"Sorry," said the Saint; and something about the way he said it made Teal's baby blue eyes go dark and beady.
"Going to tell me you've got another alibi?"
"I am."
"I'll hear about that later."
"You'll hear about it now." The arrogant forefinger which Teal had learned to hate as personally as if it had a separate individual existence prodded into the gibbosity of his waistline with unequivocal emphasis. "From seven o'clock till eight-fifteen I was having dinner at Dorchester House—which includes the time that train got in. I had two friends with me. I talked to the head waiter, I discussed vintages with the wine waiter, and I gave the maître d'hôtel a personal lesson in the art of making perfect crêpes suzette. Go and ask 'em. And ask your own flat-footed oaf outside my house what time he saw me come in"
Teal champed grimly on his gum.
"I didn't accuse you of committing the murder," he said. "I'm having you for an accessory, and you can prove you were Nova Scotia at the time for all that'll help you. Tell me you're going to prove you're in Nova Scotia right now, and perhaps I'll listen."
The Saint's brain functioned at racing speed.
A neat handful of spiky little facts prickled into its machinery, graded themselves, and were dealt with. One—that Perrigo had still got the diamonds. Two—that the diamonds must be detached from Perrigo. Three—that the detaching must not be done by Claud Eustace Teal. Four—that the Saint must therefore remain a free agent. Five—that the Saint would not remain a free agent if Claud Eustace Teal could help it.
Item five was fairly crackling about in the subtler undertones of the detective's drowsy voice, and it was that item which finally administered the upward heave to the balloon. The Teal-Templar feud was blowing up to bursting-point, and nobody knew it better than the Saint. But he also knew something else, which was that the burst was going to spray out into the maddest and merriest rodeo that ever was. Simon Templar proposed personally to supervise the spray.
He slipped his hands out of his pockets, and a very Saintly smile touched his lips.
"I might even prove something like that," he said.
And then he pushed Teal backwards and went away in one wild leap.
He had reached the foot of the stairs before the detectives had fully grasped what was happening, and he took the steps in flights of four at a pace that no detective in England could have approached. He made the upper landing before they were properly started. There was a big oak chest on that landing—Simon had noticed it on his way down—and he hulked it off the wall and ran it to the top of the stairs.
"Watch your toes, boys," he sang out, and shoved.
The three men below looked up and saw the chest hurtling down upon them. Having no time to get from under, they braced themselves and took the shock. And there they stuck, half-way up and half-way down. The huge iron-bound coffer tobogganed massively into them, two hundredweight of it if there was an ounce, and jammed them in their tracks. They couldn't go round, they couldn't go over, and it was several seconds before some incandescent intellect conceived the idea of going back.
Which was some time after the Saint had renewed his hectic acquaintance with Gunner Perrigo.
He found the gangster on his feet by a side table, cramming some papers into a shabby wallet. Perrigo's face was still contorted with agony, but he turned and crouched for a fight as the Saint burst in. As a matter of fact, the Saint was the last person he had ever expected to see again that night, and his puzzled amazement combined with the gesture of the Saint's upraised hand to check him where he was.
"Hold everything, Beautiful," said the Saint. "The police are in, and you and I are pulling our freight together."
He locked the door and strode coolly past the dumbfounded hoodlum. Flinging the window wide, he looked down into the private gardens that adjoined Gloucester Terrace and the park beyond. He saw shadows that moved, and knew that the house was surrounded. Simon waved a cheery hand to the cordon and closed the window again.
He turned back to Perrigo.
"Is there a way over the roof, or a back staircase?" he asked.
The man looked him his underlip jutting.
"What's the idea, Templar?"
"The idea is to get to hell out of here," said the Saint crisply. "Tell me what you know—and tell it quick!"
Perrigo glowered at him uncertainly, and in the silence they heard Teal's invading contingent arriving profanely on the landing.
And Perrigo made up his mind.
"There's no way out," he said.
He spoke the truth as far as he knew it; but the Saint laughed.
"Then we'll go out that way."
