"Yes?"
"Oh, yes.... It was a grand idea until the accidents began to happen. Forrest was another accident. You got some of his blood on you—it's on you now—and you were afraid to jump back into bed when you heard me coming up the stairs. You lost your head again, and plunged into a phoney kidnapping. I don't believe that you skipped out of your window at all just then—you simply hopped into another room and hid there till the coast was clear. I wondered about that when I didn't hear any car driving off, and nobody took a shot at me when I walked round the house."
"Go on."
"Then you realized that someone would send for the police, and you had to delay that until you'd carried out your original plan of strengthening Quintus's alibi and killing Hoppy and me. You cut the phone wires. That was another error: an outside gang would have done that first and taken no chances, not run the risk of hanging around to do it after the job was pulled. Again, you didn't shoot at me when I went out of doors the second time, because you wanted to make it look as if Quintus was also being shot at first. Then when you chose your moment, I was lucky enough to be too fast for you. When you heard me chasing round the outside of the house, you pushed off into the night for another think. I'd 've had the hell of a time catching you out there in the dark, so I let you hear me talking to the butler because I knew it would fetch you in."
Tamblin nodded.
"You only made two mistakes," he said. "Forrest would have been killed anyway, only I should have chosen a better time for it. I heard Rosemary talking to him one night outside the front door, directly under my window, when he was leaving—that is how I found out that Nora had written to you and where she was going to meet you."
"And the other mistake?" Simon asked coolly.
"Was when you let your own cleverness run away with you. When you arranged your clever scheme to get me to walk in here to provide the climax for your dramatic revelations, and even left the front door ajar to make it easy for me. You conceited fool! You've got your confession; but did you think I'd let it do you any good ? Your bluff only bothered me for a moment when I was afraid Quintus had ratted. As soon as I found he hadn't, I was laughing at you. The only difference you've made is that now I shall have to kill Rosemary as well. Quintus had ideas about her, and we could have used her to build up the story——"
"Bertrand," said the Saint gravely, "I'm afraid you are beginning to drivel."
The revolver that was trained on him did not waver.
"Tell me why," Tamblin said interestedly.
Simon trickled smoke languidly through his nostrils. He was still leaning back in his chair, imperturbably relaxed, in the attitude in which he had stayed even when Tamblin entered the room.
"Because it's your turn to be taking too much for granted. You thought my cleverness had run away with me, and so you stopped thinking. It doesn't seem to have occurred to you that since I expected you to come in, I may have expected just how sociable your ideas would be when you got here. You heard me give Jeeves a gun, and so you've jumped to the conclusion that I'm unarmed. Now will you take a look at my left hand ? You notice that it's in my coat pocket. I've got you covered with another gun, Bertrand, and I'm ready to bet I can shoot faster than you. If you don't believe me, just start squeezing that trigger."
Tamblin stood gazing motionlessly at him for a moment; and then his head tilted back and a cackle of hideous laughter came through the slit in the bandages over his mouth.
"Oh, no, Mr Templar," he crowed. "You're the one who took too much for granted. You decided that Quintus was a phoney doctor, and so you didn't stop to think that he might be a genuine pickpocket. When he was holding on to you in the corridor upstairs—you remember?—he took the magazines out of both your guns. You've got one shot in the chamber of the gun you've got left, and Quintus has got you covered as well now. You can't get both of us with one bullet. You've been too clever for the last time——"
It was no bluff. Simon knew it with a gambler's instinct, and knew that Tamblin had the last laugh.
"Take your hand out of your pocket," Tamblin snarled. "Quintus is going to aim at Rosemary. If you use that gun, you're killing her as surely as if ——"
The Saint saw Tamblin's forefinger twitch on the trigger, and waited for the sharp bite of death.
