The Saint Meets his Match (The Saint Series)

by Leslie Charteris

  The Saint beamed.

  “I’m merely giving you a free sample of my defence, which will also be the means of getting you thoroughly chewed up in the Courts if you get nasty, Claud Eustace old corpuscle. The Commissioner should have had my letter of resignation, in which I explained that I was so overcome with shame that I couldn’t face him to hand it in personally. It was posted the same evening. I admit I proved to be the duddest of all possible dud policemen, but my well-known desire to save my own skin at all costs—”

  Teal spread a scrap of paper on the table.

  “And this—your receipt to Essenden? I know one of these pictures, Templar, but the other—”

  “My wife,” said the Saint breezily.

  “Oh, yes. And when were you married?”

  “Not yet. The tense is future.”

  The detective closed his eyes again.

  “So that’s your story, is it?”

  “And a darn good story it is, too,” said Simon Templar complacently.

  “And what about this new home of yours?”

  “Since when has it been illegal for a respectable citizen to have a second establishment—or even an alias?…But I wouldn’t mind knowing how you located it so quickly, all the same.”

  “I’ve known about it for months,” said the detective sleepily. “When I drew a blank at Upper Berkeley Mews, I came straight here.”

  The Saint laughed.

  “And then you go straight home again. Teal, that’s too bad!…But you ought to have known better, honey, really you ought. Now, are you going to take Uncle’s advice and have a glass of barley-water before you go, or do you want to argue some more?”

  For some moments there was a gigantic silence—on the part of Chief Inspector Teal. The Saint could feel the tremendousness of it, and he was amused, for he knew exactly where he stood. And in his trouser pockets there were two iron fists quietly bunched up ready to prove the courage of his convictions if the challenge were offered…

  And then Teal opened his eyes, and his mouth widened half an inch momentarily.

  He nodded.

  “You always were a bright boy,” he said.

  “I know,” said the Saint.

  Teal’s smile remained in position. He hitched his overcoat round, and buttoned a button that must have had a tiring day. His heavy-lidded eyes roved boredly over the furnishings of the apartment.

  “Sorry you’ve wasted your time,” said the Saint sympathetically. “Don’t let me keep you any longer if you’re really in a hurry.”

  “I won’t,” said Teal. And then his eyes fell on the chair where Jill Trelawney had been sitting. Simon followed his gaze.

  “Been entertaining a friend?” asked Teal, without a change of expression.

  “My Auntie Ethel,” said the Saint blandly. “She left just before you came in. Isn’t it a pity? Still, maybe you’ll be able to meet her another day.”

  “How old is this Auntie Ethel?”

  “About fifty,” said the Saint. “A bit young for you, but you might try your luck. I’ll send you her address. She might like to see round Rochester Row.”

  Teal took his hands out of his pockets and locomoted across the room. Only a man like Teal can possibly be said to locomote. The locomotion was deceptive. It appeared to be very heavy off the mark, and very slow and clumsy in transit, but actually it was remarkably agile. Teal picked a bag up from the chair and inspected it soberly.

  “Your Auntie Ethel has a gaudy taste in bags,” he remarked. “How old did you say she was?”

  “About a hundred and fifty,” said the Saint. Teal opened the bag and proceeded to examine the contents, extracting them one by one, and laying them on the table after the inspection. Lipstick, powder-puff, mirror, comb-case, handkerchief, cigarette-case, gold pencil, some visiting cards.

  “Princess Selina von Rupprecht,” Teal read off one of the visiting-cards. “Where does she come from?”

  “Lithuania,” said the Saint fluently. “I have some very distinguished relations in Czechoslovakia, too,” he added modestly. Teal put the bag down and turned with unusual briskness. “I should like to meet this Princess,” he said.

  “Call her Auntie,” said Simon. “She likes it. But you can’t meet her here tonight because she’s gone home.”

  “She’ll come back for her bag,” said Teal comfortably. “I’ll wait. And while I’m waiting I’d like to see round some of the rooms in this flat.”

