It was a quarter past six by his wrist watch when he started work; it was five minutes past seven when he got out. He had to dig his way through twelve inches of solid brick with a small screwdriver before he could get the claw of his telescopic jemmy behind the steel panel and break the lock inwards. Anyone who had come that way must have heard him; but in that respect his luck held flawlessly. Probably neither Renway nor Petrowitz had a doubt in their minds that the tempered steel plate would be enough to hold him.
He was tired and sweating when he got out, and his knuckles were raw in several places from accidental blows against the brickwork which they had suffered unnoticed in his desperate haste; but he could not stop. He raced down the long corridor and found his way through the house to the library. Nobody crossed his path. Renway had said that the regular servants would all be away, and the gang were probably busy at their appointed stations; but if anyone had attempted to hinder him, Simon with his bare hands would have had something fast and savage to say to the interference. He burst recklessly into the library and looked out of the French windows in time to see the grey shape of the Hawker pursuit plane skimming across the far field like a bullet and lofting airily over the trees at the end.
Simon lighted another cigarette very quietly and watched the grey ship climbing swiftly into the clear morning sky. If there was something cold clutching at his heart, if he was tasting the sourest narrowness of defeat, no sign of it could have been read on the tanned outline of his face.
After a second or two he sat down at the desk and picked up the telephone.
"Croydon 2720," he called, remembering the number of the aerodrome.
The reply came back very quickly:
"I'm sorry--the line is out of order."
"Then get me Croydon police station."
"I'm afraid we can't get through to Croydon at all. All the lines seem to have gone wrong."
Simon bit his lip.
"Can you get me Scotland Yard?"
He knew the answer to that inquiry also, even before he heard it, and realized that even at that stage of the proceedings he had underestimated Sir Hugo Renway. There would be no means of establishing rapid communication with any vital spot for some hours--that was because something might have gone wrong with the duplicate wireless arrangements, or one of the possible rescue ships might have managed to transmit a message.
The Saint blew perfect smoke rings at the ceiling and stared at the opposite wall. There was only one other wild solution. He had no time to try any other avenues. There would first be the business of establishing his bona fides, then of convincing an impenetrably skeptical audience, then of getting word through by personal messenger to a suitable headquarters--and the transport plane would be over the Channel long before that. But he remembered Renway's final decision--"None of the others must know"--and touched the switch of the table microphone.
"Kellard?" he said. "This is Tombs. Get my machine out and warmed up right away."
"Yessir," said the mechanic, without audible surprise; and Simon Templar felt as if a great load had been lifted from his shoulders.
Probably he still had no chance, probably he Was still taking a path to death as certain as that Which he would have trodden if he had stayed in the cellar; but it was something to attempt-- something to do.
Of course, there was a radio station on the premises. Renway had said so. But undoubtedly it was well hidden. He might spend half an hour and more looking for it. ...
No--he had taken the only way. And if it was a form of spectacular suicide, it ought to have its diverting moments before the end.
It was only natural that in those last few moments he should think of Patricia. He took up the telephone again and called his own number at St. George's Hill. In ten seconds the voice of Orace, who never" seemed to sleep, answered him. "They've gorn," Orace informed him, with a slight sinister emphasis on the pronoun. "Miss 'Olm says she's sleepin' at Cornwall 'Ouse. Nobody's worried 'er."
Simon called another number.
"Hullo, sweetheart," he said; and the Saintly voice had never been more gentle, more easy and light-hearted, more bubbling over with the eager promise of an infinite and adventurous future. "Why, I'm fine. . . . No, there hasn't been any trouble. Just an odd spot of spontaneous combustion in the withered brain cells of Claud Eustace Teal--but we've had that before. I've got it all fixed. . . . Never mind how, darling. You know your Simon. This is much more important. Now listen carefully. D'you remember a guy named George Wynnis, that I've talked about soaking sometime? . . . Well, he lives at 366 South Aud-ley Street. He never gets up before ten in the morning, and he never has less than two thousand quid in his pockets. Phone Hoppy to join you, and go get that dough--now! And listen. Leave my mark behind!"
