He walked along from the lifeboat station with the details of his plan filling themselves out in his imagination, and they were just about to turn into Holgate’s, the hotel at the other end of the town, when his ruminations were interrupted by a figure in uniform that appeared in his path.
“I’ve been looking for you, sir,” said the Law.
The Law on the Scilly Islands was represented by one Sergeant Hancock, a pensioner of the Coldstream Guards, who must have found his rank a very empty honour, for there were no common constables to salute him. In times of need he could call upon a force of eight specials recruited from among the islanders, but in normal times he had nothing to make him swollen-headed about his position. Nor did he show any signs of ever having suffered from a swollen head—a fact which made him one of the very few officers of the law whom Simon had ever been able to regard as even human. Possibly there was something in the air of the Islands, that same something which makes the native islanders themselves the most friendly and hospitable people one could hope to meet, which had mellowed the character of an ex-sergeant-major to the man who had become not only the head, but also the personal body and complete set of limbs of the Scilly Islands Police, but certainly the Saint liked him. Simon had drunk beer with him, borrowed his fishing line and fished with it, and exchanged so many affable salutes with him that the acquaintance was in danger of becoming an historic one in the Saint’s life.
“What is it, Sergeant?” asked the Saint cheerfully. “Have I been seen dropping banana-peel in the streets or pulling faces at the mayor?”
“No, it’s nothing like that. I want to know what’s been going on up at Tregarthen’s.”
“Mr Smith has seen you, has he?”
“Yes, he came down and told me about it. I went to have a talk with those two young men but they’d just paid their bill and gone. Then I came looking for you.”
Simon offered a cigarette.
“What did Smith tell you?”
“Well sir, he told me that you were having a drink in the bar, and one of those fellows put dope in your beer, and you punched his nose. Then one of them came down and threw the beer away, so there was no evidence, except a fly that Smith couldn’t find. And Smith said you said something about Abdul Osman, which he said he thought might be a man who has a yacht over by Tresco.”
The Sergeant’s pleasant face was puzzledly serious, as well it might be. Such things simply did not happen on his well-conducted island.
Simon lighted his cigarette and thought for a moment. Abdul Osman was too big a fish for the net of a police force consisting of one man, and the only result of any interference from that official quarter would most likely be the unhappy decease of a highly amiable sergeant—a curiosity whom Simon definitely felt should be preserved for the Nation. Also he recalled a story that the Sergeant had told him on their first meeting—a story so hilariously incredible that it surpassed any novelist’s wildest flights of fantasy.
A previous holder of the office once arrested a man and took him to the village lock-up only to find that he hadn’t the keys of the lock-up with him.
“Stay here while I get my keys,” said the worthy upholder of the Law sternly, and that was the last they saw of their criminal.
While Simon did not doubt for a moment that Sergeant Hancock would be incapable of such a magnificent performance as that, his faith did not extend to the ability of a village lockup to keep Abdul Osman inside and his ship load of satellites out.
“That’s very nearly what happened, Sergeant,” he said easily. “I think their idea was to rob the hotel and get away on the boat that afternoon. Smith wasn’t drinking, so they couldn’t drug him, but with me out of the way they’d have been two to one, and he wouldn’t have stood much chance. They’d been staying in the hotel for a fortnight to get the lie of the land. I just happened to notice what they’d done to my beer.”
“But what was that about Abdul Osman?”
“I think Smith can’t have heard that properly. He was telling me some story about a man of that name and it must have been on his mind. When I punched this bloke’s face he threatened to call the police, and what I said was: ‘Ask your pal what he thinks of the idea first.’ Smith must have thought I said ‘Ask Abdul.’”
The Sergeant’s face was gloomy.
“And you just punched his nose and let him get away! Why, if you’d only got hold of me—”
“But Smith did get hold of you.”
“Oh yes, he got hold of me after they’d gone. I had to go over and see a man over the other end of the island about paying his rates, and Smith couldn’t find me till it was too late. I can’t be everywhere at once.”
The Saint grinned sympathetically.
“Never mind. Come in here and drown it in drink.”
“Well, sir, I don’t mind if I do have just one. I don’t think I’m supposed to be on duty just this minute.”
They went into the bar and found the barman enjoying his evening shave—a peculiarity of his which the Saint had observed before, and which struck Simon as being very nearly the perfect illustration for a philosophy of the Futility of Effort.
They carried their drinks over to the window at the bottom end of the bar, which looked across the harbour. The local boats were coming in to their moorings one by one, with their cargoes of holiday fishing parties. Simon studied them as they came in with a speculative eye.
“Whose boat’s that—just coming in?” he asked, and the Sergeant looked out.
“What, that nearest one? That’s Harry Barrett’s. He’s a good boatman if you want to go out for the day.”
“No—the other one—just coming round the end of Rat Island.”
The Sergeant screwed up his eyes.
“I don’t know that one, sir.” He turned round. “John, what’s the name of that boat out there by the pier?”
The barman came down and looked out.