  Simon Templar pulled himself off the mantelpiece, against which he had been leaning, and looked Teal deliberately in the eyes.

  “You won’t wait,” he said, “because I happen to want to go to bed, and I prefer to see you off the premises first. And you won’t search this flat, not on any excuse, because you haven’t a search warrant.”

  Teal stood squarely by the table.

  “I have reason to believe,” he said, “that you’re sheltering a woman who’s wanted for murder.”

  “You haven’t a search warrant,” repeated the Saint. “Don’t be foolish, Teal. I may be a suspicious character, but you’ve got nothing definite against me, apart from the little show in Paris, which isn’t your business—nothing in the wide, wide world. If you try to search this flat I shall resist you by force. What’s more, I shall throw you down the stairs and out into the street with such violence that you will bounce from here to Harrods. And if you try to get me for that, the Beak will sock you good and proper. Once upon a time you might have got away with it, but not now. The police aren’t so popular these days. You’d better watch your step.”

  “I can get a warrant,” said Teal, “within two hours.”

  “Then get it,” said the Saint shortly. “And don’t come in here again bothering me until you’ve got it in your pocket. Good night.”

  He crossed the room and opened the door, and Teal, after a few seconds of frightful hesitation, passed out into the hall.

  Simon opened the front door for him also, and there Teal paused on the threshold.

  “You are a bright boy, Saint,” said Teal somnolently. “Don’t go to bed. I shall be back with that warrant inside two hours.”

  “Good night,” said the Saint again, and closed the door in the detective’s face.

  He came back into the sitting-room and found the girl putting her possessions into her bag.

  “I heard,” she said.

  “In five minutes,” said the Saint, “Teal will have a man outside this front door to watch the place while he goes off to get a warrant. Meanwhile—”

  The shrill, sharp scream of a police whistle sounded in the street outside, and a little smile touched Simon Templar’s mouth.

  “At this moment,” said the Saint, “he’s standing on the steps blowing that whistle. He’s not taking any chances. He’s not going to look for a man—he’s going to wait till a man comes to him. He’s going to make quite sure that whoever’s in here isn’t going to slip out behind his back. And the person they want to find here is you.”

  Jill Trelawney nodded.

  “On a charge of murder,” she said softly.

  CHAPTER SIX:

  HOW SIMON TEMPLAR WENT TO BED AND MR TEAL WOKE UP

  1

  Simon had slipped out his cigarette-case and absently selected a cigarette. He lighted the cigarette, looking at a picture on the opposite wall without seeing it, and his faintly thoughtful smile lingered on the corners of his mouth, rather recklessly and dangerously. But that was like Simon Templar, who never got worked up about anything.

  “Of course,” he said quietly, “I’ve been rather liable to overlook that.”

  “Why not?” she answered, in a tone that matched his own for evenness. “You can’t spend twenty-four hours a day thinking and talking about nothing but that.”

  He shifted his gaze to her face. Her beauty was utterly calm and tranquil. She showed nothing—not in the tremor of a lip, or the flicker of an eyelid. And unless something were done there and then, she might have less than t
wo months of life ahead of her before a paid menial of the law hanged her by the neck…

  Teal’s whistle, in the street below, shrieked again like a lost soul.

  And Jill Trelawney laughed. Not hysterically, not even in bravado. She just laughed. Softly.

  She turned back the coat of her plain tweed costume, and he saw a little holster on the broad belt she wore.

  “But I’ve never overlooked it,” she said—“not entirely.”

  Simon came round the table, and his fingers closed on her wrist in a circle of cool steel.

  “Not that way,” he said.

  She met his eyes.

  “It’s the only way for me,” she said. “I’ve never had a fancy for the Old Bailey—and the crowds—and the black cap. And the three weeks’ waiting, in Holloway, with the chaplain coming in like a funeral every day. And the last breakfast—at such an unearthly hour of the morning!” The glimmer in her eyes was one of pure amusement. “No one could possibly make a good dying speech at 8 a.m.,” she said.