"You're crazy," she said; and he laughed.
"I am and I'm not," he said. "But this time I have the perfect alibi; and I want to get you every cent I can lay hold of before I cash in my chips." The lilt in his voice made it impossible to take him literally. "God bless you, keed," he said. "Be seein' ya!"
He hung up the handpiece and leaned back in his chair, inhaling the last puffs of his cigarette. Surely, this time, he had the perfect and immutable alibi. A dry sardonic smile touched his lips; but the fine-cut sapphires in his eyes were twinkling. It would give Claud Eustace something more to think about, anyway. . . . He looked out of the windows, down the long gentle slope that was just being gilded by the sun, and saw his own Tiger Moth standing beside the old tithe barn, the propeller lost" in a swirling circle of light, the mechanic's hair fluttering in the cockpit, a thin plume of haze drifting back from the exhaust. The sky was a pale crystalline eggshell blue, clear and still as a dream, a sky that could give a man pleasant memories to carry with him into the long dark. . . .
Without conscious thought, he hauled out his helmet from a side pocket, pulled it over his head, buckled the strap, and adjusted the goggles on his
forehead. And he was doing that when a shadow fell across the desk, and he looked up.
A broad-shouldered portly form, with a round cherubic pink face and small baby-blue eyes, crowned with an incongruous black bowler hat of old-fashioned elevation, was filling the open French doors. It was Chief Inspector Teal.
X
Simon sprang up impetuously.
"Claud!" he cried. "I never thought I should be glad to see your huge stomach------"
"I thought you might be here," said the detective stiffly.
He came on into the room, but only far enough to allow Sergeant Barrow to follow him through the window. With that end accomplished, he kept his distance. There was still a puffy tenderness in his jaw to remind him of a fist like a chunk of stone driven by a bolt of lightning, which had reached him once already when he came too near.
"It must be this deductive business that Scotland Yard is taking up," Simon remarked more slowly.
Teal nodded without relaxing.
"I knew you were interested in Renway, and I knew you'd been here once before--when Uniatz knocked out the policeman. It occurred to me that it'd be just like you to come back, in spite of everything."
"In spite of hell and high water," Simon murmured with a faint smile, "we keep on doing our stuff. Well, it's not a bad reputation to have. . . . But this time I've got something more important to say to you."
"I've got the same thing to say to you as I had last time," said the detective, iron-jawed. "I want you, Saint."
Simon started round the desk.
"But this is serious!"
"So is this," said Teal implacably. He took his right hand out of his pocket, and there was a gun in it. "I don't want to have to use it, but I'm going to take you back this time if it's the last thing I do."
The Saint's eyes narrowed to shreds of flint.
"You're damn right it'll be the last thing you do!" he shot back. And then his tensed lips moved into the thinnest of thin smiles. "Now listen to me, you great oaf. You want me for being mixed up with a guy name
d Hoppy Uniatz who smacked a cop on the button outside here the other night. Guilty. But you also want me for the murder of Manuel Enrique and the knocking off of an aeroplane from Hawker's. Not guilty and not guilty. That's what I wanted to see you for. That's the only reason on earth why I couldn't have been more glad to see anything else walk in here than your fatuous red face. I want to tell you whom you | really do want!"
"I know whom I want," answered Teal stonily.
"Yeah?" The Saint's voice was one vicious upward swoop of derision. "Then did you know you were standing inside his house right now?"
Mr. Teal blinked. His eyes began a fractional widening; his mouth began an infinitesimal opening.
"Renway?" he said. And then the baleful skepticism came back into his face with a tinge of colour. "Is that your new alibi?" he jeered.
"That's my new alibi," said the Saint, rather quickly and quietly; "and you'd better listen to it. Did you know that Renway was the man who stole that aeroplane from Hawker's?"
"I didn't. And I don't know it yet."
