The Saint Plays with Fire (The Saint Series)

by Leslie Charteris

  “What was it?” asked Patricia.

  “I wish I knew. But we’ll find out. It was something to do with papers and photographs. Lady Valerie didn’t remember. She never paid any attention. The whole thing bored her. But it provides the one thing we didn’t have before—the motive. Whatever it was, it was dynamite. It was big enough to mean that Kennet was too dangerous to be allowed to go on living. And he just wasn’t smart enough, or tough enough. They got him.”

  “Somehow,” said Peter, “I can’t see Fairweather doing a job like that.”

  “Maybe he didn’t. Maybe Sangore didn’t, either. But Kennet died—very conveniently. They knew about it. Probably Luker did it himself. I can just see him telling them—‘Leave it to me.’ ”

  “He was taking a big risk.”

  “What risk? It would have been a cinch, except for the pure fluke that I happened to come along. You saw how the inquest went. There were a dozen ways he could have done it. Kennet could have been poisoned, or strangled, or had his throat cut or his skull cracked: almost anything short of chopping him up would have left damned little evidence on a body that had been through a fire like that. He could even have been just knocked out and locked in his room and left there for the fire to do the rest. We’ll never know exactly how it was done, and we’ll never be able to prove anything now, but I know that they murdered him. And I’m going to carry on from where Kennet left off. You can take your own choice, but I’m in this now—up to the neck.”

  They sat looking at him, and in their ears echoed the faint trumpets of the forlorn ventures in which they had followed him without question so many times before.

  Patricia smiled.

  “All right, boy,” she said. “I’m with you.”

  “If he’s made up his mind to get murdered, I suppose you can’t stop him,” Peter said resignedly. “Anyway, if they put him in another fire we shan’t have to pay for a cremation. But what does he think he’s going to do?”

  Simon stood up and looked at the clock on the wall.

  “I’m going to London,” he said. “I found out from the girlfriend that Kennet lived with another Bolshevik named Windlay, who was in on the party with him. So I’m going to try and get hold of him before anyone else has the same idea. And I’ve wasted enough time already. If you two want to be useful, you can try and keep tabs on the Whiteways outfit while I’m away. Be good, and I’ll call you later.”

  He waved to them and was gone, in a sudden irresistible urge of action, and the room seemed curiously drab and lifeless after he had gone. They had one more glimpse of him, at the wheel of the Hirondel, as the great car snaked past the window with a spluttering roar of power, and then there was only the fading thunder of his departure.

  The Saint drove quickly. When he was in a hurry, speed limits were merely a trivial technicality to him, and he was in a hurry now. He did not like to dwell too much on the thought of how desperate his hurry might really be. His effortless touch threaded the car through winding roads and obstructing traffic with the deftness of an engraver etching an intricate pattern; the rush of the wind beating at his face and shoulders assuaged some of his hunger for primitive violence; the deep-throated drone of the exhaust was an elemental music that matched his mood. The clean-cut activity of driving, the concentration of judgment, and the ceaseless play of fine nerve responses, absorbed the forefront of mechanical consciousness, so that another part of his mind seemed to be set free, untrammelled by dimension, outside of time…to roam over the situation as he knew it and to try to probe into the future where it was leading. It was ninety-five miles from Anford to Notting Hill, and the clock on the dashboard told him that he made the distance in one hour and twenty-five minutes, but the ground that his mind covered in the same time would have taken much longer to account for.

  The arrival in Notting Hill brought him back to reality. He stopped beside a postman who directed him to Balaclava Mansions, and when he caught sight of the building he was obliged to admit to himself that he might have been unduly harsh with Lady Valerie. It actually did look like an Awful Place, being one of those gloomy and architecturally arid concoctions of sooty stucco to which the London landlord is so congenitally prone to attach the title of “Mansions,” presumably in the hope of persuading the miserable tenant that luxury is being poured into his humble lap. Just inside the front door, a number of grubby and almost indecipherable scraps of paper pinned and pasted to the peeling wall gave instructions for locating those of the inhabitants who were still sufficiently optimistic to believe that anyone might have any interest in finding them. From one of those pathetically neglected emblems of stubborn survival, Simon ascertained that John Kennet and Ralph Windlay had been the joint occupants of the rear ground-floor flat on the right.

