The Saint in Action (The Saint Series)

by Leslie Charteris

  “Someone wantin’ to see yer,” said Orace, and the Saint raised his eyebrows. “Does he look like a detective?” he asked hopefully.

  Orace shook his head.

  “Nossir. ’E looks like a gennelman.”

  Simon went through into the living-room and found his visitor standing by the table flicking over the pages of the New Yorker. He dropped the magazine and turned quickly as the Saint came in. He was a youngish man with brown curly hair and a lantern jaw and rimless glasses. The Saint, whose life had depended more than once on his gift for measuring up strangers with a casual glance, guessed that Orace’s diagnosis was probably correct, and also that his visitor was slightly agitated.

  “Mr Templar? I’ve never had the pleasure of meeting you, but I’ve seen your picture and read about you in the papers. I’ve really got no business to come and take up your time, but—”

  The Saint nodded. He was used to people who really had no business to come and take up his time—it was one of the penalties of fame, but it had often turned out to be a profitable penalty. He held out his cigarette-case.

  “Sit down and let’s hear what’s on your mind,” he said soothingly. “I’ve never met you either, so anyway we start square.”

  “My name’s Graham—Geoffrey Graham.” The young man took a cigarette and sat on the arm of a chair as if he expected to bounce off at any moment. “I don’t know how much you want to know about me—I’m an articled pupil in an architect’s office, and I live in Bloomsbury—my family live in Yorkshire and they aren’t very well off—”

  “Have you murdered somebody?” asked the Saint gravely.

  “No. No, I haven’t done that—”

  “Or burgled a bank?”

  “No, but—”

  “It might have been quite exciting if you had,” said the Saint calmly. “But as things are, suppose you tell me what the trouble is first, and then we’ll decide how far back to go into the story of your life.”

  “Well—”

  The expectation was justified. The young man did bounce off the chair. He pulled a bundle of large folded papers out of his pocket, disengaged one of them, and held it out.

  “Well, look,” he said. “What d’you think this is?”

  Simon unfolded the document. It was printed on crisp heavy paper, and very beautifully engraved; it looked as if it might have been valuable, but most men would have studied it for some time before venturing to define it. Simon held it up to the light, rubbed it between his fingers, and flipped it back on to the table.

  “It seems to be one of the new American Government short-term loan thousand-dollar bearer bonds,” he said, in much the same way as he might have said, “It seems to be a bus ticket to Wimbledon,” but his blue eyes had settled into a quiet and rather watchful interestedness.

  Graham pulled out a handkerchief and wiped his forehead.

  “My God,” he said. He breathed heavily once or twice. “Well, that’s what I’d come to the conclusion it was, only I couldn’t believe it. I thought I’d better make sure. You know, I’ve read about those things in stories, like everybody else, but I’d never seen one before. My God!”

  He blinked down at the handful of papers which he was still clutching, and threw them down on the table beside the specimen.

  “Look,” he said in an awe-stricken voice. “There’s thirty-four more of ’em. That’s thirty-five thousand dollars—seven thousand pounds—isn’t it?”

  Simon picked up the collection and glanced through them.

  “It was when I was at school,” he said. “Are you making a collection or something?”

  “Well, not exactly. I got them out of a fellow’s desk.”

  “There must be money in architecture,” said the Saint encouragingly.

  “No, it wasn’t at the office. This was a fellow who lived in the same boarding-house with me when I was living in Bayswater. You see—”

  The Saint studied him thoughtfully. His uninvited callers in the past had included more than one optimistic gentleman who had tried to sell him a machine for making diamonds or turning water into lubricating oil, and he was always glad to listen to a new story. But although the opening he had just listened to might well have served as a prelude to one of those flights of misdirected ingenuity which were the Saint’s perennial joy and occasional source of income, there seemed to be something genuine about the young man in front of him which didn’t quite fit in with the Saint’s shrewdly discriminating suspicions.

  “Why not start at the beginning and go on to the end?” he suggested.

  “It’s quite simple, really,” explained Graham, as if he didn’t find it simple at all. “You see, about six months ago I lent this fellow a tenner.”

