The Saint and Mr. Teal (The Saint Series)

by Leslie Charteris

  “I got knocked overboard,” said the girl. “I did something silly with the sail, and the boom hit me on the head—”

  “It might have happened to anyone,” said the Saint airily—he had never blushed over a lie in his life. “A sudden squall can make a lot of trouble for any boat, and you get plenty of them around here.”

  “Ha,” said Mr Stride. His sharp eyes ran once up the Saint’s lean poiseful length, thoughtfully, but at the sound of the Saint’s voice he had let go his wallet as if it had grown red-hot in his fingers. “Ha,” said Mr Stride. He tugged at his grey moustache, “Very lucky that you saw the accident, Mr—”

  Simon elegantly ignored the invitation to supply his name.

  “We were just going to have lunch, Mr—” said Stride, dangling the bait again. “Won’t you stay?”

  “That’s awfully kind of you,” murmured the Saint, and thought that Mr Stride would have been more cordial if he had refused.

  He proceeded to put on his shirt, with a calm indifference to his host’s emotions that would have been boorish if it had been a shade less transparently innocent, and as he did so he was glancing over the other ships that were anchored within a hundred yards of the Claudette. There was a couple of French fishing smacks, broad-beamed sea boats, with high bows and low sterns, held idly into the wind by their great rust-red sails. Beyond them was a superb 200-ton Diesel yacht with a sweet line of clipper bow: Simon could read the name painted there—Luxor. Beside the wheel-house Simon could see a man focusing a pair of binoculars, and he knew that it was the Claudette that was the object of his attention.

  “A lovely boat,” said Stride, purringly.

  “Lovely,” agreed the Saint. “You have to be a very successful man to own a ship like that—or even a ship like yours, Mr Stride.”

  The other shot one of his surprisingly sharp glances at the unruffled young man beside him.

  “Hum,” he assented mechanically, but he was spared the necessity of finding some suitable amplification of his answer by the arrival of a white-coated steward with a tray of glasses, followed by what appeared to be the remainder of his guests.

  These consisted of a pleasant-faced youngster of about twenty-five, with a diligently suppressed crinkle in his fair hair, and a sleek and saturnine man of indeterminate age whose coat fitted very tightly to his waist and whose hair waved unashamed in faultless undulations that Nature unaided could scarcely have made so symmetrical. The fair-haired youngster’s name was Toby Halidom, and his solicitude for Laura Berwick’s complete recovery from the effects of her adventure seemed to account satisfactorily for the engagement ring which appeared on her finger when she had powdered her nose and changed for lunch. The sleek and saturnine one was introduced as Mr Almido, private secretary to Mr Stride; he spoke little, and when he did so it was with a lisping accent that was certainly no more English than his clothes.

  Mr Stride swallowed his cocktail in silence, and led the way below almost abruptly. His lack of festive geniality, remarkable in a man whose stepdaughter had so recently been saved from a watery grave, continued for fully half the meal, but the Saint was unabashed. And then, just as surprisingly for anyone who had begun to accept his taciturnity, he began to thaw. He thawed so much that by the time the dessert was placed on the table he was inquiring into the Saint’s plans with something approaching affability.

  “Are you staying long?” he asked.

  “Until I’m tired of absorbing Vitamin D, probably,” said the Saint. “I have no plans.”

  “I always thought the South of France was the favourite resort of sunbathers,” remarked Mr Stride, with a show of interest in which only an ear that was listening for it could have discerned the veiled point. “I think, if that were my object, I should be inclined to go there rather than risk the uncertainties of the British climate. I’m sure that would be wiser.”

  “Ah, but even there they make you wear some clothes,” said the Saint ingenuously. “It always annoys me to see myself in my bath looking as if I was wearing a ridiculous pair of transparent white pants. Here I can find a nice piece of coast all to myself, and acquire the same beautiful colour all over.”

  Mr Toby Halidom, who was wearing an Old Harrovian tie, looked faintly shocked, but Mr Stride was unmoved.

  He accompanied Simon on to the deck, with Laura Berwick, when the Saint excused himself as soon as coffee had been served. One of the men, he said, would take Mr Hum Ha back to St Mary’s in the motor dinghy, and while the boat was being brought round Simon glanced across again to the Luxor. A seaman was standing on the deck, looking towards them, and as Simon came into view the man turned and spoke through a hatch to someone below. A moment later the man who had watched the Saint before came up with the companion and adjusted his binoculars again.

