"I wish I could say they were," said Teal glumly. "As soon as that postcard arrived I went after him myself, but he appears to have left the country. Anyhow, he went down to Hanworth last night, where he keeps an aeroplane, and went off in it; and he hasn't been back since. Probably he's only fixing up an alibi——"
Even as he uttered the theory, the vision of a helicopter flashed into his mind. The hotel was a large tall building, with the latest type of autogiro it might have been possible to land and take off there. Teal had a sudden wild desire to post more detectives on the roof—even to ask for special aeroplanes to patrol the skies over the hotel. He laughed himself out of the aeroplanes, but he went downstairs and picked up one of the men he had posted in the lobby.
"Go up and watch the roof," he ordered. "I'll send some-one to relieve you at eight o'clock."
The man nodded obediently and went off, but he gave Teal a queer look in parting which made the detective realise how deeply the Saint superstition had got into his system. The realisation did not make Mr. Teal any better pleased with himself, and his manner when he returned to the royal suite was almost surly.
"We'd better watch in turns," he said. "There are twenty-four hours to go, and the Saint may be banking on waiting until near the end of the time when we're all tired and thinking of giving it up."
Schamyl yawned.
"I am going to bed," he said. "If anything happens, you may inform me."
Teal watched the departure of the lean blackhawk figure, and wished he could have shared the Prince's tolerant boredom with the whole business. One of the detectives who watched the crown, at a sign from Teal, curled up on the settee and closed his eyes. The private watchdog of the Southshire Insurance lolled back in his chair; very soon his mouth fell open, and a soporific buzzing emanated from his throat and caused his handlebar moustaches to vibrate in unison.
Chief Inspector Teal paced up and down the room, fashioning a wodge of chewing gum into endless intricate shapes with his teeth and tongue. The exercise did not fully succeed in soothing his nerves. His brain was haunted by memories of the buccaneer whom he knew only too well—the rakish carving of the brown handsome face, the mockery of astonishingly clear blue eyes, the gay smile that came so easily to the lips, the satirical humour of the gentle dangerous voice.
He had seen all those things too often ever to forget them— had been deceived, maddened, dared, defied, and outwitted by them in too many adventures to believe that their owner would ever be guilty of an empty hoax. And the thought that the Saint was roving at large that night was not comforting. The air above Middlesex had literally swallowed him up, and he might have been anywhere between Berlin and that very room.
When the dawn came Teal was still awake. The private detective's handlebars ceased vibrating with a final snort; the officer on the couch woke up, and the one who had kept the night watch took his place. Teal himself was far too wrought up to think of seizing his own chance to rest. Ten o'clock arrived before the Prince's breakfast, and Schamyl came through from his bedroom as the waiter was laying the table.
He peered into the box where the crown was packed, and stroked his beard with an ironical glint in his eyes.
"This is very strange, Inspector," he remarked. "The crown has not been stolen! Can it be that your criminal has broken his promise?"
With some effort, Teal kept his retort to himself. While the Prince attacked his eggs with a healthy appetite, Teal sipped a cup of coffee and munched on a slice of toast. For the hundredth time he surveyed the potentialities of the apartment. The bedroom and the sitting-room opened on either side of a tiny private hall, with the bathroom in between. The hall had a door into the corridor, outside which another detective was posted; there was no other entrance or exit except the open windows overlooking Hyde Park, through which the morning sun was streaming. The possibility of secret panels or passages was absurd. The furniture was modernistically plain, expensive, and comfortable. There was a chesterfield, three armchairs, a couple of smaller chairs, a writing desk, the centre table on which breakfast was laid, and a small side table on which stood the box containing the crown of Cherkessia. Not even a very small thief could have secreted himself in or behind any of the articles. Nor could he plausibly slip through the guards outside. Therefore, if he was to make good his boast, it seemed as if he must be inside already; and Teal's eyes turned again to the moustached representative of the Southshire Insurance Company. He would have given much for a legitimate excuse to seize the handlebars of that battle-scarred sleuth, one in each hand, and haul heftily on them; and he was malevolently deliberating whether such a manoeuvre could be justified in the emergency when the interruption came.
