The Saint Closes the Case s-2

by Leslie Charteris

  It had been still when the Saint first set eyes on it, but now it moved. It did not spread aimlessly over the floor; it was creeping along purposefully, as though imbued with life. The Saint, afterwards, described it as like a great, ghostly, lumi­nous worm travelling sideways. Stretched out in a long line that reached from side to side of the greenhouse, it humped itself forward in little whirling rushes, and the living power within it seemed to burn more and more fiercely, until the cloud was framed in a faint halo of luminance from the whirl of eye-searing violet at its core.

  It had seemed to be creeping at first, but then the Saint saw that that impression had been deceptive. The creeping of the cloud was now the speed of a man running, and it was plain that it could have only one objective. The goat at the end of the trough was cringing against the farthest wall, frozen with terror, staring wild-eyed at the cloud that rolled towards it with the relentlessness of an inrushing tide.

  The Saint flashed a lightning glance back at the staging, and divined, without comprehending, why the cloud moved so decisively. The white-haired man was holding in one hand a thing of shining metal rather like a small electric radiator, which he trained on the cloud, moving it from side to side. From this thing seemed to come the propulsive force which drove the cloud along as a controlled wind might have done.

  Then the Saint looked back at the cloud; and at that instant the foremost fringe of it touched the petrified goat.

  There was no sound that the Saint could hear from outside. But at once the imprisoned power within the cloud seemed to boil up into a terrible effervescence of fire; and where there had been a goat was nothing but the shape of a goat starkly outlined in shuddering orange-hued flame. For an instant, only the fraction of a second, it lasted, that vision of a dazzling glare in the shape of a goat; and then, as if the power that had produced it was spent, the shape became black. It stood of itself for a second; then it toppled slowly and fell upon the concrete. A little black dust hung in the air, and a little wreath of bluish smoke drifted up towards the roof. The violet cloud uncoiled slothfully, and smeared fluffily over the floor in a widening pool of mist.

  Its force was by no means spent—that was an illusion belied by the flickering lights that still glinted through it like a host of tiny fireflies. It was only that the controlling rays had been diverted. Looking round again, Simon saw that the white-haired man had put down the thing of shining metal with which he had directed the cloud, and was turning to speak to the three men who had watched the demonstration.

  The Saint stood like a man in a dream.

  Then he drew Patricia away, with a soft and almost frantic laugh.

  "We'll get out of here," he said. "We've seen enough for one night."

  And yet he was wrong, for something else was to be added to the adventure with amazing rapidity.

  As he turned, the Saint nearly cannoned into the giant who stood over them; and, in the circumstances, Simon Templar did not feel inclined to argue. He acted instantaneously, which the giant was not expecting. When one man points a revolver at another, there is, by convention, a certain amount of backchat about the situation before anything is done; but the Saint held convention beneath contempt.

  Moreover, when confronted by an armed man twice his own size, the Saint felt that he needed no excuse for employ­ing any damaging foul known to the fighting game, or even a speciality of his own invention. His left hand struck the giant's gun arm aside, and at the same time the Saint kicked with one well-shod foot and a clear conscience.

  A second later he was sprinting, with Patricia's hand in his.

  There was a car drawn up in front of the house. Simon had not noticed it under the trees as he passed on his way round to the back; but now he saw it, because he was looking for it; and it accounted for the stocky figure in breeches and a peaked cap which bulked out of the shadows round the gate and tried to bar the way.

  "Sorry, son," said the" Saint sincerely, and handed him off with some vim.

  Then he was flying up the lane at the girl's side, and the sounds of the injured chauffeur's pursuit were too far behind to be alarming.

  The Saint vaulted into the Furillac, and came down with one foot on the self-starter and the other on the clutch pedal.

  As Patricia gained her place beside him he unleashed the full ninety-eight horse-power that the speedster could put forth when pressed.

  His foot stayed flat down on the accelerator until they were running into Putney, and he was sure that any attempt to give chase had been left far astern; but even during the more sedate drive through London he was still unwontedly taciturn, and Patricia knew better than to try to make him talk when he was in such a mood. But she studied, as if she had never seen it before, the keen, vivid intentness of his profile as he steered the hurtling car through the night, and realised that she had never felt him so sheathed and at the same time shaken with such a dynamic savagery of purpose. Yet even she, who knew him better than anyone in the world, could not have explained what she sensed about him. She had seen, often before, the inspired wild leaps of his genius; but she could not know that this time that genius had rocketed into a more frantic flight than it had ever taken in all his life. And she was silent.

  It was not until they were turning into Brook Street that she voiced a thought that had been racking her brain for the past hour.

  "I can't help feeling I've seen one of those men before—or a picture of him——"

  "Which one?" asked the Saint, a trifle grimly, "The young secretary bird—or Professor K. B. Vargan—or Sir Roland Hale—or Mr. Lester Hume Smith, His Majesty's Secretary of State for War?"

  He marked her puzzlement, turning to meet her eyes. Now Patricia Holm was very lovely; and the Saint loved her. At that moment, for some reason, her loveliness took him by the throat.

  He slipped an arm around her shoulders, and drew her close to him.

