“And I suppose you didn’t do that?” he said.
There was a sudden stillness of incomprehension over the other men in the room, who had accepted Simon without introduction as an assistant of the Scotland Yard man, and Teal glanced back at them with inscrutable stolidity.
“This is the Saint,” he explained.
A rustle of astonishment stirred the local men, and Teal bit on his gum and met it with his own soured disillusion: “No, I haven’t done anything clever. He’s been with me all the evening. He hasn’t been out of my sight from seven o’clock till now—not for five minutes.”
The police surgeon blew a bubble in his coffee-cup and wiped his lips on his handkerchief, gaping at him stupidly.
“But that’s impossible!” he spluttered. “The body was still warm when I saw it, and the pupils dilated with atropine. He couldn’t have been dead three hours at the outside!”
“I expected something like that,” said the detective, with sweltering restraint. “That’s all it wanted to round off the alibi.”
Simon put the torn scrap of paper back on the inspector’s desk. It had given him a queer feeling looking at that crude sketch on it. He hadn’t drawn it, but it was his. It had become too well known for him to be able to use it very often now, for the precise reason which Mr Teal had overlooked—that when that little drawing was found anywhere on the scene of a crime, there was only one man to search for. But it still had its meaning. That childish haloed figure had stood for an ideal, for a justice that struck swiftly where the Law could not strike, a terror which could not be turned aside by technicalities: it had never been used wantonly…The three local men were staring at him inquisitively, more like morbid sightseers at a sensational trial than professional sifters of crime, but the Saint’s gaze met them with an arctic calm.
“Who was this man?” he asked.
The inspector did not answer at once, until Teal’s shifting glance repeated the question. Then he turned back to the things on his desk.
“He had a Spanish passport—nothing seems to have been stolen from him. The name is—here it is—Enrique. Manuel Enrique. Age thirty; domicile, Madrid.”
“Occupation?”
The inspector frowned over the booklet.
“Aviator,” he said.
Simon took out his cigarette-case, and his eyes travelled thoughtfully back to the drawing which was not his. It was certainly rather squiggly.
“Who were these men who picked him up on the road?”
Again the inspector hesitated, and again Teal’s attitude repeated the interrogation. The inspector compressed his lips. He disapproved of the proceedings entirely. If he’d had his way, the Saint would have been safely locked away in a cell in no time—not taking up a cross-examination of his own. With the air of a vegetarian being forcibly fed with human flesh, he picked up a closely-written report sheet.
“Sir Hugo Renway, of March House, Betfield, near Folkestone, and his chauffeur, John Kellard,” he recited tersely.
“I suppose they didn’t stay long?”
The inspector leaned back so that his chair creaked.
“Do you think I ought to have arrested them?” he inquired ponderously.
The doctor smirked patronisingly, and said, “Sir Hugo is a Justice of the Peace and a permanent official of the Treasury.”
“Wearing top hat and spats?” asked the Saint dreamily.
“He was not wearing a top hat.”
The Saint smiled, and it was a smile which made Mr Teal queerly uneasy. The little beetle of dubiety in his mind laid another clutch of eggs and sat on them. In some way he felt that he was losing his depth, and the sensation lifted his temperature a degree nearer to boiling point.
“Well, Claud,” the Saint was saying, “we’re making progress. I arrested myself to come down here, and I’m always ready to go on doing your work for you. Shall I charge myself, search myself, and lock myself up in a cell? Or what?”
“I’ll think it over and let you know,” said the detective jaggedly.
“Go on a fish diet and give your brain a chance,” Simon advised him.
He trod on his cigarette-end and buttoned his coat, and his blue eyes went back to Mr Teal with a level recklessness of challenge which was like a draught of wind on the embers of Teal’s temper.
“I’m telling you again that I don’t know a thing about this bird Manuel Enrique, beyond what I’ve heard here. I don’t expect you to believe me, because you haven’t that much intelligence, but it happens to be the truth. My conscience is as clean as your shirt was before you put it on—”
“You’re a liar,” brayed the detective.