  “I hope we shall see some more of you,” said Mr Stride, standing by the gangway. “Come and pay us a call whenever you like.”

  “I should love to,” murmured the Saint, just as politely, and then, with such a smooth transition that the effect of it was like a gunshot, he said, “I didn’t know Abdul Osman was short-sighted.”

  Galbraith Stride went white, as if the blood had been drained from his face by a vacuum pump.

  “Do you know Mr Osman?” he asked, with an effort.

  “Fairly well,” said the Saint casually. “I branded him on both cheeks five years ago, and it must have cost him no end of money in plastic surgeons to put his face right again. If anyone had done that to me I shouldn’t have to look at him twice through field-glasses to be sure who it was.”

  “Very interesting,” said Galbraith Stride slowly. “Very interesting.” He held out his hand. “Well, good-bye, Mr…er…hum.”

  “Templar,” said the Saint. “Simon Templar. And thanks so much for the lunch.”

  He shook the proffered hand cordially and went down to the boat, and he was so happy that he wanted to sing to himself all the way back to St Mary’s.

  3

  “If,” said Patricia Holm, “that was supposed to be another of your famous Exercises in Tact—”

  “But what else could it have been?” protested the Saint. “If I hadn’t used extraordinary tact, I shouldn’t have been invited to lunch, and that would have meant I’d have missed a display of caviar, lobster mayonnaise, and dry champagne that no man with a decent respect for his stomach could resist—not to mention a first-hand knowledge of the geography of Stride’s boat—”

  “And by dinner-time,” said Patricia, “she’ll be fifty miles away, with the Luxor racing her.”

  Simon shook his head.

  “Not if I know Abdul Osman. The surgeons may have refashioned his face, but there are scars inside him that he will never forget…I should have had to scrape an acquaintance with Laura some time, and that accident made it so beautifully easy.”

  “I thought we were coming here for a holiday,” said Patricia, and the Saint grinned, and went in search of Mr Smithson-Smith.

  Mr Smithson-Smith was the manager of Tregarthen’s, which is one of the three hotels with which the island of St Mary’s is provided. Simon Templar, whose taste in hotels could be satisfied by nothing less lavish than palaces like the Dorchester, failing which he usually plunged to the opposite extreme, had declined an invitation to stay there, and had billeted himself in a house in the village, where he had a private sitting-room thrown in with the best of home-cooked meals for a weekly charge that would have maintained him in an attic at the Dorchester for about five minutes. At Tregarthen’s, however, he could stay himself with draught Bass drawn from the wood, and this was one of the things of which he felt in need.

  The other thing was a few more details of local gossip, with which Mr Smithson-Smith might also be able to provide him.

  It was then half-past three in the afternoon, but by a notable oversight on the part of the efficient legislators who framed that unforgettable Defence of the Realm Act which has for so long been Britain’s bulwark against the horrors of an invas
ion of foreign tourists, the Scilly Islands were omitted from the broad embrace of that protection, and it is still lawful to drink beer at almost any hour at which a man can reasonably raise a thirst. As Simon entered the long glass-fronted verandah overlooking the bay, he naturally expected to find it packed to suffocation with sodden islanders wallowing in the decadent excesses from which a beneficent Government had not been thoughtful enough to protect them, but such (as the unspeakable newspapers say, in what they apparently believe to be the English language) was not the case. In fact, the only occupant of the bar was Mr Smithson-Smith himself, who was making out bills beside an open window.

  “Why—good afternoon, Templar. What can I do for you?”

  “A pint of beer,” murmured the Saint, sinking into a chair. “Possibly, if my thirst holds, two pints. And one for yourself if you feel like it.”

  Mr Smithson-Smith disappeared into his serving cubicle and returned with a brimming glass. He excused himself from joining in the performance.

  “I’d rather leave it till the evening, if you don’t mind,” he said with a smile. “What have you been doing today?”