  “What fellow?”

  “His name’s David Ingleston. I knew him quite slightly, the way you know people in a boarding-house, but he seemed all right, and he said he’d pay me back in a week. He hasn’t paid me back yet. He kept promising to pay me back, but when the time came he’d always have some excuse or other. When I moved my digs to Bloomsbury it got worse—if I rang up or went to see him he’d be out, or he’d have been sent abroad by his firm, or something, and if I wrote to him he didn’t answer, and so on. I’m not very well off, as I told you, and a tenner means quite a bit to me. I was getting pretty fed up with it.” The young man stared resentfully at the sheaf of bonds on the table, as if they personified the iniquity of their owner.

  “Well, the other day I found out that he was back in England and that he’d moved into a flat in Chelsea. That made it seem worse, because I thought if he could afford to move into a flat he could afford to pay me my ten quid. I rang him up and I happened to catch him at home for once, so I told him what I thought of him. He was very apologetic, and he asked me to go round and have a drink with him last night and he’d pay me the tenner then. I was there at half-past eight, and he was out, but the maid said I could wait. I kicked my heels for half an hour, and then I began to get angry. After I’d waited an hour I was thoroughly furious. I guessed that he’d forgotten the appointment, or he just wasn’t going to keep it, and I could see I’d be waiting another ten years before I got my tenner back. The only thing I could think of was to take it out of him some other way. I couldn’t see anything worth pinching that was small enough for me to sneak out under my coat, so I pulled open a drawer of the desk, and I saw those things.”

  “So you borrowed them for security.”

  “I didn’t really stop to think about it. I didn’t know what they were, but they looked as if they might be valuable, so I just shoved them into my pocket. Then the maid came in and said she was going home because she didn’t sleep in the flat, and she didn’t think she’d better leave me there alone. I was just boiling by that time, so I told her she could tell Ingleston I’d have something to say to him later, and marched off. When I got home and had another look at what I’d pinched I began to get the wind up. I couldn’t very well take the things into a bank and ask about them, but I thought that you…Well, you know, you—”

  “You don’t have to feel embarrassed,” murmured the Saint kindly. “I have heard people say that they thought my principles were fairly broad-minded. Still, I’m not thinking of sending for the police, although for an amateur burglar you do seem to have got off to a pretty good start.”

  The young man’s lantern jaw became even longer and squarer.

  “I don’t want Ingleston’s beastly bonds,” he said, “but I do want my tenner.”

  “I know,” said the Saint sympathetically. “But the Law doesn’t allow you to pinch things from people just because they owe you money. It may be ridiculous, but there it is. Hasn’t Ingleston rung you up or anything since you pushed off with his bonds?”

  “No, but perhaps he hasn’t missed them yet.”

  “If he had, you’d probably have heard from him—the maid would have told him you’d been waiting an hour for him last night. Let’s hope he hasn’t missed them, because if he felt nasty you mi
ght have had the police looking for you.”

  Graham looked slightly stunned.

  “But I didn’t mean to keep the things—”

  “You pinched them,” Simon pointed out. “And the police don’t know anything about what people mean. Do you realise that you’ve committed larceny on a scale that’d make a lot of professionals jealous, and that you could be sent to prison for quite a long time?”

  The other’s mouth fell open.

  “I hadn’t thought of it like that,” he said feebly. “It was all on the spur of the moment—I hadn’t realised—My God, what am I going to do?”

  “The best thing you can do, my lad,” said the Saint sensibly, “is to put them back before there’s any fuss.”

  “But—”

  There was something so comical about the young man’s blankly horrified paralysis that Simon couldn’t help taking pity on him.

  “Come on,” he said. “He can’t eat you, and the sooner he gets his bonds back the less likely he is to try. Look here—I’ll drive over with you if you like and see that he behaves himself, and we’ll take a tenner off him at the same time.”

  “It’s awfully good of you,” Graham began weakly, and the Saint grinned and stood up.

  “We always try to oblige our customers,” he said.

