The Saint and Mr. Teal (The Saint Series)

by Leslie Charteris

  “Come in, brother,” said the Saint heartily. “Come in and have a drink.”

  The young man’s face went red, and his mouth opened in a weak grin.

  “I-I’m sorry,” he stammered, “I must have tripped or something—”

  A thin smile cut into the corners of the Saint’s mouth.

  “Sure you must, brother.”

  “I’ll-I’ll have a whisky and soda.”

  “You’ll have beer!”

  The Saint caught up his own glass from the table and thrust it out. He was only a yard from the other, on his toes, indefinably dangerous.

  “Drink this,” he said, and the young man went white.

  “I-I don’t—”

  Simon’s free fist caught him on the mouth and knocked him backwards.

  “I’ll have the police on you for this,” blustered the other, and the Saint smiled again.

  “Go get him. And don’t be too lavish with your plurals, because there is only one. But ask Abdul what he thinks of the idea first, or you may find yourself unpopular. Now amscray—and if you value your beauty, don’t damage my beer again!”

  He seized the respectable young man by the ear and propelled him deftly and vigorously out of the bar; then he turned back to face the outraged stare of Mr Smithson-Smith. The course of events had been so violently sudden and incomprehensible that the manager had been pardonably nonplussed, but by this point at least his path of duty seemed unmistakable.

  “Why—really, Templar,” he said, with his quiet voice shaking. “You can’t behave like that here, I shall have to apologise to my guest. I’m afraid you’ll have to leave this bar—”

  Simon took his arm calmly, and pointed.

  A fly was crawling down the inside of the half emptied glass of beer which he had just replaced on the table. It was quite unhurried about the journey, after the impudent fashion of flies; perhaps its thirst was of no great dimensions, or perhaps it had been reared in scrupulously well-mannered circumstances. It moved downwards in little short runs, pausing once to wash its hands and once to rub its feet together, in a genteel ecstasy of anticipation. Mr Smithson-Smith’s eye followed it because it was the only moving object in the direction which the Saint had indicated, and there seemed to be nothing else to look at.

  Even so, it seemed an extremely trivial spectacle and he moved his arm restlessly in the Saint’s grasp. But Simon Templar continued to point at it, and there was something dynamic about the immobility of that extended finger. Mr Smithson-Smith watched, and saw the fly reach the level of the beer. It looked around cautiously, and lowered his proboscis delicately into the liquid. For two or three seconds after that it was motionless. And then, without any kind of struggle, it pitched over in a limp somersault and floated quietly on its back, with its legs stretched stiffly upwards…

  4

  Mr Smithson-Smith blinked, and wiped his forehead. His arm relaxed slowly, as if it required a conscious effort to loosen the involuntary contraction of his muscles. He had no idea why the miniature drama that he had seen enacted should have had such an effect on him. It might have been the utter stillness in which it was played out, the unexplanatory silence of the man beside him—anything. But it seemed as if for the last few seconds he had forgotten to breathe, and when it was finished he expanded his chest with an inaudible sigh.

  Then the Saint spoke, and his voice jarred the other’s ears by sheer contrast with the silence.

  “Don’t tell me your beer’s as potent as all that!”

  The manager stared at him.

  “Do you mean—do you mean it was drugged?”

  “No less, and possibly even some more. We’ll soon see.” With unruffled calm, the Saint fished out the fly with a match-stick and laid it in an ash-tray to cool off. “But I don’t somehow think it was sudden death—that would probably be considered too good for me.”

  “But…but…damn it!” Mr Smithson-Smith felt queerly shaken under his instinctive incredulity. “You can’t tell me that Mr Trape—”

  “Is that his name?” The Saint was as cool as an ice-pack. “I can’t tell you much about him, but I can tell you that. My dear chap”—he put his hand on the manager’s shoulder for a moment—“can you be expected to guarantee the morals of everyone who stays at your hotel? Can you demand a budget of references from anyone who asks for a room? Of course you can’t. You have to take them at their face value, and so long as they behave themselves while they’re here you aren’t expected to ask them whether their finger-prints are registered at Scotland Yard. No—they just had to find somewhere to stay, and you were unlucky.”

  The manager frowned.

  “If what you say is true, Templar, I shall have to ask for their room,” he said, and the Saint had to laugh.

  “You’ve got your room now, old lad. But whether they’ve left money to pay the bill is another matter.”

  He sat on the table with a glance at the fly, which was still sunken in its coma. He found it difficult to think that it could be dead—although, of course, a drug that a man would survive might be fatal to an insect. But his summary of Abdul Osman’s character didn’t fit in with such a clean conclusion. The hot irons that had scored their insult on the Egyptian’s face would call for something much more messy in the way of vengeance—Abdul Osman would not forget, nor would he be so easily satisfied when his chance came. Then why the drug? And why, anyway, the very presence of those two respectable young men who on Smithson-Smith’s own statement had been staying at the hotel for the past fortnight? It seemed improbable that Abdul Osman claimed any of the gifts of necromantic clairvoyance which popular novelists attribute to the “mysterious East.” And yet—

  All at once he recognised a slim figure in wide blue trousers walking up from the harbour towards the hotel, and waved to it joyfully out of the window. He was in a state of puzzlement in which he wanted to think aloud, and he could not have hoped for a better audience. But it struck him, while he was waiting for her to arrive, that it was a remarkable thing that he had not seen the two respectable young men making their way hastily towards the harbour, even as he had seen her coming in the opposite direction.