  He went through the cheerless dilapidated hall and raised his hand to knock on the indicated door. And in that position he stopped, with his knuckles poised, for the door was already ajar.

  The Saint scarcely paused before he pushed it open with his foot and went in.

  “Hullo there,” he called, but there was no answer. It did not take him any time to discover why. He had come through into the one all-purpose room of which the habitable part of the flat was composed, and when he saw what was in it he knew that his fear had been justified, that he had indeed wasted too much time. Ralph Windlay was already dead.

  3

  A bullet fired at close range had helped to shorten his life and had done it without making a great deal of mess. He lay flat on his back hardly a yard inside the doorway, with his arms spread wide and his mouth stupidly open. Lady Valerie’s description of him was quite recognisable. He still wore his glasses. He couldn’t have been much more than twenty-five, and his pale thin face looked as if it might once have been intellectual. The only mark on it was a black-rimmed hole between the eyes, but his head lay in the middle of a sticky dark red mess on the threadbare carpet, and Simon knew that the back of his skull would not be nice for a squeamish person to look at.

  The room had been ransacked. The two divans had been ripped to pieces, and the upholstery of the chairs had been cut open. Cupboards were open, and drawers had been pulled out and left where they fell. A shabby old roll-top desk in one corner looked as if a crowbar had been used on it. The table and the floor were strewn with papers.

  Simon saw that much, and then there was a sound of tramping footsteps in the hall. Automatically he pushed the door to behind him, subconsciously thinking that it would only be some other occupants of the building passing through; his brain was too busy with what he was looking at to think very hard. Before he realised his mistake the footsteps were right behind him, and he was seized roughly from behind.

  He whirled round with his muscles instantly awake and one fist driving out mechanically as he turned. And then, with some superhuman effort, he checked the blow in mid-flight.

  In that delirious instant his brain reversed itself with such fantastic speed that everything else seemed to have a nightmare slowness by comparison. He watched the trajectory of his hand as if from a vast distance, and it was exactly like sitting in a car with catastrophe leaping up ahead, with brakes jammed on to the limit and nothing left to do but to hold on and hope that they would do their work in time. And with a kind of hysterical relief he saw his zooming fist slow up and stop a bare inch from the round face of the man who had grabbed him. For another split second he simply stood blankly staring, and then suddenly he went weak with laughter.

  “You shouldn’t give me these shocks, Claud,” he said. “My nerves aren’t what they used to be.”

  The man on the other side of his fist went on gaping at him, with his baby-blue eyes dilating with a ferment of emotions which whole volumes might be written to describe. And a tinge of royal purple crept into his plump cherubic visage.

  The reasons for that regal hue were only distantly connected with the onrush of that pile-driving fist which had been so miraculously held back from its mark. To Chief Inspector Claud
Eustace Teal, a man who had never set any exaggerated value on his beauty, a punch on the nose would only have been a more or less unpleasant incident to be endured with fortitude in the execution of his duty, and in that stoical spirit he had in his younger days suffered more drastic forms of assault and battery than that. A punch on the nose, indeed, would have been almost a joyous and desirable experience compared with the spasm of unmitigated woe that speared through Mr Teal’s cosmogony when he saw the face of the Saint. It was a pang that summed up, in one poignant instant, all the years through which Chief Inspector Teal had fought his hopelessly losing battle with that elusive buccaneer, all the disappointments and disasters and infuriating bafflements, all the wrath and sarcasm that his efforts had brought down upon him from his superiors, all the impudent mockeries of the Saint himself, the Saint’s disrespectful forefinger prodding the rotundity of his stomach and the Assistant Commissioner’s acidulated sniff. It was a sharp stab of memory that brought back all the occasions when Mr Teal had seen triumph dangling in front of his nose, only to have it jerked away by invisible strings at the very moment when he thought his hands were closing round it, and with it came a, revival of the barren desolation that followed so many of those episodes, when Mr Teal had felt that he was merely the dumb quarry of an unjust destiny, doomed to be harried through eternity with the stars themselves conspiring against him. And at the same time it was pervaded with the realisation that the identical story was starting all over again.

