“My dear young friend!”
The voice, when Kuzela found it, had the same svelte timbre as before, and Simon bowed a mocking compliment to the other’s nerve.
“My dear old comrade!” he murmured, open-armed.
“You have saved us the trouble of fetching you, Templar,” Kuzela said blandly. “But where is Ngano?”
“The Negro Spiritual?” The Saint aligned his eyebrows banteringly. “I’m afraid he—er—met with a slight accident.”
“Ah!”
“No—not exactly. I don’t think he’s quite dead yet, though he may easily have strangled himself by this time. But he hasn’t enjoyed himself. I think if the circumstances had been reversed, he would have talked,” said the Saint, with a glacial inclemency of quietness.
Kuzela stroked his chin.
“That is unfortunate,” he said.
And then he smiled.
“But it is not fatal, my friend,” he purred. “The lady has already solved one problem for us herself. And now that she is here, I am sure you would do anything rather than expose her to the slightest danger. So let us return to our previous conversation at once. Perhaps the lady will tell us herself where she went to when she drove away from here?”
Simon put his hands in his pockets.
“Why, yes,” he said good-humouredly. “I should think she would.”
The girl looked at him as if she could not quite believe her ears. And Simon met her puzzled gaze with blue eyes of such a blinding Saintly innocence that even she could read no enticement to deception in them.
“Do you mean that?” she asked.
“Of course,” said the Saint. “There are one or two things I shouldn’t mind knowing myself.”
Patricia put a hand to her head.
“If you want to know—when I left here I drove straight to—”
“Buckingham Palace,” drawled the Saint. “And then?”
“I had the bags taken up to Beppo’s room, and I saw him myself. He was quite wide awake and sensible. I told him I was coming back here to get you out, and said that if I wasn’t back by four o’clock, or one of us hadn’t rung him up, he was to get in touch with Teal. I gave him Teal’s private number. He didn’t want me to go at all, but I insisted. That’s all there is to tell. I picked up a puncture on the second trip out here, and that held me up a bit—”
“But who cares about that?” said the Saint.
He turned back to the desk.
The man with the gun stood less than a yard away on his right front, but the Saint, ignoring his very existence, leaned a little forward and looked from the distance of another yard into the face of Kuzela. The loose poise of his body somehow centred attention even while it disarmed suspicion. But the mockery had gone out of his eyes.
“You heard?” he asked.
Kuzela nodded. His mouth went up at one corner. “But I still see no reason for alarm my friend,” he said, in that wheedling voice of stow malevolence. “After all, there is still time for much to happen. Before your friend Mr Teal arrives—”
“Before my friend Chief Inspector Teal arrives with a squad of policemen in a plain van, I shall be a long way from here,” said the Saint.
Kuzela started.
“So you have invoked the police?” he snapped. And then again he recovered himself. “But that is your affair. By the time they arrive, as you say, you will have left here. But where do you think you will have gone?”
“Home, James,” said the Saint.
He took one hand out of his pocket to straighten his coat, and smiled without mirth.
“Fortunately, the argument between us can be settled tonight,” he said, “which will save me having to stage any reunions. Your black torturer has been dealt with. I have given him a dose of his own medicine which will, I think, put him in hospital for several weeks. But you remain. You are, after all, the man who gave Ngano his orders. I have seen what you did to the Duke of Fortezza, and I know what you wanted to have done to me…I hope you will get on well with Wilfred.”
“And what do you think you are going to do to me?” asked Kuzela throatily, and Simon held him with his eyes.
“I’m going to kill you, Kuzela,” he said simply.
“Ah! And how will you do that?”
Simon’s fingers dipped into his pocket. They came out with an ordinary match-box, and he laid it on the desk.
“That is the answer to all questions,” he said.
Kuzela stared down at the box. It sat there in the middle of his clean white blotter, yellow and oblong and angular, as commonplace a thing as any man could see on his desk—and the mystery of it seemed to leer up at him malignantly. He picked it up and shook it: it weighed light in his hand, and his mind balked at the idea that it should conceal any engine of destruction. And the Saint’s manner of presenting it had been void of the most minute scintilla of excitement—and still was. He eyed Kuzela quizzically.