"He brought it here and landed it here, and I watched him. Go down to that field out there and have a look at the scars in the grass where he had his flares, if you're too dumb to believe me. Did you know that he had a submarine in a cave in the cliffs, with live torpedoes on board?"
"Did I know------"
"Did you know that the crew of the submarine have been sleeping in a secret room under this house for months? Did you know they were the toughest bunch of hoodlums I've seen in England for years?"
"Did I------"
"Did you know," asked the Saint, in a final rasp, "that three million pounds in gold is on its way flying from Croydon to Paris right now while you're getting in my hair with your blathering imitation of a bum detective--and Renway has got everything set to shoot it down and set up a crime record that'll make Scotland Yard look more halfwitted than it's ever looked since I started taking it apart?"
The detective swallowed. There was an edge of savage sincerity in the Saint's voice which bit into the leathery hide of his incredulity. He suffered a wild fantastic temptation to begin to listen, to take in the preposterous story that the Saint was putting up, to consider the items of it soberly and seriously. And he was sure he was making a fool of himself. He gulped down the ridiculous impulse and plunged into defensive sarcasm.
"Of course I didn't know all that," he almost purred. "Is Einstein going to prove it for you, or will Renway admit it himself?"
"Renway will admit it himself," said the Saint grimly. "But even that won't be necessary. Did you know that these ten tons of gold were being shipped on aeroplane G-EZQX, which took off from Croydon at seven?" He ripped the top sheet off the memorandum block on the desk and thrust it out. "Do you know that that's his handwriting, or will you want his bank manager to tell you?"
Teal looked at the sheet.
"It doesn't matter much whether it's his writing or your version of it," he said, with an almost imperceptible break in the smoothness of his studied purr. "As a Treasury official, Renway has a per-fect right to know anything like that."
"Yeah?" Simon's voice was suddenly so soft that it made Teal's laboured suaveness sound like the sreech of a circular saw. "And I suppose he had a perfect right to know Manuel Enrique, and not say anything about it when he brought him into the police station at Horley?"
"Who says he knew Enrique?"
The Saint smiled.
"Not me, Claud. If I tell you he did, it'll just make you quite sure he didn't. This is what says so."
He put his hand in his pocket and took out the letter which he had found in the safe. "Or maybe I faked this, too?" he suggested mildly.
"You may have done," said Teal dispassionately; but his baby-blue eyes rested with a rather queer intensity on Simon's face.
"Come for a walk, Claud," said the Saint gently, "and tell me I faked this."
He turned aside quite calmly under the muzzle of Teal's gun and walked to the door. For no earthly reason that he could have given in logical terms, Mr. Teal followed him. And all the time he had a hot gnawing fear that he was making a fool of himself.
Sergeant Barrow followed Mr. Teal because that was his job. He was a fool anyway, and he knew it. Mr. Teal had often told him so.
In the billiard room, Simon pointed to the panel sagging loose on its hinges as he had torn it off-- the hole he had chipped through the wall, the wooden stairway going steeply down into the chalk.
"That's where those six men have been living, so that the ordinary servants never knew there was anything going on. You'll find their beds and everything. That's where I was shut up when they got wise to who I was; and that's where I've just got out of."
Teal said nothing for several seconds. And then the most significant thing was, not what he said, but what he did.
He put his gun back in his pocket and looked at the Saint almost helplessly. No one will ever know what it cost him to be as natural as that. But whatever his other failings may have been, Chief Inspector Teal was a kind of sportsman. He could take it, even when it hurt.
"What else do you know?" he asked.
"That the submarine is out in the Channel now, waiting for the aeroplane to come down. That Renway's up over here in that Hawker ship, with loaded machine guns to shoot down the gold transport, and a packet of bombs to drop on any boat that tries to go to the rescue. That all the telephone lines to Croydon Aerodrome, and between the coast and London, have been cut. That there's a radio transmitter somewhere in this place--I haven't found it yet--which is just waiting to carry on signalling when the transport plane stops. That there isn't a hope in hell of getting a warning through to anywhere in time to stop the raid."