  “Look here, Templar,” began Mr Smithson-Smith worriedly, but the Saint interrupted him with a smile of seraphic blandness.

  “Excuse me—I’ll be back in a sec.”

  He went out and met Patricia at the gate.

  “What about a spot of tea, boy?” she suggested, and then the electric gaiety of him opened her eyes, and she stopped.

  “Sit down here—this is a conference, but since we aren’t politicians we can’t fix a date for it next year on the other side of the world.” The Saint pulled open the gate, seated himself on the step, and drew her down beside him. “Pat, a very respectable-looking young man, name of Trape, has just put a sleeping-draught in my beer.”

  “Good Lord—you haven’t drunk it, have you?”

  The Saint laughed.

  “I certainly haven’t. In fact, I punched the face of Mr Trape, just to learn him, and kicked him out of the bar—to the pardonable indignation of our friend Mr Smith. But I think he’s beginning to understand—probably more than I wanted him to. I dropped a line about Abdul Osman while interviewing Mr Trape that must have made Smith think a bit…I’ll tell you how it happened. I was having my drink, and these two harmless-looking birds rolled in. They ordered lemonade, or something, and then one of them went out. He walked down the path, tripped on this very spot where we’re sitting, and appeared to sprain his ankle. I saw it happen, and Smith called his pal over to the window. That was when he did it, of course. He wanted an excuse to come over to our table, with both of us looking outside, so he could slip in the dope. That’s what the whole plant was for—and damned well done it was, too. I didn’t see it at all until the injured warrior had been helped back to the hotel and away to his room, and then only because I’m naturally suspicious. I’ll tell you the things that struck me as odd later—never mind them now. But all at on
ce it dawned on me that there was something in my beer that hadn’t been there when I started it, and also that Mr Trape might be listening outside the door to see what happened. I opened the door, and there he was—so I pushed his teeth in. Episode over.”

  “But what was the idea?”

  “That’s just what I want to get—and I want it quick.” He was speaking so rapidly that it wasn’t easy for her to pick the facts and deductions out of that vital rush of vivid sentences. “I want to reconstruct what might have happened if I’d drunk the beer. Make holes in it anywhere you can.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Right. I drink the beer. I appear to go groggy. Smith registers alarm. Trape hears, and walks innocently in—probably requesting brandy for wounded comrade. Apparently I’ve fainted. Cold water, keys, feathers, smelling-salts—all tried and found wanting. Smith departs to summon doctor, leaving me with Trape. Whereupon I’m rushed out of the place—?”

  “But what happens when Smith comes back?”

  “Exactly…No, that’s easy enough. Trape returns to bewildered Smith, explains that I revived and pushed off. Maybe I saw a man I had to talk to about a dog, or anything like that. Apologies, thanks, and so forth…Well, where do they take me? Answer, the Luxor, of course—Abdul was watching me through field glasses all the time I was on Stride’s deck. That’s all right till—”

  “But there are holes everywhere!” she protested. “Suppose anyone saw him carrying you away?”

  The Saint’s keen blue eyes flicked round the scene.

  “Abdul’s a clever man—he doesn’t forget much. There’s a donkey and jingle two yards away, isn’t there? And probably Trape hired it for the occasion. He could also have a cask—and I become cold potatoes. Down to the harbour—into a boat—there’d be no hurry. Once he had me in the cart he could leave me there for hours if it was good dope. And even when I was missing for good, his alibi would hold water. I don’t say there was no risk, but it could have been done. And Abdul would be the man to do it. What I want to know is what the scheme is now that I haven’t drunk the beer. Those two birds have been here a fortnight so they were put here for some other job. Have they finished that job, and are they free to get away? I expect they’d have to consult Abdul, and Abdul wouldn’t approve of bungling. I haven’t seen them come out of the hotel, though I expect they could work round the back of the town—”

  He was still trying to frame his thoughts aloud, but actually the thread of them was racing away ahead of his voice. And a new light dawned on him at the same moment. His fingers clamped on Patricia’s wrist.

  “Organisation—that’s what it is! Gee, I’m as slow as a village concert today!”

  In another second he was on his feet and sprinting back to the bar. He entered it from the path as Mr Smithson-Smith came in at the other end.

  “What have you decided to do about all this unpleasantness?” asked the Saint, and the manager put his hands on his hips.

  “Well, I’ve just seen the young fellow with the sprained ankle—”

  The Saint’s smile was fast and thin.

  “I thought you would. And if you hadn’t gone to see him, he’d have sent for you. Meanwhile the most extraordinary things go on happening to my beer. First a sleeping-draught—then it grows legs!”