  All these accumulated indignations and despairs drained through Mr Teal’s intestines in one corrosive moment of appalling stillness before he finally wrenched a response out of his vocal chords.

  “How the hell did you get here?” he glurked.

  It was not, perhaps, the most fluent and comprehensive speech that Mr Teal had ever made. But it conveyed, with succinctness which more rounded oratory might well have failed to achieve, the distilled essence of what was seething through the overloaded cauldrons of his mind. Its most serious defect was in the enunciation, which lacked much of that flute-like clarity which is favoured by the cognoscenti of the science of elocution. It sounded, in fact, as if his throat was full of hot porridge.

  Simon smiled at him rather thoughtfully. He also had his memories, and the prime deduction which they offered him was that that unexpected intrusion of Chief Inspector Teal, at that particular moment of all moments, was definitely an added complication in an affair that was already complicated enough. But the sublimely bantering slant of his brows never wavered.

  “I might ask you the same,” he murmured, “But I see that your feet are looking as flat as ever, so I suppose you’re still wearing them down.”

  The detective’s face, under his staid bowler hat, remained a glaring purple, but his inflated china-blue eyes were receding fractionally.

  “I noticed your car outside,” he said.

  He was a liar. He had seen it, but not noticed it. That shining cream-and-red monster was something that it would have been almost impossible to overlook in any landscape, but Mr Teal’s thoughts had been far away from any subject so disturbing as the Saint. They had simply been moving in a fool’s paradise where detectives from Scotland Yard were allowed to plod along investigating ordinary crimes committed by ordinary criminals, without even a hint of such fantastic freaks as Simon Templar to mar the serenity of their dutiful labours. But Mr Teal had to say something like that to try and recover the majestic dominance from which in the agony of the moment he had so ruinously lapsed.

  The Saint dissected his effort with a sardonically generous tolerance that made the detective’s collar feel as if it were shrinking into his neck like a garrotte.

  “Of course, Claud,” he said mildly, “Of course you did. I was forgetting what a sleuth you were. And while we’re on the subject of sleuthing, I must say that you seem to have arrived in the nick of time. I don’t know whether you’ve noticed it yet, but there’s a dead man on the floor behind me. Without pretending to your encyclopedic knowledge of crime, I should say that he appears to have been murdered.”

  “That’s right,” Teal said raspingly. “And I should say that I knew who did it.”

  The Saint raised his eyebrows.

  “I don’t want to seem unduly sensitive,” he remarked, “but there’s something about your tone of voice that makes me feel uncomfortable. Can you by any chance be suggesting—”

  “We’ll see about that,” Teal retorted. He stepped aside out of the doorway. “Search him!” he barked.

  Behind him, a lanky uniformed sergeant unfolded himself into full view. Somewhat apprehensively, he stepped up to the Saint and went over his coat pockets. He took out a platinum cigarette case, a wallet, an automatic lighter, and a fountain pen, and an expression of outraged astonishment came over his face.

  “ ’Ere,” he said suspiciously. “What’ve you done with that gun?”

  “What gun?” asked the Saint puzzledly. “You don’t think I’d carry a gun in a suit like this, do you? I’ve got too much respect for my tailor. Anderson would be horrified, and Sheppard would probably throw a fit.”

  “Search his hip pockets, you fool,” snarled Mr Teal. “And under his armpits. That’s where he’s most likely to have it.”

