“I think so. You’re going to ask the Scorpion to pay your income tax.”
“I am.”
“How?”
The Saint laughed. He pointed to the desecrated overmantel.
“One thousand three hundred and thirty-seven pounds, nineteen and five-pence,” he said. “That’s my sentence for being a useful wage-earning citizen instead of a prolific parasite, according to the laws of this spavined country. Am I supposed to pay you and do your work as well? If so, I shall emigrate on the next boat and become a naturalised Venezuelan.”
“I wish you would,” said Teal, from his heart.
He picked up his hat.
“Do you know the Scorpion?” he asked suddenly.
Simon shook his head.
“Not yet. But I’m going to. His donation is not yet assessed, but I can tell you where one thousand three hundred and thirty-eight pounds of it are going to travel. And that is towards the offices of Mr Lionel Delborn, collector of extortions—may his teeth fall out and his legs putrefy! I’ll stand the odd seven-pence out of my own pocket.”
“And what do you think you’re going to do with the man himself?”
The Saint smiled.
“That’s a little difficult to say,” he murmured. “Accidents sort of—er—happen, don’t they? I mean, I don’t want you to start getting back any of your naughty old ideas about me, but—”
Teal nodded; then he met the Saint’s mocking eyes seriously.
“They’d have the coat on my back if it ever got round,” he said, “but between you and me and these four walls, I’ll make a deal—if you’ll make one too.”
Simon settled on the edge of the table, his cigarette slanting quizzically upwards between his lips, and one whimsically sardonic eyebrow arched.
“What is it?”
“Save the Scorpion for me, and I won’t ask how you paid your income tax.”
For a few moments the Saint’s noncommittal gaze rested on the detective’s round red face; then it wandered back to the impaled memorandum above the mantelpiece. And then the Saint looked Teal in the eyes and smiled again.
“O.K.,” he drawled. “That’s O.K. with me, Claud.”
“It’s a deal?”
“It is. There’s a murder charge against the Scorpion, and I don’t see why the hangman shouldn’t earn his fiver. I guess it’s time you had a break, Claud Eustace. Yes—you can have the Scorpion. Any advance on four-pence?”
Teal nodded, and held out his hand.
“Four-pence half-penny—I’ll buy you a glass of beer at any pub inside the three-mile radius on the day you bring him in,” he said.
CHAPTER 5
Patricia Holm came in shortly after four-thirty. Simon Templar had lunched at what he always referred to as “the pub round the corner”—the Berkeley—and had ambled elegantly about the purlieus of Piccadilly for an hour thereafter, for he had scarcely learned to walk two consecutive steps when his dear old grandmother had taken him on her knee and enjoined him to “eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow is Shrove Tuesday.”
He was writing when she arrived, but he put down his pen and surveyed her solemnly.
“Oh, there you are,” he remarked. “I thought you were dead, but Teal said he thought you might only have taken a trip to Vladivostok.”
“I’ve been helping Eileen Wiltham—her wedding’s only five days away. Haven’t you any more interest in her?”
“None,” said the Saint callously. “The thought of the approaching crime makes my mind feel unbinged—unhinged. I’ve already refused three times to assist Charles to select pyjamas for the bridal chamber. I told him that when he’d been married as often as I have—”
“That’ll do,” said Patricia.
“It will, very nearly,” said the Saint.
He cast an eye over the mail that she had brought in with her from the letter-box.
“Those two envelopes with half-penny stamps you may exterminate forthwith. On the third, in spite of the deceptive three-half-penny Briefmarke, I recognise the clerkly hand of Anderson and Sheppard. Add it to the holocaust. Item four”—he picked up a small brown-paper package and weighed it calculatingly in his hand—“is much too light to contain high explosive. It’s probably the new gold-mounted sock-suspenders I ordered from Asprey’s. Open it, darling, and tell me what you think of them. And I will read you some more of the Hideous History of Charles.”
He took up his manuscript.
“With what a zest did he prepare
For the first meeting (open-air)!