The crisp thunder of cordite splintered the unearthly stillness; but the Saint felt no shock, no pain. Staring incredulously, he saw Tamblin stagger as if a battering-ram had hit him in the back; saw him sway weakly, his right arm drooping until the revolver slipped through his fingers; saw his knees fold and his body pivot slantingly over them like a falling tree. . . . And saw the cubist figure and pithecanthropoid visage of Hoppy Uniatz coming through the door with a smoking Betsy in its hairy hand.
He heard another thud on his right, and looked round. The thud was caused by Quintus's gun hitting the carpet. Quintus's hands waved wildly in the air as Hoppy turned towards him.
"Don't shoot!" he screamed. "I'll give you a confession. I haven't killed anyone. Tamblin did it all. Don't shoot me——"
"He doesn't want to be shot, Hoppy," said the Saint. "I think we'll let the police have him—just for a change. It may help to convince mem of our virtue."
"Boss," said Mr Uniatz, lowering his gun, "I done it."
The Saint nodded. He got up out of his chair. It felt rather strange to be alive and untouched.
"I know," he said. "Another half a second and he'd 've been the most famous gunman on earth."
Mr Uniatz glanced cloudily at the body on the floor.
"Oh, him," he said vaguely, "Yeah.... But listen, boss— I done it!"
"You don't have to worry about it," said the Saint. "You've done it before. And Comrade Quintus's squeal will let you out."
Rosemary Chase was coming towards him, pale but steady. It seemed to Simon Templar that a long time had been wasted in which he had been too busy to remember how beautiful she was and how warm and red her lips were. She put out a hand to him; and because he was still the Saint and always would be, his arm went round her.
"I know it's tough," he said. "But we can't change it."
"It doesn't seem so bad now, somehow," she said. "To know that at least my father wasn't doing all this.... I wish I knew how to thank you."
"Hoppy's the guy to thank," said the Saint, and looked at him. "I never suspected you of being a thought-reader, Hoppy, but I'd give a lot to know what made you come out of the kitchen in the nick of time ?"
Mr Uniatz blinked at him.
"Dat's what I mean, boss, when I say I done it," he explained, his brow furrowed with the effort of amplifying a statement which seemed to him to be already obvious enough. "When you call out de butler, he is just opening me anudder bottle of Scotch. An' dis time I make de grade. I drink it down to de last drop wit'out stopping. So I come right out to tell ya." A broad beam of ineffable pride opened up a gold mine in the centre of Mr Uniatz's face. "I done it, boss! Ain't dat sump'n ?"
PART 3: THE AFFAIR OF HOGSBOTHAM
I
THERE ARE times," remarked Simon Templar, putting down the evening paper and pouring himself a second glass of Tio Pepe, "when I am on the verge of swearing a great oath never to look at another newspaper as long as I live. Here you have a fascinating world full of all kinds of busy people, being born, falling in love, marrying, dying and being killed, working, starving, fighting, splitting atoms and measuring stars, inventing trick corkscrews and relativity theories, building skyscrapers and suffering hell with toothache. When I buy a newspaper I want to read all about them. I want to know what they're doing and creating and planning and striving for and going to war about — all the exciting vital things that make a picture of a real world and real people's lives. And what do I get?"
"What do you get, Saint?" asked Patricia Holm with a smile.
Simon picked up the newspaper again.
"This is what I get," he said. "I get a guy whose name, believe it or not, is Ebenezer Hogsbotham. Comrade Hogsb
otham, having been born with a name like that and a face to match it, if you can believe a newspaper picture, has never had a chance in his life to misbehave, and has therefore naturally developed into one of those guys who feel that they have a mission to protect everyone else from misbehaviour. He has therefore been earnestly studying the subject in order to be able to tell other people how to protect themselves from it. For several weeks, apparently, he has been frequenting the bawdiest theatres and the nudest night clubs, discovering just how much depravity is being put out to ensnare those people who are not so shiningly immune to contamination as himself; as a result of which he has come out hot and strong for a vigorous censorship of all public entertainment. Since Comrade Hogsbotham has carefully promoted himself to be president of the National Society for the Preservation of Public Morals, he hits the front-page headlines while five hundred human beings who get themselves blown to bits by honourable Japanese bombs are only worth a three-line filler on page eleven. And this is the immortal utterance that he hits them with: 'The public has a right to be protected,' he says, 'from displays of suggestiveness and undress which are disgusting to all right-thinking people.' . . . 'Right-thinking people', of course, only means people who think like Comrade Hogsbotham; but it's one of those crushing and high-sounding phrases that the Hogsbothams of this world seem to have a monopoly on. Will you excuse me while I vomit ?"