“Why not open it?” he suggested.
Kuzela looked at him blankly. And then, with a sudden impatience, he jabbed his thumb at the little sliding drawer…
In a dead silence, the box fell through the air and flopped half-open on the desk.
“What does this mean?” asked Kuzela, almost in a whisper.
“It means that you have four minutes to live,” said the Saint.
Kuzela held up his hand and stared at it.
In the centre of the ball of his right thumb a little globule of blood was swelling up in the pinky-white of the surrounding skin. He gazed stupidly from it to the match-box and back again. In imagination, he felt a second time the asp-like prick that had bitten into his thumb as he moved the drawer of the box—and understood. “The answer to all questions…”
He stood there as powerless to move as a man in a nightmare, and watched the infinitely slow distention of the tiny crimson sphere under his eyes, his face going ashen with the knowledge of inescapable doom. The drop of blood hypnotised him, filled his vision till he could see nothing else but the microscopic reflections glistening over the surface of it—until all at once it seemed to grow magically into a coruscating red vesicle of enormous size, thrusting in upon him, bearing him down, filling the whole universe with the menace of its smothering scarlet magnitude. A roaring of mighty waters seethed up about his ears…
The others saw him brace himself on his feet as if to resist falling, and he remained quite still, with his eyes fixing and going dim. And then he took one step sideways, swayed, and crumpled down on to the floor with his limbs twitching convulsively and his chest labouring…
Quite calmly and casually the Saint put out a hand and clasped it on the gun wrist of the man who stood beside him.
The man seemed to come alive out of a dream. And without any noticeable interregnum of full consciousness, he seemed to pass right on into another kind of dream—the transition being effected by the contingence upon the point of his jaw of a tearing uppercut that started well below the Saint’s waistline and consummated every erg of its weight and velocity at the most vital angle of the victim’s face. With the results aforementioned. He went down in a heap and lay very still, even as his companion had done a little earlier, and Simon picked up the gun.
“Which finishes that,” said the Saint, and found Patricia looking down again at Kuzela.
“What happened to him?” she asked, a trifle unsteadily.
“More or less what he tried to make happen to me. Ever come across those trick match-boxes that shoot a needle into you when you try to open them? I bought one last afternoon, and replaced the needle with something that was sent to me along with the message you know about. And I don’t know that we shall want it again.”
He took the little box of death over to the fireplace, dropped it in the grate, and raked the glowing embers over it. Then he took up his hat and stick, which he saw lying in a chair, and glanced around for the last time. Only Kuzela’s fingers were twitching now, and a wet froth gleamed on his lips and dribbled down one c
heek…Simon put an arm round the girl’s shoulders.
“I guess we can be going,” he said, and led her out of the room.
It was in the hall that the expression on the face of a clock caught his eye and pulled him up with a jerk.
“What time did you say Beppo was going to get in touch with Teal?” he inquired.
“Four o’clock.” Patricia followed his gaze and then looked at her wrist. “That clock must be fast—”
“Or else you’ve stopped,” said the Saint pithily. He turned back his sleeve and inspected his own watch. “And stopped you have, old darling. It’s thirty-three minutes after four now—and to give Claud Eustace even a chance to think that he’d pulled me out of a mess would break my heart. Not to include another reason why he mustn’t find us here. Where did you leave the car?”
“Just one block away.”
“This is where we make greyhounds look lazy,” said the Saint, and opened the front door.
They were at the gate when Simon saw the lights of a car slowing up and swinging in to the kerb on his left. Right in front of him, Kuzela’s car was parked, and the Saint knew clairvoyantly that that was their only chance.
He caught Patricia’s arm and flipped up the collar of her coat.
“Jump to it,” he crisped.
