“There’s one gunman in London who loses his nerve rather easily, which is just as well for us,” he remarked. “But I wonder who it was?”
Curiously enough he had almost forgotten the man named Jones, who had done such an unfriendly thing to Brian Quell that night in Paris.
4
There were no further demonstrations of disapproval that night, although the Saint paid particular attention to the setting of his gadgets before he went to bed, and slept with one ear cocked. He came down to breakfast late the next morning, and was confronted by a shining little cylinder of brass in the middle of his plate. For a moment he stared at it puzzledly, and then he laughed.
“A souvenir?” he murmured, and Patricia nodded.
“I found it in the hall, and I thought you might like to put it in your museum.”
Simon spread his napkin cheerfully.
“More ‘Weapons I Have Not Been Killed With?’” he suggested “There must be quite a trunkful of them.” He reached out a hand towards the cartridge case, and then drew it back. “Wait a minute—just how did you pick this thing up?”
“Why—I don’t know. I—”
“Surely you can remember. Think for a minute. I want you to show me exactly how you took hold of it, how you handled it, everything that happened to it between the time when you saw it on the carpet and the time when it reached this plate…No—don’t touch it again. Use a cigarette.”
The girl took up the cigarette endways between her thumb and forefinger.
“That’s all I did,” she said. “I had the plate in my other hand, and I brought it straight in. Why do you want to know?”
“Because all clever criminals wear gloves when they open safes, but very few of them wear gloves when they’re loading a gun.” Simon picked up the shell delicately in his handkerchief, rubbed the base carefully where the girl’s thumb had touched it, and dropped it into an empty match-box. “Thanks to your fastidious handling, we probably have here some excellent finger-prints of a rotten marksman—and one never knows when they might come in handy.”
He returned to a plate of sizzling bacon and eggs with the profound gusto of a man who has slept like a child and woken up like a lion. Patricia allowed him to eat and skim through his morning paper in peace. Whatever schemes and theories were floating through his mercurial imagination, he would never have expounded them before his own chosen time, and she knew better than to try and drag them out of him before he had dealt satisfactorily with his fast.
He was stirring his second cup of coffee when the telephone bell roused him from a fascinating description of the latest woman Atlantic flier’s underwear. He reached out a long arm, lifted the receiver, and admitted fearlessly that he was Mr Simon Templar.
“I trust you are well,” said the telephone.
The Saint raised his eyebrows, and felt around for a cigarette.
“I’m very fit, thanks,” he said. “How are you? And if it comes to that, who are you?”
A deep chuckle reached him from the other end of the line.
“So long as you don’t interfere with me, that need not concern you. I’m sorry that you should have had such an unpleasant shock last night, but if my envoy had kept his head you would have felt nothing at all. On the other hand, his foolishness might still encourage you to accept a friendly warning.”
“That’s very kind of you,” said the Saint thoughtfully. “But I’ve already got someone to see that my socks are aired, and I always take care not to get my feet wet—”
“I’m talking about more dangerous things than colds, Mr Templar.”
Simon’s gaze fell on the sheet of newspaper which he had been reading. Two columns away from the inventory of the lady aviator’s wardrobe he saw a headline that he had not noticed before: and the germ of an inspiration suddenly flashed through his mind. “Another ‘Saint’ Threat,” ran the heading of the column, in large black letters, and below it was an account of the letter that had been received by Mr Ronald Nilder…Patricia was watching him anxiously, but he waved her to silence.
“Dear me! Are you such a dangerous man—Mr Jones?” There was a long pause, and the Saint’s lips twitched in a faint smile. It had been a shot clear into the dark, but his mind worked like that—flashing on beyond the ordinarily obvious to the fantastically far-fetched that was always so gloriously right.
“My congratulations.” The voice on the line was scarcely strained. “How much did Quell tell you?”
“Plenty,” said the Saint softly. “I’m sorry you should have had such an unpleasant shock, but if you had kept your head…”
He heard the receiver click down at the other end, and pushed the telephone away from him.