  He was a thin mild-mannered man with sandy-grey hair, a tiny moustache, and an extraordinary gentle voice, and it was a strange thing that he was only one of many men in those islands who were more familiar with the romantic cities of the East than they were with the capital of their own country. Simon had been struck by that odd fact on his first call at Tregarthen’s and subsequent visits had confirmed it. There, on those lonely clusters of rock breaking out of the sea forty miles from Land’s End, where you would expect to find men who had seen scarcely anything of the world outside the other rocky islands around their own homes, you found instead simple men whose turns of reminiscence recalled the streets of Damascus and Baghdad by their names. And whenever reminiscence turned that way, Mr Smithson-Smith would call on his own memories, with a far-away look in his eyes, and the same far-away sound in that very gentle voice, as if his dreams saw the deserts of Arabia more vividly than the blue bay beyond his windows. “I mind a time when I was in Capernaum…” Simon had heard him say it, and felt that for that man at least all the best days lay in the past. It was the War, of course that had picked men out of every sleepy hamlet in England and hurled them into the familiarity of strange sights and places as well as the flaming shadows of death, and in the end sent some of them back to those same sleepy hamlets to remember, but there was in that quiet man a mystic sensitiveness, a tenseness of poetry struggling rather puzzledly for the expression he could not give it, that made his memories more dreamy with a quaint kind of reverence than most others.

  “I’ve been over by Tresco,” said the Saint, lifting his face presently from the beer.

  “Oh. Did you see those yachts—are they still there?”

  Simon nodded.

  “As a matter of fact, I managed to scrounge lunch on one of them.”

  “Was it Abdul Osman’s?”

  “No—Galbraith Stride’s. I saw Osman’s though. It’s a long way for him to come all the way over here.”

  He knew that the other would need the least possible encouragement to delve into the past, and his expectations were founded on the soundest psychology. Mr Smithson-Smith sat down and accepted a cigarette.

  “I think I said in my letter that I thought I’d heard his name before. I was thinking about it only yesterday, and the story came back to me. He hasn’t visited St Mary’s—at least, if he has, I don’t think I’ve seen him—but I should know this Abdul Osman if he was the same man, because he was branded on both cheeks.”

  The Saint’s eyebrows rose in innocent surprise.

  “Really?”

  The other nodded.

  “It’s quite a story—you could almost put it in a book. An Englishman did it—at least, the rumour said he was an Englishman, although they never caught him. This Abdul Osman was supposed to have a monopoly of various unpleasant things in the East—brothels and gambling dens and drug trafficking, all that sort of thing. I don’t know if it was true, but that was what they told me. He had a fine house in Cairo, anyway, so he must have made plenty of money out of it. I remember what happened distinctly. It was a local sensation at the time…I hope I’m not boring you?”

  Mr Smithson-Smith was oddly afraid of being boring, as if he felt that any mundane restlessness in his audience would break the fragile glamour of those wonderful things he could remember.

  “Not a bit,” said the Saint. “What happened?”

  “Well apparently this Abdul Osman disappeared one night. He was supposed to be driving back to Cairo from Alexandria, just himself and his chauffeur. It was a beautiful car he had. I’ve often seen it driving past Shepheard’s Hotel. Well, he didn’t arrive when they were expecting him, and as the time went on, and he was three or four hours late and hadn’t sent any message to say what had held him up, his household became anxious and went out to look for him. They drove all the way to Alexandria without seeing him, but when they got there they were told by the place where he’d been staying that he’d left about eight hours previously. Then they went to the police, and there was another search. No trace of him was found.”

  A couple of young men in white open shirts and flannel trousers came in and sat down. Mr Smithson-Smith excused himself to go and take their order, and while he was filling it the Saint lighted a cigarette and glanced at them disinterestedly. They were quiet, very respectable young men, but their faces were sallow and the arms exposed by their rolled-up sleeves were white above the elbows.

  “Well,” said Mr Smithson-Smith, returning to his chair, “they searched for him half the night, but he seemed to have vanished into thin air. Of course, it wasn’t easy to make a thorough search in the dark, so in the morning they tried again. And then they found him. His car was on the road—they found tracks that showed it had been driven off quite a long way into the desert, and brought back again, and out in the desert where it had been turned round there was the remains of a fire. The chauffeur was just recovering consciousness—he’d been knocked on the head and tied up and gagged—and Abdul Osman was in the back of the car with this brand on both his cheeks. Whoever did it had burnt it in almost to the bone with a red-hot iron—it was an Arabic word, and it meant just what this man was.”

