"Alone?"
"He was talking to his sleuth-hound when I gave you the signal. There wasn't anyone else with him."
"Splendid."
His coat off, the Saint was over at the dressing-table, putting a lightning polish on his hair with brush and comb. Under Patricia's eyes, the traces of his recent rough-and-tumble in the car disappeared miraculously. In a matter of seconds he was his old spruce self, lean and immaculate and alert, a laughing storm-centre of hell-for-leather mischief, flipping into a blue velvet smoking-gown. . . .
"Darling—"
She stopped him, with a hand on his arm. She was quite serious.
"Listen, boy. I've never questioned you before, but this time there's no Duke of Fortezza to frame you out."
"Maybe not."
"Are you sure there isn't going to be real trouble?"
"I'm sure there is. For one thing, our beautiful little bolt-hole has done its stuff. Never again will it make that sleuth-hound outside my perfect alibi. After tonight, Claud Eustace will know that I've got a spare exit, and he'll come back with a search warrant and a gang of navvies to find it. But we'll have had our money's worth out of it. Sure, there's going to be trouble. I asked for it—by special delivery!"
"And what then?"
Simon clapped his hands on her shoulders, smiling the old Saintly smile.
"Have you ever known any trouble that I couldn't get out of?" he demanded. "Have you ever seen me beaten?"
She thrilled to his madcap buoyancy—she did not know why.
"Never!" she cried.
Downstairs, the front door bell rang. The Saint took no notice. He held her with his eyes, near to laughing, vibrant with impetuous audacity, magnificently mad.
"Is there anything that can put me down?"
"I can't imagine it."
He swept her to him and kissed her red lips.
The bell rang again. Simon pointed, with one of his wide gestures.
"Down there," he said, "there's an out-size detective whose one aim in life is to spike the holiday that's coming to us. Our own Claud Eustace Teal, with his mouth full of gum and his wattles crimsoning, paying us his last professional call. Let's go and swipe him on the jaw."
Chapter VII
In the sitting-room, Patricia closed her book and looked up as Chief Inspector Teal waddled in. Simon followed the visitor. It was inevitable that he should dramatise himself—that he should extract the last molecule of diversion from the scene by playing his part as strenuously as if life and death depended on it. He was an artist. And that night the zest of his self-appointed task tingled electrically in all his fibres. Teal, chewing stolidly through a few seconds' portentous pause, thought that he had never seen the Saint so debonair and dangerous.
"I hope I don't intrude," he said at last, heavily.
"Not at all," murmured the Saint. "You see before you a scene of domestic repose. Have some beer?"
Teal took a tight hold on himself. He knew that there was a toe-to-toe scrap in front of him, and he wasn't going to put himself at a disadvantage sooner than he could help. The searing vials of righteous indignation within him had simmered down still further during the drive from Regent's Park, and out of the travail caution had been born. His purpose hadn't weakened in the least, but he wasn't going to trip over his own feet in the attempt to achieve it. The lights of battle glittering about in the Saint's blue eyes augured a heap of snags along the route that was to be paddled, and for once Chief Inspector Teal was trying to take the hint.
"Coming quietly?" he asked.
The feeler went out, gruffly noncommital; and Simon smiled.
"You're expecting me to ask why," he drawled, "but I refuse to do anything that's expected of me. Besides, I know."
"How do you know?"
"My spies are everywhere. Sit down, Claud. That's a collapsible chair we bought specially for you, and the cigars in that box explode when you light them. Oh, and would you mind taking off your hat?—it doesn't go with the wallpaper."
Teal removed his bowler with savage tenderness. He realised that he was going to have an uphill fight to keep the promise he had made to himself. There was the faintest thickening in his lethargic voice as he repeated his question.
"How do you know what I want you for?"
"My dear soul, how else could I have known except by being with you when you first conceived the idea of wanting me?" answered the Saint blandly.
"So you're going to admit it really was you I was talking to at Regent's Park?"
"Between ourselves—it was."
"Got some underground way out of here, haven't you?"