“Who was that?” asked Patricia.
“Someone who can think nearly as fast as I can,” said the Saint, with a certain artistic admiration. “We know him only as Mr Jones—the man who shot Brian Quell. And it was one of his pals who disturbed the peace last night.” The gay blue eyes levelled themselves on her with the sword-steel intentness that she knew of old. “Shall I tell you about him? He’s a rather clever man. He discovered that I was staying in the hotel that night—on Quell’s floor, with my window almost opposite his across the well. But he didn’t know that before he did his stuff—otherwise he might have thought up something even cleverer. How he found out is more than we know. He may have accidentally seen my name in the register, or he may even have come back for something and listened outside Quell’s door—then he’d made inquiries to find out who it could have been. But when he got back to England he heard more about me—”
“How?”
“From the story of your noble assault on Wolseley Lormer. Brother Jones decided to take no chances—hence last night. Also this morning there was another dose for him.”
Simon pointed to the headlines that he had seen. It was while Patricia was glancing over them that a name in an adjoining paragraph caught his eye, and he half rose from his chair.
“And that!” His finger stabbed at the news item. “Pat—he can certainly think fast!”
He read the paragraph again.
UNIVERSITY PROFESSOR MISSING
SEQUEL TO PARIS SHOOTING TRAGEDY
Birmingham, Thursday.
Loss of memory is believed to be the cause of the mysterious disappearance of Dr Sylvester Quell, professor of electro-chemistry, who has been missing for twenty-four hours.
The professor’s housekeeper, Mrs E. J. Lane, told a Daily Express representative that Dr Quell left his house as usual at 10:30 a.m. on Wednesday to walk to his lecture-room. He did not arrive there, and he has not been heard of since.
“The professor was very upset by his brother’s sudden death,” said Mrs Lane. “He spoke very little about it, but I know that it affected him deeply.”
Dr Quell is acknowledged to be one of the foremost authorities on metallurgy—
Simon sprang out of his chair and began to pace up and down the room.
“Think it out from the angle of Comrade Jones. He knows I was in a position to know something—he knows my reputation—and he knows I’m just the man to pry into his business without saying a word to the police. Therefore he figures I’d be better out of the way. He’s a wise guy, Pat—but just a little too wise. A real professional would have bumped me off and said nothing about it. If he failed the first time he’d’ve just tried again—and still said nothing. But instead of that he had to phone me and tell me about it. Believe it or not, Pat, the professional only does that sort of thing in story-books. Unless—”
“Unless what?” prompted the girl.
The Saint picked up his cigarette from the edge of the ash-tray, and fell into his chair again with a slow laugh.
“I wonder! If there’s anything more dangerous than being just that little bit too clever, it’s being in too much of a hurry to say that very thing of the other man. There’s certainly some energetic vendetta going on against the Quell family, and since I’ve been warned to keep o
ut I shall naturally have to be there.”
“Not today, if you don’t mind,” said the girl calmly. “I met Marion Lestrange in Bond Street yesterday, and I promised to drop in for a cocktail this evening.”
Simon looked at her.
“I think it might happen about then,” he said. “Don’t be surprised if you hear my melodious voice on the telephone.”
“What are you going to do?” she asked, and the Saint smiled.
“Almost nothing,” he said.
He kept her in suspense for the rest of the afternoon, while he smoked innumerable cigarettes and tried to build up a logical story out of the snatches of incoherent explanation that Brian Quell had babbled before he died. It was something about a man called Binks, who could make gold…But no consecutive sense seemed to emerge from it. Dr Sylvester Quell might have been interested—and he had disappeared. The Saint could get no further than his original idea.
He told Patricia Holm about it at tea-time. It will be remembered that in those days the British Government was still pompously deliberating whether it should take the reckless step of repealing an Act of 1677 which no one obeyed anyhow, and the Saint’s feelings on the matter had been finding their outlet in verse when the train of his criminal inspiration faltered. He produced the more enduring fruits of his afternoon’s cogitation with some pride.
