The Saint in Action (The Saint Series)

by Leslie Charteris

  “Claud!” said the Saint reprovingly. “Is that nice? Is it kind? Is that the way your dear old mother would like to hear you speak?”

  “Never mind my mother—”

  “How could I, Claud? I never met her. How’s she getting on?”

  Mr Teal swallowed, and turned towards the policeman who had brought Simon in. “What did you let him in for?” he demanded, in a voice of fearful menace.

  The policeman swayed slightly before the blast.

  “Richards brought him up, sir. I understood you were expecting him—”

  “And so you are, Claud,” said the Saint. “Why be so bashful about it?” Teal stared at him malevolently.

  “Why should I be expecting you?”

  “Because you always are. It’s a habit. Whenever anybody does anything, you come and unbosom yourself to me. Whenever any crime’s been committed, I did it. So just for once I thought I’d come and see you and save you the trouble of coming to see me. Pretty decent of me, I call it.”

  “How did you know a crime had been committed?”

  “It was Deduction,” said the Saint. “You see, I happened to be ambling along by here when I saw a policeman at the door and a small crowd outside, and your intellectual features leering out of the door to say something to the said cop, so I went into a tea-shop and had a small cup of cocoa while I thought it over. I admit that the first idea that crossed my mind was that you’d been thrown out—I mean that you’d retired from the Force and gone in for Art, and that you were holding an exhibition of your works, and that the crowd outside was waiting for the doors to open, and that you were telling the cop to keep them in order for a bit because you couldn’t find your false beard. It was only after some remarkable brain work that I avoided falling into this error. Gradually the real solution dawned on me—”

  “Now you mention it,” Teal said ominously, “why did you happen to be ambling along here?”

  “Why shouldn’t I, Claud? I have to amble somewhere, and they say this is a free country. There are several thousands of other people ambling around Chelsea, but do you rush out into the streets and grab them and ask them why?”

  Mr Teal’s pudgy fists clenched inside his pockets. It was happening again—the same as it always had. He set out to be a detective, and some evil spirit turned him into a clown. It wasn’t his fault. It was the fault of that debonair, mocking, lazily smiling Mephistopheles who was misnamed the Saint, who seemed to have been born with the uncanny gift of paralysing the detective’s trained and native caution and luring him into howling gaucheries that made Mr Teal go hot and cold when he thought about them. And the more often it happened, the more easily it happened next time. There was an awful fatefulness about it that made Mr Teal want to burst into tears.

  He took hold of himself doggedly, glowering up at the Saint with a concentrated uncharitableness that would have made a lion think twice before biting him.

  “Well,” he said, with a restraint that made the veins stand out on his forehead, “what do you want here?”

  “I just thought I’d drop in and see how you were getting on with your detecting. Quite a jolly little murder it looks, too, if I may say so.”

  For the first time since the casual glance he had taken round the room when he came in, his cool gaze went back to the crumpled shape on the floor.

  It lay on the floor, close to the fireplace and a side table on which stood a bottle of whisky and a siphon—the body of what seemed to have been a man of medium size and build, wearing an ordinary dark suit. His hair looked as if it might have been a pale gingery colour, but it was difficult to be sure about that, because there was not much of it that was not clotted with the blood that had flowed from his smashed skull and spread in a pool over the carpet. There was not much of the back of his head left at all, as a matter of fact, for the smashing had been carried out very methodically and with the obvious intention of making sure that there would never be any need to repeat the dose. A little distance away lay the instrument with which the smashing had been done: it looked like an ordinary cheap hammer, and the wooden handle was so clean that it might well have been bought new for the purpose.

  The rest of the room was in disorder. Books had been pulled out of their shelves, the carpet was wrinkled as if it had been pulled up to examine the floor underneath, cushions had been taken out of the chairs, and there were gashes in the upholstery. All the drawers of the desk were open—one of them had been pulled right out and left on the floor, and another was upturned on the table. A mass of papers was scattered around like a stage snowfall. A yard from the dead man’s right hand, a tumbler lay on its side at the edge of a pool of moisture where its contents had soaked into the carpet.

  “Quite a jolly little murder,” Simon repeated. Teal went on watching him suspiciously.

  “Do you know anything about it?”

  “Not a thing,” said the Saint honestly. “Do you?”

  Chief Inspector Teal dug into his waistcoat pocket and extracted from it a small pink rectangular packet. From this he drew a small pink envelope, unwrapped it, and fed the contents into his mouth. There was a short interval of silence, while his salivary glands responded exquisitely to the stimulus and his teeth mashed the strip of gum into a conveniently malleable wedge.

  The delay, coupled with the previous pause while the Saint had been studying the scenery, gave him a chance to complete the recovery of his self-possession, and Mr Teal had been making the most of his respite. Some of the rich purple had faded out of his face, and his eyelids had started to droop. His brain was reviving from its first shock and beginning to function again.

  “It looks like an ordinary murder and robbery to me,” he answered, with a gruff straightforwardness which he hoped was convincing. “Hardly in your line, I should say.”