  "Saint," she said, "you're on the trail of more trouble. I know the signs."

  "It's even more than that, dear," said the Saint softly. "To­night I've seen a vision. And if it's a true vision it means that I'm going to fight something more horrible than I've ever fought before; and the name of it may very well be the same as the name of the devil himself."

  2. How Simon Templar read newspapers, and understood what was not written

  Here may conveniently be quoted an item from one of the stop press columns of the following morning.

  "The Clarion is officially informed that at a late hour last night Mr. Lester Hume Smith, the Secretary for War, and Sir Roland Hale, Director of Chemical Research to the War Of­fice, attended a demonstration of Professor K. B. Vargan's 'electroncloud.' The demonstration was held secretly, and no details will be disclosed. It is stated further that a special meeting of the Cabinet will be held this morning to receive Mr. Hume Smith's report, and, if necessary, to consider the Government's attitude towards the invention."

  Simon Templar took the paragraph in his stride, for it was no more than a confirmation and amplification of what he al­ready knew.

  This was at ten o'clock—an extraordinary hour for the Saint to be up and dressed. But on this occasion he had risen early to break the habits of a lifetime and read every page of every newspaper that his man could buy.

  He had suddenly become inordinately interested in politics; the news that an English tourist hailing from Manchester and rejoicing in the name of Pinheedle had been arrested for punching the nose of a policeman in Wiesbaden fascinated him; only such articles as "Why Grandmothers Leave Home" (by Ethelred Sapling, the brilliant author of Lovers in Leeds) continued to leave him entirely icebound.

  But he had to wait for an early edition of the Evening Rec­ord for the account of his own exploit.

  ". . . From footprints found this morning in the soft soil, it appears that three persons were involved—one of them a woman. One of the men, who must have been of exceptional stature, appears to have tripped and fallen in his flight, and then to have made off in a different dire
ction from that taken by his companions, who finally escaped by car.

  "Mr. Hume Smith's chauffeur, who attempted to arrest these two, and was knocked down by the man, recovered too late to reach the road in time to take the number of their car. From the sound of the exhaust, he judges it to have been some kind of high-powered sports model. He had not heard its approach or the entrance of the three intruders, and he admits that when he first saw the man and the woman he had just woken from a doze.

  "The second man, who has been tracked across two fields at the back of Professor Vargan's house, is believed to have been picked up by his confederates further along the road. The fact of his presence was not discovered until the arrival of the detectives from London this morning.

  "Chief Inspector Teal, who is in charge of the case, told an Evening Record representative that the police have as yet formed no theory as to what was the alarm which caused the hurried and clumsy departure of the spies. It is believed, how­ever, that they were in a position to observe the conclusion of the experiment. ..."

  There was much more, stunted across the two middle col­umns of the front page.

  This blew in with Roger Conway, of the Saint's very dear acquaintance, who had been rung up in the small hours of that morning to be summoned to a conference; and he put the sheet before Simon Templar at once.

  "Were you loose in England last night?" he demanded ac­cusingly.

  "There are rumours," murmured the Saint, "to that effect."

  Mr. Conway sat down in his usual chair, and produced ciga­rettes and matches.

  "Who was your pal—the cross-country expert?" he inquired calmly.

  The Saint was looking out of the window.

  "No one I know," he answered. "He kind of horned in on the party. You'll have the whole yarn in a moment. I phoned Norman directly after I phoned you; he came staggering under the castle walls a few seconds ago."

  A peal on the bell announced that Norman Kent had reached the door of the apartment, and the Saint went out to admit him. Mr. Kent carried a copy of the Evening Record, and his very first words showed how perfectly he understood the Saint's eccentricities.

  "If I thought you'd been anywhere near Esher last night——"

  "You've been sent for to hear a speech on the subject," said the Saint.

  He waved Norman to a chair, and seated himself on the edge of a littered table which Patricia Holm was trying to reduce to some sort of order. She came up and stood beside him, and he slid an arm round her waist.

  "It was like this," he said.

  And he plunged into the story without preface, for the time when prefaces had been necessary now lay far behind those four. Nor did he need to explain the motives for any of his actions. In clipped, slangy, quiet, and yet vivid sentences he told what he had seen in the greenhouse of the house near Esher; and the two men listened without interruption.

  Then he stopped, and there was a short silence.

  "It's certainly a marvellous invention," said Roger Conway at length, smoothing his fair hair. "But what is it?"

  "The devil."

  Conway blinked.

  "Explain yourself."

  "It's what the Clarion called it," said the Saint; "something we haven't got simple words to describe. A scientist will pre­tend to understand it, but whether he will or not is another matter. The best he can tell us is that it's a trick of so modify­ing the structure of a gas that it can be made to carry a tre­mendous charge of electricity, like a thunder-cloud does— only it isn't a bit like a thunder-cloud. It's also something to do with a ray—only it isn't a ray. If you like, it's something entirely impossible—only it happens to exist. And the point is that this gas just provides the flimsiest sort of sponge in the atmosphere, and Vargan knows how to saturate the pores in the sponge with millions of volts and amperes of compressed lightning."

