The chronicler, a conscientious and respectable citizen whose income-tax payments are never more than two years in arrears, hesitates over those last ten words. He bounces, like an inexpert matador on the antlers of an Andalusian bull, upon the horns of a dilemma. All his artistic soul, all that luminescent literary genius which has won him the applause and reverence of the reading world, rises in shuddering protest against that scant dismissal. He feels that this waiter, who rejoiced in the name of Bassanio Quinquapotti, should have more space. He is tempted to elaborate at much greater length the origin and obscure beginnings of this harbinger of fate, this dickey-bird of destiny; to expatiate in pages of elegant verbiage upon the psychological motivations which put him into permanent evening dress, upon his feverish sex life, and upon the atrophied talent which made him such a popular performer on the sackbut at informal Soho soirées. For this waiter, who came to the table, was the herald of five million golden pounds, the augur of one of the Saint’s most satisfactory adventures, and the outrider of yet another of the melancholy journeys of Mr Teal. With all these things in mind, the sensitive psyche of the historian revolts from that terse unceremonious description—“a waiter came to the table.” And only the bloodthirsty impatience of editors and publishers forces him to press on.
“Excuse me, sir,” said this waiter (whose name, we insist on recording, was Bassanio Quinquapotti), “but are you Mr Teal?”
“That’s right,” said the detective.
“You’re wanted on the telephone, sir,” said the waiter (Bassanio Quinquapotti).
Mr Teal got up and left the table. Ulysses, at some time or another, must have got up and left a table with the same limpid innocence, undreaming of the odyssey which lay before him…And the Saint lighted a cigarette and watched him go.
It was one of those rare occasions when Simon Templar’s conscience carried no load; when his restless brain was inevitably plotting some fresh audacious mischief, as it always was, but there was no definite incident in the daily chronicles of London crime which could give Scotland Yard cause to inquire interestedly into his movements, and Chief Inspector Teal was enjoying a brief precarious interlude of peace. At those times the Saint could beguile Mr Teal into sharing a meal with him, and Mr Teal would accept it with an air of implacable suspicion, but they would both end their evening with a vague feeling of regret.
On this particular occasion, however, thanks to the egregious Mr Quinquapotti, the feeling of regret was doomed on one side to be the reverse of vague, but this vision of the future was hidden from Claud Eustace Teal.
He wedged himself into the telephone booth in the foyer of the restaurant with the pathetic trustfulness of a guinea-pig trotting into a vivisectionist’s laboratory, and took up the receiver.
“Teal speaking,” he said.
The familiar voice of his assistant at the Yard clacked back at him through the diaphragm. It uttered one sentence. It uttered another.
The voice of Mr Teal’s assistant went on uttering, and the mouth of Mr Teal opened wider as the recital went on. The milk of human kindness, always an unstable element in Mr Teal’s sorely tried cosmogony, curdled while he listened. By the time his assistant had finished, it would, if laid aside in a cool place, have turned itself gradually into a piece of cheese.
“All right,” he said thickly, at the end. “I’ll call you back.”
He hung up the receiver and levered himself out of the cabinet. Squeezing his way between the tables on his way back across the restaurant, he was grimly conscious of the Saint’s face watching his approach. It was a face that inevitably stood out among the groups of commonplace diners, a lean and darkly handsome face which would have arrested any wandering glance, but it was no less inevitably the face of an Elizabethan buccaneer, lacking only the beard. The lean relaxed figure struck the imagination like a sword laid down among puddings, and for the same reason it was indescribably dangerous. The very clear and humorous blue eyes had a mocking recklessness which could never have stood in awe of man or devil, and Mr Teal knew that that also was true. The detective’s mind went back once again over the times when he had confronted that face, that debonair immaculate figure, those gay piratical blue eyes, and the remembrance was no more comforting than it had been before. But he went back to the table, and sat down.
“Thanks for the dinner, Saint,” he said.
Simon blew a smoke-ring.
“I enjoyed it, too,” he remarked. “Call it a small compensation for the other times when everything hasn’t been so rosy. I often feel that if only our twin souls, freed from the contagion of this detectivitis which comes over you sometimes—”
“It’s a pity you didn’t complete the party,” Teal said with a certain curious shortness.
The Saint raised his eyebrows.
“How?”
“That American gunman you’ve been going about with, for instance—what’s his name?”
“Hoppy Uniatz? He’s gone to the Ring to have a look at some wrestling. Ran into some Yankee grunter he knew over on the other side, who’s doing a tour over here; so Hoppy felt he’d better go and root for him.”
“Yes?” Teal was jerkily unwrapping a fresh slice of gum, although the wad in his mouth was still putting forth flavour in a brave endeavour to live up to its advertising department. “He wouldn’t have gone there alone, of course.”
“I think he went with this wriggler’s manager and a couple of his clutching partners,” said the Saint.