“That? That one’s Lame Frankie’s boat—the Puffin. Built her himself, he did.”
Simon watched the boat all the way in to her mooring and marked its position accurately in his memory. He discarded the idea of Barrett’s trim-looking yawl reluctantly—he was likely to have his hands full while he was using the craft he proposed to borrow, and the Puffin, though she was too broad in the beam for her length, judged by classic standards of design, looked a trifle more comfortable as a single hander for a busy man. And, in making his choice he noted down the name of Lame Frankie for a highly anonymous reward, for the Saint’s illicitly contracted obligations were never left unpaid.
But none of his intentions just then were public property. He held up to the light a glass of gin-and-it of astounding size for which he had been charged the sum of ninepence, and sighed.
“How shall I ever be able to bring myself to pay one and six for a drink about one-eighth the size of this in London again, is more than I know,” he murmured contentedly, and improved the shining hour by drinking it down rapidly and calling for another.
He strolled back with Patricia to their modest supper as it was beginning to grow dark. Their meal was just being put on the table.
“You poach a wonderful egg, Mrs Nance,” he remarked approvingly, and sank into his chair as the door closed behind that excellent landlady. “Pat, darling, you must wish me bon appétit, because I’ve got a lot to do on these vitamins.”
She had not liked to question him before but now she gazed at him resignedly.
“We were going away for a holiday,” she reminded him.
“I know,” said the Saint. “And we still are—away to the south, where there’s sunshine and good wine and tomorrow is also a day. But we came by this roundabout way on a hunch and the hunch was right. There is still a little work for us to do.”
He finished his plate without speaking again, poured himself out a cup of coffee, and lighted a cigarette. Then he said, “There’s more nonsense talked about capital punishment than anything else, and the sentimentalists who organise petition
s for the reprieve of every murderer who’s ever sentenced are probably less pernicious than the more conventional humanitarians. Murder, in England anyway, is the most accidental of crimes. A human life is such a fragile thing, it’s so easily snuffed out, and dozens of respectable men, without a thought of crime in their heads, have lost control of themselves for one second, and have woken up afterwards to the numbing and irrevocable realisation that they have committed murder, and the penalty is death. There are deliberate murders, but there are other crimes no less deliberate and no less damning. The drug trafficker, the white slaver, the blackmailer—not one of them could ever plead that he acted in uncontrollable passion, or gave way to an instant’s temptation, or did it because his wife and children were starving. All of those crimes are too deliberate—need too much capital, too much premeditation, too long to work through from beginning to end. And each of them wrecks human lives less mercifully than a sudden bullet. Why should the death penalty stop where it does?…That is justice as we have chosen to see it, and even now I believe that the old days were worthwhile.”
He sat and smoked until it was quite dark, and, being the man he was, no detail of the future weighed on his mind. He scribbled industriously on a writing pad, with occasional pauses for thought, and presently Patricia came round behind him to see what he had written.
At the top of the sheet he had roughly pinned the scrap of a report from The Daily Telegraph, and panelled it in characteristic slashes of the blue pencil.
“…He saw his friend in difficulties,” said the Coroner, “and although he could not swim himself he went to his assistance. He did what any Englishman would have done…”
The blue pencil had scored thickly under the last sentence. And underneath it the Saint was writing:
FLOREAT HARROWVIA !
When Adam fell, because of Eve,
Upon that dreadful day,
He did not own up loud and strong,
And take his licking with a song,
In our good English way:
He had so little chivalry,
He said “The Woman tempted me,”
And tried to hide away.
(Chorus)
But in the blaze of brighter days
Britannia yet shall rule,
While English Sportsmen worship God
And bend their bottoms to the rod
For the Honour of the School!
When Joshua strafed Jericho
(N.B.—another Jew)
He did not risk his precious gore
Or take a sporting chance in war
As English soldiers do:
He marched his bandsmen round the walls
And knocked it down with bugle calls—
A trick that is tabu.
(Chorus)
When Roland, at the gates of Spain,
Died beside Oliver,
He must have found it rather hard
To stand his ground and keep the guard,
Being a foreigner:
So we can only think he went
There by some kind of accident,
Or as an arbiter.
(Chorus)
When Louis faced the guillotine,
That calm the people saw
Flinched to a sickly pallor when
He knew he was an alien,
A Breed without the Law;
Where one of truly British phlegm,
Of course, would have leapt down at them
And socked them on the jaw.
(Chorus)
“Is all that necessary?” asked Patricia with a smile.
“Of course it is,” said the Saint. “Because I’ve got an appointment with one kind of excrescence, must I forget all the others? God in Heaven, while there’s still a supply of smug fools for me to tear in pieces I shall have everything to live for…There are about five hundred and fifty more verses to that song, embracing everything from the massacre of Garigliano, down through Christopher Columbus and Marco Polo to the last Czar of Russia, which I may write some day. I think it will end like this—”
He wrote again, rapidly:
But in our stately tolerance
We condescend to see
That heroes whose names end in -vitch
Are striving to be something which
We know they cannot be,
But, sweating hard, they make a good
Attempt to do what Britons would
Achieve instinctively.