  "And when the goat got into the cloud——"

  "It was exactly the same as if it had butted into a web of live wires. For the fraction of a second that goat burnt like a scrap of coal in a blast furnace. And then it was ashes. Sweet idea, isn't it?"

  Norman Kent, the dark and saturnine, took his eyes off the ceiling. He was a most unsmiling man, and he spoke little and always to the point.

  "Lester Hume Smith has seen it," said Norman Kent. "And Sir Roland Hale. Who else?"

  "Angel Face," said the Saint; "Angel Face saw it. The man our friend Mr. Teal assumes to have been one of us—-not hav­ing seen him wagging a Colt at me. An adorable pet, built on the lines of something between Primo Carena and an over­grown gorilla, but not too agile with the trigger finger—other­wise I mightn't be here. But which country he's working for is yet to be discovered."

  Roger Conway frowned.

  "You think——"

  "Frequently," said the Saint. "But that was one think I didn't need a cold towel round my head for. Vargan may have thought he got a raw deal when they missed him off the front page, but he got enough publicity to make any wideawake foreign agent curious."

  He tapped a cigarette gently on his thumb-nail and lighted it with slow and exaggerated deliberation. In such pregnant silences of irrelevant pantomime he always waited for the seeds he had sown to germinate spontaneously in the brains of his audience.

  Conway spoke first.

  "If there should be another war——"

  "Who is waiting for a chance to make war?" asked Norman Kent.

  The Saint picked up a selection of the papers he had been reading before they came, and passed them over. Page after page was scarred with blue pencillings. He had marked many strangely separated things—a proclamation of Mussolini, the speech of a French delegate before the League of Nations, the story of a break in the Oil Trust involving the rearrangement of two hundred million pounds of capital, the announcement of a colossal merger of chemical interests, the latest move­ments of warships, the story of an outbreak of rioting in India, the story of an inspired bull raid on the steel market, and much else that he had found of amazing significance, even down to the arrest of an English tourist hailing from Man­chester and rejoicing in the name of Pinheedle, for punching the nose of a policeman in Wiesbaden. Roger Conway and Norman Kent read, and were incredulous.

  "But people would never stand for another war so soon," said Conway. "Every country is disarming——"

  "Bluffing with everything they know, and hoping that one day somebody'll be taken in," said the Saint. "And every na­tion scared stiff of the rest, and ready to arm again at any notice. The people never make or want a war—it's sprung on them by the statesmen with the business interests behind them, and somebody writes a 'We-Don't-Want-to-Lose-You-but-We-Think-you-Ought-to-Go' song for the brass bands to play, and millions of poor fools go out and die like heroes without ever being quite sure what it's all about. It's happened before. Why shouldn't it happen again?"

  "People," said Norman Kent, "may have learnt their les­son."

  Simon swept an impatient gesture.

  "Do people learn lessons like that so easily? The men who could teach them are a past generation now. How many are left who are young enough to convince our generation? And even if we are on the crest of a wave of literature about the horrors of war, do you think that cuts any ice? I tell you, I've listened till I'm tired to people of our own age discussing those books and plays—and I know they cut no ice at all. It'd be a miracle if they did. The mind of a healthy young man is too optimistic. It leaps to the faintest hint of glory, and finds it so easy to forget whole seas of ghastliness. And I'll tell you more. ..."

  And he told them of what he had heard from Barney Malone.

  "I've given you the facts," he said. "Now, suppose you saw a man rushing down the street with a contorted face, scream­ing his head off, foaming at the mouth, and brandishing a large knife dripping with blood. If you like to be a fool, you can tell yourself that it's conceivable that his face is contorted because he's trying to swallow a bad egg, he's screaming be­cause someone has trodden on his pet corn, he's fo
aming at the mouth because he's just eaten a cake of soap, and he's just killed a chicken for dinner and is tearing off to tell his aunt all about it. On the other hand, it's simpler and safer to as­sume that he's a homicidal maniac. In the same way, if you like to be fools, and refuse to see a complete story in what spells a complete story to me, you can go home."

  Roger Conway swung one leg over the arm of his chair and rubbed his chin reflectively.

  "I suppose," he said, "our job is to find Tiny Tim and see that he doesn't pinch the invention while the Cabinet are still deciding what they're going to do about it?"

  The Saint shook his head.

  For once, Roger Conway, who had always been nearest to the Saint in all things, had failed to divine his leader's train of thought; and it was Norman Kent, that aloof and silent man, who voiced the inspiration of breath-taking genius—or mad­ness—that had been born in Simon Templar's brain eight hours before.

  "The Cabinet,'' said Norman Kent, from behind a screen of cigarette smoke, "might find the decision taken out of their hands . . . without the intervention of Tiny Tim. ..."

  Simon Templar looked from face to face.

  For a moment he had an odd feeling that it was like meet­ing the other three again for the first time, as strangers. Patri­cia Holm was gazing through the window at the blue sky above the roofs of Brook Street, and who is to say what vision she saw there? Roger Conway, the cheerful and breezy, waited in silence, the smoke of his neglected cigarette staining his fingers. Norman Kent waited also, serious and absorbed.