  “You’re talking nonsense,” said the Saint roughly.

  “I’m not,” she said. “And you know it. If the worst comes to the worst—”

  “It hasn’t come to that yet.”

  “Not yet.”

  “And it won’t, lass—not while I’m around.”

  She laughed again.

  “Simon—really—you’re a darling!”

  “But have you only just discovered that?” said the Saint.

  He made her smile. Even if her laughter had been of neither hysteria nor bravado, it had not been a thing to reassure him. A smile was different. And he still found it easy to make her smile.

  But she was of such a very unusual mettle that he could have no peace of mind with her at such a moment. They were very recent partners, and still she was almost a stranger to him. They were familiar friends of a couple of days’ standing, and he hardly knew her. In the days of their old enmity he had recognised in her a fearless independence that no man could have lightly undertaken to control—unless he had been insanely vain. And with that fearless independence went an unconscious aloofness. She would follow her own counsel, and never realise that anyone else might consider he had a right to know what that counsel was. That aloofness was utterly unaware—he divined that it had never been in her at all before the days of the Angels of Doom, and when the work of the Angels of Doom was done it would be gone.

  And Teal’s whistle was silent. Simon looked down from a window, and saw that Teal had gone. But a uniformed man stood at the foot of the steps on the pavement outside, and looked up from time to time.

  “Well?” said the girl.

  “He’s gone for his warrant,” said the Saint. “Cast your bread upon the waters, and you shall find it after many days. We can thank your Angels of Doom for that. If you hadn’t made the police so unpopular, Teal would have risked the search without a warrant. As it is, we’ve got a few minutes’ grace, which may run into two hours. Pardon me.”

  He went through into the bedroom, and selected a coat from his wardrobe. He returned with this, and a pillow from the bed.

  “Keep over on that side of the room.”

  She obeyed, perplexedly. He pushed an armchair over against the window, put the pillow inside the coat he had brought, and sat coat and pillow in the chair.

  “Now—where’s your hat?”

  He found the hat, and propped it up over the coat on a walking-stick. Then he carried over a small table and set it beside the chair, and on the table he put a small lamp. After a calculating survey, he switched on the small lamp.

  “Now turn out that switch beside you.”

  She did as she was told, and the only light left in the room came from the small lamp on the table by the armchair against the window.

  “The Shadow on the Blind,” said the Saint. “A Mystery in Three Acts. Act One.”

  She looked at him.

  “And Act Two—the fire escape?”

  He shook his head.

  “No. We haven’t got one of those. Why not the front door? Are you ready?”

  He handed her her bag, went out into the hall, and fetched her valise. This he opened for her.

  “Put on another hat,” he said. “You must look ordinary.”

  She nodded. In a couple of minutes she was ready, and they walked down the stairs together. At the foot of the stairs he stopped.

  “Round there,” he said, pointing, “you’ll find a flight of steps to the basement. Wait just out of sight. When you hear me go up the stairs again, walk straight out of the front door and take a taxi to the Ritz. Stay there as Mrs Joseph M. Halliday, of Boston. Mr Joseph M. Halliday—myself—will arrive for breakfast at ten o’clock tomorrow morning.”

  “And Act Three?” she asked.

  “That,” said the Saint serenely, “will be nothing but a brief brisk dialogue between Teal and me. Good night, Jill.”

  He held out his hand. She took it.

  “Simon, you’re not only a darling—you’re a bright boy.”

  “Just what Teal said,” murmured the Saint. “Sleep well, Jill—and don’t worry.”

  He left her there, and went and opened the front door.

  The constable outside turned round alertly.

  “Officer!” said the Saint anxiously.

  He looked amazingly respectable, and the policeman relaxed.

  “Yes, sir?”

  “There seems to be something funny going on in the flat below me—”

  The constable came up the steps.

  “Which floor are you on, sir?”

  “Second.”

  The eyes of the law studied the Saint’s nervous respectability with an intent stare, and then the finger of the law beckoned.

  Simon followed the law outside, and the finger of the law pointed upwards. In the first-floor window, a silhouette could be seen on a blind.

