Alias the Saint (The Saint Series)

by Leslie Charteris

  The Professor’s voice suddenly cracked out the order with a startling intenseness, and the two men who had stood on either side of the prisoner hurried into the opposite corner of the room and left him standing alone.

  Betty Tregarth stared stupidly at the gleaming weapon in her hand, and looked from it to the bound man who stood stiffly erect by the door.

  Then something seemed to snap in her brain, and everything went black; but through the whirling, humming kaleidoscope of spangled darkness that swallowed up consciousness, she heard, a thousand miles away, the report of an automatic that echoed and re-echoed deliriously through an eternity of empty blackness.

  She woke up in bed, with a splitting headache.

  Opening her eyes sleepily, she grasped the general geography of the room in a dazed sort of way. The blinds were drawn, and the only light came from a softly shaded reading lamp by the side of the bed. There was a dressing-table in front of the window, and a wash-stand in one corner. Everything was unfamiliar. She couldn’t make it out at first—it didn’t seem like her room.

  Then she turned her head and saw the man who sat regarding her steadily, with a book on his knee, in the arm-chair beside the bed, and the memory of what had happened, before the drug she had inhaled overcame her, returned in its full horror. She sat up, throwing off the bedclothes, and found that she was still wearing the dress in which she had left the flat. Only her shoes had been removed.

  The effort to rise made the room swim dizzily before her eyes, and her head felt as if it would burst.

  “If you lie still for a moment,” said Raxel suavely, “the headache will pass in about ten minutes.”

  She put her hand to her forehead and tried to steady herself. All her strength seemed to have left her, and even the terror she felt could not give her back the necessary energy to leap out of bed and dash out of the door and out of the house.

  “You’ll be sorry about this,” she said faintly. “You can’t keep me here forever, and when I get out and tell the police—”

  “You will not tell the police,” said Raxel soothingly, as one might point out the fallacies in the argument of a child. “In fact, I should think you will do your best to avoid them. You may not remember doing it, but you have killed a man. What is more, he was a detective.”

  She looked at him aghast.

  “That man who was tied up?”

  “He was a detective,” said Raxel. “This is his house. I may as well put my cards on the table. I am a criminal, and I had need of your services. The detective you killed was on my trail, and it was necessary to remove him. I killed two birds with one stone. We captured him in the north, and brought him back here to his own house in London, a prisoner. His housekeeper’s absence had already been assured by a fake telegram summoning her to the death-bed of her mother in Manchester. I then brought you here, drugged you with Bhang, and gave you an automatic pistol.”

  She was aghast at a sudden recollection.

  “I heard a shot—just as everything went black…”

  “You fired it,” said Raxel smoothly, “but you are unlikely to remember that part.”

  Betty Tregarth caught her breath.

  “It’s impossible!” she cried hysterically. “I couldn’t—”

  Raxel sighed.

  “You will disappoint me if you fail to behave rationally,” he said. “The ordinary girl might be pardoned for such an outburst; but you, with your scientific training, should not need me, a layman, to explain to you the curious effects that Bhang has upon those who take it. A blind madness seizes them. They kill, not knowing who they kill, or why. This is what you did. Your first shot was successful. Naturally, you fired first at the unfortunate Inspector Henley, because I had so arranged the scene that he was the first man you saw at the instant when the drug took effect! I might mention that we had some difficulty in overpowering you afterwards, and taking the pistol away from you. Henley died an hour later.”

  It was true—what Raxel had said was an absolute scientific fact. Granted that she had been drugged as he said, she would easily have been capable of doing what he said she had done.

  “The terrifying circumstances,” Raxel went on unemotionally, “probably hastened your intoxication. Your immediate impulse was to escape from the room at all costs, and Henley was the one man who stood between you and the door. You shot your way out—or tried to. It is all quite understandable.”

  “Oh, God!” said Betty Tregarth softly.

  Raxel allowed her a full five minutes of silence in which to grasp the exact significance of her position, and at the end of that time the pain in her head had abated a little.

  “I don’t care,” she said dazedly. “I’ll see it through—I’ll tell them I was drugged.”

  “That is no excuse for murder,” said Raxel, “and taking drugs is, in itself, an offence.”

  “But I can tell them everything about it—how you brought me here. There’s proof. You telephoned. The Exchange can prove that.”

  “The Exchange can prove nothing,” said Raxel. “I did not telephone—I should be a very poor tactician to have overlooked such an obvious error. Your line was tapped, and the Exchange has no record of the call. I must ask you to realise the circumstances. You will be taken away from here, and the house will be left exactly as we found it. The only fingerprints will be yours on the automatic you used. Nothing has been moved, and Inspector Henley will be found lying dead here when the police are summoned by his housekeeper on her return. We have treated him very gently during his captivity; and before we leave, the ropes that bound him will be removed, so that from an examination of his body it will be impossible to prove that he was not completely at liberty, in his own house—as any man, even a detective, has every right to be. The scene will be staged in such a way that the detectives, unless they are absolute imbeciles, will deduce that Henley was entertaining a woman here, and that for some reason or other she shot him. The woman, of course, will be you. But your fingerprints are not known to the police, and there will be nothing to incriminate you unless I should write and tell them, in an anonymous letter, where they can find the owner of the fingerprints on the gun. I don’t want to have to do that.”