“Wilberforce Egbert Levi Gupp
Was very, very well brought up,
Not even in his infant crib
Did he make messes on his bib,
Or ever, in his riper years
Forget to wash behind his ears.
Trained from his rawest youth to rule
(At that immortal Public School
Whose playing fields have helped to lose
Innumerable Waterloos),
His brains, his wit, his chin, were all
Infinitesimal,
But (underline the vital fact)
He was the very soul of tact,
And never in his innocence
Gave anyone the least offence:
Can it be wondered at that he
Became, in course of time, M.P.?”
“Has that got anything to do with your Mr Jones?” asked Patricia patiently.
“Nothing at all,” said the Saint. “It’s probably far more important. Posterity will remember Wilberforce Gupp long after Comrade Jones is forgotten. Listen to some more:
“Robed in his faultless morning dress
They voted him a huge success;
The sober drabness of the garb
Fittingly framed the pukka sahib;
And though his many panaceas
Show no original ideas,
Gupp, who could not be lightly baulked,
Just talked, and talked, and talked, and talked,
Until the parliamentary clan
Prophesied him a coming man.”
“I seem to have heard something in the same strain before,” the girl remarked.
“You probably have,” said the Saint. “And you’ll probably hear it again. So long as there’s ink in my pen, and I can make two words rhyme, and this country is governed by the largest collection of soft-bellied half-wits and doddering grandmothers on earth, I shall continue to castigate its imbecilities—whenever I have time to let go a tankard of old ale. I have not finished with Wilberforce.”
“Shall I be seeing you after I leave Marion’s?” she asked, and the Saint was persuaded to put away the sheet of paper on which he had been scribbling and tell her something which amazed her.
He expounded a theory which anyone else would have advanced hesitantly as a wild and delirious guess with such vivid conviction that her incredulity wavered and broke in the first five minutes. And after that she listened to him with her heart beating a little faster, helplessly caught up in the simple audacity of his idea. When he put it to her as a question she knew that there was only one answer.
“Wouldn’t you say it was worth trying, old Pat? We can only be wrong—and if we are it doesn’t cost a cent. If we’re right—
“I’ll be there.”
She went out at six o’clock with the knowledge that if his theory was right they were on the brink of an adventure that would have startled the menagerie of filleted young men and sophisticated young women whom she had promised to help to entertain. It might even have startled a much less precious audience, if she had felt disposed to talk about it, but Patricia Holm was oblivious of audiences—in which attitude she was the most drastic possible antithesis of Simon Templar. Certainly none of the celebrated or nearly celebrated prodigies with whom it pleased Marion Lestrange to crowd her drawing-room once a month would have believed that the girl who listened so sympathetically to their tedious autobiographies was the partner in crime of the most notorious buccaneer of modern times.
The cocktail party ploughed on through a syrupy flood of mixed alcohols, mechanical compliments, second-hand scandal, vapid criticism, lisps, beards, adolescent philosophy, and personal pronouns. Patricia attended with half her mind, while the other half wondered why the egotism which was so delightful and spellbinding in the Saint should be so nauseatingly flatulent in the assorted hominoids around her. She watched the hands of her wrist watch creep round to seven and seven-thirty, and wondered if the Saint could have been wrong.
It was ten minutes to eight when her hostess came and told her that she was wanted on the telephone.
“Is that you, Pat?” said the Saint’s voice. “Listen—I’ve had the most amazing luck. I can’t tell you about it now. Can you get away?”
The girl felt a cold tingle run up her spine.
“Yes—I can come now. Where are you?”
“I’m at the May Fair. Hop into a taxi and hurry along—I’ll wait for you in the lounge.”
She pulled on her hat and coat with a feeling somewhere between fear and elation. The interruption had come so exactly as the Saint had predicted it that it seemed almost uncanny. And the half-dozen bare and uninformative sentences that had come through the receiver proved beyond doubt that the mystery was boiling up for an explosion that only Simon Templar would have gone out of his way to interview at close quarters. As she ran down the stairs, the fingers of her right hand ran over the invisible outlines of a hard squat shape that was braced securely under her left arm, and the grim contact gave her back the old confidence of other dangerous days.
