"What do you know about him?" she asked.
The Saint shrugged.
"It's surprising what a lot of odd things I know," he answered. "I think we may talk some more on that subject one day—Jill. Some day when you've forgotten this nonsense, and the Angels of Doom have grown their tails."
For a span of silence he held her eyes steadily—the big golden eyes which, he knew by his own instinct, were made for such gentle things as the softness into which he had betrayed them for a moment. And then that instant's light died out of them again, and the tawny hardness returned. She laughed a little.
"I'll go back when the slate's clean," she said; and so the Saint slipped lightly back into the role he had chosen to play.
"You missed your vocation," he said sweetly. "You ought to have been writing detective stories. Vengeance —and the Angels of Doom! Joke!"
He swung round in his smooth sweeping way and picked his hat out of the chair. Weald seemed about to say something, and, meeting the Saint's suddenly direct and interrogative gaze, refrained. Simon looked at the girl again.
"I'm leaving," he said. "We shall meet again. Quite soon. I promised to get you in three weeks, and two and a half days of it have gone. But I'll do it, don't you worry!"
"I'm not worrying, Templar. And next time you give me your word of honour——"
"Be suspicious of everything I say," Simon advised. "I have moments of extreme cunning, as you'll get to know. Good-afternoon, sweetheart."
He went put, leaving the door open, and walked down the stairs. He saw Pinky Budd standing in the hall with six men drawn up impassively behind him; but it would have taken more than that, at any time, to make Simon Templar's steps falter.
The girl spoke from the top of the stairs.
"Mr. Templar is leaving, Pinky. His men are waiting for him outside."
"Now that," said the Saint, "is tough luck on you— isn't it, Pinky?"
He walked straight for the door, and the guard stood aside without a word to give him gangway. Only Budd stood his ground, and Simon halted in front of him.
"Getting in my way, Pinky?"
Budd looked at him with narrowed, glittering eyes. They were of a height as they stood, but Budd would have been a couple of inches taller if he had straightened his huge hunched shoulders. His long arms hung loosely at his sides, and the ham-like fists at the end of them were clenched.
"Nope, I'm not getting in your way. But I'll come 'n' find you again soon, Templar. See?"
"Do."
The Saint's hand came flat in the middle of Budd's chest and overbalanced him out of the road. And Simon Templar went through to the door.
A few strides up the street he stopped and laid half a crown on a harmonium.
"Do you know a song called 'A Farewell'?" he asked.
"Yes, sir," said the serenader.
"Play it for me," said the Saint. "And miss out the middle verse."
He went on towards Buckingham Palace Road as soon as he had heard the introductory bars moaned out on the machine; and his departure was watched by vengeful eyes from the drawing-room window.
"You let him get clean away," snivelled Weald. "We had him——"
"Don't be an imbecile!" snapped the girl. "He only came to see if he could tempt us into doing anything foolish. And if we had, he'd have been tickled to death. And I just asked him to come so I could get to know a little more about him, for future reference. He's——"
"What's that bull with the organ singing?"
They listened. The words of the unmelodious performance came clearly to their ears. The troubadour, startled by the magnitude of the Saint's largesse, was putting his heart into the job.
"Maaaye fairest chiiild-da, I have no gift to giiive
theeee; No lark-ka could pipe-pa to skies sow dull and
gra-a-ay;
Yet-ta, ere I gow, one lesson I can leeeave theeee For every da-a-ay. ..."
"I saw Templar speak to him——"
"Shut up, you fool!"
"Be gooood-da, sweet maaid, and-da let who can-na
be cle-evah;
Do nowble things, not-ta dream them, awl daaay lawng ..."
The telephone bell screamed.
"See who it is, Weald. No, give it to me."
She took the instrument out of his hands. There was no need to ask who was the owner of the silkily endearing voice that came over the wire.
"Hullo!"
"Yes, Mr. Templar?"
"Please don't let the Angels pester the innocent gentleman with the criminal voice. He doesn't know me from Adam, and probably never will. I warned you I had moments of extreme cunning, didn't I?"
