But it didn’t lollop back into the bush from which it had emerged. Perhaps it had a date with some loose-moralled doe in the next parish, and had merely paused to admire the wonders of nature on its way to more serious business; or perhaps it had only heard news of some fresh, young lettuces sprouting in the kitchen gardens of March House; only its reincarnation in the shape of a theosophist will ever tell. But at all events, it pushed on instead of turning back. It made a rapid hopping dive for the nearest gap in the hedge through which Simon himself had been preparing to pass.
And it died.
There was a momentary flash of blue flame, and the rabbit kicked over backwards in a dreadful leap and lay twitching in the patch of moonlight.
4
Simon turned it over with his foot: it was indubitably one of the deadest rabbits in the county of Kent. Then he took a tiny flashlight from his pocket and examined the hedge with great caution. There were lines of gleaming copper wire strung through it at intervals of about six inches and rising to a height of six feet above the ground—if he had not stopped to watch the rabbit he could not have helped touching one of them.
The Saint pushed a hand somewhat unsteadily across his forehead, and turned his attention to the tree. But there was no chance there of repeating his Tarzan impersonation, for there were similar copper wires coiled round the trunk to a greater height than he could reach. Without rubber gloves and insulated wire-cutters he could go no farther, and he had no doubt that the same high-voltage circuit continued all the way round the landing-field and enclosed everything else that might be interesting to look at.
Twenty minutes later he dropped out of another tree into the road beside his car, and found Hoppy Uniatz sitting on the running-board and gazing disconsolately at an inadequate hip-flask which had long since run as dry as a Saharan water-hole.
“Hi, boss,” said Mr Uniatz, rising stiffly from his unprofitable meditations. “Dijja get de dough?”
Simon shook his head, lighting a cigarette in his cupped hands.
“I didn’t get to first base,” he said. “A rabbit stopped me.” He saw a vacuous expression of perplexity appear on Mr Uniatz’s homely dial, and extinguished his lighter with a faint grin. “Never mind, Hoppy. Pass it up. I’ll tell you all about it next year. Let’s get back to London.”
He slid into the driving-seat, and Mr Uniatz put his flask away and followed him more slowly, glancing back doubtfully over his shoulder with a preoccupied air. As Simon pressed the starter, he coughed.
“Boss,” said Mr Uniatz diffidently. “Is it oke leavin’ de cop here?”
“Leaving the which?” ejaculated the Saint limply.
“De cop,” said Mr Uniatz.
Simon pushed the gear lever back into neutral and gazed at him.
“What are you talking about?” he inquired.
“Ya see, boss,” said Mr Uniatz, with the manner of Einstein solving a problem in elementary arithmetic, “de tyre wasn’t flat.”
“What tyre?” asked the Saint heroically.
“De tyre you told me to change,” explained Hoppy. “Ya told me to fix de flat, but it wasn’t.”
The Saint struggled with his vocabulary in an anguished silence, seeking words in which he might deal suitably with the situation, but before he had counted all the syllables in the phrases he proposed to use, Mr Uniatz was ploughing on, as if determined, now that he had started, to make a clean breast of the matter.
“Well, boss, I put back de wheel an’ sat down to wait for de cop. After a bit he rides up on a bicycle. ‘Hi-yah, guy,’ he says, ‘whaddaya doin’ here?’ So I tells him I was fixin’ a flat, but it wasn’t. ‘Well, whaddaya waitin’ for?’ he says. So I remember what ya tells me, boss, an’ I says, ‘I’m t’inkin’ of de little woman back home, waitin’ for her man.’ ‘Ya big bum,’ he says, ‘ya drunk.’ ”
“I’ll bet he didn’t,” said the Saint.
“Well, it was sump’n like dat,” said Hoppy, dismissing the quibble, “only he talked wit’ an accent.”
“I see what you mean,” said the Saint. “And what did you do?”
“Well, boss, I hauls off an’ gives him a poke in de jaw.”
“And what does he say to that?”