Patricia fingered the curls in her soft golden hair and considered him guardedly.
"You can't do anything else about it," she said. "Even you can't alter that sort of thing, so you might as well save your energy."
"I suppose so." The Saint scowled, "But it's just too hopeless to resign yourself to spending the rest of your life watching nine-tenths of the world's population, who've got more than enough serious things to worry about already, being browbeaten into a superstitious respect for the humbug of a handful of yapping cryptorchid Hogsbothams. I feel that somebody on the other side of the fence ought to climb over and pin his ears back.. . I have a pain in the neck. I should like to do something to demonstrate my unparalleled immorality. I want to go out and burgle a convent; or borrow a guitar and parade in front of Hogsbotham's house, singing obscene songs in a beery voice."
He took his glass over to the window and stood there looking down over Piccadilly and the Green Park with a faraway dreaminess in his blue eyes that seemed to be playing with all kinds of electric and reprehensible ideas beyond the humdrum view on which they were actually focused; and Patricia Holm watched him with eyes of the same reckless blue but backed by a sober understanding. She had known him too long to dismiss such a mood as lightly as any other woman would have dismissed it. Any other .man might have voiced the same grumble without danger of anyone else remembering it beyond the next drink; but when the man who was so fantastically called the Saint uttered that kind of unsaintly thought, his undercurrent of seriousness was apt to be translated into a different sort of headline with a frequency that Patricia needed all her reserves of mental stability to cope with. Some of the Saint's wildest adventures had started from less sinister openings than that, and she measured him now with a premonition that she had not yet heard the last of that random threat. For a whole month he had done nothing illegal, and in his life thirty days of untarnished virtue was a long time. She studied the buccaneering lines of his lean figure, sensed the precariously curbed restlessness under his lounging ease, and knew that even if no exterior adventure crossed his path that month of peace would come to spontaneous disruption. ...
And then he turned back with a smile that did nothing to reassure her.
"Well, we shall see," he murmured, and glanced at his watch. "It's time you were on your way to meet that moribund aunt of yours. You can make sure she hasn't changed her will, because we might stir up some excitement by bumping her off."
She made a face at him and stood up.
"What are you going to do tonight ?"
"I called Claud Eustace this morning and made a date to take him out to dinner—maybe he'll know about something exciting that's going on. And it's time we were on our way too. Are you ready, Hoppy?"
The rudimentary assortment of features which constituted the hairless or front elevation of Hoppy Uniatz's head emerged lingeringly from behind the bottle of Caledonian dew with which he had been making another of his indomitable attempts to assuage the chronic aridity of his gullet.
"Sure, boss," he said agreeably. "Ain't I always ready? Where do we meet, dis dame we gotta bump off?"
The Saint sighed.
"You'll find out," he said. "Let's go."
Mr Uniatz trotted placidly after him. In Mr Uniatz's mind, a delicate organ which he had to be careful not to overwork, there was room for none of the manifestations of philosophical indignation with which Simon Templar was sometimes troubled. By the time it had found space for the ever-present problems of quenching an insatiable thirst and finding a sufficient supply of lawfully bumpable targets to keep the rust from forming in the barrel of his Betsy, it really had room for only one other idea. And that other permanently comforting and omnipresent notion was composed entirely of the faith and devotion with which he clung to the intellectual pre-eminence of the Saint. The Saint, Mr Uniatz had long since realized, with almost religious awe, could Think. To Mr Uniatz, a man whose rare experiments with Thought had always given him a dull pain under the hat, this discovery had simplified life to the point where Paradise itself would have had few advantages to offer, except possibly rivers flowing with Scotch whisky. He simply did what he was told, and everything came out all right. Anything the Saint said was okay with him.