A taxi came crawling along the kerb as she stepped out into Cavendish Square, and she waved to it and climbed in. The cab pulled out again with a jerk, and it was then that she noticed that the glass in the windows was blackened, and was protected against damage from the inside by a closely-woven mesh of steel wire.
She leaned forward and felt around in the darkness for a door handle. Her fingers encountered only a smooth metal plate secured over the place where the handle should have been, and she knew that the man who called himself Jones was no less fast a thinker, and not one whit less efficient, than Simon Templar had diagnosed him to be.
5
Simon Templar refuelled his Duofold and continued with the biography of the coming politician.
And down the corridors of fame
Wilberforce Egbert duly came.
His human kindness knew no bounds:
Even when hunting with the hounds
He always had a thought to spare
For the poor little hunted hare;
But manfully he set his lips
And did the bidding of the Whips.
And though at times his motives would
Be cruelly misunderstood,
Wilberforce plodded loyally on
Like a well-bred automaton
Till 1940, when the vote
Placed the Gupp party in the boat,
And Wilberforce assumed the helm
And laboured to defend the realm.
Simon glanced at his watch, meditated for a few moments, and continued:
And through those tense and tedious days
Wil
berforce gambolled (in his stays);
The general public got to know
That Gupp, who never answered “No,”
Could be depended on to give
Deft answers in the negative;
And Royal Commissions by the score
Added to Wisdom’s bounteous store:
The Simple Foods Commission found
That turnips still grow underground;
The Poultry Farms Commission heard
That turkeys were a kind of bird;
While in an office in the City
The Famous Vicious Drugs Committee
Sat through ten epic calendars
To learn if women smoked cigars;
And with the help Gupp’s party gave
Britannia proudly ruled the wave
(Reported to be wet—but see
Marine Commission, section D.)
It was nearly seven o’clock when the Saint started his car and cruised leisurely eastwards through the Park. He had a sublime faith in his assessment of time limits, and his estimate of Mr Jones’s schedule was almost uncannily exact. He pulled up in the south-west corner of Cavendish Square, from which he could just see the doorway of the Lestranges’ house, and prepared himself for a reasonable wait.
He was finishing his third cigarette when a brand-new taxi turned into the square and snailed past the doorway he was watching. It reached the north-east corner, accelerated down the east side and along the south, and resumed its dawdling pace as it turned north again. The Saint bent over a newspaper as it passed him, and when he looked up again the blue in his eyes had the hard glitter of sapphires. Patricia was standing in the doorway, and he knew that Mr Jones was beyond all doubt a fast mover.
Simon sat and watched the girl hail the taxi, and climb in. The cab picked up speed rapidly, and Simon touched his self-starter and hurled the great silver Hirondel smoothly after it.
The taxi swung away to the north and plunged into the streaming traffic of the Marylebone Road. It had a surprising turn of speed for a vehicle of its type, and the Saint was glad that he could claim to have the legs of almost anything on the road. More than once it was only the explosive acceleration of its silent hundred horse-power that saved him from being jammed in a tangle of slow-moving traffic which would have wrecked his scheme irretrievably. He clung to the taxi’s rear number-plate like a hungry leech, snaking after it past buses, drays, lorries, private cars of every size and shape under the sun, westwards along the main road and then to the right around the Baker Street Crossing, following every twist of his unconscious quarry as faithfully as if he had been merely steering a trailer linked to it by an invisible steel coupling. It was the only possible method of making certain that no minor accident of the route could leave him sandwiched behind while the taxi slipped round a corner and vanished for ever, and the Saint concentrated on it with an ice-cold singleness of purpose that shut every other thought out of his head, driving with every trick of the road that he knew and an inexorable determination to keep his radiator nailed to a point in space precisely nine inches aft of the taxi’s hind-quarters.
The Saint and Mr. Teal (The Saint Series) Page 4