  “And don’t tickle,” said the Saint severely. “It makes me go all girlish.”

  Breathing heavily, the sergeant searched as instructed and continued to find nothing.

  Simon lowered his arms.

  “After which little formality,” he said amiably, “let us get back to business. As I was tactfully trying to mention, Claud, there seems to be a sort of corpse lying about on the floor. Do you think we ought to do something about it, or shall we shove it into the bathroom and pretend we haven’t seen it?”

  Chief Inspector Teal’s lower jaw moved in a ponderous surge like the first lurch of the pistons of a locomotive getting under way, as he dislodged a forgotten bolus of chewing gum from behind his wisdom teeth. The purple tinge was dying out of his face, allowing it to revert a little closer to its normal chubby pink. The negative results of the sergeant’s search had almost thrown him back on his heels, but the shock had something homeopathic in its effect. It had jarred him into taking one wild superhuman clutch at the vanishing tail of his self-control, and now he found himself clinging on to it with the frenzied fervour of a man who has inadvertently taken hold of the steering end of a starving alligator.

  Behind him, while the search was proceeding, a number of other persons had sidled cautiously into the room—a melancholy plain-clothes sergeant, a bald-headed man with a camera, a small sandy man with a black bag, a constable in uniform. To the experienced eye, they identified themselves as the members of a CID murder squad as unmistakably as if they had been labelled.

  Simon had watched their entrance with interest. He was doing some rapid reconstruction of his own. Teal’s advent had been far too flabbergastingly apt to be pure coincidence, and the presence of that compact covey of supporters was extra confirmation of the fact. Even Chief Inspectors didn’t go forth with a retinue of that kind unless they were on a particular and major assignment. And Simon located the origin of the assignment a moment later, in the shape of a fat blowzy woman with stringy grey hair who was hovering nervously in the least exposed part of the background.

  Teal turned and looked for her.

  “Have you seen this man before?” he demanded. She gulped.

  “N-no. But I bet ’e done it, just the sime. ’E looks just like one o’ them narsty Capitalists as pore Mr Windlay was always talkin’ abaht.”

  Simon’s gaze rested on her.

  “Do you live in these parts?” he inquired politely.

  She bridled.

  “This ’ere is my property, young man, so you mind yer tongue. I come ’ere every week to collect the rent, not that I ’aven’t wasted me time coining ’ere the larst two weeks.”

  “You came here today and found the body?”

  “Yes, I did.”

&
nbsp; “How long ago was that?”

  “Not ’arf an hour ago, it wasn’t. You oughter know.”

  “And then you went straight out for the police, I suppose.”

  “I went an’ phoned Scotland Yard, that’s wot I done knowing as it’s their business to catch murderers, an’ a good thing too. They got you, all right.”

  “You didn’t scream or anything?” Simon asked interestedly.

  The woman snorted.

  “Wot, me? Me scream an’ ’ave all the neighbours in, an’ get me ’ouse a bad nime? Not likely. This is a respectable place, this is, or it was before you came to it.” A twinge of grief shot through her suety frame and made it quiver. “An’ now ooze going ter pie me rent, that’s wot I wanter know.”

  The Saint extracted a cigarette from his case. The minor details of the situation were satisfactorily cleared up—the remarkably prompt arrival of the CID combined with the absence of a crowd outside. The fact that that exceptional conjunction of circumstances had resulted in his present predicament unfortunately remained unaltered, but it was some consolation to know that his first wild surmise was wrong, and that Teal hadn’t been led there in some fantastic way on a definite search for him. It made the odds look rather more encouraging.

  “Madam,” he said helpfully, “I should think you might do rather well for a while by inviting the public to drop in and charging them sixpence admission. X marks the spot where the body was found, and they can see the original pool of blood on the mat. With Inspector Teal’s bowler hat on the mantelpiece in a glass case, and a plaster cast of his tummy in the hall—”