  “Stout piece of work,” murmured the Saint, pushing his glass forward for replenishment.

  “Probably it was.” Mr Smithson-Smith provided another pint of beer, and resumed his seat. “And the only clue they had was a sort of drawing that had been painted on the sides of Osman’s beautiful car—the paint was still wet when they found it. It was a sort of figure made out of straight lines, with a round head, like you see kids drawing on walls, only this one had a circle on top like the haloes in those medieval church pictures. I’ve often wondered what it was meant to be. It couldn’t have been a picture of Abdul Osman, because he had no right to a halo. Perhaps it was meant for a picture of the man who did it.”

  “It sounds possible,” murmured the Saint.

  One of the respectable young men rose and left the bar; idly, Simon watched him going slowly down the sloping path to the gate.

  “Yes,” said Mr Smithson-Smith thoughtfully…“I mind another time when I heard of him. This was in Beirut. A friend of mine met a girl there in a dance place—it was the sort of dance place that wouldn’t be allowed at all in England. She told him a story about Abdul Osman—I don’t think I should like to repeat the details to anyone, but if it was true he couldn’t be painted any blacker than he is. As a matter of fact, I did tell this story to a man I met on a boat going across to Marseilles, who had just retired from the Egyptian Police, and he said it was probably true. It was—”

  “Hullo,” said the Saint. “Bloke seems to have fallen down.”

  The respectable young man who had gone out had stumbled as he stepped down to the road, and at that moment he was sprawled in the dust just beyond the gate. He was clutching one ankle, and his face was turn
ed back towards the verandah with a twisted expression of agony.

  Mr Smithson-Smith looked out, then round to the respectable young man’s companion.

  “Your friend seems to have hurt himself,” he said. “It looks as if he has sprained his ankle.”

  The respectable young man came over to their table and also looked out.

  “I’ll go and see,” he said.

  Simon watched him go, inhaling speculatively.

  “Staying in the hotel?” he queried.

  “Yes,” said Mr Smithson-Smith, with his eyes on the developments below. “They’re staying here.”

  “Have they been here long?”

  The question was put with perfect casualness.

  “About a fortnight,” said Mr Smithson-Smith. “I don’t know much about them. They’re out most of the day—I think they go bathing, but by the look of the basket they take with them you’d think they needed towels enough to dry a regiment.”

  “They aren’t very sunburnt,” said the Saint softly, almost as if he was speaking to himself.

  He picked up his glass mechanically—and put it down again.

  The young man with the injured ankle was coming back, limping painfully and leaning on his companion’s arm.

  “Silly thing to do, wasn’t it?” he said, and Mr Smithson-Smith nodded with some concern.

  “Would you like me to get you a doctor?”

  The young man shook his head.

  “I’ll just go and bathe it with cold water and rest it for a bit. I don’t think it’s anything serious.”

  The three-legged party went on through into the hotel premises, and Simon sat down again and lighted another cigarette. Mr Smithson-Smith’s gentle voice was continuing his interrupted anecdote, but the Saint scarcely heard a word. The narrative formed no more than a vague undercurrent of sound in his senses, a restful background to his working thoughts. In a life like the Saint’s, a man’s existence is prolonged from day to day by nothing but that ceaseless vigilance, that unsleeping activity of a system of question marks in the mind which are never satisfied with the obvious explanations that pass through the torpid consciousness of the average man. To him, anything out of the ordinary was a red light of possible danger, never to be dismissed as mere harmless eccentricity: nine times out of ten the alarm might be proved false, but it could never be ignored. And it seemed odd that two very respectable young men should have attracted attention by carrying an outsize basket of towels; odd, too, that after bathing every day for a fortnight they should still have the soft white bodies of men who have not been free of the muffling protection of clothes for many years…And then the Saint’s probing suspicions came to a head in a sudden flash of inspiration, and he pulled himself swiftly out of his chair. He was across the bar in a flash, over to the closed door through which the two respectable young men had disappeared, and Mr Smithson-Smith, startled to silence by his abrupt movement, noticed in an eerie moment of perplexity that the Saint’s feet made no sound as they swung over the floor. It was like the charge of a leopard in its smooth powerful noiselessness, and then Simon Templar had his hand on the handle of the door, jerking it open, and the young man who had assisted the injured one stumbled and almost fell into the room.