It was provided by Peter Quentin, who stood at another window of the hotel vertically above the Prince's suite, dangling a curious egg-shaped object at the end of a length of cotton. When it hung just an inch above Schamyl's window, he took up a yard of slack and swung the egg-shaped object cautiously outwards. As it started to swing back, he dropped the slack, and the egg plunged through the Prince's open window and broke the cotton in the jerk that ended its trajectory.
Chief Inspector Teal did not know this. He only heard the crash behind him, and swung around to see a pool of milky fluid spreading around a scattering of broken glass on the floor. Without stopping to think he made a dive towards it, and a gush of dense black smoke burst from the milky pool like a flame and struck him full in the face.
He choked and gasped, and groped around in a moment of utter blindness. In another instant the whole room was filled with a jet-black fog. The shouts and stumblings of the other men in the room came to him as if through a film of cotton-wool as he lumbered sightlessly towards the table where the crown had stood. He cannoned into it and ran over its surface with frantic hands. The box was not standing there any longer. In a sudden panic of fear he dropped to his knees and began to feel all over the floor around the table. . . .
He had already made sure that the box had not been knocked over on to the floor in the confusion, when the smoke in his lungs forced him to stagger coughing and retching to the door. The corridor outside was black with the same smoke, and in the distance he could hear the tinkling of fire alarms. A man collided with him in the blackness, and Teal grabbed him in a vicious grip.
"Tell me your name," he snarled.
"Mason, sir," came the reply; and Teal recognised the voice of the detective he had posted in the corridor.
His chest heaved painfully.
"What happened?"
"I don't know, sir. The door—opened from the inside— one of those damn smoke-bombs thrown out—started all this. Couldn't see—any more, sir."
"Let's get some air," gasped Teal.
They reeled along the corridor for what seemed to be miles before the smoke thinned out, and after a while they reached a haven where an open corridor window reduced it to no more than a thin grey mist. Red-eyed and panting, they stared at one another.
"He's done it," said Teal huskily.
That was the bitter fact he had to face; and he knew without further investigation, even without the futile routine search that had to follow, that he would never see the crown of Cherkessia again.
The other members of the party were blundering down towards them through the fog. The first figure to loom up was that of Prince Schamyl himself, cursing fluently in an incomprehensible tongue; and after him came the form of the Southshire Insurance Company's private bloodhound. Teal's bloodshot eyes glared at that second apparition insanely through the murk. Mr. Teal had suffered much; he was not feeling himself, and in the last analysis he was only human. That is the only explanation this chronicle can offer for what he did. For with a kind of strangled grunt, Chief Inspector Claud Eustace Teal lurched forward and took hold of the offensive handlebar moustaches, one in each determined hand. . . .
"Perhaps now you'll tell me how you did it," said Patricia Holm.
The Saint smiled. He had arrived onl
y twenty minutes, before, fresh as a daisy, at the hotel in Paris where he had arranged to meet her; and he was unpacking.
From a large suitcase he had taken a small table, which was a remarkable thing for him to have even in his frequently eccentric luggage. He set it up before her, and placed on it a velvet-lined wooden box. The table was somewhat thicker in the top than most tables of that size, as if it might have contained a drawer; but she could not see any drawer.
"Watch," he said.
He touched a concealed spring somewhere in the side of the table—and the box vanished. Because she was watching it closely, she saw it go: it simply fell through a trapdoor into the hollow thickness of the top, and a perfectly fitted panel sprang up to fill the gap again. But it was all done in a split second; and even when she examined the top of the table closely it was hard to see the edges of the trapdoor. She shook the table, but nothing rattled. For all that any ordinary examination could reveal, the top might have been a solid block of mahogany.