He scudded round to the driving-seat, and the girl tumbled in beside him as he let in the clutch. He shot right past the police car with his head well down and his shoulders hunched. A tattered shout reached him as he went by, and then he was bucking off down a side street with the car heeling over on two wheels as he crammed it round the corner. The police car would have to be turned right round in a narrow road before it could get after him, and he knew he was well away. He dodged hectically south-east, and kept hard at it till he was sure he had left any pursuit far behind.
Somewhere in the northern hinterlands of the Tottenham Court Road he stopped the car and made some hurried repairs to his appearance with the aid of the driving-mirror, and ended up looking distinctly more presentable than he had been when they left Hampstead. He looked so presentable, in fact, that they abandoned the car on that spot, and walked boldly on until they met a taxi, which took them to Berkeley Square.
“For the night isn’t nearly over yet,” said the Saint, as they walked down Upper Berkeley Mews together after the taxi had chugged off out of sight.
It was one of those fool-proof prophecies which always delighted his sense of the slickness of things by the brisk promptness with which they fulfilled themselves. He had hardly closed the door of his house when the telephone bell began to ring, and he went to answer the call with a feeling of large and unalloyed contentment.
“Hullo-o?…Speaking…That’s which?…Teal?…Well, blow me. Claud Eustace, this is very late for you to be out! Does your grandmother allow you—? What?…What have I been doing tonight? I’ve been drinking beer with Beppo…No, not a leper—BEPPO. B for bdellium, E for eiderdown, P for psychology, P for pneumonia, O for a muse of fire that would ascend the brightest heaven of…I beg your pardon?…You were called up and told I was in trouble?…Someone’s been pulling your leg, Claud. I’m at peace with the world…Whassat?…Why, sure. I was just going to bed, but I guess I can stay up a few minutes longer. Will you be bringing your own gum?…Right-ho…”
He listened for a moment longer, and then he hung up the receiver and turned to Pat.
“Claud’s coming right along,” he said gleefully, and the laughter was lifting in his voice. “We’re not to try to get away, because he’ll have an armed guard at every sea and air port in the British Isles ten minutes after he gets here and finds we’ve done a bunk. Which will be tremendous fun for all concerned…And now, get through to Beppo as fast as you can spin the dial, old sweetheart, while I sprint upstairs and change my shirt—for there’s going to be a great day!”
CHAPTER 10
Chief Inspector Claud Eustace Teal fixed his pudgy hands in the belt of his overcoat, and levelled his unfriendly gaze on the superbly elegant young man who lounged against the table in front of him.
“So that message I had was a fake, was it?” he snarled.
“It must have been, Claud.”
Teal nodded fatly.
“Perhaps it was,” he said. “But I went to the address it gave me—and what do you think I found?”
“The Shah of Persia playing Ludo,” hazarded Simon Templar intelligently, and the detective glowered.
“In the cellar I found a nigger tied up with the whip that had beaten half the hide off his back. Outside, there was a white man with a fractured skull—he’s gone to hospital as well. In a room upstairs there was another man laid out with a broken jaw, and a fourth man in the same room—dead.”
The Saint raised his eyebrows.
“But, my dear old sturgeon!” he protested reasonably. “What on earth do you think I am? A sort of human earthquake?”
“Both the nigger and the man with the broken jaw,” Teal continued stonily, “gave me a description of the man responsible, and it fits you like a glove. The man with the broken jaw also added the description of the woman who couldn’t be distinguished apart from Miss Holm.”
“Then we obviously have doubles, Claud.”
“He also heard the woman say, ‘Where is the Saint?’ ”
Simon frowned.
“That’s certainly odd,” he admitted. “Where did you say this was?”
“You know darned well where it was! And I’ll tell you some more. Just as I got there in the police car, a man and a woman dashed out of the house and got away. And who do you suppose they looked like?”
“The same doubles, obviously,” said the Saint with great brilliance.
“And just one block away from that house we found a blue saloon Hirondel, which the two people I saw would have got away in if they’d had time to reach it. The number of it was ZX1257. Is that the number of your car?”
The Saint sat up.
