The Saint Goes On (The Saint Series)

by Leslie Charteris

  “I’ll have a look at it,” said the Saint, after a brief hesitation.

  Viewing Mrs Florence Ellshaw for the first time, when he opened the door to her, Simon could not deny that Sam Outrell had an excuse for his veiled vulgarity. She was certainly very bovine in build, with stringy mouse-coloured hair and a remarkable torso—the Saint didn’t dislike her, but he did not feel that Life would have been incomplete if she had never discovered his address.

  “It’s about me ’usband, sir,” said Mrs Ellshaw, putting the matter in what must have looked to her like a nutshell.

  “What is about your husband?” asked the Saint politely.

  “I seen ’im,” declared Mrs Ellshaw emphatically. “I seen ’im last night, plain as I can see you, I did, ’im wot left me a year ago wivout a word, after all I done for ’im, me that never gave ’im a cross word even when ’e came ’ome late an’ left all ’is money at the local, as large as life ’e was, an’ me workin’ me fingers to the bone to feed ’is children, six of ’em wot wouldn’t ’ave a rag to their backs if it weren’t for me brother Bert as ’as a job in a garridge, with three of his own ’im to look after and his wife an invalid, she often cries all night, it’s pitiful—”

  Simon perceived that to let Mrs Ellshaw tell her story in her own way would have required a lifetime’s devotion.

  “What do you want me to do?” he interrupted.

  “Well, sir, I seen ’im last night, after ’im leaving me wivout a word, ’e might ’ave bin dead for all I was to know, after all I done for ’im, as I says to ’im only the day before ’e went, I says ‘Ellshaw,’ I says, ‘I’m the best wife you’re ever likely to ’ave, an’ I defy you to say anythink else,’ I says, an’ me workin’ me fingers to the bone, with varicose veins as ’urts me somethink terrible sometimes, I ’as to go an’ sit down for an hour, this was in Duchess Place—”

  “What was in Duchess Place?” asked the Saint weakly.

  “Why, where I sore ’im,” said Mrs Ellshaw, “’im wot left me wivout a word—”

  “After all you done for him—”

  “An’ me doing for gentlemen around ’ere all these months to feed ’is children, wiv me pore legs achin’ an’ ’e turns an’ runs away when ’e sees me as if I ’adn’t bin the best wife a man ever ’ad, an’ never a cross word between us all these years.”

  The Saint found it hard to believe that Mrs Ellshaw had reached an intentional full stop, and concluded that she had merely paused for breath. He took a mean advantage of her momentary incapacity.

  “Didn’t you run after him?” he put in.

  “That I did, sir, wiv me pore legs near to bursting after me being on them all day, an’ ’e runs into an ’ouse an’ slams the door, an’ I gets there after ’im an’ rings the bell an’ nobody answers, though I waits there ’arf an hour if I waited a minnit, ringin’ the bell, an’ me sufferin’ with palpitations wot always come over me if I run, the doctor tole me I mustn’t run about, an’ nobody answers till I says to meself, ‘All right, Ellshaw,’ I says, ‘I’ll be smarter’n you are,’ I says, an’ I goes back to the ’ouse this morning, not ’arf an hour ago it wasn’t, an’ rings the bell again like it might be a tradesman delivering something, an’ ’e opens the door, an’ when ’e seen me ’e gets all angry, as if I ’adn’t bin the best wife ever a man ’ad—”

  “And never a cross word between you all these years—”

  “‘Yer daft cow,’ ’e says, ‘can’t yer see yer spoilin’ everythin’?’ ‘Never you mind wot I’m spoiling,’ I says, ‘even if it is some scarlet ’ussy yer livin’ with in that ’ouse, you gigolo,’ I says, ‘leaving me wivout a word after all I done for you,’ I says, and ’e says to me, ‘’Ere’s some money, if that’s wot yer after, an’ you can ’ave some more any time you want it, so now will you be quiet an’ get out of ’ere or else you’ll lose me job, that’s wot you’ll do, if anybody sees you ’ere,’ ’e says, an’ ’e shoves some money into me ’and an’ slams the door again, so I come straight round ’ere to see you, sir.”