  “Then what do you want?”

  “Your loyal support,” said Raxel. “Tomorrow you will go to Coulter’s and tell them that your doctor has advised you to take a rest cure, as you are in danger of a nervous breakdown. You will tell your brother the same story. Then you will go down with me to an inn in South Wales, which I have recently purchased, and in which I have installed an expensive laboratory. There you will work for me—and it will only be for three weeks. At the end of that time, if you have done your work satisfactorily, you will be free to go home and return to your job, and I will pay you a thousand pounds for your services. Incidentally, I can assure you that you will not be asked to do anything criminal. I required a qualified chemist on whose silence I could rely—that is all. Therefore I took steps to secure you. I do not think any jury would be likely to hang you, but you would certainly go to prison for a long time—if you were not sentenced to be detained at Broadmoor during His Majesty’s pleasure—and fifteen years spent in prison would rob you of the best part of your life. As an alternative to such a punishment, I think you should find my suggestion singularly acceptable.”

  “And what am I supposed to do in this laboratory?”

  He answered her question in three brief sentences, and she gasped.

  “Why do you want that?” she answered.

  “That is no concern of yours,” answered Raxel. “You will not be asked to associate yourself with my use of it, and so you need have no fear that you will be incriminating yourself. I promise you that when you have made a sufficient quantity for my ends, I shall ask nothing more of you. Nothing shall be done to stop your return home, and no one need ever know what you have been doing. You can, if you like, adopt me as your physician, and tell any inquirers that you are taking a cure under my personal supervision.
We can arrange that. Also, I give you my word of honour that no harm shall come to you while you are in my employ.”

  He looked at his watch.

  “It is half-past ten,” he said. “You have hardly been unconscious an hour, though I expect you have been wondering how many days it has been. There is plenty of time for you to give me your answer and be back at the flat by the time your brother returns. And there is only one answer that you can possibly give.”

  2

  Besides the huge flying Hirondel that was the apple of his eye, Simon Templar possessed another and much less conspicuous car which ran excellently downhill, and therefore he was able to descend upon Llancoed at a clear twenty miles an hour.

  The car (he called it Hildebrand, for no reason that the chronicler, nor anyone else in this story, could ever discover) was of the model known to the expert as “Touring,” which is to say that in hot weather you had the choice of baking with the hood down, or broiling with the hood up. In wet weather you had the choice of getting soaked with the hood down, or driving to the peril of the whole world and yourself while completely encased in a compartment as impervious to vision as it was intended to be impervious to rain. It dated from one of the vintage years of Henry Ford, and the Saint had long ago had his money’s worth out of it.

  On this occasion the hood was up, and the side-screens also, for it was a filthy night. The wind that whistled round the car and blew frosty draughts through every gap in the so-called “all-weather” defences, seemed to have whipped straight out of the bleakest fastnesses of the North Pole. With it came a thin drizzle of rain that seemed colder than snow, which hissed glacially through a clammy sea-mist. The Saint huddled the collar of his leather motoring-coat up round his ears, and wondered if he would ever be warm again.

  He drove through the little village, and came, a minute later, to his destination—a house on the outskirts, within sight of the sea. It was a long, low, rambling building of two storeys, and a dripping sign outside proclaimed it to be the Beacon Inn. It was half-past nine, and yet there seemed to be no convivial gathering of villagers in any of the bars, for only one of the downstairs windows showed a light. In three windows on the first floor, however, lights gleamed from behind yellow blinds. The house did not look particularly inviting, but the night was particularly loathsome, and Simon Templar would have had no difficulty in choosing between the two even if he had not decided to stop at the Beacon Inn nearly twelve hours before.

  He climbed out and went to the door. Here he met his first surprise, for it was locked. He thundered on it impatiently, and after some time there was the sound of footsteps approaching from within. The door opened six inches, and a man looked out.

  “What do you want?” he demanded surlily.

  “Lodging for a night—or even two nights,” said the Saint cheerfully.

  “We’ve got no rooms,” said the man.

  He would have slammed the door in the Saint’s face, but Simon was not unused to people wanting to slam doors in his face, and he had taken the precaution of wedging his foot in the jamb.

  “Pardon me,” he said pleasantly, “but you have got a room. There are eight bedrooms in this plurry pub, and I happen to know that only six of them are occupied.”

  “Well, you can’t come in,” said the man gruffly. “We don’t want you.”

  “I’m sorry about that,” said the Saint, still affably. “But I’m afraid you have no option. Your boss, being a licensed innkeeper, is compelled to give shelter to any traveller who demands it and has the money to pay for it. If you don’t let me in, I can go to the magistrate tomorrow and tell him the story, and if you can’t show a good reason for having refused me you’ll be slung out. You might be able to fake up a plausible excuse by that time, but the notoriety I’d give you and the police attention I’d pull down on you, wouldn’t give you any fun at all. You go and tell your boss what I said, and see if he won’t change his mind.”