“Claud, you’re a blessing in disguise! That certainly is my car—and I was thinking I’d lost her! Pinched outside May Fair only yesterday afternoon, she was, in broad daylight. I was meaning to ring up Vine Street before, but what with one thing and another—”
Teal drew a deep breath—and then he exploded.
“Now would you like to know what I think of your defence?” he blurted out, in a boiling gust of righteous wrath. And he went on without waiting for encouragement. “I think it’s the most weak-kneed tangle of moonshine I’ve ever had to listen to in my life. I think it’s so drivelling that if any jury will listen to it for ten minutes, I’ll walk right out of the court and have myself certified. I’ve got two men who’ll swear to you on their dying oaths, and another one to put beside them if he recovers, and I know what I saw myself and what the men who were with me saw, and I think everything you’ve got to say is so maudlin that I’m going to take you straight back to Scotland Yard with me and have it put in writing before we lock you up. I think I’ve landed you at last, Mr Saint, and after what you said to me this morning I’m damned glad I’ve done it.”
The Saint took out his cigarette-case and flopped off the table into an armchair, sprawling one long leg comfortably over the arm.
“Well, that does express your point of view quite clearly,” he conceded. He lighted a cigarette, and looked up brightly. “Claud, you’re getting almost fluent in your old age. But you’ve got to mind you don’t let your new-found eloquence run away with you.”
“Oh, have I?” The detective took the bait right down into his oesophagus, and clinched his teeth on the line. “Very well. Then while all these extraordinary things were being done by your double—while half a dozen sober men were seeing you and listening to you and being beaten up by you and getting messages from you—maybe you’ll tell me what you were doing and who else knows it besides yourself?”
Simon inhaled luxuriously, and smiled.
“Why, sure. As I told you over the phone, I was drinking beer with Beppo.”
“The Duke of Fortezza.”
“Oh yes?” Teal grew sarcastic. “And where was the King of Spain and the Prime Minister of Jugoslavia?”
“Blowed if I know,” said the Saint ingenuously. “But there were some other distinguished people present. The Count of Montalano, and Prince Marco d’Ombria, and the Italian Ambassador—”
“The Italian what?”
“Ambassador. You know. Gent with top hat and spats.”
“And where was this?”
“At the Italian Embassy. It was just a little private party, but it went on for a long time. We started about midnight, and didn’t break up till half-past four—I hadn’t been home two minutes when you phoned.”
Teal almost choked.
“What sort of bluff are you trying to pull on me now?” he demanded. “Have you got hold of the idea that I’ve gone dotty? Are you sitting there believing that I’ll soak up that story, along with everything else you’ve told me, and just go home and ask no questions?” Teal snorted savagely. “You must have gone daft!” he blared.
The Saint came slowly out of his chair. He posed himself before the detective, feet astraddle, his left hand on his hip, loose-limbed and smiling and dangerous, and the long dictatorial forefinger which Teal had seen and hated before drove a straight and peremptory line into the third button of the detective’s waistcoat.
“And now you listen to me again, Claud,” said the Saint waspily. “Do you know what you’re letting yourself in for?”
“Do I know what I’m—”
“Do you know what you’re letting yourself in for? You burst into my house and make wild accusations against me. You shout at me, you bully me, you tell me I’m either lying or dippy, and you threaten to arrest me. I’m very sensitive, Claud,” said the Saint, “and you hurt me. You hurt me so much that I’ve a damned good mind to let you run me in—and then, when you’d put the rope right round your own neck and drawn it up as tight as it’d go, I’d pull down such a schemozzle around your bat ears that you’d want nothing more in life than to hand in your resignation and get away to some forgotten corner of earth where they’ve never seen a newspaper. That’s what’s coming your way so fast that you’re going to have to jump like a kangaroo to get from under it. It’s only because I’m of a godly and forgiving disposition,” said the Saint virtuously, “that I’m giving you a chance to save your skin. I’m going to let you verify my alibi before you arrest me, instead of having it fed into you with a stomach-pump afterwards, and then you are going to apologise to me and go home,” said the Saint.
The Saint versus Scotland Yard (The Saint Series) Page 14