“Doubtless you know your own laundry best,” said the Saint equably, and then his eyes chilled again. “But that’s about all you do know. You’re not a detective—you’re a homing pigeon. When in doubt, shove it on the Saint—that’s your motto. Well, Claud, just for this once, I’m going to take the trouble to chew you up. I’m going to get your man. I’ve got a quarrel with anyone who takes my trade-mark in vain, and the lesson’ll do you some good as well. And then you’re going to come crawling to me on your great fat belly—”
In a kind of hysteria, Teal squirmed away from the sinewy brown forefinger which stabbed at his proudest possession.
“Don’t do it!” he blared.
“—and apologise,” said the Saint, and in spite of himself, in spite of every obdurately logical belief he held, Chief Inspector Teal thought for a moment that he would not have liked to stand in the shoes of the man who ventured to impersonate the owner of that quiet satirical voice.
3
March House, from one of the large-scale ordnance maps of which Simon Templar kept a complete and up-to-date library, appeared to be an estate of some thirty acres lying between the village of Betfield and the sea. Part of the southern boundary was formed by the cliffs themselves, and a secondary road from Betfield to the main Folkestone highway skirted it on the north-west. The Saint sat over his maps with a glass of sherry for half an hour before dinner the following evening, memorising the topography—he had always been a firm believer in direct action, and, wanting to know more about a man, nothing appealed to him with more seductive simplicity than the obvious course of going to his house and taking an optimistic gander at the scenery.
“But whatever makes you think Renway had anything to do with it?” asked Patricia Holm.
“The top hat and spats,” Simon told her gravely. He smiled. “I’m afraid I haven’t got the childlike faith of a policeman, lass, and that’s all there is to it. Claud Eustace would take the costume as a badge of respectability, but to my sad and worldly mind it’s just the reverse. From what I could gather, Hugo wasn’t actually sporting the top hat at the time, but he seems to have been that kind of man. And the picture they found on the body was rather squiggly—as it might have been if a bloke had drawn it in a car, travelling along…I know it’s only one chance in a hundred, but it’s a chance. And we haven’t any other clue in the whole wide world.”
Hoppy Uniatz had no natural gift for subtlety, but he did understand direct action. Out of the entire panorama of human endeavour, it was about the only thing which really penetrated through all the layers of bullet-proof ivory which protected his brain. Detaching his mouth momentarily from a tumbler of gin, nominally diluted with ginger-ale, he said, “I’ll come wit’ ya, boss.”
“Is it in your line?” asked the Saint.
“I dunno,” Hoppy confessed frankly. “I ain’t never done no boiglary. Whadda we have to wear dis costume for?”
Patricia looked at him blankly. “What costume?”
“De top hat an’ spats,” said Hoppy Uniatz.
The Saint covered his eyes.
Six hours later, braking the Hirondel to a smooth standstill under an overarching elm where the road touched the north-west boundary of March House, Simon felt more practically cautious about accepting Hoppy’s offer of assistance. On such an expedition as he had underta
ken, a sportive elephant would certainly have been less use, but not much less. All the same, he had no wish to offend Mr Uniatz, whose proud spirit was perhaps unduly sensitive on such points. He swung himself out into the road, detached the spare wheel, and opened up the tool-kit, while Hoppy stared at him puzzledly.
“This is where you come in,” the Saint told him flatteringly. “You’re going to be an unfortunate motorist with a puncture, toiling over the wheel.”
Mr Uniatz blinked at him dimly.
“Is dat part of the boiglary?” he asked.
“Of course it is,” said the Saint unscrupulously. “It’s probably the most important part. You never know when some village slop may come paddling around these parts, and if he saw a car standing by the road with nobody in it he’d naturally be suspicious.”
Hoppy reached round for his hip flask, and nodded.
“Okay, boss,” he said. “I get it. If de cop comes while you’re gone, I give him de woiks.”