With what a glee he fastened on
His bevor and his morion,
His greaves, his ventail, every tace,
His pauldrons and his rerebrace!
He sallied forth with martial eye,
Prepared to do, prepared to die,
But not prepared—by Bayard! not
For the reception that he got.
Over that chapter of the tale
It would be kind to draw a veil:
Let it suffice that in disdain,
Some hecklers threw him in a drain,
And plodding home—
“Excuse me,” said the Saint.
His right hand moved like lightning, and the detonation of his heavy automatic in the confined space was like a vindictive thunderclap. It left the girl with a strange hot sting of powder on her wrist and a dull buzzing in her ears. And through the buzzing drifted the Saint’s unruffled accents:
“And plodding home, all soaked inside,
He caught pneumonia—and died.”
Patricia looked at him, white-faced.
“What was it?” she asked, with the faintest tremor in her voice.
“Just an odd spot of scorpion,” answered Simon Templar gently. “An unpleasant specimen of the breed—the last time I saw one like that was up in the hills north of Puruk-jahu. Looks like a pal of mine has been doing some quick travelling, or…Yes.” The Saint grinned. “Get on the phone to the Zoo, old dear, and tell ’em they can have their property back if they care to send round and scrape it off the carpet. I don’t think we shall want it any more, shall we?”
Patricia shuddered.
She had stripped away the brown paper and found a little cardboard box such as cheap jewellery is sometimes packed in. When she raised the lid, the tiny blue-green horror, like a miniature deformed lobster, had been lying there in a nest of cotton-wool; while she stared at it, it had rustled on to her and…
“It—wasn’t very big,” she said, in a tone that tried to match the Saint’s for lightness.
“Scorpions run to all sizes,” said the Saint cheerfully, “and as often as not their poisonousness is in inverse ratio to their size in boots. Mostly, they’re very minor troubles—I’ve been stung myself, and all I got was a sore and swollen arm. But the late lamented was a member of the one and only sure-certain and no-hokum family of homicides in the species. Pity I bumped it off so quickly—it might have been really valuable stuffed.”
Patricia’s finger-tips slid mechanically around the rough edges of the hole that the nickel-cased .45 bullet had smashed through the polished mahogany table before ruining the carpet and losing itself somewhere in the floor. Then she looked steadily at the Saint.
“Why should anyone send you a scorpion?” she asked.
Simon Templar shrugged.
“It was the immortal Paragot who said, ‘In this country the unexpected always happens, which paralyses the brain.’ And if a real man-sized Scorpion can’t be expected to send his young brothers to visit his friends as a token of esteem, what can he be expected to do?”
“Is that all?”
“All what?”
“All you propose to tell me.”
The Saint regarded her for a moment. He saw the tall slim lines of reposeful strength in her body, the fine moulding of the chin, the eyes as blue and level as his own. And slowly he screwed the cap on his fountain pen, and he stood up and came round the table.
“I’ll tell you as much more as you want to know,” he said.
“Just like in the mad old days?”
“They had their moments, hadn’t they?”
She nodded.
“Sometimes I wish we were back in them,” she said wistfully. “I didn’t fall in love with you in a pair of Anderson and Sheppard trousers—”
“They were!” cried the Saint indignantly. “I distinctly remember—”
Patricia laughed suddenly. Her hands fell on his shoulders.
“Give me a cigarette, boy,” she said, “and tell me what’s been happening.”
And he did so—though what he had to tell was little enough. And Chief Inspector Teal himself knew no more. The Scorpion had grown up in darkness, had struck from the darkness, and crawled back deeper into the dark. Those who could have spoken dared not speak, and those who might have spoken died too soon…
But as he told his tale, the Saint saw the light of all the mad old days awakening again in Patricia’s eyes, and it was in a full and complete understanding of that light that he came to the one thing that Chief Inspector Teal would have given his ears to know.
“Tonight, at nine—”
“You’ll be there?”