The door-handle rattled, and the woodwork creaked under an impacting weight; and Elberman suddenly roused out of his long retirement. ——
"And vot happens to me?" he squeaked, with his labouriously cultivated accent scattering to the four winds. "Vot do I say ven dey com' in?"
Simon walked to the mantelpiece and picked up a large globular vase, from which he removed the artificial flowers.
"You stay here and sing," he said, and forced the pot down firmly over the receiver's ears.
Outside, Chief Inspector Teal settled his hat and stepped back a pace. The casket that had delayed him was at the bottom of the stairs then, but if Teal could have had his way with it would have been at the bottom of the nethermost basement in Gehenna.
"All together," he snapped.
Three brawny shoulders moved as one, and the door splintered inwards.
Except for Isadore Elberman, struggling like a maniac to shake the porcelain cowl off his head, the room was empty of humanity.
Teal's glance scorched round it. There was plenty of furniture, but not a thing that would have given cover to a full-grown man. Then he saw a communicating door in another wall, and swore.
He dashed through, leaving his men to deal with the easy prisoner. Curtains flapping before an open window caught his eye, and instinctively he went over and stuck his head out. A man standing by a bush below looked up.
"Seen anyone?" Teal shouted.
"No, sir."
Teal withdrew his head and noticed a second door standing ajar. He went through it and found himself back on the landing he had just left, and his language became lurid.
Simon Templar and Perrigo stopped for a moment in the hall. Perrigo was a tough guy from the Uskides upwards, but Simon felt personally responsible for his safety and he took the responsibility seriously. There were irrefutable financial reasons for his solicitude—one hundred thousand of them. And for the duration of the fast-travelling episode he had got Perrigo's confidence. He tapped the gangster's bosom impressively.
"In case we should get separated, 7, Upper Berkeley Mews is the address," he stated. "See you remember it."
Perrigo gloomed sidelong at him, still fuddled with suspicious perplexity.
"I don't want to see you again," he growled.
"You will," said the Saint, and pushed him onwards.
Chief Inspector Teal floundered to the top of the stairs, and two of his men pressed close behind him. They looked down and saw Simon Templar alone in the hall, hands on hips, with his back to the door and an angelic smile on his upturned face.
"About that rhyme," said the Saint. "I've just thought of something. Suppose the old colonel 'went up in smoke for his gluttony? Would the Poet Laureate pass it? Would Wilhelmina Stitch approve?"
"Get him!" snapped Teal.
The detectives swept down in a bunch.
They saw the Saint open the door, and heard outside the sharp pipping of a motor-horn. Patricia Holm was cruising round. But this they did not know. The door slammed shut again, and as a kind of multiple echo to the slam came the splattering cackle of an automatic. It fired four times, and then Teal got the door open.
He faced a considerable volume of pitchy darkness, out of which spoke the voice of one of the men he had posted to guard the courtyard.
"I'm sorry, sir—they got away."
"What happened?"
"Shot out the lights and slipped us in the dark, sir." Way down the road, a horn tooted seven times, derisively.
Chapter IV
A tinge of old beetroot suffused Mr. Teal's rubicund complexion.
To say that his goat was completely and omnipotently got conveys nothing at all. In the last ten minutes his goat had been utterly annihilated, and the remains spirited away to the exact point in space where (so Einstein says) eternity changes its socks and starts back on the return journey. He was as comprehensively de-goated as a man can be.
With a foaming cauldron of fury bubbling just below his collar, he stood and watched his two outposts come up the steps towards him.
"Did you see Perrigo?" he rasped.
"Yes, sir. He came out first, and waited. I didn't recognise him at once—thought it was one of our own men. Then another bloke came out "
Teal turned on the men behind him.
"And what are you loafing about here for?" he stormed. "D'you want your nannies to hold your hands when you go out at night? Get after them!"
He left the pursuit in their hands, and fumed back up the stairs. There he found a bedraggled Isadore Elberman, released at last from his eccentric headgear, in charge of a plain-clothes constable. The receiver was as loquacious as Teal allowed him to be.
