then he turned again to the shaking man.
“That flat underneath is empty,” he remarked pleasantly, “so you can yell as much as you like. What would you like to have done to you first?”
En
right swallowed a lump in his throat. The stimulating effects of the whisky he had drunk had vanished altogether, leaving him at the stage where he would have burst into tears on the slightest provocation. Nobody loved him, and he was going to be tortured till he talked.
“They’d kill me,” he said huskily. “Joe Corrigan squealed, and ’e was killed.”
“No one will kill you if you behave,” said the Saint. “You can lie low here till the gang’s broken up, and I’ll see you out of the country if you want to go abroad. Also I’ll say nothing about you to the police, and I’ll let you keep all your money.”
Clem Enright tried to lick the saliva round a mouth that had gone unaccountably arid. All his dreams of glory had gone west, and yet he felt lucky. There was that in the Saint’s eye which told him that Ted Orping’s lurid description paled into fairy-tales beside what that lean soft-spoken man was capable of doing.
“Wot d’yer want to know?”
“How much have you been getting from Goldman?”
“Fifty quid a week, wiv extra pickings when we did somethink good.”
“How much did Ted get?”
“I dunno, guv’nor. P’raps ’e got a bit more—’e did more than they let me.”
“Didn’t it ever occur to you that there was a lot more money than that in what you were doing?”
“Goldman said ’e better bank for us, guv’nor. We ’ad plenty o’ dough to spend, and ’e said where we used to go wrong was by spending everythink when we was flush and then ’aving nothink to see us through rainy days. ’E said you ’ad to ’ave capital so’s you could wait for the right job, instead of ’aving to do somethink in a hurry.”
Simon nodded.
“Where does Goldman keep his money?”
“’E’s got a safe in ’is bedroom—in a wall. Some of it’s there, anyway. I seen ’im take money out of it to give me, and it was full of dough.”
The Saint smoothed his hair and indicated a telephone which stood on a small table beside the divan.
“Now there’s just one other little thing you can do for me,” he said. “Do you know a man called Ronald Nilder?”
The Saint and Mr. Teal (The Saint Series) Page 14