  He picked up the bundle of bonds and stuffed them into his own pocket. On the way out he looked in at the dining-room to wrinkle his nose at Patricia.

  “You’ll have to button your own boots,” he said. “I’m tottering out for an hour or so to do my Boy Scout act. Where’s my bugle?”

  He thought of it no more seriously than that, as a mildly amusing interlude to pass the morning between a late breakfast and a cocktail before lunch. The last idea in his head was that he might be setting out on an adventure whose brief intensity would rank with the wildest of his many immortal escapades, and perhaps if it had not been for all those other adventures he might have missed this one altogether. But the heritage of those other adventures was an instinct, the habit of a lifetime, a sixth sense too subtle to define, that fell imperceptibly and unconsciously into tune with the swift smoky rhythm of danger, and that queer intuition caught him like an electric current as the long shining Hirondel purred close to the address that Graham had given him. It caught him quicker than his mind could work—so quickly that before he could analyse his thoughts he had smacked the gear lever down into second, whipped the car behind the cover of a crawling taxi, and whirled out of sight of the building around the next corner.

  2

  “That was the house,” Graham protested. “You just passed it.”

  “I know,” said the Saint.

  He locked the handbrake as the car pulled in to the kerb, and turned to look back at the corner they had just taken. The movement was automatic, although he knew that he couldn’t see the entrance of the house from where they had stopped, but in his memory he could see it as clearly as if the angle of the building which hid it from his eyes had been made of glass—the whole little tableau that had blazed those high-voltage danger signals into his brain.

  Not that there had been anything sensational about it, anything that would have had that instantaneous and dynamic effect on the average man’s reactions. Just seven or eight assorted citizens of various but quite ordinary and unexciting shapes and sizes, loafing and gaping inanely about the pavement, with the door of the house which Simon had been making for as a kind of vague focus linking them roughly together. A constable in uniform standing beside the door, and a rotund pink-faced man in a bowler hat who had emerged from the hall to speak to him at the very moment when the Saint’s eye was grasping the general outlines of the scene. Nothing startling or prodigious, but it was enough to keep the Saint sitting there with his eyes keen and intent while he went over the details in his mind. Perhaps it was the memory of that round man with a face like a slightly apoplectic cherub, who had come out to speak to the policeman…

  Graham was staring at him perplexedly. “What’s the matter?” he asked.

  The Saint looked at him, almost without seeing him, and a faint aimless smile touched his lips.

  “Nothing,” he said. “Can you drive a car?”

  “Fairly well.”

  “Drive this one. She’s a bit of a handful, so you’d better take it easy. Don’t put your foot down too quickly, or you’ll find yourself a mile or two ahead of yourself.”

  “But—”

  “Go back to my place. You’ll find a girl there—name of Patricia Holm. I’ll phone her and tell her you’re on your way. She’ll give you a drink and prattle to you till I get back. I’d like to pay this call alone.”

  “But—”

  Simon swung his legs over the side and pushed himself off on to the pavement.

  “That seems to be quite a favourite word of yours,” he remarked. “On your way, brother. You can tell me all about it presently.”

  He stood and watched the Hirondel take a leap forward like a loosed antelope and then crawl on up the road with a very mystified young man clinging grimly to the steering-wheel, and then he turned into a convenient tobacconist’s and put a call through to Patricia.

  “I’m sending my Boy Scout material back for you to look after,” he said. “Feed him some ginger ale and keep him happy till I get back. I wouldn’t flirt with him too much, because I think he’s a rather earnest soul. And if there should be any inquiries, tell Orace to hide him in the oven and don’t let anybody know we’ve got him.”

  “Does this mean you’re getting into trouble again?” she demanded ominously. “Because if you are—”

  “Darling, I am about to have a conference with the vicar about the patterns for the next sewing bee,” said the Saint, and hung up the receiver.

  He lighted a cigarette as he sauntered down to the corner and across the street towards the house which he had been meaning to visit. The scene was still more or less the same, one or two new idle citizens having joined the small accumulation of inquisitive loafers, and one or two of the old congregation having grown tired of gaping at nothing and moved off. The policeman still stood majestically by the door, although the man in the bowler hat no longer obstructed the opening. The policeman moved a little to do some obstructing of his own as the Saint ambled up the steps.