Mr Teal nodded. Something was happening to his blood-pressure—something which had begun its deadly work while he was listening to the voice of his assistant on the telephone. He knew all the symptoms. The movements with which he folded his wafer of naked spearmint and stuffed it into his mouth had a stupendous slothfulness which cost him a frightful effort to maintain.
“Or your girlfriend, perhaps—Patricia Holm?” Teal articulated slowly. “What’s happened to her?”
“She came over all evening dress and went to a party—one of these Mayfair orgies. Apart from that she’s quite normal.”
“She’d have a good time at a party, wouldn’t she?” Teal said ruminatively.
The Saint swilled liqueur brandy around in the bowl of a pear-shaped glass.
“I believe lots of young men do get trampled to death in the stampede when she turns up,” he admitted.
“But there’d be enough survivors left to be able to swear she’d been dancing or sitting out with one or other of ’em from the time she arrived till well after midnight—wouldn’t there?” Teal insisted. Simon sat up. For one or two minutes past he had been aware that a change had come over the detective since he returned to the table, and there had been a sudden grittiness in the way that last question mark had been tagged on which he couldn’t have missed if he had been stone deaf. He looked Teal over with thoughtful blue eyes.
“Claud!” he exclaimed accusingly. “I believe there’s something on your mind!”
For a moment Teal’s windpipe tied itself into a knot of indignation which threatened to strangle him. And then, with a kind of dogged resolution, he untied it and waded on.
“There’s plenty on my mind,” he said crunchily. “And you know what it is. I suppose you’ve been laughing yourself sick ever since you sat down at the table. I suppose you’ve been wondering if there were any limits on earth to what you could make me swallow. Well, I’ve bought it. I’ve given you your rope. And now suppose you tell me why you think it isn’t going to hang you?”
“Claud?” The Saint’s voice was wicked. “Are you sure you haven’t had too much of this brandy? I feel that your bile is running away with you. Is this—”
“Never mind my bile!” Teal got out through his teeth. “I’m waiting for you to talk about something else. And before you start, let me tell you that I’m going to tear this alibi to pieces if it takes me the rest of my life!”
Simon raised his eyebrows. “Alibi?” he repeated gently.
“That’s what I said.”
/>
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“No?” Teal meant to be derisive, but the word plopped out of his mouth like a cork out of a bottle. “I’m talking about this precious alibi of yours which accounts for everything that fellow Uniatz and that girl Patricia Holm have been doing all the evening—and probably accounts for all your other friends as well. I mean this alibi you think you’ve framed me into giving you—”
“What on earth are you talking about?” asked the Saint patiently, and Teal drew another laboured breath.
“I mean,” he said—and all the cumulative rancour of five years of that unequal duel was rasping through his voice like a red-hot file—“I mean that you must be thinking it was damned clever of you to get me to have dinner with you on this night of all nights, and keep me here with you from seven o’clock till now, when a dead man was picked up on the Brighton road half an hour ago with your mark on him!”
2
Simon stared at him blankly. And even while he did so, he realised that he was letting the opportunity of a lifetime of Teal-baiting dawdle past him and raise its hat as it went by, without so much as lifting a hand to grab it. To be accused for once of a crime of which he was as innocent as an unborn Eskimo, and to have a made-to-measure alibi presented to him on a plate at the same time, should have presented vistas of gorgeous possibility to warm the heart. But he didn’t even see them. He was too genuinely interested.
“Say that again,” he suggested.
“You’ve heard me already,” retorted the detective gratingly. “It’s your turn now. Well, I’m waiting for it. I like your fairy-tales. What is it this time? Did he commit suicide and tie your mark round his neck for a joke? Did the Emperor of Abyssinia do it for you, or was it arranged by the Sultan of Turkey? Whatever your story is, I’ll hear it!”
It has been urged by some captious critics of these records that Chief Inspector Teal has rarely been observed in them to behave like a normal detective. This charge the scribe is forced to admit. But he points out that there are very few of these chronicles in which Chief Inspector Teal has had any chance to be a normal detective. Confronted with the slow smile and bantering blue eyes of the Saint, something went haywire inside Mr Teal. He was not himself. He was overwrought. He gave way. He behaved, in fact, exactly as a man who had been burned many times might have been expected to behave in the presence of fire. But it wasn’t his fault, and the Saint knew it.
“Now wait a minute, you prize fathead,” Simon answered quite pleasantly, “I didn’t kill this bloke—”
“I know you didn’t,” said Teal in an ecstasy of elephantine sarcasm. “You’ve been sitting here talking to me all the time. This fellow just died. He drew your picture on a piece of paper, and had heart failure when he looked at it.”
“Your guess is as good as mine, Claud,” drawled the Saint lazily. “But personally I should say that some low crook is trying to frame me.”
“You would, eh? Well, if I were looking for this low crook—”
“You’d come to my address.” Simon pushed his cigarette into an ashtray, finished his drink, and spread money on the table to pay the bill. “Well, here I am. You gave me the murder and you gave me the alibi. You thought of this game. Why don’t you get on with it? Am I arrested?”
Teal gulped and swallowed a piece of gum.