"The place is a rabbit-warren."
"And where's Perrigo?"
"He's playing bunny."
Teal twiddled a button, and his eyelids lowered. The leading tentacles of a nasty cold sensation were starting to weave clammily up his spine. It was something akin to the sensation experienced by a man who, in the prelude to a nightmare, has been cavorting happily about in the middle of a bridge over a fathomless abyss, and who suddenly discovers that the bridge has turned into a thin slab of toffee and the temperature is rising.
Something was springing a leak. He hadn't the ghost of a presentiment of what the leak was going to be, but the symptoms of its approach were bristling all over the situation like the quills on a porcupine.
"You helped Perrigo to escape at Regent's Park, didn't you?" He tried to make his voice sleepier and more bored than it had ever been before, but the strain clipped minute snippets off the ends of the syllables. "You're admitting that you caused a wilful breach of the peace by discharging firearms in a public thoroughfare, and you obstructed and assaulted the police in the execution of their duty, and that you became an accessory to wilful murder?"
"Between these four walls," said the Saint, "and in these trousers, I cannot tell a lie."
"Very well." Teal's knuckles whitened over the brim of his hat. "Templar, I arrest you——"
"Oh, no," said the Saint. "Oh, no, Claud, you don't."
The detective tautened up as if he had received a blow. But Simon Templar wasn't even looking at him. He was selecting a cigarette from a box on the centre table. He flicked it into the air and caught it between his lips, with his hands complacently outspread. "My only parlour trick," he remarked, changing the subject.
Teal spoke through his teeth.
"And why?" he flared.
"Only one I ever learnt," explained the Saint naively.
"Why don't I arrest you?"
Simon ranged himself side-saddle on the table. He stroked the cog of an automatic lighter and put his cigarette in the flame.
"Because, Claud, what I say to you now, between these four walls and in these trousers, and what I'd say in the witness-box, are two things so totally different you'd hardly believe they came from the same rosebud mouth."
Teal snorted.
"Perjury, eh? I thought something cleverer than that was coming from you, Saint."
"You needn't be disappointed."
"Got a speech that you think'll let you out?"
"I have, Claud. I've got a peach of a speech. Put me in the dock, and I'll lie like a newspaper proprietor. Any idea what that means?"
The detective shrugged.
"That's your affair," he grunted. "If you want to be run for perjury as well as other things, I'm afraid I can't stop you."
Simon leaned forward, his left hand on his hip and his right hand on his knee. The deep-blue danger lights were glinting more brightly than ever in his eyes, and there was fight in every line of him. A back-to-the-wall, buccaneering fight, rollicking out to damn the odds.
"Claud, did you think you'd got me at last?"
"I did. And I still think so."
"Thought that the great day had dawned when my name was coming out of the Unfinished Business ledger, and you were going to sleep nights?"
"I did."
"That's too bad, Claud," said the Saint.
Teal purs
ed his lips tolerantly, but there were pinpoints of red luminance darting about in his gaze.
"I'm still waiting to hear why," he said flatly.
Simon stood up.
"O.K.," he said, and a new indefinable timbre of menace was pulsing into his easy drawl. "I'll tell you why. You asked for a showdown. I'll tell you what you've been thinking. There was a feather you wanted for that hat of yours: you tried all manner of ways to get it, but it wasn't having you. You were too dumb. And then you thought you'd got it. Tonight was your big night. You were going to collect the Saint on the most footling break he ever made. I've got away with everything from murder downwards under your bloodshot eyes, but you were going to run me for stealing fourpence out of the Bank of England."
"That's not what I said."
"It goes for what you meant. You get what you asked for, Claud. Thought I was the World's Wet Smack, did you? Figured that I was so busy crashing the mountains that I'd never have time to put a tab on all the molehills? Well, you asked for something. Now would you like to know what I've really been doing tonight?"
"I'll hear it."
"I've been entertaining a dozen friends, and I'll give you from now till Kingdom Come to prove it's a lie!"
The detective glared.
"D'you think I was born yesterday?" he yelped.