It is a lamentable fact that Chief-Inspector Claud Eustace Teal had no such faith to buoy him up. Mr Teal's views were almost diametrically the reverse of those which gave so much consolation to Mr Uniatz. To Mr Teal, the Saint was a perennial harbinger of woe, an everlasting time-bomb planted under his official chair—with the only difference that when ordinary bombs blew up they were at least over and done with, whereas the Saint was a bomb with the supernatural and unfair ability to blow up whenever it wanted to without in any way impairing its capacity for future explosions. He had accepted the Saint's invitation to dinner with an uneasy and actually unjustified suspicion that there was probably a catch in it, as there had been in most of his previous encounters with the Saint; and there was a gleam of something like smugness in his sleepy eyes as he settled more firmly behind his desk at Scotland Yard and shook his head with every conventional symptom of regret.
"I'm sorry, Saint," he said. "I ought to have phoned you, but I've been so busy. I'm going to have to ask you to fix another evening. We had a bank holdup at Staines today, and I've got to go down there and take over."
Simon's brows began to rise by an infinitesimal hopeful fraction.
"A bank holdup, Claud? How much did they get away with?"
"About fifteen thousand pounds," Teal said grudgingly. "You ought to know. It was in the evening papers."
"I do seem to remember seeing something about it tucked away somewhere," Simon said thoughtfully. "What do you know?"
The detective's mouth closed and tightened up. It was as if he was already regretting having said so much, even though the information was broadcast on the streets for anyone with a spare penny to read. But he had seen that tentatively optimistic flicker of the Saint's mocking eyes too often in the past to ever be able to see it again without a queasy hollow feeling in the pit of his ample stomach. He reacted to it with a brusqueness that sprang from a long train of memories of other occasions when crime had been in the news and boodle in the wind, and Simon Templar had greeted both promises with the same incorrigibly hopeful glimmer of mischief in his eyes, and that warning had presaged one more nightmare chapter in the apparently endless sequence that had made the name of the Saint the most dreaded word in the vocabulary of the underworld and the source of more grey hairs in Chief-Inspector Teal's dwindling crop than any one man had a right to inflict on
a conscientious officer of the law.
"If I knew all about it I shouldn't have to go to Staines," he said conclusively. "I'm sorry, but I can't tell you where to go and pick up the money."
"Maybe I could run you down," Simon began temptingly. "Hoppy and I are all on our own this evening, and we were just looking for something useful to do. My car's outside, and it needs some exercise. Besides, I feel clever tonight. All my genius for sleuthing and deduction——"
"I'm sorry," Teal repeated. "There's a police car waiting for me already. I'll have to get along as well as I can without you." He stood up, and held out his hand. A sensitive man might almost have thought that he was in a hurry to avoid an argument. "Give me a ring one day next week, will you? I'll be able to tell you all about it then."
Simon Templar stood on the Embankment outside Scotland Yard and lighted a cigarette with elaborately elegant restraint.
"And that, Hoppy," he explained, "is what is technically known as the Bum's Rush."
He gazed resentfully at the dingy panorama which is the total of everything that generations of London architects and County Councils have been able to make out of their river frontages.
"Nobody loves us," he said gloomily. "Patricia forsakes us to be a dutiful niece to a palsied aunt, thereby leaving us exposed to every kind of temptation. We try to surround ourselves with holiness by dining with a detective, and he's too busy to keep the date. We offer to help him and array ourselves on the side of law and order, and he gives us the tax-collector's welcome. His evil mind distrusts our immaculate motives. He is so full of suspicion and uncharitable-ness that he thinks our only idea is to catch up with his bank holder-uppers before he does and relieve them of their loot for our own benefit. He practically throws us out on our ear, and abandons us to any wicked schemes we can cook up. What are we going to do about it?"
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