“He don’t say nut’n, boss.” Mr Uniatz jerked a nicotine-stained thumb backwards at an indistinguishable quarter of the night. “I tucks him up in de bushes an’ leaves him. Dat’s what I mean, is it oke leavin’ him here,” said Hoppy, harking back to his original problem.
Simon Templar fought with his soul for a short time without speaking. If he had followed his most primitive instincts, there would probably have been a late lamented Mr Uniatz tucked up in the bushes alongside the sleeping rural constable, but the Saint’s sense of civic responsibility was improving.
“I guess we’ll leave him,” he said at length. “It can’t make things any worse.”
He drove back to London in a thoughtful frame of mind. It was one of those times when the hundredth chance turned up in magnificent vindication of all hare-brained enterprises, and when the established villain was a man in the position of Sir Hugo Renway the Saint was inclined to have a few things to think about. There were only two forms of smuggling in which the rewards were high and the penalties heavy enough to justify such extreme measures as the murdered airman on the Brighton Road and that lethally electrified wire fence at March House—it is curious that the Saint was still far from reading the real interpretation into the facts he knew.
The wandering policeman whom Hoppy Uniatz had “poked in de jaw” was a complication which had not been allowed for in his plan of campaign as seriously as it might, and he was not expecting the repercussions of it to reach him quite so quickly as they did.
He put the Hirondel back in its garage at about a quarter to four, and walked round to his apartment on Piccadilly. A sleepy night porter took them up in the lift: he was a new employee of the building whom the Saint had not seen before, and Simon made a mental note to learn more about him at an early date—he had found it a very sound principle to enlist the sympathies of the employees in any such building where he lived, for there were other detectives besides Mr Teal who had visualised a cast-iron arrest of the Saint as a signpost to promotion. But he was not thinking of doing anything about it at that hour, and his mind was too much occupied with other matters to notice that the man looked at him with more than ordinary curiosity as he got in.
His apartment lay at the end of a short corridor. He strolled innocently towards it, taking out his key, with Hoppy following him, and he was on the point of putting the key in the lock when a voice that was only too familiar spoke behind him. “Do you mind if we come in?”
The Saint turned rather slowly on his heel, and looked at the two men who had appeared from somewhere to bar the way back along the corridor—there was something rather solid and purposeful about the way they stood shoulder to shoulder so as to fill the passage, something which put the glint of steel back in his eyes and set his heart ticking a fraction faster. Hoppy’s hand was leaping automatically to his hip, but Simon caught it by the wrist, and smiled.
“You know you’re always welcome, Claud,” he murmured. “But you do choose the most Bohemian hours for your visits.”
He turned back to the door and unlocked it, and led the way into the living-room, spinning his hat onto a peg in the hall as he passed through. He took a cigarette from the box on the table and lighted it, facing round with one hand in his pocket and that thoughtful smile still on his lips.
“Well, what’s the fun, boys?” he inquired genially. “Has somebody pinched the north side of Oxford Street and do you think I did it, or have you just dropped in to sing carols?”
“Where have you been tonight?” asked Mr Teal. His manner was not the manner of a man who had dropped in to sing carols. Even in his wildest flights of whimsy, the Saint had never thought of Chief Inspector Teal as the Skylark of Scotland Yard, but he had known him to look more like an embryonic warbl
er than he did just then. Simon smiled even more genially and even more thoughtfully, and trickled out a lungful of blue smoke.
“We’ve been on a pub-crawl with Andrew Volstead and Lady Astor, and Hoppy came along to carry the bromo-seltzer.” Teal did not smile.
“If you’ve got another alibi,” he said, “I’d like to hear it. But it had better be a good one.” The Saint pondered for a moment.
“You are getting particular,” he said. “A story like that would always have kept you amused for hours in the old days. I suppose you’ve been taking a correspondence course in this detective business…All right. We haven’t been on a pub-crawl. We’ve been splitting hairs on the dome of St. Paul’s and looking for needles in the Haymarket.”
Mr Teal’s hands remained in his pockets, but his whole attitude suggested that they were grasping something as heavy as a steamroller.
“Is that all you’ve got to say?” he demanded hoarsely.