"I don't know," said the Saint lazily. "Maybe you weren't born at all. Maybe you were just dug up. What's that got to do with it?"
Teal choked. His restraint split into small pieces, and the winds of his wrath began to twitch the bits out of his grasp, one by one.
"What's the idea?" he demanded heatedly; and the Saint smiled.
"Only the usual alibi, old corpuscle. Like it?"
"Alibi?" Teal rent the words with sadistic violence. "Oh, yes, you've got an alibi! Six men saw you at Regent's Park alone, but you've got twelve men to give you an alibi. And where was this alibi?"
"In the house that communicates with this one by the secret passage you wot of."
"You aren't going to change your mind about that passage?"
"Why should I? It may be eccentric, but there's nothing in the Statute Book to say it's illegal."
"And that's the alibi you're going to try and put over on me?"
"It's more," said the Saint comfortably. "It's the alibi that's going to dish you."
"Is it?"
Simon dropped his cigarette into an ashtray and put his hands in his pockets. He stood in front of the detective, six feet two inches of hair-trigger disorder—with a smile.
"Claud," he said, "you're missing the opportunity of a lifetime. I'm letting you in on the ground floor. Out of the kindness of my heart I'm presenting you with a low-down on the organisation of a master criminal that hundreds would give their ears to get. I'm not doing it without expense to myself, either. I'm giving away my labyrinth of secret passages, which means that if I want to be troublesome again I shall have to look for a new headquarters. I'm showing you the works of my emergency alibi, guaranteed to rescue anyone from any predicament: there are four lords, a knight and three officers of field rank in it—they've taken me years to collect, and now I shall have to fossick around for a new bunch. But what are trifles like that between friends? Now be sensible, Claud. It becomes increasingly evident that some one is impersonating me."
"Yes, and I know who it is!"
"But it was bound to happen, wasn't it?" said the Saint, continuing in that philosophically persuasive strain under which the razor-keen knife-edges were gliding about like hungry sharks in a smooth tropical sea. "In my misguided efforts to do good, I once made myself so notorious that someone or other was bound to think of hanging his sins on me. The wonder is that it wasn't thought of years ago. Now look at that recent affair in Hampstead——"
"I don't want to know any more about that affair in Hampstead," said Teal torridly. "I want to know how you're going to swing it on me this time. Come on. Let me have the names and addresses of these twelve liars. I'll run them for perjury at the same time as I'm running you."
"You won't. But I'll tell you what I'll do——"
The Saint's forefinger shot out. Teal struck it aside.
"Don't do that!" he yapped.
"I have to," said the Saint. "I love the way your tummy dents in and pops out again. Talking of tummies——"
"You tell me what you think you're going to do."
"I'll run you for bribery, corruption, and blackmail!" said the Saint.
His languid voice tightened up on the sentence with a sudden crispness that had the effect of a gunshot. It rocked the atmosphere like an exploding bomb. And it was followed by a silence that was ear-splitting.
The detective gaped at him with goggling eyes, while a substratum of dull scarlet sapped up under the skin of his face. It was the most flabbergasting utterance that Chief Inspector Teal had listened to. He blinked as if he had been smitten with doubts of his own sanity.
"Have you gone off your head?" he hooted.
"Not that I know of."
"And who's supposed to have been bribing me?"
"I have."
"You?"
"Yeah." The Saint took another cigarette from the box, and lighted it composedly. "Haven't seen your pass-book lately, have you? You'd better ask for it tomorrow morning. You'll discover that in the last six weeks alone you've taken eight hundred and fifty pounds off me. Two hundred pounds on February the sixteenth, two-fifty on March the sixth, four hundred on March the twenty-second—apart from smaller regular payments extending over the previous six months. All the cheques have got your endorsement on 'em, and they've all been passed through your account: they're back in my bank now, available for inspection by any authorised person. It's quite a tidy little sum, Claud—eighteen hundred quid altogether. You'll have a grand time explaining it away."