She hung up the receiver thoughtfully, ignoring Weald's splutter of questions.
The musician below, a man inspired, was repeating the last verse with increased fervour—perhaps as a consolation to himself for having been deprived of the middle one.
"Bee goooooda-da, sweet maaid-da,
and-da let whoo caan-na be cle-e-e-ev-ah. . . ."
The girl stood by the window, and something like a smile touched her lips. "A humorist!" she said. Then the smile was gone altogether. "Second round to Simon Templar," she said softly. "And now, I think, we start!"
Chapter II
HOW SIMON TEMPLAR WAS DISTURBED,
AND THERE WAS FURTHER BADINAGE IN
BELGRAVE STREET
IF IT had been possible to prepare a place-time chart of the activities of the Angels of Doom, it would have shown, during the eighteen hours following Simon Templar's departure from the house in Belgrave Street, a distinct concentration of interest in the region of Upper Berkeley Mews, where the Saint had converted a couple of garages, with the rooms above, into the most ingeniously comfortable fortress in London. Also, like other concentrations of the Angels of Doom, it appeared to be conducted with considerable labour and expense for no prospect of immediate profit.
It may be suggested that the district of Mayfair was an eccentric situation for the home of a policeman; but Simon Templar thanked God he wasn't a real policeman. In fact, he must have been the weirdest kind of policeman that ever claimed to be attached to Scotland Yard. But attached he indisputably was, and could claim his official salutes from some of the men who would once have given their ears to arrest him. "Thus are the mighty fallen, and the weapons of walloping perished," he said to Teal at another lunch, with a kind of wicked wistfulness; and the detective sighed, and kept his misgivings to himself. For the Saint, in his new disguise of a respectable citizen, seemed much too good to be true—much too good. . . . Teal had an uneasy feeling that no bad man who had suddenly reformed would have been quite so overpoweringly sanctimonious about it. All that he had ever seen of the Saint, all that he had ever known of him, made Chief Inspector Teal feel like a performing elephant dancing a hornpipe over a thin glass dome in the presence of this inexplicable virtue. And in his mountainously bovine way Chief Inspector Teal watched the Saint enforcing the law by strictly legal methods, and wondered. . . .
Not that anyone's mystification would have worried Simon Templar in the least. If he had thought about it at all, he would have been impishly amused, in his serenely contented fashion. As it was, he went on with his life, and the job he had taken on, with a sublime disregard for the feelings and opinions of the world at large, seeming to be distressed only by the lack of an adequate supply of victims for his exaggerated sense of humour.
One thing, however, could disturb his tranquillity, and that was to have business troubles intruded upon the hours which he had allotted to himself for rest or recreation. At midnight of the day after his visit to Belgrave Street, for instance, when he was sitting up in bed, happily engaged in polishing the opening lines of a new song dealing with the shortcomings of the latest Honours List, and a bullet smacked through the window behind him and chipped a lump out of a perfectly good ceiling, he was distinctly bored.
With a sigh he climbed out and pulled on his dressing gown. One gl
ance at the line between the star-shaped split in the window and the scar in the plaster was enough to show that the shot had come in at a wide angle. The Saint sighed again. Perhaps his estimate of himself had been wrong, It seemed that there was something else which annoyed him even more than to be interrupted after business hours—and that was to be taken for a fool.
He glanced round the room and selected a battered pickelhaube—relic of a grimmer warfare than that. Then he switched off the light. Returning to the window, he knelt down so, that he was below the level of the sill, and raised the lower sash. On one side of this opening he displayed the pickelhaube, looped over the back of a chair which he edged into position with his foot, and awaited developments with a kindly interest.
The mews was deserted, and there were no pedestrians visible at the entrance in Berkeley Square at that moment, but he could pick out the shadowy bulk of a big saloon car parked in the cul-de-sac of the mews itself, and the second shot from it impinged accurately upon the pickelhaube with a noise like that of a dull gong.