“You don’t do anything of the sort,” said the Saint wearily. “They don’t allow you to kill policemen in this country. What you do is to give your very best imitation of a guy fixing a flat. You might possibly get into conversation with him. Talk sentimentally about the little woman at home, waiting for her man. Make him feel homesick, and encourage him to push on. But you don’t give him de woiks.”
“Okay, boss,” repeated Hoppy accommodatingly. “I’ll fix it.”
“God help you if you don’t,” said the Saint harrowingly, and left him to it.
The frontier of the March House estate at that point consisted of a strong board fence about eight feet high, topped with three lines of barbed-wire carried on spiked iron brackets beetling outwards at an angle: the arrangement was effective enough to have checked any less experienced and determined trespasser than the Saint, and even Simon might have wasted some time over it if it had not been for the overhanging elm under which he had thoughtfully stopped his car. But by balancing himself precariously on the side of the tonneau and leaping upwards, he was able to get a fingerhold on one of the lower branches, and he swung himself up onto it as if Tarzan had been his grandfather.
Finding his way through the tree, in the dark, was not quite so easy, but he managed it more or less silently, and dropped from another branch onto a mat of short undergrowth on the inside of the fence.
From there, while the muffled mutterings of Hoppy Uniatz wrestling with a wheel drifted faintly to his ears, he surveyed the lie of the land ahead of him. He was in a spinney of young trees and brushwood, barred here and there with the holes of older trees similar to the one by which he had made his entrance; a half-moon, peeping fitfully between squadrons of cirrus cloud, gave his night-hunter’s eyes enough light to make out that broad impression and at the same time suggested an open space some distance farther on beyond the coppice. The house itself stood roughly in the same direction, according to his map-reading, and with a fleeting smile for the complete craziness of his intentions he began to pick his way through the scrub towards it.
A small bird let out a startled squeak at his feet and went whirring away into the dark, and from time to time he heard the rustlings of diminutive animal life scurrying away from his approach, but he encountered no pitfalls or tripwires or other unpleasant accidents. The clear space ahead was farther away than he had thought at first, and as he went on he seemed to make very little progress towards it. Presently he understood why, when he broke out through a patch of thinner shrubbery into what seemed to be a long narrow field laid out broadside to his route: twenty yards away, on the other side, was a single rank of taller trees linked by what appeared to be another fence—it was this wall of shadow and line of lifting tree-trunks which he had never seemed to come any nearer to as he threaded his way through the spinney.
As he crossed the field and came close to this inner boundary, he saw that it was not a fence, but a loosely grown hedge about six feet high. He was able to see this without any difficulty, because when he was still a couple of yards away the pattern of it was suddenly thrown up in silhouette by the kindling of a light behind it. At first his only impression was that the moon had chosen that moment for one of its periodical peeps from behind the drifting flotillas of cloud. Then, very quickly, the light flared up brighter. He saw the patchwork shadow of the hedge printed on his own clothes, and instinctively ducked behind the sheltering blackness of the nearest tree. And as he did so he became aware that the humming noise he had been hearing had grown much louder.
It was a noise which had been going on, very faintly, for some time, but he had thought nothing of it. A car passing on another road half a mile away might have caused it, and a subconscious suggestion of the same car drawing nearer had prevented him paying much attention to the first increase in its volume. But at this moment it had swelled into a steady drone that was too powerful and unvarying for any ordinary car to make, rising to the indefinable border-line of assertiveness at which his sense of hearing was jolted into sitting up and taking notice. He listened to it, frowning, while it grew to a sharp roar—and then stopped altogether.
The Saint remained as still as the tree beside which he stood, as if he had been an integral part of it, and looked out over the hedge at the field where the light was. Rising a little on his toes, he was able to get a clear view of it and see the cause of the light.