“It’ll do for the time being,” said the Saint calmly. “That’s what I say we’ve been doing, and what the hell does it matter to you?”
The detective appeared, somehow, in spite of his mountainous immobility, to approach the verge of gibbering. It may seem unkind of the chronicler to mention this, but he is conscientiously concerned to deal only with the bare facts, without apology or decoration. And yet he must admit that Mr Teal had lately suffered much.
“Now listen,” Mr Teal got out through his teeth. “About half-past-eleven tonight the watchman at Hawker’s factory, down at Brooklands, was knocked on the head by someone he found prowling around the sheds. When he woke up and raised the alarm, one of the hangars had been forced open and an aeroplane had been stolen!”
Simon tapped his cigarette on the edge of an ash-tray. His brain was starting to turn over like an electric motor responding to the touch of a switch, but no hint of that sudden mental commotion could have been seen in his face. His gaze went back to the detective from under quizzically slanting eyebrows.
“It sounds pretty ambitious,” he remarked. “But what makes you think I’d be interested?”
“I don’t have to think—”
“I know, Claud, you just chew a thistle and your ears flap.”
“I don’t have to think,” Teal said grimly, “when you leave your mark behind you.” The Saint raised one eyebrow a little farther.
“Meaning?”
“When the watchman woke up, there was a piece of paper pinned to his coat. There was a drawing on it. It was the same drawing that was found in the pocket of that dead airman last night—Manuel Enrique. It was your mark!”
“Dear me!” said the Saint.
The detective’s china-blue eyes were as hard and bright as porcelain. His mouth had disappeared altogether—it was a mere slit in the hardened round chubbiness of his face.
“I suppose you can explain that away,” he snapped.
“Of course I can,” said the Saint easily. “The same low criminal who was taking my name in vain on the Brighton Road last night—”
“Is that all the alibi you’ve got this time?” Teal asked, with a kind of saw-edged note in his voice.
“More or less,” said the Saint. He watched the detective take a second grip on himself, watched a glimmer of tentative relief and triumph creep hesitantly into the angry baby-blue eyes, watched the thinned mouth begin to open for an answer—and added, with a seraphically apologetic smile, at the very last and most devastating instant, “Oh, yes, there was something I forgot to mention. On the way from St. Paul’s to the Haymarket I did stop at the Lex Garage off Piccadilly to collect my car, and now I come to think of it, Claud, it must have been exactly half-past-eleven.”
Mr Teal blinked. It was not the nervous bashful blink of a gentle botanist being rudely confronted with the facts of mammalian reproduction: it was the dizzy blink of a bather who has made unwary contact with an electric eel. His chest appeared to deflate; then it swelled up again to a point where his coat was straining on its seams.
“You expect me to believe that?” he blared.
“Of course not,” said the Saint. “You haven’t enough intelligence to save yourself that much time. But you can verify it. Go to the garage and find out. Their records’ll show what time I checked out. The night staff’ll remember me. Go and ask ’em. Push off and amuse yourself. But if that’s all that’s on your mind tonight, I’m going to bed.”
“You can wait a little longer,” retorted Teal. “Half-past-eleven isn’t the only time I want you to account for.”
The Saint sighed.
“What’s the rest of it?”
“You seemed rather interested in Sir Hugo Renway last night,” Teal said waspily, “so I asked the police down there to keep an eye on his place. I know your methods pretty well by now, and I had an idea you might go there. At half-past-one this morning the constable was cycling round the estate when he saw your car—and him!”
“What—Brother Uniatz?” drawled Simon. “Did you see a cop, Hoppy?”
Mr Uniatz, who had been trying to unlock the cellaret with a piece of bent wire, turned round vacantly.
“Yes, boss,” he said.
“Ha!” barked Mr Teal. It may sound improbable, but that is a close approximation to the noise he made.
“I see one only yesterday,” Hoppy elaborated hastily, with the Saint’s blue stare scorching through him. “In de Haymarket.”