  “What for?” asked the Saint feebly.

  He felt that he was only inviting a fresh cataract of unpunctuated confidences, but he could think of no other question that seemed so entirely apt.

  Mrs Ellshaw, however, did not launch out into another long-distance paragraph. She thrust one of her beefy paws into the fleshy canyon that ran down from her breastbone into the kindly concealment of her clothing, and dragged out what looked at first like a crumpled roll of white paper.

  “That’s wot for,” she said, thrusting the catch towards him.

  Simon took it and flattened it out. It was three new five-pound notes clumsily crushed together, and for the first time in that interview he was genuinely interested.

  “Is that what he gave you?”

  “That’s wot he gave me, exactly as ’e put it in me ’and, an’ there’s somethink dirty about it, you mark my words.”

  “What sort of job was your husband in before he—er—left you?” Simon inquired.

  “’E never ’ad no regular job,” said Mrs Ellshaw candidly. “Sometimes ’e made a book—you know, sir, that street betting wot’s supposed to be illegal. Sometimes ’e used to go to race meetings, but I don’t know wot ’e did there, but I know ’e never ’ad fifteen pounds in ’is life that ’e came by honestly, that I know, and I wouldn’t let ’im be dishonest, it ain’t worth it, with so many coppers about, and ’im a married man wiv six children—”

  “What’s the address where you saw him?”

  “It’s in Duchess Place, sir, wot’s more like a mews, and the ’ouse is number six, sir, that’s wot it is, it’s next door to two young gennelmen as I do for, such nice gennelmen they are too, always askin’ about me legs—”

  The Saint stood up. He was interested, but he had no intention of resuming a study of Mrs Ellshaw’s varicose veins.

  “I don’t know whether I can do anything for you, but I’ll see what I can find out—you might like to let me change these fivers for you,” he added. “Pound notes will be easier for you to manage, and these may help me.”

  He put the three banknotes away in a drawer, and saw the last of Mrs Ellshaw with some relief. Her troubles were not so utterly commonplace as he had expected them to turn out when she started talking, and some of the brightest episodes in his career had had the most unpromising beginnings, but there was nothing in the recital he had just listened to which struck him as giving it any special urgency. Even when the whole story was an open book to him, the Saint could not feel that he was to blame for failing to foresee the consequences of Mrs Ellshaw’s visit.

  He was occupied at that time with quite a different proposition—the Saint was nearly always occupied with something or other, for his ideas of good living were put together on a shamelessly plutocratic scale, and all his expenses were paid out of the proceeds of his raids on those whom he knew as the Ungodly. In this case it was a man of no permanent importance who claimed to be the owner of a mining concession in Brazil. There were always one or two men of that kind on the Saint’s visiting list—they were the providential pot-boilers of his profession, and he would have considered it a crime to let them pass him by, but only a very limited number of them have been found worthy of commemoration in these chronicles. He walked home from the conclusion of this casual episode at two o’clock in the morning, and might have died before dawn if Sam Outrell had been less conscientious.

  “The men have been to fix your extension telephone,” was the message passed on to him by the night porter, and the Saint, who had not ordered an extension telephone at all, was silently thoughtful in the lift that whisked him up to his floor.

  He walked down the corridor, as soundless as a prowling cat on the thick carpet, past the entrance of his own suite to another door at the very end of the passage. There was a key on his chain to unlock it, and he stepped out on to the fire-escape and lighted a cigarette under the stars.

  From the handrail of the g
rating where he stood, it was an easy swing to his bathroom window, which was open. He passed across the sill like a shadow and went from room to room with a gun in his hand, searching the darkness with supersensitive faculties for anything that might be waiting to catch him unawares. Everything was quiet, but he touched pieces of furniture, and knew that they had been moved. The drawers of his desk were open, and his foot rustled against a sheaf of papers carelessly thrown down on the floor. Without touching a light switch he knew that the place had been effectively ransacked, but he came to the hall without finding a trace of any more actively unfriendly welcome.

