12 The Saint in London (The Misfortunes of Mr Teal)

by Leslie Charteris

  "Sir Hugo Renway, of March House, Betfield, near Folkestone, and his chauffeur, John Kel-lard," 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 patronizingly 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 apologize," 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.

  III

  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 northwest. The Saint sat over his maps with a glass of sherry for half an hour before dinner the following evening, memorizing 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 such seductive simplicity as 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, traveling 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 of 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 northwest boundary of March House, Simon felt more practically cautious about accepting Hoppy's offer of assistance. On such an expedition as he had undertaken, 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 de 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 har-rowingly 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 lay of the land ahead of him. He was in a spinney of young trees and brushwood; barred here and there with the boles 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 trip wires 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 thej 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 noth-ing of it. A car passing on another road half mile away might have caused it, and a subcon-scious 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 borderline of as-sertiveness at which his sense of hearing was jolted into sitting up and taking notice. He lis-tened to it, frowning, while it grew to 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 oh 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 spring 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 northwest to southeast, 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 hear 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 sleuthlike 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 that 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 realized 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.

  But it didn't lollop back into the bush from which it had emerged. Perhaps it had a date with some loose-moraled 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.

  IV

  SlMON 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 h
e 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.