Chief Inspector Teal did not burst. Perhaps it is not actually possible for the human organism to become so inflated with spleen that it explodes into small fragments—the chronicler is inclined to take this as the only plausible reason why his favourite detective did not stand there and pop. But there was something about him which suggested that even the point of a joke might have punctured him into the power of performing that impossible disintegration. He glared at the Saint again with reddening eyes.
“This constable was also knocked on the head,” he went on, getting the words out somehow through his contracting larynx, “and when he woke up—”
“The garden gate had been forced open and March House had been stolen,” murmured Simon. “I know. The bloke flew off with it in the aeroplane.”
“He reported to the local station, and they telephoned me. The other thing I want to know is what you were doing at that time.”
“We were driving round and round Regent’s Park, and I’ll give you half a million pounds if you can prove we weren’t!”
The detective bit on his long-forgotten chewing-gum with a force that almost fractured his jaw.
“Do you think you can make a monkey out of me?” he roared.
Simon shook his head.
“Certainly not,” he replied solemnly. “I wouldn’t try to improve on God’s creation.”
The chronicler has already submitted, perhaps somewhat rashly, his opinion that the human organism is not capable of literally expanding into small and separate pieces under no other influence than the dilation of its own wrath. But he has, fortunately, offered the suggestion that some outside prod might succeed in procuring this phenomenal disruption.
Mr Teal did not burst, physically. But he performed the psychological equivalent. Moved by a cosmic passion which stronger men than he might have failed lamentably to control, he grasped destiny in both his quivering hands. He did something which he had never in all his life contrived to do before.
“All right,” he said throatily. “I’ve heard all I want to hear tonight. You can tell the rest of it to a jury. I’m arresting you on charges of common assault, burglary, and wilful murder.”
5
Simon extinguished his cigarette in an ashtray. The ticking of his heart was going faster, but not so very much faster. It was curious how Teal’s ultimate explosion surprised him; curious also that it did not find him unprepared. Perhaps, in his heart of hearts, he had always known that something of the kind must happen someday. The gay career of Teal-baiting could not go on for ever; it had gone on for a long time, but Mr Teal was
human. There was no more concrete evidence now than there had ever been, but the Saint had a good deal of belated psychological understanding. In Teal’s place he would probably have done the same.
The detective was still speaking, with the same rather frantic restraint and rather frantic consciousness of the awful temerity of what he was going to do.
“I caution you that anything you say now will be taken down and may be used in evidence at your trial.”
The Saint smiled. He understood. He deeply sympathised. In Teal’s place, he would probably have done the same. But he was not in Teal’s place.
“If you want to make a fool of yourself, Claud, I can’t stop you,” he said, and his left fist leapt out and crashed like a cannon-ball into the furrow between Chief Inspector Teal’s first and second chins.
The expression of compressed wrathfulness vanished startlingly from the detective’s face. For a moment it was superseded by a register of grotesque surprise, and then every other visible emotion was smudged out by a vast blank sleepiness which for once was entirely innocent of pose. Mr Teal’s legs folded up not ungracefully beneath him; he lay down on the floor, and went to sleep.
Mr Teal’s mute equerry was starting forward, and his mouth was opening; it is possible that at any moment some human sound might have emerged from that preternaturally silent man, but Simon gave it no chance. The man was grabbing for his wrists, and the Saint obligingly permitted him to get his hold. Then he planted his left foot firmly in the detective’s stomach, and rolled over backwards, pushing his foot vimfully upwards as he pulled his wrists down. The man sailed over his head in an adagio flying somersault and hit the carpet with an explosive “wuff!” which any medium-sized dog could have vocalised much better, and Simon somersaulted after him more gently and sat astride his chest. He grasped the man’s coat collar in his hands and twisted his knuckles scientifically into the carotid arteries—unconsciousness can be produced in two or three seconds by that method, when employed by a skilful exponent, and Sergeant Barrow’s resistance had been considerably impaired already by the force with which his shoulder-blades had landed on the floor. It was all over in far less time than it takes to describe, and Simon looked up at Mr Uniatz, who was prancing about like a puppy with his revolver reversed in his hand.
The Saint in London (The Saint Series) Page 19