"It was just as easy as that," said the Saint, with the air of a conjuror revealing a treasured illusion. "The crown never even left the room until I was ready to take it away. Fortunately the Prince hadn't actually paid for the crown. It was still insured by Vazey's themselves, so the Southshire Insurance Company's cheque will go direct to them—which saves me a certain amount of extra work. All I've got to do now is to finish off my alibi, and the job's done."
"But Simon," pleaded the girl, "when Teal grabbed your moustaches ——"
"Teal didn't grab my moustaches," said the Saint with dignity. "Claud Eustace would never had dreamed of doing such a thing. I shall never forget the look on that bird's face when the moustaches were grabbed, though. It was a sight I hope to treasure to my dying day."
He had unpacked more of the contents of his large bag while he was talking; and at that moment he was laying out a pair of imperially curled moustachios with which was connected an impressively pointed black beard. Patricia's eyes suddenly opened wide.
"Good Lord!" she gasped. "You don't mean to say you kidnapped the Prince and pretended to be him?"
Simon Templar shook his head.
"I always was the Prince of Cherkessia—didn't you know?" he said innocently; and all at once Patricia began to laugh.
V
The Treasure of Turk's Lane
There was a morning when Simon Templar looked up from his newspaper with a twinkle of unholy meditation in his blue eyes and a rather thoughtful smile barely touching the corners of his mouth; and to the privileged few who shared all his lawless moods there was only one deduction to be drawn when the Saint looked up from his newspaper in just that thoughtful and unholy way.
"I see that Vernon Winlass has bought Turk's Lane," he said.
Mr. Vernon Winlass was a man who believed in Getting Things Done. The manner of doing them did not concern him much, so long as it remained strictly within the law; it was only results which could be seen in bank accounts, share holdings, income tax returns, and the material circumstances of luxurious living, and with these things Mr. Winlass was very greatly and whole-heartedly concerned. This is not to say that he was more avaricious than any other business man, or more unscrupulous than any other financier. In his philosophy, the weakest went to the wall: the careless, the timid, the foolish, the simple, the hesitant, paid with their misfortunes for the rewards that came naturally to those of sharper and more aggressive talents. And in setting up that elementary principle for his only guiding standard, Mr. Winlass could justifiably claim that after all he was only demonstrating himself to be the perfect evolutionary product of a civilisation whose honours and amenities are given only to people who Get Things Done, whether they are worth doing or not—with the notable exception of politicians, who, of course, are exempted by election even from that requirement.
Simon Templar did not like Mr. Winlass, and would have considered him a legitimate victim for his illegitimate talents, on general principles that were only loosely connected with one or two things he had heard about Mr. Winlass's methods of Getting Things Done; but although the idea of devoting some time and attention to that hard-headed financier simmered at the back of his mind in a pleasant warmth of enthusiasm, it did not actually boil over until the end of the same week, when he happened to be passing Turk's Lane on his return from another business affair.
Turk's Lane is, or was, a narrow cul-de-sac of small two-storey cottages. That description is more or less as bald and unimaginative as anything a hard-headed financier would have found to say about it. In actual fact it was one of those curious relics of the past which may sometimes be discovered in London, submerged among tall modern buildings and ordered squares as if a new century had grown up around it without noticing its existence any more than was necessary to avoid treading on it. The passer-by who wandered into that dark lane at night might have fancied himself magically transported back over two centuries. He would have seen the low ceilings and tiny leaded windows of oak-beamed houses, the wrought-iron lamps glowing above the lintels of the narrow doors, the worn cobblestones gleaming underfoot, the naphtha flares flickering on a riot of foodstuffs spread out in unglazed shop fronts; and he might have thought himself spirited away into the market street of a village that had survived there unaltered from the days when Kensington was a hamlet three miles from London and there was a real Knights' Bridge across the Serpentine where it now flows through sanitary drainpipes to the Thames.