“You’ll be arrested as soon as I know some more about this murder. I know where to find you—”
The Saint smiled.
“I seem to have heard words to that effect before,” he said. “But it hasn’t always worked out quite that way. My movements are so erratic. Why take a chance? Let me arrest myself. My car’s just round the corner, and the night is before us. Let’s go and find out some more about this murder of mine.”
He stood up, and for some unearthly reason Teal also rose to his feet. An exasperating little bug of uncertainty was hatching out in the detective’s brain and starting to dig itself in. He had been through these scenes before, and they had lopped years off his expectation of life. He had known the Saint guilty of innumerable felonies and breaches of the peace, beyond any possible shadow of human doubt, and had got nothing out of it—nothing but a smile of infuriating innocence, and a glimmer of mocking amusement in the Saint’s eyes which was not evidence. He was used to being outwitted, but it had never occurred to him that he might be wrong. Until that very moment, when the smile of infuriating innocence was so startlingly absent…He didn’t believe it even then—he had reached the stage when nothing that Simon Templar said or did could be taken at its face value—but the germ of preposterous doubt was brooding in his mind, and he followed the Saint out into the street in silence, without understanding why he did it.
“Where did this news come from?” Simon inquired, as he slid in behind the wheel of the great shining Hirondel which was parked close by.
“Horley,” Teal replied curtly, and couldn’t help adding, “You ought to know.”
The Saint made no retort, and that again was unusual. The tiny maggot of incertitude in Teal’s brain laid another egg, and he chewed steadily on his remaining sludge of spearmint in self-defensive taciturnity while the long thrumming nose of the car threaded its way at breath-taking speed through the thinning traffic of South London.
Simon kindled a fresh cigarette from the lighter on the dash and thrust the Hirondel over the southward artery with one hand on the wheel and the speedometer quivering around seventy, driving automatically and thinking about other things. Before that, he had sometimes wondered why such a notorious scapegoat as himself should have been passed over for so long by the alibi experts of the underworld, and he had only been able to surmise that the fear of attracting his own attention was what had deterred them. The man who had set a new precedent this night must either have been very confident or very rash, and the Saint wanted to know him. And there was an edge of quiet steel in the Saint’s narrowed eyes as they followed the road in the blaze of his sweeping headlights which indicated that he would have an account to settle with his unauthorised substitute when they met…
Perhaps it was because he was very anxious to learn something more which might help to bring that meeting nearer, or perhaps it was only because the Saint never felt really comfortable in a car unless it was using the king’s highway for a race-track, but it was exactly thirty-five minutes after they left the restaurant when he swung the car round the last two-wheeled corner and switched off the engine under the blue lamp of Horley Police Station. For the latter half of the journey Mr Teal had actually forgotten to chew, but he released his hold on his bowler hat and climbed out phlegmatically enough. Simon followed him up the steps, and heard Teal introduce himself to the night sergeant.
“They’re in the inspector’s office, sir,” said the man.
Simon went in at Teal’s shoulder, and found three men drinking coffee in the bare distempered room. One of them, from his typical bulk and the chair he occupied at the desk, appeared to be the inspector; the second, a grey-haired man in pince-nez and an overcoat, was apparently the police surgeon; the third was a motorcycle patrol in uniform.
“I thought I’d better come down at once,” Teal said laconically.
The inspector, who shared the dislike of all provincial inspectors for interference from Scotland Yard, but accepted it as an unfortunate necessity, nodded no less briefly and indicated the motorcycle patrol.
“He can tell you all about it.”
“There ain’t much to tell, sir,” said the patrol, putting down his cup. “Just about two mile from here, it was, on the way to Balcombe. I was on me way home when I saw a car pulled up by the side of the road an’ two men beside it carryin’ what looked like a body. Well, it turned out it was a body. They said they saw it lyin’ in the road an’ thought it was someone been knocked down by another car, but when I had a look I saw the man had been shot. I helped ’em put the body in their car and rode in alongside of ’em to the police station here.”
“What time was this?” Teal asked him.
“About half-past-ten, sir, when I first stopped. It was exactly a quarter to eleven when we got here.”
“How had this man been shot?”
It was the doctor who answered.
“He was shot through the back of the head at close range—probably with an automatic or a revolver. Death must have been instantaneous.”
Mr Teal rolled his gum into a spindle, pushed his tongue into the middle to shape a horseshoe, and chewed it back into a ball.
“I was told you’d found the Saint’s mark on the body,” he said. “When was that?”
The inspector turned over the papers on his desk.
“That was when we were going through his things. It was in his outside breast pocket.”
He found a scrap of paper and handed it over. Teal took it and smoothed it out. It was a leaf torn from a cheap pocket diary, and on one side of it had been drawn, in pencil, a squiggly skeleton figure whose round blank head was crowned with a slanting elliptical halo.
Teal’s heavy eyes rested on the drawing for a few seconds, and then he turned and held it out to the Saint.
The Saint in London (The Saint Series) Page 17