(Chorus)
So let’s give praise through all our days,
Again and yet again,
That we do not eat sauerkraut,
That some storks knew their way about,
And made us Englishmen!
“I can never finish my best songs—my gorge rises too rapidly,” said the Saint, and then he looked at his watch, and stood up, stretching himself with his gay smile. “Pat, I must be going. Wish me luck.”
She kissed him quickly, and then he was gone, with the cavalier wave of his hand that she knew so well. All the old ageless Saint went with him, that fighting troubadour whom he chose to be who could always find time to turn aside in an adventure to shape one of those wild satires that came from him with such a biting sincerity. In some way he left her happier for that touch of typical bravado.
Her emotion was not shared by Galbraith Stride.
Something had come into the life of that successful man that he felt curiously impotent to fight against, something that had stricken him with a more savage shock because it was the one thing that he had never prepared himself for. It had the inexorable march of a machine. It left him unable to think clearly, with a sense of physical helplessness as if he had been worn down overnight by a fierce fever, struggling with the fore-knowledge of defeat against a kind of paralysis of panic. And that thing was the name of the Saint.
He was a silent man at dinner that night. He knew that Abdul Osman had crushed and beaten him with an ease that seemed fantastically ridiculous, and the knowledge hypnotised him into a sort of horrible nightmare. And yet at the same time he knew that he might still have been fighting, calling on all the resources of guile and duplicity that had brought him to the power that was being stripped from him, if it had not been for the words that had stunned his ears early that afternoon. He was that strange psychological freak, a criminal possessed of an imagination that amounted almost to mania, and when Osman had told him that the Saint was still at large, an overstrained bulwark on the borders of his reason seemed to have crashed inwards. He was still fighting for all he could hope to save from the disaster, but it was a dumb stubborn fight without vitality.
He sent for Laura Berwick at nine o’clock. Her slender young body looked particularly beautiful in the black evening gown she was wearing; in some way its cool sweetness was framed in that sombre setting with an effect that was pulse-quickeningly radiant from the contrast. To do him justice, Galbraith Stride felt a momentary twinge of remorse as he saw her.
“My dear, I want you to take a note over to Mr Osman. It’s rather important, and I’d feel relieved if you delivered it yourself.”
He had been drinking, but the whisky that reeked on his breath had thickened his voice without making him drunk. It served the purpose of nipping that twinge of remorse in the bud, before he had time to forget his own danger.
“Couldn’t one of the crew go?” she asked, in some surprise.
“I’m afraid there are reasons why they can’t,” he said. “They…er…hum…I may be able to explain later. A matter of business. It’s vitally important—”
“But what about Mr Almido?”
“Mr Almido,” said Stride, “is a fool. Between ourselves, I don’t trust him. Some funny things have been happening to my accounts lately. No, my dear, you must do this for me. I’d go myself, only I…I’m not feeling very well. You can take the motor-boat.”
He was staring at her with the fixed and glassy eyes of semi-intoxication—she could see that—but there was something besides alcohol in his
stare that frightened her. His excuses for requiring her to go over in person seemed absurd, and yet it seemed equally absurd to imagine that there could be anything serious behind them. She was fond of him, in a purely conventional way—chiefly because he was the only relative she had had since she was six years old. She knew nothing of his business, but in his remotely fussy way he had been kind to her.
“All right—I’ll go for you. When do you want it done?”
“At once.” He pressed a sealed envelope into her hand, and she felt that his own hand was hot and sticky. “Run along right away, will you?”
“Right-ho,” she said, and wondered, as she went to the door, why her own words rang in her ears without a trace of the artificial cheerfulness that she had tried to put into them.
She left him sitting at the table, squinting after her with the same glazed stare, and went up on deck to find Toby Halidom.
“Daddy wants me to go over to the Luxor and deliver a note,” she said, and he was naturally perplexed.
“Why shouldn’t one of the crew go—or that Dago secretary with the Marcel wave?”
“I don’t know, Toby.” Out under the stars, the vague impressions she had received in the saloon seemed even more absurd. “He was rather funny about it, but he seemed to want it particularly badly, so I said I’d go.”
“Probably suffering from an attack of liver,” hazarded Toby heartily. “All the same, he ought to know better than to ask you to pay calls on a reptile like that at this hour of the night. I’d better come with you, old thing—I don’t like you to go and see that ugly nigger alone.”
It was not Toby Halidom’s fault that he had been brought up to that inscrutable system of English thought in which all coloured men are niggers unless they happen also to be county cricketers, but on this occasion at least his apprehensions were destined to be fully justified. They had both met Abdul Osman once before during their stay, and Laura knew that her fiancé had shared her instinctive revulsion. She felt relieved that he had spontaneously offered to go with her.
“I’d be glad if you would come, Toby.”
The Saint and Mr. Teal (The Saint Series) Page 20