  “In that flat below you, sir,” said the law impressively, “there’s a woman ’ooze wanted for murder.”

  Simon peered upwards.

  “Why don’t you arrest her?” he asked.

  “Inspector’s gone for a warrant,” said the constable. “I’m keeping watch till he gets back. Now, what was it you heard in that flat, sir?”

  “A sort of moaning noise,” said the Saint sepulchrally. “It’s been going on for some time. Sounds as if someone was dying. I got anxious after a bit, and went down and rang the bell, but I couldn’t get any answer.”

  “Listen,” said the policeman.

  They listened.

  “Can’t hear anything,” said the policeman.

  “You wouldn’t, down here, with the window shut,” said the Saint. “It’s not very loud. But you can hear it quite clearly on the landing outside the flat.”

  “She’s still sitting there, in that window,” said the policeman.

  They stared upwards, side by side.

  “Sits very still, doesn’t she?” said the Saint vaguely.

  They stared longer.

  “Funny,” said the policeman, “now you come to mention it, she does sit still. Ain’t never moved ’arf an inch, all this time we’ve been watching her.”

  “I don’t like the look of it, officer,” said the Saint nervously. “If you’d heard that noise—”

  “Can’t ’ear no noise now.”

  “I tell you, it gave me the creeps…Did this woman know you were going to arrest her?”

  “Oh, I think she knows all right.”

  “Supposing she’s committing suicide—”

  The constable continued to strain his neck.

  “Sounds as if I ought to look into it,” he said. “But I don’t care to leave my post. The Inspector said I wasn’t to move on any account. But if she’s trying to escape justice—”

  “She still hasn’t moved,” Simon said.

  “No, she ain’t moved.”

  “I don’t see how going inside would be leaving your post,” said the Saint thoughtfully. “You’d be just as m
uch use as a guard outside the door of the flat as you are here.”

  “That’s true,” said the policeman.

  He looked at the Saint.

  “Come on up with me,” he said.

  “L-l-l-like a shot,” said the Saint timidly, and followed in the burly wake of the law.

  They listened outside the door of the flat for some time, and, not unnaturally, heard nothing.

  “Perhaps she’s dead by now,” Simon ventured morbidly.

  The law applied a stubby forefinger to the bell.

  A minute passed.

  The law repeated the summons—without result.

  The Saint cleared his throat.

  “Couldn’t we break in?” he said.

  The law shook its head.

  “Better wait till the Inspector gets back. He won’t be long.”

  “Come up and wait in my flat.”

  “Couldn’t do that, sir. I’ve got to keep an eye on this door.”

  Simon nodded.

  “Well, I’ll be off,” he sighed. “I’ll be upstairs if you want me.”

  “If anything’s happened, I expect the Inspector will want to see you, sir. May I have your name?”

  “Essenden,” said Simon Templar glibly. “Marmaduke Essenden. Your Inspector will know the name.”

  He saw the name written down in the official notebook, and went up the stairs. On the landing above, he waited until he heard the constable tramping downwards, and then he descended again and let himself into his own flat.

  He was reading, in his pyjamas and a dressing-gown, when his bell rang again an hour and a half later, and he opened the door at once.

  Teal was outside, and behind Teal was the constable. Seeing Simon, the constable goggled.

  “That’s the man, sir,” he blurted.

  “I knew that, you fool,” snarled Teal, “as soon as you told me the name he gave you.”

  He pushed through into the sitting-room. His round red face was redder than ever, and for once his jaws seemed to be unoccupied with the produce of the Wrigley Corporation.

  The constable followed, and Simon humbly followed the constable.

  “Now look at that!” said Teal sourly.

  The Saint stood deferentially aside, and the constable stood in his tracks and gaped along the line indicated by Mr Teal’s forefinger. The Saint had not interfered with the improvised dummy in the chair. He had felt that it would have been unkind to deprive the constable of the food for thought with which that mysteriously motionless silhouette must have been able to divert his vigil.