"You can't hold me for nothing, Mr. Teal. Those men attacked me and tied me up. You saw how I was fixed when you came in."
"I know all about you," said Teal unpleasantly.
Elberman blinked rapidly.
"Now you listen and I tell you somethings, Mr. Teal. I don't like Perrigo. He's stole some tickets and never pay me for them, nor nothing else vot he owes me. You catch him and I'll tell you all about him. I'm an innocent man vot's been robbed. Now I'll tell you."
"You can tell the magistrate in the morning," said Teal.
He was in no mood to listen patiently to anyone. His temper had been jagged over with a cross-cut saw. Simon Templar had tweaked his nose for the umpteenth time, literally and figuratively; and the realisation of it was making Teal's palms sweat. It mattered nothing that a warrant to arrest the Saint could be obtained for the trouble of asking for it, and that the Saint could probably be located in fifteen minutes by the elementary process of going to No. 7, Upper Berkeley Mews and ringing the bell. Time after time Teal had thought his task was just as easy, and time after time he had found a flourishing colony of bluebottles using his ointment for a breeding-ground. It had gone on until Teal was past feeling the faintest tremor of optimism over anything less than a capture of the Saint red-handed, with stereoscopic cameras, trained on the scene and a board of bishops standing by for witnesses. And something dimly approaching that ideal had offered itself that night—only to slither through his fingers and flip him in the eye with its departing tail.
He had no real enthusiasm for the arrest of Elberman, and even his interest in Perrigo had waned. The Saint filled his horizon to the exclusion of everything else. With a morose detachment he watched Elberman removed in a taxi, and stayed on in the same spirit to receive the reports of the men who had been down the road. These were not helpful.
"We went as far as Euston Road in the squad car, sir, but it wasn't any use. They had too long a start."
Teal had expected no better. He gave his subordinates one crowded minute of the caustic edge of his tongue for not having got on the job more promptly, and was mad with himself for doing it. Then he dismissed them.
"And give my love to your Divisional Inspector," he said. "Tell him I like his officers. And when I want some dumbbell exercise, I'll send for you again."
He made his exit on that line, and was sourly aware that their surprised and reproachful glances followed him out of the house.
He realised that the Saint had got under his skin more deeply than he knew. Never in any ordinary circumstances could the stoical and even-tempered Mr. Teal have been moved to pass the buck to his helpless underlings in such a fashion.
And Teal didn't care. As he climbed into his car, the broiling crucibles of fury within him were simmering down to a steady white-hot calidity of purpose. By the time he got to grips with his man again, the Saint would probably have another peck of dust ready to throw in his eyes, some new smooth piece of hokum laid out for him to skate over. Teal was prepared for it. It made no difference to him. His whole universe at that moment comprised but one ambition—to hound Simon Templar into a corner from which there could be no escape, corral him there, and proceed to baste into him every form of discourtesy and dolour permitted by the laws of England. And he was going to do it if it took him forty years and travelled him four thousand miles.
Some of which it did-—-but this prophecy was hidden from him.
The most inexorably wrathful detective in the British Isles, Chief Inspector Claud Eustace Teal, stepped on the gas and walloped into the second lap of his odyssey, heading for Upper Berkeley Mews.
Chapter V
Simon Templar garaged his gat in a side pocket and leapt into the darkness. The men outside were on their toes for concerted action, but the dousing of the lights beat them. Simon swerved nimbly round the noises of their blundering, and sprinted for the square patch of twilight that indicated the way out of the courtyard.
His fingers hooked on the brickwork at the side of the opening as he reached it, and he fetched round into the road on a tight hair-pin turn that brought him up with his back to the wall outside. A yard or two to his left he saw the parking lights of a car gliding along the kerb.
Then Perrigo came plunging out. He skidded round the same turn and picked up his stride again without a pause. Simon shot off the wall and closed alongside him. He grabbed Perrigo's arm.
"The car—you won't make it on foot!"