“I shall,” said the Saint, with the slightest tightening of his lips. “Shot up by a bloody amateur! Good God! Suppose he’d hit me! Pat, believe Papa—when I pass out, there’s going to be a first-class professional, hall-marked on every link, at the thick end of the gun.”
Patricia, in the deep armchair, settled her sweet golden head among the cushions.
“What time do we start?” she asked calmly.
For a second, glancing at him sidelong. She saw the old stubborn hardening of the line of his jaw. It happened instinctively, almost without his knowing it, and then suddenly he swung off the arm of the chair in the breath of an even older Saintly laughter.
“Why not?” he said. “It’s impossible—preposterous—unthinkable—but why not? The old gang have gone—Dicky, Archie, Roger—gone and got spliced on to women and come over all bowler-hat. There’s only you left. It’d make the vicar’s wife let out one piercing squawk and swallow her knitting-needles, but who cares? If you’d really like to have another sniff at the old brew—”
“Give me the chance!”
Simon grinned.
“And you’d flop after it like a homesick walrus down a water-chute, wouldn’t you?”
“Faster,” she said.
“And so you shall,” said the Saint. “The little date I’ve got for tonight will be all the merrier for an extra soul on the side of Saintliness and soft drinks. And if things don’t turn out exactly according to schedule, there may be an encore for your especial entertainment. Pat, I have a feeling that this is going to be our week!”
CHAPTER 6
It was one of the Saint’s most charming characteristics that he never hurried and never worried. He insisted on spending an idle hour in the cocktail bar of the May Fair Hotel, and seven-thirty had struck before he collected his car, inserted Patricia, and turned the Hirondel’s long silver nose northwards at an unwontedly moderate speed. They dined at Hatfield, after parking the Hirondel in the hotel garage, and after dinner the Saint commanded coffee and liqueurs and proceeded to incinerate two enormous cigars of a plutocratically delicate bouquet. He had calculated exactly how long it would take to walk out to location, and he declined to start one moment before his time-table demanded it.
“I am a doomed man,” he said sombrely, “and I have my privileges. If necessary, the Scorpion will wait for me.”
Actually he had no intention of being late, for the plan of campaign that he had spent the nicotinised interval after dinner adapting to Patricia’s presence required them to be at the rendezvous a shade in advance of the rest of the party.
But this the Scorpion did not know.
He drove up slowly, with his headlights dimmed, scanning the dark shadows at the side of the road. Exactly beside the point where his shaded lights picked up the grey-white blur of the appointed milestone, he saw the tiny red glow of a cigarette-end, and applied his brakes gently. The cigarette-end dropped and vanished under an invisible heel, and out of the gloom a tall dark shape stretched slowly upwards.
The Scorpion’s right hand felt the cold bulk of the automatic pistol in his pocket as his other hand lowered the nearside window. He leaned over towards the opening.
“Garrot?”
The question came in a whisper to the man at the side of the road, and he stepped slowly forward and answered in a throaty undertone.
“Yes, sir?”
The Scorpion’s head was bent low, so that the man outside the car could only see the shape of his hat.
“You obeyed your orders. That is good. Come closer…”
The gun slipped silently out of the Scorpion’s pocket, his forefinger curling quickly round the trigger as he drew it. He brought it up without a sound, so that the tip of the barrel rested on the ledge of the open window directly in line with the chest of the man twelve inches away. One lightning glance to left and right told him that the road was deserted.
“Now there is just one thing more—”
“There is,” agreed Patricia Holm crisply. “Don’t move!”
The Scorpion heard, and the glacial concentration of dispassionate unfriendliness in her voice froze him where he sat. He had not heard the noiseless turning of the handle of the door behind him, nor noticed the draught of cooler air that trickled through the car, but he felt the chilly hardness of the circle of steel that pressed into the base of his skull, and for a second he was paralysed. And in that second his target vanished.
“Drop that gun—outside the car. And let me hear it go!”