Neither of the shots from outside had been accompanied by a report, but Simon Templar, since acquiring the right to be as noisy as he pleased, had ceased to be of such a retiring disposition. He emptied his automatic without stealth, and crammed in a fresh magazine as he raced down the stairs.
His servant met him in the hall.
"Count ten, and then open the front door—but lie flat on the ground when you do it!" snapped the Saint, and vanished into the sitting room without explaining how this feat of contortion was to be performed.
He was edging back the window curtains when the door began to open.
He had no fear for the man who was opening it, for there were so few flies on Orace that even a short-sighted man would have had no excuse for mistaking him for a Chilean mule. Neither had he any fear of the agile gunman who was upsetting his evening. Either the car was an ordinary car, in which case the gunman was winged if Simon Templar had ever learnt anything about the art of shooting up automobiles; or the car was an extraordinary car, lined throughout with half-inch nickel steel, in which case the gunman was probably not winged. And, either way, if it came to a fight . . .
"Joke!" murmured the Saint, and lowered his head again quickly.
Ordinary guns he was prepared for, and ready to take on any time. Not that he particularly fancied himself with guns, but he reckoned he could just about pull his weight in most kinds of rough stuff. But there was another kind of gun before tackling which Simon Templar always paused to take a deep breath and recite rapidly the verse from the hymn which contains a line about shelters from the stormy blast; and it was undoubtedly a specimen of that kind of gun which was spluttering a horizontal hailstorm of lead sufficiently close to his direction to be appreciably unpleasant.
Taking the breath, and postponing the recitation to a later date, Simon put up his head again; and as he did so the fire ceased, and the car picked up speed with a rush and swooped into the emptiness of Berkeley Square.
The Saint, standing at the corner of the mews and trying to draw a bead on one of the departing tires as the car turned into Mount Street, was briskly arrested.
"Don't be a bigger fool than you can help," he snarled; and the constable, recognizing him, released him with a stammered apology.
"It was a car, sir——"
"You amaze me," said the Saint, in awe. "I thought it was a team of racing camels. Get the number down in your book."
The policeman obeyed; and Simon, with a shrug,turned and shouldered his way back to the house through the nucleus of a gaping crowd.
He found Orace dabbing an ear with a stained handkerchief.
"Hurt?"
"Nossir—just a splinter er wood. They were firin' low."
"It's more painful through the stomach," said the Saint enigmatically, and went on upstairs.
The pursuit of the car from which the machine gun had been fired wasn't Simon Templar's business. It could be carried on just as effectively by the regulars—or just as ineffectively, for the number plates were certain to have been changed. But it made the Saint think.
When the assistant commissioner called in later for the story, however, Simon showed no signs of perturbation.
"It was Budd's idea, of course. He's seen service in Chicago. But machine guns in the streets of London are nothing new on me—I've had it happen before. There's no blamed originality in this racket, that's the trouble."
"They seem to think you're important."
"There's certainly some personal bias against me," admitted the Saint innocently. "I was expecting a demonstration—I had further words with Jill Trelawney yesterday. Cigarette?"
"Thanks."
The commissioner helped himself. He was a grizzled, hard-featured man who had worked his way up from the bottom of the ladder, and he had all the taciturn abruptness common to men who have risen in the world by ' nothing but a relentless devotion to the ambition of rising in the world.
"How did she strike you?"
"She didn't," said the Saint perversely."I think she would have, though, but for the low cunning with which I made my escape. She's a sweet child."
"Charming," agreed the commissioner ironically. "So gentle! Such endearing ways!"
"Ever meet her?"
"No. I knew her father, of course."
Simon grinned.
"He never made any friendly advance towards me," he murmured. "But of course there was some prejudice against me at the time. Tell me that story again—from the inside."
Cullis settled himself.
"The inside is that Trelawney swore all along that he'd been framed," he said. "It's not such an inside, anyway, because he told exactly the same tale at the inquiry. After all, that was the only defense open to him: he was caught so red-handed that no one could have thought out any other explanation except that he was guilty."
"The story?"