  “Anything is in my line if it helps you,” said the Saint generously. “Mmm…robbery. The place does look as if it had been taken apart, doesn’t it?” He drifted about the room, taking in details. “Couple of nice silver cups on the mantelpiece. Gold cigarette-case. Burglars certainly are getting choosey these days, aren’t they, Claud? Why, I can remember a time when none of ’em would have turned up their noses at a few odds and ends like that.”

  “They may have been looking for something more valuable,” Teal said temptingly.

  The Saint nodded.

  “Yes, that’s possible—you must have been reading a book or something.”

  “Have you any idea what that could have been?”

  Simon thought for a moment.

  “I know,” he said suddenly. “It was the plans for the new death ray which the master spy with the hare-lip stole from the War Office in Chapter Three.”

  Mr Teal felt the arteries in his neck throbbing, but with a superhuman effort he clung to his precariously rescued sang-froid, chewing fiercely on his blob of spearmint.

  “Oh yes,” he said, with desperate moderation. “But we don’t really believe in things like that. They must have thought he had something here that they could get money for—” “They?” said the Saint, as if the point had just occurred to him. “I see—you’ve already found that there were several blokes involved in it.”

  “I was saying that to be on the safe side. Of course, we haven’t found any evidence yet—”

  “Nobody would expect you to,” Simon encouraged him liberally. “After all, you’re only detectives, and that isn’t your job. If this had been a night-club where the deceased was serving drinks after hours, it would have been quite a different matter. But making allowances for that—”

  “What would you see?”

  Simon pointed.

  “There’s whisky and a siphon on that small table. And one glass with what looks like whisky in it. Just one. On the floor there’s another glass, surrounded by a certain amount of dampness. What happens when a bloke’s dishing up a round of drinks? Normally, he pours out the whisky into however many glasses he’s using. Then he squirts the soda into the glass of the
first victim, tells him to say when, hands him his dose of medicine, and goes on to the next. And so on.”

  “So you think there was only one other man here, and the murderer hit him while he was filling the first glass?”

  “I didn’t say so,” responded the Saint airily. “I didn’t say ‘man’ in the first place. It might have been some of these hairy Olympic female champions—some of ’em sling a pretty hefty hammer, I believe. And all the rest of them may have been teetotallers, so they wouldn’t be getting a drink.”

  Teal edged his gum into a hollow tooth and held it there heroically.

  “All the same,” he persisted, “you do think it looks as if he, or she, or they, were on fairly friendly terms with…”

  He hesitated.

  “With Comrade Ingleston?” Simon prompted him kindly. “How did you know that?”

  The brassy note was creeping back into Teal’s voice, and he tried to strangle the symptom with a gulp that almost ruptured his larynx. The ensuing silence made him feel as self-conscious as if he had blared out like a bugle, but the Saint was only smiling with unaltered affability.

  “How did I know they were friendly? Well, after all, when you start pouring out drinks—”

  “How did you know his name was Ingleston?”

  “I was just guessing,” said the Saint apologetically. “I took it that the motive was robbery, going on what you said. Therefore the robberee was the murderee, so to speak. Therefore the corpse was the owner of this flat and all that therein is. Therefore he was the owner of that photo.”

  The detective blinked at him distrustfully for a second or two, and then went back to the mantelpiece and peered at the picture he had indicated. It was a framed photograph of a plump swarthy man in horn-rimmed spectacles, and across the lower part of it was scrawled:

  A mi buen amigo

  D. David Ingleston,

  con mucho afecto de

  LUIS QUINTANA

  Mr Teal was no linguist, but he scarcely needed to be.

  “Just another spot of this deduction business,” Simon explained modestly. “Of course, these tricks must seem frightfully easy to you professionals, but to an amateur like myself—”

  “I was only wondering how you knew,” Teal said shortly.

  The brassy note was still jangling in his vocal chords, but the texture of it was different. He seemed disappointed. He was disappointed. He hit on his chewing-gum with the ferocious energy of a hungry cannibal tasting a mouthful of tough missionary.

  “It does look as if the murderer or murderers were on friendly terms with Ingleston,” he said presently. “Apart from the glasses, none of the windows seems to have been tampered with, and the front door hasn’t been touched.”

  “How was the murder discovered?”

  “When the maid came in this morning. She has her own key.”

  “You’ve checked up on Ingleston’s friends?”

  “We haven’t had time to do much in that line yet. But the maid says that a friend of his waited over an hour for him here last night, until she sent him away because she wanted to go home. She says that this fellow seemed to be in a rage about something, and when he went off he said he’d have something to say to Ingleston later, so he may have waited in the street until Ingleston came home and followed him upstairs.”

  The Saint nodded interestedly. “Did she know who he was?”

  “Oh yes, we know who he was,” said Mr Teal confidently. “It won’t take long to find him.”

  His drowsy eyes were fastened unwinkingly on the Saint’s face, watching for the slightest betrayal of emotion, but Simon only nodded again with benevolent approval.