He sprang for the running-board as he spoke—Patricia was keeping level, with the Hirondel dawdling easily along in second. Perrigo looked round hesitantly, making the pace flat-footed. Then he also hauled himself aboard.
"Right away, lass," said the Saint.
The great car surged forward, sprawling Perrigo head over heels on to the cushions of the back seat. Patricia changed up without a click, and Simon swung himself lightly over into place beside her.
"Well?" she asked calmly; and the Saint laughed.
"Oh, we had quite a jolly little party."
"What happened?"
Simon lighted a cigarette, and inhaled with deep satisfaction.
"Claud Eustace Teal's stomach walked in, closely followed by Claud Eustace. It was most extraordinary. Subsequently, I walked out. Claud Eustace is now thinking that that was even more extraordinary."
Patricia nodded.
"I saw the men getting into the gardens, and then I drove round to the back and saw the squad car. Did you have much trouble?"
"Nothing to speak of." The Saint was slewed round in his seat, his keen eyes searching back up the road. "I pulled Teal's nose, told him a perfectly drawing-room limerick, and left him to think it over. ... I should turn off again here, old darling —they're certain to be after us."
The girl obeyed.
And then she flashed the Saint a smile, and she said:
"Boy, I was all set to crash that squad car if they'd tried to take you away in it."
The Saint stared.
"You were which?"
"Sure, I'd have wrecked that car all right."
"And then?"
"I'd have got you out somehow."
"Pat, have you gone loco?"
She laughed, and shook her head, hustling the car recklessly down the long clear street.
Simon gazed at her thoughtfully.
It was typical of him that even then he was able to do that— and do it with his whole attention on the job. But the longer you knew him, the more amazing did that characteristic of light-hearted insouciance become. The most tempestuous incidents of his turbulent life occupied just as much of his mind as he allotte
d to them, and no more. And their claims were repudiated altogether by such a mood of scapegrace devilment as descended upon him at that instant.
He took in the features that he knew even better than his own with a new sense of delight. They stood out fair and clean-cut against the speeding background of sombre buildings—the small nose, the finely modelled forehead, the firm chin, the red lips slightly parted, the eyes gay and shining. The wind whipped a faint flush into her cheeks and swept back her hair like a golden mane. Under her short leather jacket the small high breasts seemed to be pressing forward with the eagerness of youth.
She turned to him, knowing his eyes were on her.
"What are you thinking, lad?"
"I'm thinking that I shall always want to remember you as I'm seeing you now," said the Saint.
One of the small strong hands came off the wheel and rested on his knee. He covered it with his own.
"I'm glad I was never a gentleman," he said.
They raced on, carving a wide circle out of the map of London. Traffic crossings delayed them here and there, but they kept as much as possible to unfrequented side streets, and moved fast. Perrigo sat in the back and brooded, with his coat collar turned up over his ears. His cosmos was still in a dizzy whirl, which he was trying to reduce to some sort of coherence. The vicissitudes that had somersaulted upon him from all angles during the past forty-five minutes had hopelessly dislocated his bearings. One minute the Saint was thumping him in the stomach, the next minute he was helping him on with his hat. One minute the Saint was preparing to hoist him, the next minute he was yanking him out of a splice. One minute the Saint seemed to have a direct hook-up with the police, the next minute he was leading the duck-out with all the zeal of an honest citizen avoiding contact with a Member of Parliament. It was a bit too much for Gunner Perrigo, a simple soul for whom the solution of all reasonable problems lay in the breech of a Smith-Wesson.
But out of the chaos one imperishable thought emerged to the forefront of his consciousness, and it was that which motivated his eventual decision. One bifurcated fact stood indefeasible amid the maelstrom. The Saint knew too much, and the Saint had at one time announced his intention of hijacking a certain parcel of diamonds. And the two prongs of that fact linked up and pointed to a single certainty: that the safest course for Gunner Perrigo was to get the hell out of any place where the Saint might be—and to make the voyage alone.
The Saint vs Scotland Yard (The Holy Terror) Page 16