Mr. Winlass did not think any of these things; but he saw something far more interesting to himself, which was that Turk's Lane stood at the back of a short row of shabby early Victorian houses, which were for sale. He also saw that the whole of Turk's Lane—except for the two end houses, which were the freehold property of the occupants—was likewise for sale, and that the block comprised of these two principal properties totalled an area of about three-quarters of an acre, which is quite a small garden in the country, but which would allow plenty of space to erect a block of modern apartments with running hot and cold water in every room for the tenancy of fifty more sophisticated and highly civilised Londoners. He also saw that this projected building would have an impressive frontage on a most respectable road in a convenient situation which the westward trend of expansion was annually raising in value; and he bought the row of shabby early Victorian houses and the whole of Turk's Lane except the two end cottages, and called in his architects.
Those two cottages which had not been included in the purchase were the difficulty.
"If you don't get those two places the site's useless," Mr. Winlass was told. "You can't build a block of flats like you're proposing to put up with two old cottages in the middle."
"Leave it to me," said Mr. Winlass. "I'll Get It Done."
Strolling into Turk's Lane on this day when the ripeness of Mr. Winlass for the slaughter was finally made plain to him, Simon Templar learned how it was getting done.
It was not by any means the Saint's first visit to the picturesque little alley. He had an open affection for it, as he had for all such pathetic rearguards of the forlorn fight against dull mechanical modernity; and he had at least one friend who lived there.
Dave Roberts was a cobbler. He was an old grey-haired man with gentle grey eyes, known to every inhabitant of Turk's Lane as "Uncle Dave," who had plied his trade there since the oldest of them could remember, as his father and grandfather had done before him. It might almost be said that he was Turk's Lane, so wholly did he belong to the forgotten days that were preserved there. The march of progress to which Mr. Vernon Winlass belonged had passed him by. He sat in his tiny shop and mended the boots and shoes of the neighbourhood for microscopical old-world prices; he had a happy smile and a kind word for everyone; and with those simple things, unlike Mr. Vernon Winlass, his philosophy began and ended and was well content. To such pioneers as Mr. Winlass he was, of course, a dull reactionary and a stupid bumpkin; but to the Saint he was one of the few and dwindling relics of happier and
cleaner days, and many pairs of Simon's own expensive shoes had gone to his door out of that queer affection rather than because they needed repairing.
Simon smoked a cigarette under the low beamed ceiling in the smell of leather and wax, while Dave Roberts wielded his awl under a flickering gas-jet and told him of the things that were happening in Turk's Lane.
"Ay, sir, Tom Unwin over the road, he's going. Mr. Winlass put him out o' business. Did you see that new shop next to Tom's? Mr. Winlass started that up, soon as he'd got the tenants out. Sold exactly the same things as Tom had in his shop for a quarter the price—practically give 'em away, he did. 'Course, he lost money all the time, but he can afford to. Tom ain't hardly done a bit o' business since then. 'Well,' Tom says to himself, 'if this goes on for another couple o' months I'll be broke,' so in the end he sells out to Mr. Win-lass an' glad to do it. I suppose I'll be the next, but Mr. Winlass won't get me out if I can help it."
The Saint looked across the lane at the garish makeshift shop front next door to Tom Unwin's store, and back again to the gentle old man straining his eyes under the feeble light.
"So he's been after you, has he?" he said. "Ay, he's been after me. One of his men come in my shop the other day. 'Your place is worth five hundred pounds,' he says. 'We'll give you seven hundred to get out at once, an' Mr. Winlass is being very generous with you,' he says. Well, I told him I didn't want to get out. I been here, man an' boy, for seventy years now, an' I wasn't going to get out to suit him. 'You realise,' he says, 'your obstinacy is holding up an important an' valuable piece of building?'—'Begging your pardon, sir,' I says, 'you're holdin' me up from mending these shoes.'—'Very well,' this chap says, 'if you're so stupid you can refuse two hundred pounds more than your place is worth, you're going to be glad to take two hundred less before you're much older, if you don't come to your senses quick,' he says, 'and them's Mr. Winlass's orders,' he says."
13 The Saint Intervenes (Boodle) Page 7