  Mr Smithson-Smith looked down at the table rather blankly. The fly still reclined in the ash-tray, oblivious of all excitement in its rigid stupor, but the glass of beer from which oblivion had overtaken it was gone.

  “Someone may have been in here and moved it,” began Mr Smithson-Smith hazily, and Simon showed his teeth.

  “Someone has been in here and moved it—you can write that down in the family Bible. That sprained ankle was good enough for another stall. Did you go up and see the bloke off your own bat?”

  “As a matter of fact, he asked me to go up—”

  “And naturally you had to go. Organisation, that’s what it is. What did he say?”

  “He said that his friend had told him what happened, and he couldn’t understand it. He wanted to know if I should be asking them to leave.”

  “Did you say anything about doped beer?”

  “No.”

  “Or flies?”

  “No.”

  “Then that lets you out,” said the Saint, with some relief. “If they think you don’t know anything they won’t worry about you. What did you say?”

  “I said I should have to consider the matter.”

  “That,” said the Saint grimly, “will be all right so long as you don’t consider it too deeply.”

  Mr Smithson-Smith looked at him. The events he had witnessed, and that rattle of cross-examination, had left that gentle-voiced man utterly bewildered without shifting the foundations of his practical standpoint.

  “Look here, Templar,” he said directly. “I don’t know what you or these two young men are playing at, but I’m in a responsible position. I can’t take any risks with this hotel. Unless one of you can give me a satisfactory explanation, I think I shall have to tell the Sergeant as much as I know, and leave him to deal with it.”

  Simon pondered for a moment, and then he nodded.

  “That’s obviously your duty, and I think it would be better from every point of view if you did it. May I go up to Trape’s room and see if he’ll speak to me? I don’t know if he’ll accept an apology, but if he did it might save a little scandal.”

  He knew that he was taking rather an unfair advantage, but the idea was one that he had to follow. The bait was tempting, and Mr Smithson-Smith, with the interest of his employers at heart and no conception of the depth of duplicity to which Simon Templar could sink when it was necessary, could scarcely refuse it. Simon obtained permission, and the number of the room which the two respectable-looking young men were sharing, and went upstairs with as much consolation as he could derive from the knowledge that if his plan went through successfully the victims would be most unlikely to complain to the management. If he were caught in the act, of course he would find himself ten times more unpopular with the controlling powers of that respectable hotel than he was already, but the Saint had an unshakable faith in his guardian angels.

  He knocked on the door, and went in with the forefinger of his right hand prodding out the shape of his trouser pocket in an ostentatious untruth. Both the respectable-looking young men were there.

  “Put your hands up, and don’t even think of shouting,” he said genially. “You’d only give the chambermaids hysterics.”

  For a moment the two young men were speechless.

  “Sorry to arrive so late, boys,” Simon went in the same friendly tone. “I should have been here long ago, but your organisation was so slick it took me a little while to catch up with. I congratulate you on getting rid of the evidence of that doped beer so smartly. We gather that you haven’t yet told Abdul about our mutual misunderstanding. I guess you were wise—he wouldn’t have been very sympathetic, and you had lots of time to take a second shot at me.”

  Their faces gave him confirmation. And then Mr Trape, who was nearest, brought himself a couple of paces nearer, with his head twisted viciously on one side.

  “Why not, Templar?” he said. “You wouldn’t dare to shoot here.”

  “Maybe you’re right, Eric,” admitted the Saint, with astonishing meekness, and removed his hand from his empty pocket. “But then it mightn’t be necessary—considering the evidence you’ve got on your ceiling.”

  He glanced upwards as he spoke, and Mr Trape would not have been human if he had not followed that compelling gaze. He also glanced upwards, and in so doing he arranged his chin at an angle that could not have been posed better. Simon’s fist shot up to the inviting mark, and impacted with a crisp click…

  The Saint had been long enough in the game to know that even a modest two to one is bigger odds than any sane man takes on for his health, and at that moment he was feeling more hurried than heroic. Mr Trape was sinking limply towards the carpet before his compan
ion realised that he was left to carry the banner alone, and by that time it was a bit late for realisations. The second respectable-looking young man was only beginning to scramble up off the bed when the Saint’s flying leap caught him irresistibly round the shoulders and hurled his face mufflingly back into the pillow; then Simon aimed his fist in a scientifically merciless jolt to the nape of the exposed neck.

  The Saint returned coolly to the floor, and smoothed his hair. The second respectable-looking young man would not recover from the effects of that blow for several minutes, but it was the aggressive Mr Trape whom Simon selected automatically for his experiment. There was a large gunny sack and a coil of manila under the bed—Simon could not have deduced the plans for his own transportation better if he had been in the know from the beginning like any story-book detective—and in a few seconds he had Mr Trape inside the sack and the sack fastened. Then he went to the window and looked out. It was only a short drop to a small garden at the rear of the hotel, which was built on a steep slope, and Simon dumped Mr Trape over the sill unceremoniously. That was the greatest risk he took, but a searching glance round before he did it revealed a landscape apparently bare of watchers. Then he followed himself and went back to Patricia.