  “Then there really doesn’t seem to be anything for me to do,” he drawled. “With that Sherlock Holmes brain of yours and the great organisation behind you, I shall expect to read about the arrest in tomorrow morning’s papers. And a good job too. These ruffians must be taught that crime will not be allowed to go unpunished so long as there is one honest bowler hat in Scotland Yard. Farewell, old faithful.”

  He buttoned his coat and held out his hand.

  “Is that all you’ve got to say?” barked the detective, and Simon raised his eyebrows.

  “What more can I add? You’ve got a gorgeous collection of clues, and I know you’ll make the most of them. What poor words of mine could compete with the peals of praise that will echo down the corridors from the Chief Commissioner’s office—”

  “All right,” said Teal blackly. “I’ll know where to find you if I want you.”

  He stood and watched the Saint’s broad, elegantly tailored back pass out through the door with a feeling as if he had recently been embalmed in glue. It was not the first time that Mr Teal had had that sensation after an interview with the Saint, but many repetitions had never inured him to it. All the peace and comfort had been taken out of his day. He had set out to attend to a nice, ordinary, straightforward, routine murder, and now he had to resign himself to the expectation that nothing about it would turn out to be nice or ordinary or straightforward or routine. Nothing that brought him in contact with the Saint ever did.

  He turned wearily round, as if a great load had been placed on his shoulders, to find his subordinates watching him with a kind of smirking perplexity. Mr Teal’s eyes glittered balefully.

  “Get on with your work!” he snarled. “What d’you think this is—an old maids’ home?”

  He strode across to the telephone, and switched his incandescent glare on to the fingerprint expert. “Have you finished with this?”

  “Y-yes, sir,” stammered the man hastily. “There’s nothing on it except the deceased’s own prints—”

  Mr Teal was not interested in that. He grabbed off the microphone and dialled Scotland Yard.

  “I want somebody to tail Simon Templar, of Cornwall House, Piccadilly,” he snapped, when he was through to his department. “Put a couple of good men on the job, and tell ’em to keep their eyes open. He’s a slippery customer, and he’ll lose them if they give him the chance. I want to know everything he does for twenty-four hours a day until further notice…Yes, I do mean the Saint—and if he gives them the slip they’ll need some saints to pray for them!”

  At that moment Simon Templar was not thinking about the possible consequences of being followed night and day by the heavy-footed minions of the C.I.D. His mind was entirely occupied with other consequences which struck him as being far less commonplace.

  He had hailed a taxi outside the house, and as he was climbing in he heard a curious sharp crack of sound in front of him. He felt a quick stinging pain like the jab of a needle in his chin, and something like an angry wasp zoomed past his ear. As his head jerked up he saw a new spidery pattern of cracks in the window a couple of feet from his eyes—an irregular star-shaped spangle of lines radiating from a neat hole perforated in the glass, about the size of a .38-calibre bullet.

  4

  A split second later, the Saint’s glinting gaze was raking the street and surrounding pavements instinctively, before he realised a moment afterwards that the shot could only have come from another car, which had crept up alongside the taxi so that some philanthropist could fire at him through the offside window as he boarded the cab from the pavement. As he started to search the scenery for the offending vehicle, a bus crashed past, shutting off his field of vision like a moving curtain, and as it went on its bulk effectively obliterated any glimpse he might have had of a car making off in the same direction.

  Fortunately the gun must have been silenced, and the taxi driver must have taken the accompanying sound effects for a combination of the cough of a passing exhaust and the clumsiness of his passenger, for he had not even looked round. As the Saint settled on to the seat and closed the door through which he had entered, he grated the gears together and chugged away without any apparent awareness of the sensational episode that had taken place a few inches behind his unromantic back.

  Simon took out a handkerchief and dabbed his chin wh
ere it had been nicked by a flying splinter of glass. Then he reached forward, unlatched the damaged door, and slammed it again with all his strength. The glass with the bullet-hole in it shattered with the impact and tinkled down into the road.

  This time the driver did look round, jamming on his brakes at the same time. “’Ere,” he protested plaintively, “wot’s all this?”

  “I’m sorry,” said the Saint in distress. “The door wasn’t fastened properly, and I must have banged it a bit too hard. I’ll have to pay you for it.”

  “That you will,” said the driver. “Free pahnds each, them winders cost.”

  “Okay,” said the Saint. “You’ll get your three pounds.”

  “Ar,” said the driver.

  He ground the gears again and sent the cab spluttering on, slightly mollified by the prospect of collecting double the cost of the repair, and the Saint sat back and took out a cigarette.

  As far as he was concerned, it was worth the bonus to dispose of a witness who might have inconvenient recollections of a fare who allowed himself to be shot at “fru winders,” but there were other points less easy to dispose of, and he was still considering them when he opened the door of his flat in Cornwall House.

  He found Patricia with her feet up on the settee, smoking a cigarette, while Geoffrey Graham, balanced on springs on the edge of a chair as usual, appeared to be expounding the principles of architecture.