  It was not until he switched on the hall light that he saw what his fate ought to have been.

  There was a cheap fibre attaché-case standing close to the entrance—if he had moved another step to one side he would have kicked it. Two thin insulated wires ran from it to the door and terminated in a pair of bright metal contacts like a burglar alarm, one of them screwed to the frame and the other to the door itself. If he had entered in the normal way, they would have completed the circuit directly the door began to open, and he had no doubt what the sequel would have been.

  An ingenious mixture of an electrical detonator, a couple of pounds of gelignite, and an assortment of old scrap-iron was indicated inside that shabby case, but the Saint did not attempt to make certain of it, because it was not beyond the bounds of possibility that some such eccentric entrance as he had made could have been foreseen, and a second detonator provided to act on anyone who opened the valise to investigate it. He disconnected the wires, and drove out to Hammersmith Bridge with the souvenir, very cautiously, as soon as he could fetch his car from the garage, and lowered his potential decease on a string to the bottom of the Thames.

  So far as he could tell, only the three five-pound notes which he had put away in his desk had been taken. It was this fact which made him realize that the search of his rooms had not been a merely mechanical preliminary to the planting of a booby-trap by one of the many persons who had reason to desire his funeral. But it was not until the next morning that he realized how very important the disappearance of Mr Ellshaw must be, when he learned how Mrs Ellshaw had left her troublesome veins behind her for all time.

  2

  The body was taken out of the Thames just below London Bridge by the river police. There were no marks of violence beyond a slight bruise on the forehead which might have been caused by contact with the piers of one of the upper bridges. Death was due to drowning.

  “It’s as obvious as any suicide can be,” said Chief Inspector Claud Eustace Teal. “Apparently the woman’s husband left her about a year ago, and she had to work like a slave to keep the children. Her neighbours say she was very excited the night before, talking incoherently about having seen her husband and him having refused to recognize her. If that was true, it provides a motive; if it wasn’t, it covers ‘unsound mind.’”

  The Saint lounged back in his chair and crossed his feet on a sheaf of reports on Mr Teal’s sacred desk.

  “As a matter of fact, it was true,” he said. “But it doesn’t provide a motive—it destroys it.”

  If anybody else had made such a statement Mr Teal would have jeered at him, more or less politely according to the intruder’s social standing, but he had been sitting at that desk for too many years to jeer spontaneously at anything the Saint said. He shuffled his chewing-gum to the back of his mouth and gazed across the Saint’s vandal shoes with sporously clouded eyes.

  “How do you know?”

  “Because she came to see me yesterday morning with the same story, and I’d promised to see what I could do for her.”

  “You think it was murder?” asked Teal, with cherubic impassivity.

  Simon shrugged.

  “I’d promised to look into it,” he repeated. “In fact, she had a date to come and see me again on Friday evening and hear if I’d managed to find out anything. If she had enough faith in me to bring me her troubles in the first place, I don’t see her diving into the river before she knew the verdict.”

  Teal brought his spearmint back into action, and worked on it for a few seconds in silence. He looked as if he were on the point of falling asleep.

  “Did she say anything to make you think she might be murdered?”

  “Nothing that I understood. But I feel kind of responsible. She was killed after she’d been to see me, and it’s always on the cards that she was killed because of it. There was something fishy about her story, anyhow, and people in fishy rackets will do plenty to keep me out of ’em…I was nearly murdered myself last night.”

  “Nearly?” said Mr Teal.

  He seemed disappointed.

  “I’m afraid so,” said the Saint cheerfully. “Give me something to drink and find out for yourself whether I’m a ghost.”

  “Do you think it was because of something Mrs Ellshaw told you?”

  “I’m damned if I know, Claud. But somebody put down all the makings of a Guy Fawkes picnic in Cornwall House last night, and I shouldn’t be talking to you now if I hadn’t been born careful as well as lucky—there’s something about the way I insist on keeping on living which must be frightfully discouraging to a lot of blokes, but I wouldn’t believe for a moment that you were one of them.”