Teal's pink face had gone curiously pale.
"Isn't there anything we can do?" he said.
"There's only one thing," answered the Saint. "Down on the landing field you probably saw a Tiger Moth warming up. It's mine. It's the ship I came here in--but that's another story. With your permission, I can go up in it and try to keep Renway off. Don't tell me it's suicide, because I know all that. But it's murder for the crew of that transport plane if I don't try."
The detective did not answer for a moment. He stared at the floor, avoiding the Saint's straight blue gaze.
"I can't stop you," he said at last; and Simon smiled.
"You can forget about Hoppy hitting that policeman, if you're satisfied with the other evidence," he said. He had a sudden absurd thought of what would shortly be happening to a certain George Wynnis, and a shaft of the old mockery touched his smile like sunlight. "And next time I tell you that some low criminal is putting his stuff onto me, Claud," he said, "you mayn't be so nasty and disbelieving."
His forefinger prodded Mr. Teal's stomach in the old maddening way; but his smile was only reminiscent. And without another word he went out of the billiard room, down the long dark corridor to the open air.
As he climbed into the cockpit of his ship he looked back towards the house and saw Mr. Teal standing on the terrace, watching him. He waved a gay arm, while the mechanic dragged away the chocks from under the wheels; and then he settled down and opened the throttle. The stick slid forward between his knees, the tail lifted, and he went roaring down the field to curve upwards in a steep climbing turn over the trees.
He had left it late enough; and if the wind had been in the north instead of in the south he might have been too late. Winding up the sky in smoothly controlled spirals, he saw the single wide span of a big monoplane coming up from the northern horizon, and knew that it must be the transport plane for which Renway was waiting--no other ship of that build would have been flying south at that hour. He looked for Renway and saw a shape like a big square-tipped seagull swinging round in a wide circle over the Channel, six thousand feet up in the cloudless blue. . . .
Renway! The Saint's steady fingers moved on the stick, steepening the angle of climb by a fraction; and his lips settled in a grim reckless line at the remainder that thos
e fingers had no Bowden trips under them, as Renway's had. He looked ahead through the propeller between a double rank of dancing valve springs instead of between the foreshortened blued jackets of a pair of guns. He was taking on a duel in which nothing but his own skill of hand and eye could be matched against the spitting muzzles of Renway's guns-- and whatever skill Renway could bring to the handling of them. And suddenly the Saint laughed --a devilish buccaneering laugh that bared his teeth and edged the chilled steel in his eyes, and was drowned to soundlessness in the smashing howl of his engine and whipped away in the tearing sting of the wind.
Renway! The man who had taken his name in vain. The man who had murdered Enrique and put the Saint's mark on him. The man who had stolen the very aeroplane which he was now going up to fight--and had put the Saint's mark on the theft. The overfed, mincing, nerve-ridden, gas-choked, splay-footed, priggish, yellow-bellied, pompous great official sausage who had had the everlasting gall to say that he himself--he--was the Saint!
Simon Templar glanced at the altimeter and edged the stick forward again along his right thigh. Five thousand feet. ... A gentle pressure of his right foot on the rudder, and the Tiger Moth swung round and levelled off. The country beneath him was flattened out like a painted map, the light green of fields, the darker green of woods, white ribbons of road, and a white ribbon of surf along the edge of the grey-green sea. The transport plane was slipping across the map half 'a mile under him, cruising at ninety miles an hour air-speed--a lumbering slow-motion cargo boat of the skies. His eagle's eyesight picked out the letters painted across the upper fabric of the wing: G-EZQX. His own air-speed indicator showed .1 hundred and eighty. It went through his mind that Renway must have watched him coming up. Renway must have seen the Tiger Moth warming up outside the barn and seen it take off. Renway must have guessed that something had gone wrong --must, even then, have been staring down with glazed eyes and twitching fingers, realizing that there was an obstacle in his path that must he blotted out.
12 The Saint in London (The Misfortunes of Mr Teal) Page 22