Again that crisp, commanding voice, as inclemently smooth as an arctic sea, whisked into his eardrums like a thin cold needle. He hesitated for a moment, and then, as the muzzle of the gun behind his neck increased its pressure by one warning ounce, he moved his hand obediently and relaxed his fingers. His automatic rattled on to the running board, and almost immediately the figure that he had taken for Long Harry rose into view again, and was framed in the square space of window.
But the voice that acknowledged the receipt of item, Colts, automatic, scorpions, for the use of, one, was not the voice of Long Harry. It was the most cavalier, the most mocking, the most cheerful voice that the Scorpion had ever heard—he noted those qualities about it subconsciously, for he was not in a position to revel in the discovery with any hilariously wholehearted abandon.
“O.K.…And how are you, my Scorpion?”
“Who are you?” asked the man in the car.
He still kept his head lowered, and under the brim of his hat his eyes were straining into the gloom for a glimpse of the man who had spoken, but the Saint’s face was in shadow. Glancing away to one side, the Scorpion could focus the head of the girl whose gun continued to impress his cervical vertebræ with the sense of its rocklike steadiness, but a dark close-fitting hat covered the upper part of her head, and a scarf that was loosely knotted about her neck had been pulled up to veil her face from the eyes downwards.
The Saint’s light laugh answered the question.
“I am the world’s worst gunman, and the lady behind you is the next worst, but at this range we can say that we never miss. And that’s all you need to worry about just now. The question that really arises is—who are you?”
“That is what you have still to discover,” replied the man in the car impassively. “Where is Garrot?”
“Ah! That’s what whole synods of experts are still trying to discover. Some would say that he was simply rotting, and others would say that that was simply rot. He might be floating around the glassy sea, clothed in white samite, mystic, wonderful, with his new regulation nightie flying in the breeze behind, or he might be attending to the central heating plant in the basement. I was never much of a theologian myself—”
“Is he dead?”
“Very,”
said the Saint cheerfully. “I organised the decease myself.”
“You killed him?”
“Oh, no! Nothing like that about me. I merely arranged for him to die. If you survive to read your morning paper tomorrow, you may be informed that the body of an unknown man has been fished out of the Thames. That will be Long Harry. Now come out and take your curtain, sweetheart!”
The Saint stepped back and twitched open the door, pocketing the Scorpion’s gun as he did so.
And at the same moment he had a queer feeling of futility. He knew that that was not the moment when he was destined to lay the Scorpion by the heels.
Once or twice before, in a life which had only lasted as long as it had by reason of a vigilance that never blinked for one split second, and a forethought that was accustomed to skid along half a dozen moves ahead of the opposition performers in every game with the agility of a startled streak of lightning zipping through space on ball bearings with the wind behind it, he had experienced the same sensation—of feeling as if an intangible shutter had guillotined down in front of one vitally receptive lens in his alertness. Something was going to happen—his trained intuition told him that beyond all possibility of argument, and an admixture of plain horse-sense told him what would be the general trend of that forthcoming event, equally beyond all possibility of argument—but exactly what shape that event would take was more than any faculty of his could divine.
A tingling stillness settled upon the scene, and in the stillness some fact that he should have been reckoning with seemed to hammer frantically upon that closed window in his mind. He knew that that was so, but his brain produced no other response. Just for that fractional instant of time a cog slipped one pinion, and the faultless machine was at fault. The blind spot that roams around somewhere in every human cerebral system suddenly broke its moorings, and drifted down over the one minute area of co-ordinating apparatus of which Simon Templar had most need, and no effort of his could dislodge it.
“Step out, Cuthbert,” snapped the Saint, with a slight rasp in his voice.
In the darkness inside the car, a slight blur of white caught and interested Simon’s eye. It lay on the seat beside the driver. With that premonition of failure dancing about in his subconscious and making faces at his helpless stupidity, the Saint grabbed at the straw. He got it away—a piece of paper—and the Scorpion, seeing it go, snatched wildly but not soon enough.
The Saint versus Scotland Yard (The Saint Series) Page 4