  Chief Inspector Teal chewed his way through another silence. He knew that the Saint had called on him to extract information, not to give it. Simon Templar gave nothing away, where Scotland Yard was at the receiving end. A Commissioner’s post-mortem on the remains of a recent sensational case in which the Saint had played a leading and eventually helpful part had been held not long ago: it had, however, included some unanswerable questions about the fate of a large quantity of stolen property which the police had expected to recover when they laid the High Fence by the heels, and Mr Teal was still smarting from some of the things which had been said. He had been wielding his unavailing bludgeon in the endless duel between Scotland Yard and that amazing outlaw too long to believe that the Saint would ever consult him with no other motive than a Boy Scout ambition to do him a good turn. Every assistance that Simon Templar had ever given the Metropolitan Police had had its own particular string tied to it, but in Teal’s job he had to take the strings with the favours. The favours had helped to put paid to the accounts of many elusive felons; the strings accounted for many of the silver threads among Mr Teal’s dwindling fleece of gold, and seemed likely to account for many more.

  “If you think Mrs Ellshaw was murdered, that’s your affair,” he said at last. “We haven’t any reason to suspect it—yet. Or do you want to give us any?”

  Simon thought for a moment, and said, “Do you know anything about the missing husband?”

  “As a matter of fact, we did use to know him. He was about the worst card-sharp we ever had on our records. He used to work the race trains, usually—he always picked on someone who’d had too much to drink, and even then he was so clumsy that he’d have been lagged a dozen times if the mugs he found hadn’t been too drunk to remember what he looked like. Does that fit in with your theory?” Teal asked, with the disarming casualness of a gambolling buffalo.

  The Saint smiled.

  “I have no theory, Claud. That’s what I’m looking for. When I’ve got one, we might have another chat.”

  There was nothing more to be got out of him, and the detective saw him go with an exasperated frown creasing down over his sleepy blue eyes.

  As a matter of fact, the Saint had been perfectly straightforward—chiefly because he had nothing to conceal. He had no theory, but he was certainly looking for one. The only thing he had kept back was the address where Mrs Ellshaw had seen her mysterious husband. It was the only information he had from which to start his inquiries, and Mr Teal remembered that he had forgotten to ask for it five minutes after the Saint had left.

  It was not much consolation for him to realize that the Saint would never have given him the information even if he had asked for it. Simon Templar’s idea of c
riminal investigation never included any premature intrusions by the Department provided by London’s ratepayers for the purpose, and he had his own methods of which that admirable body had never approved.

  He went out of Scotland Yard and walked round to Parliament Square with a strange sensation going through him as if a couple of dozen fleas in hobnailed boots were playing hopscotch up and down his spine. The sensation was purely psychic, for his nerves were as cold as ice, as he knew by the steadiness of his hand when he stopped to light a cigarette at the corner of Whitehall, but he recognized the feeling. It was the supernatural, almost clairvoyant tingle that rippled through his consciousness when intuition leapt ahead of logic—an uncanny positive prescience for which logic could only trump up weak and fumbling reasons. He knew that Adventure had opened her arms to him again—that something had happened, or was happening, that was bound to bring him once more into the perilous twisted trails in which he was most at home—that because a garrulous charwoman had taken it into her head to bring him her troubles, there must be fun and games and boodle waiting for him again under the shadow of sudden death. That was his life, and it seemed as if it always would be.

  He had nothing much to go on, but that could be rectified. The Saint had a superb simplicity of outlook in these matters. A taxi came cruising by, and stopped when he put up his hand.

  “Take me to Duchess Place,” he said. “It’s just at the back of Curzon Street. Know it?”

  The driver said that he knew it. Simon relaxed in a corner and propped up his feet on the spare seat diagonally opposite, while the cab turned up Birdcage Walk and wriggled through the Green Park towards Hyde Park Corner. Once he roused himself to test the mechanism of the automatic in his hip-pocket; once again to loosen the thin-bladed knife in its sheath under his left sleeve. Neither of those weapons was part of the conventional outfit which anyone so impeccably dressed as he was would have been expected to wear, but for many years the Saint had placed caution so far before convention that convention was out of sight.