  “Do you live here, sir?”

  “No,” said the Saint amiably. “Do you?” The constable gazed at him woodenly.

  “Who do you want to see?”

  “I should like to see Chief Inspector Teal,” Simon told him impressively. “He’s expecting me.”

  The policeman studied him suspiciously for a moment, but the Saint was very impressive. He looked like a man whom a Chief Inspector might have been expecting. He might equally well have been expected by a Prime Minister, a film actress, or a man who trained budgerigars to play the trombone, but the constable was not a sufficiently profound thinker to take this universal view. He turned and led the way into the house, and Simon followed him. They went through the hall, which had the empty and sanitary and fresh-painted air common to all houses which have been recently converted into flats, and through the half-open door of a ground-floor flat a strip of curl-papered female goggled at them morbidly as they went by. At the top of the empty and sanitary and freshly painted stairs the door of another flat was ajar, with another policeman standing beside it.

  “Someone to see the Inspector,” said the first policeman, and, having discharged his duty, went downstairs again to resume his vigil.

  The second policeman opened the door, and they went into the hall of the flat. Almost opposite the entrance was the open door of the living-room, and as the Saint reached it he saw four men moving about. There was a man fiddling with a camera on a tripod near the door, and across the room another man was poring over the furniture with a bottle of grey powder and a camel-hair brush and magnifying glass. A tall, thin, melancholy looking man with a large notebook stood a little way apart, sucking the end of a pencil, and the man with the
bowler hat and the figure like an inverted egg whom Simon had seen from his car was peering over his shoulder at what had been written down.

  It was on the last of these men that the Saint’s eyes rested as he entered the room. He remained indifferent to the other stares that swivelled round to greet him with bovine curiosity, waiting until the bowler hat tilted towards him. And as it did so, a warm and friendly smile established itself on the Saint’s face.

  “What ho, Claud Eustace,” he said affably.

  The china-blue eyes under the brim of the bowler hat grew larger and rounder as they assimilated the shock of identification. In them, even a man with the firmest intentions of believing nothing but good of his fellow men would have found it hard to discern any of that spontaneous cordiality and cheer with which a well-mannered wanderer in the great wilderness of life should have returned the greeting of a brother voyager. To be precise, they looked as if their owner had just discovered that he was in the act of absent-mindedly swallowing a live toad.

  A rich tint of sun-kissed plum mantled the face below the eyes, and the man seemed to quiver a little, like a volcano seeking for some means of self-expression. After one or two awful seconds he found it.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” blared Chief Inspector Claud Eustace Teal.

  3

  It must be admitted in Mr Teal’s defence that he was not normally a man who blared, or whose eyes tended to perform strange antics. Left to himself, he would have been a placid and even-tempered soul, with all the sluggish equanimity appropriate to his girth, and as a matter of fact he had during his earlier years with the Criminal Investigation Department developed a pose of exaggerated sleepiness and perpetual boredom of which he was extremely proud. It was the advent of the Saint on Mr Teal’s halcyon horizon which had changed all that, and made the detective an embittered and an apoplectic man.

  Not that there was one single crime on the record, one microscopic molecule of a misdemeanour, for which Chief Inspector Teal could have taken official action against the Saint. That was a great deal of the trouble, and the realisation of it did nothing to brighten the skies above the detective’s well-worn and carefully laundered bowler. But it sometimes seemed to Mr Teal that all the griefs and misfortunes that had afflicted him in recent years could be directly traced to the exploits of that incredible outlaw who had danced so long and so derisively just beyond Mr Teal’s legal reach—who had mocked him, baffled him, cheated him, eluded him, brought down upon him the not entirely justified censure of his superiors, and set him more insoluble problems than any other man alive. Perhaps it was some of these acid memories that welled up into the detective’s weary brain and stimulated that spontaneous outburst of feeling. For wherever the Saint went there was trouble, and trouble of a kind with which Mr Teal had grown miserably familiar.