Some of the colour ebbed slowly out of Teal's plump cheeks, and he seemed to sag inside his overcoat. Only the expression in his eyes remained the same—a stare of blank, frozen, incredulous stupefaction.
"You framed me for that?" he got out.
"I'm afraid I did." Simon inhaled, and blew a smoke-ring. "It was just another of my brilliant ideas. Are you thinking you can deny the endorsements? It won't be easy. Eight hundred and fifty pounds in six weeks is real money. I wrote it off as insurance, but I still hated parting with it. And how many juries would believe that I paid a detective eighteen hundred pounds inside six months just with the idea of being funny? It'd be a steep gamble for you if we had to go through the courts, old dear. I admit it was very naughty of me to bribe you, but there it is. ... Unfortunately, you couldn't be content with what I gave you. You wanted more, and you tried all sorts of persecutions to get it. First that Hampstead affair, and then this show tonight. . . . Oh, well, Claud, it looks as if we shall have to swing together."
Chapter VIII
The detective seemed to have shrunk. His complexion had gone lined and blotchy, and there was a dazed look in his eyes that stabbed the Saint with a twinge of pity.
Teal was a man facing the end. The bombshell that the Saint had flung at him had knocked the underpinning from the very foundations of his universe. The fight and bluster had gone out of him. He knew, better than anyone, the full and devastating significance of the trap that had been laid for him. There was no way out of it—no human bluff or subterfuge that would let him out. He could stick to his guns and give battle to the last ditch—arrest the Saint as he had intended, take his chance with the threatened alibi, fight out the counter-charge of bribery and corruption when it came along, perhaps even win an acquittal—but it would still be the end of his career. Even if he won, he would be a ruined man. A police officer must be above suspicion. And those endorsed and cancelled cheques of which the Saint had spoken, produced in court, would be damning evidence. Acquitted, Teal would still be under a cloud. Ever afterwards, there would be gossips to point to him and whisper that he was a man who had broken the eleventh commandment and escaped the co
nsequences by the skin of his teeth. And he was not so young as he had been —not so young that he could snap his fingers at the gossips and buckle grimly back into the task of making good again. He would have to resign. He would be through.
He stood there, going paler, but not flinching; and the Saint blew two more smoke-rings.
Teal was trying to think, but he couldn't. The suddenness with which the blow had fallen had pulverised his wits. He felt himself going mentally and physically numb. Under the surveillance of those devilishly bleak blue eyes, and in the vivid presence of what they stood for, he couldn't dp any consecutive and sober thinking.
Abruptly, he settled his belt and shook down his coat.
"I'll see you in the morning," he said, in a sort of gulp, and walked jerkily out of the room.
Simon heard the front door close, and listened to the detective's footsteps clumping past the window and dying away towards Berkeley Square. Something seemed to have paralysed their ordinary ponderous self-reliance. There was the least little tell-tale drag in them. . . . And the Saint turned, and found Patricia watching him.
"A notable triumph," he said quietly.
The girl stood up.
"Were you bluffing?" she asked.
"Of course not. I knew that Teal and I were certain to have that showdown sooner or later, and I was prepared for it. I'd got half a dozen more shocks waiting for him, if he'd stayed to hear them. I just wanted to put the wind up him. But I'd no idea it'd be such a smash."
Patricia looked away.
"It was pathetic," she said. "Oh, I could see him go ten years older while you were talking."
Simon nodded. The fruits of victory were strangely bitter.
"Pat, did you know that an hour or so ago I was planning for this to be the sorriest show Teal ever stuck his nose into? The noble game of Teal-baiting was going to be played as it had never been played before. That's all I've got to say. . . . What a damn-fool racket it is!"
He turned on his heel, and left her without another word.
His mind was too full to talk. Upstairs, he threw off his clothes and tumbled into bed, and almost instantly he fell asleep. That gift of sleep is one that all great adventurers have shared—a sleep that heals the mind and solves all problems. Patricia, coming up later, found his face as peaceful as a child's.
The Saint vs Scotland Yard (The Holy Terror) Page 18