A double row of flares was being kindled in the field, like a file of tiny brilliant bonfires. With a sudden jerk of understanding, he remembered other days in his life, and knew what they were. Mounds of cotton waste soaked in petrol or paraffin. Even while he watched, the last of them was lighted: a reddish glow danced in the dark, licked up into a tentative flame, and sprang suddenly into blazing luminance. The shadow of the man who had lit it stretched out in a sudden long bar of blackness into the surrounding gloom where the light exhausted itself. The twin rank of flares was complete, forming a broad lane of light from north-west to south-east, six flares to each side, two hundred yards long at a rough guess. The dimension of the field beyond that was lost in the darkness which lapped the light.
Over his head there was a rush of air and a dying hiss of wind as though a monstrous bird sighed across the sky. Looking upwards, he saw a shadow like a great black cross diving against the hazy luminousness of the clouds, barely skimming the tree-tops: it plunged into the lane of light, gathering shape and detail—flattened out, bumped once, and landed.
Almost at the same moment the nearer flares began to flicker and die down. One of them went out; then another…
“Never again, so long as I live, will I be rude to Luck,” the Saint said to Patricia Holm, much later. “For every dozen minor troubles the little lady gives us, somehow or other she manages to let you draw three to a straight flush and fill your hand—once or twice in a lifetime.”
He stood, fascinated, and watched the flares going out. Fifteen minutes earlier, he might have run into no end of trouble, without profit to himself or anybody else; fifteen minutes later, there might have been nothing whatever to see; only the blind gods of chance had permitted him to arrive at the exact moment when things were happening. In the outer glow of the farthest flare he saw a man attaching himself to the tail of the aeroplane and beginning to push it farther into the darkness; in a few seconds he was joined by the pilot, unidentifiable in helmet and goggles and leather coat. The engine had been switched off as the ship touched the deck, and the last scene of the drama was played out in utter silence. The two men wheeled the machine away, presumably into some invisible hangar: the last flare wavered and blinked, and the fitful gloom of the night came down once again upon the scene.
Simon Templar drew a long deep breath, and stepped back out of the shadow of his tree. Of all the sins which he might have accused the top hat and spats of Sir Hugo Renway of camouflaging, ordinary smuggling was the last, but he was always accessible to new ideas.
In this case, the most obvious course which presented itself was a further and yet more sleuth-
like investigation into the topography and individual peculiarities of March House, and with the sublime abandon of the congenitally insane he proposed to pursue the said course without delay. The last flare was finally extinguished, and the peaceful darkness settled once more upon the field. As far as anyone outside the estate could have told, the aeroplane had flown on across the Channel—if any reflected glow of light had been visible beyond the belt of woodland through which he had passed, and the high fence beside the road, it could hardly have attracted any ordinary citizen’s attention, and it had lasted such a short time that there would have been nothing particularly remarkable about it anyway. But to anyone who had been privileged to witness the performance from the inside, the whole thing was highly furtive and irregular, especially at the country house of a Justice of the Peace and permanent Treasury official, and the Saint could see nothing for it but to intrude.
And it was at this psychological moment that the moon, to whose coy tactics we have already had occasion to refer, elected once again to say peekaboo to the slumbering world.
Simon Templar had owed his life to many queer things, from opening a window to dropping a cigarette, but he had never owed it before to such a rustic combination of items as a flirtatious moon and a rabbit. The rabbit appeared about one second after the moon, by lolloping out of a bush into the pool of twilight which the moon provided between two trees. The Saint had been so absolutely immobile in his observation post by the tree-trunk that it could never even have noticed him: it had simply been attracted by the lighting effects provided in the adjoining field, and, being a bunny of scientific appetites and an inquisitive turn of mind, it had suspended its foraging for a space to explore this curious phenomenon. Simon saw the moving blur of it out of the corner of his eye before he realised what it was, and froze instinctively back into motionlessness almost before he had begun to move. Then he saw the rabbit clearly, and moved again. A dry leaf rustled under his foot, and the rabbit twitched its nose and decided to abandon its cosmic investigations for that evening.
The Saint in London (The Saint Series) Page 18