"Police plans were leaking out; raids falling flat regularly. Something had to be done. The chief commissioner took a chance on myself and another superintendent— we had the longest service records—and arranged for us to lead a surprise raid on a Thursday night. On Thursday morning he let it get round the Yard that the raid was to take place on Saturday. We raided on Thursday without any fuss, roped in a gang that had slipped us twice before, and kept everyone on the premises—including the men who made the raid, and they were officially supposed to be on leave. Therefore there was nobody left at the Yard, except the chief, who knew that the raid was over. We had one man sitting over the telephone and another over the letter box. First post on Friday morning, a letter came in. Just one word, typewritten: Saturday. It was on official paper, with the heading cut off, and the experts put it under the microscope and traced it to the typewriter in Trelawney's office."
"Which anyone might have used."
"It was postmarked Windsor. Trelawney went down to Windsor for a consultation on Thursday afternoon—and he went alone."
"Flimsy," said the Saint. "An accomplice might have posted it."
Cullis nodded.
"I know it wasn't any good by itself. But it was a clue. Nobody saw the letter but the chief and myself. We watched Trelawney ourselves. We were after Waldstein then. He was always slippery, and at that time we reckoned he was vanishing an average of one girl a week through the Pan-European Concert Agency, which was one of his most profitable incarnations. But he was clever, and he never appeared in person, and there was never a line of evidence. Then I had the inspiration. I suggested to the chief that he go to Trelawney with the story that one of Waldstein's men had squealed. He saw the point, and agreed. He told the tale of Trelawney, as he'd naturally have told him anything else in the way of business that he was pleased about. Waldstein was in Paris, and the chief said that the Sûreté had arranged to intercept any letters, telegrams, or telephone calls addressed to him, so that no one could warn him, and one of our men was going over to arrest him the next morning. And the next morn
ing, bright and early, Trelawney chartered a special aëroplane and set off for Paris."
"No!"
"He did. The chief and I, having been waiting for just that, chased him in a faster aëroplane, and trailed him all the way from Le Bourget to Waldstein's hotel. Then, when we'd heard him ask for Waldstein at the office, the chief tapped him on the shoulder."
"And?"
"He'd got his story pat. Gosh, I've never met such a nerve! He just blinked a bit when he first saw the chief and me, but from then on he never batted an eyelid. We went into a private room, and the chief told him the game was up.
" 'What game?' asked Trelawney.
" 'What are you doing here?' asked the chief.
" 'What you told me to do,' says Trelawney.
" 'I never told you to come here,' says the chief.
"The chief says Trelawney went a bit white then, but I never noticed it. Anyway, Trelawney's story was that he'd been called up by the chief early that morning and told to go over and attend to Waldstein himself, as there was some difficulty with the French police, and Waldstein was likely to get away during the argument. We asked him why he hadn't gone to the Quai d'Orsay first, to present his papers, and he said the chief had told him to get Waldstein first and argue afterwards."
"Well?"
Cullis shrugged.
"After that, it was all over."
"Don't see it," said the Saint. "If Trelawney was guilty, why should he tell that story to the very man who would know at once that it wasn't true?"
"Brains," said the assistant commissioner. "He'd thought out the possibility of being caught, and he'd got his defense ready—a frame-up. That story was the best he could have told. It prepared his ground for when we opened his safe deposit and found, among others, banknotes that were traced to Waldstein."
"How did he account for those?"
"He couldn't."
"And afterwards?"
"The chief decided not to make a public scandal of it. For one thing, it would have been difficult to get a conviction, even on that evidence, because we couldn't bring Waldstein into it. Waldstein, in the eyes of the ignorant world, was a perfectly respectable citizen and is the same to this day. So there wasn't any lawful reason why he shouldn't have given Trelawney money. Still, Trelawney was asked for his resignation, and he died a month afterwards. I don't like thinking about that part of it—it isn't pleasant to think that I was indirectly responsible, even if he was a grafter."
The Saint Meets His Match (She was a Lady) Page 3