  At the same time, Simon Templar suddenly applied his weight to the door. The man inside was not ready for this, and he was thrown off his balance. Simon calmly walked in, shaking the rain off his hat.

  “Go on—tell your boss what I said,” said the Saint encouragingly. “I want a room here tonight, and I’m going to get one.”

  The man departed, grumbling, and Simon walked over to the fire and warmed his hands at the blaze. The man came back in ten minutes, and it appeared at once that the Saint’s warning had had some effect.

  “The Guv’nor says you can have a room.”

  “I thought he would,” said the Saint comfortably, and peeled off his coat. There were seventy-four inches of him, and he looked very lean and tough in his plus-fours.

  “There’s a car outside,” he said. “Shove it in your garage, will you, Basher?”

  The man stared at him.

  “Who are you speaking to?” he demanded.

  “Speaking to you, Basher Tope,” said the Saint pleasantly. “Put my car in the garage.”

  The man came nearer and scowled into Simon’s face. The Saint saw alarm dawning in his eyes.

  “Who are you?” asked Tope hoarsely. “Are you a split?”

  “I am,” admitted the Saint mendaciously. “We wondered where you’d got to, Basher. You’ve no idea how we miss your familiar face in the dock, and all the warders at Wormwood Scrubs have been feeling they’ve lost an old friend.”

  Basher’s mouth twisted.

  “We don’t want none of you damned flatties here,” he said. “The Guv’nor better hear of this.”

  “You can tell the Guv’nor anything you like after you’ve attended to me,” said the Saint languidly. “My bag’s in the car. Fetch it in. Then bring me the register, and push the old bus round to the garage while I sign. Then, when you come back, bring me a pint of beer. After that, you can run away and do anything you like.”

  It is interesting to record that Simon Templar got his own way. Basher Tope obeyed his injunctions to the letter before moving off with the obvious intention of informing his boss of the disreputable policeman whom he was being compelled to entertain. Of course, Basher Tope was prejudiced about policemen, and it must be admitted that the Saint used menaces to enforce obedience. There was the little matter of a robbery with violence, for which Basher Tope had been wanted for the past month, as the Saint happened to know, and that gave him what many would consider to be an unfair advantage in the argument.

  Left alone with a tankard of beer at his elbow, the register on his knee, a cigarette between his lips, and his fountain-pen poised, Simon read the previous entries with interest before making his own. The last few names were those which particularly occupied his attention.

  A.E. Crantor

  Bristol

  British

  Gregory Marring

  London

  British

  E. Tregarth

  London

  British

  Professor Bernhard Raxel

  Vienna

  Austrian

  All these entries were dated about three weeks before, and none had been made since. Simon Templar smiled, and signed directly under the last entry.

  Professor Rameses Smith-Smyth-Smythe

  Timbuctoo

  Patagonian

  “And still,” thought the Saint, as he carefully blotted the page, “the question remains—who is E. Tregarth?”

  3

  The Saint went to bed early that night, and he had not seen any of the men he hoped to find. That fact failed to trouble him, for he reckoned that the following day would give him all the time he needed for making the acquaintance of Messrs. Raxel, Marring, and Crantor.

  He got up early the next morning, and went out to have a look round. The mist had cleared, and although it was still bitterly cold the sky was clear and the sun shone. Standing just outside the door of the inn, in the road, he could see on his left the clustered houses of the village of Llancoed, of which the nearest was about a hundred yards away. On the other si
de of the road was a tract of untended ground which ran down to the sea, two hundred yards away. A cable’s length from the shore, a rusty and disreputable-looking tramp steamer, hardly larger in size than a sea-going tug, rode at anchor. A thin trickle of black smoke wreathed up into the still air from her single funnel, but apart from that she showed no signs of life.

  Simon returned to the inn, and discovered the dining-room.

  It contained only three tables, and only one of these was laid. In the summer, presumably, it catered for the handful of holiday-makers who were attracted by the quietness of the spot, for there were green-painted chairs and tables stacked up under a tarpaulin outside; but in December the place was deserted except for the villagers, and those would be likely to eat at home. The table was laid for four. The Saint chose the most comfortable of the selection of uninviting chairs that offered themselves, and thumped on the table with the handle of a knife to attract attention. It was Tope who answered.

  “Breakfast,” said the Saint laconically. “Two boiled eggs, toast, marmalade, and a pint of coffee.”

  Tope informed him that the table he occupied was engaged, and Simon mildly replied that he was not interested.

  “It’s the only table that looks ready for use,” he pointed out, “and I want my breakfast. You can be laying a table for the other guys while I eat. Jump to it, Basher, jump to it!”

  Basher Tope muttered another uncomplimentary remark about interfering busies what thought they owned the earth, and went out again. The Saint waited patiently for fifteen minutes, and at the end of that time Tope re-entered, bearing a tray, and banged eggs, toast-rack, and coffee-pot down on the table in front of him.