The Saint Closes the Case s-2

by Leslie Charteris

  The Saint Closes the Case

  ( Saint - 2 )

  Leslie Charteris

  The Saint Closes The Case

  (The Last Hero)

  By Leslie Charteris

  Author's Foreword

  This was the first "big" Saint novel—that is, the first story in which he went up against king-size international dragons, as against the ordinary leeches, rats, skunks, and other vermin of the Underworld—and it still seems to be one of the prime favorites of those loyal readers who have followed his adven­tures almost from the beginning.

  For the benefit of those who may be taking up the series so much later, however, I feel it may be necessary to slip in this reminder that the book was written in 1929, when the world was politically, technologically, and temperamentally a totally different place from the one we live in today.

  In those days, there was a genuine widespread suspicion, which I was inclined to share with a great many of my genera­tion, that modern wars were plotted and deliberately engi­neered by vast mysterious financial cartels for their own en­richment. There was also a vague idea that fighting, itself, was still a fairly glamorous activity, or would be if the scientists would leave it alone. No doubt there were romantics in other periods who thought it was more sporting to be shot at with arrows than with bullets, and they were followed by others who thought that rifles were more fun than machine-guns and howitzers, and after them came those who thought that poison gas the last step to reducing glorious war to sordidness.

  This book is based on the Saint's accidental discovery that the usual slightly goofy scientist has dreamed up something called an "electron cloud", a sort of extension of the gas hor­ror with radioactive overtones, and his decision that it should not only be kept out of the hands of the stateless war-mongers, but for the good of humanity should be suppressed altogether, on the theory that this would still leave heroes happily free to enjoy the relatively good clean fun of air raids and ordinary mustard gas. (The original title of the book was The Last Hero, and in it the Saint first expounded his philosophy of "battle, murder, and sudden death" as a joyous form of self-expression.)

  Well, this was an attitude of youth which of course I shared with him, or he got from me. And in those days there were no mushroom clouds on the horizon to make even Vargan's electron cloud look like a comparatively harmless toy. But this should not for a moment be taken to imply that either of us, today, would be supporters of the "Ban the Bomb" kind foggy-minded idealism. There are many things which seemed like eternal truths to both of us in those days, which no longer look so immutable. In fact, I myself am often tempted now to lean with the optimists who think that the Bomb may actually achieve what the moralists failed to do, and abolish major warfare by making it impossible for anyone, financier or des­pot, to hope to profit by it.

  Be tolerant, then, of one or two outworn ideas, and enjoy it simply as a rattling good adventure story of its time, which I think it still is.

  Prelude

  It is said that in these hectic days no item of news is capable of holding the interest of the public for more than a week; wherefore journalists and news editors age swiftly, and become prematurely bald and bad-tempered, Tatcho and Kruschen availing them naught. A new sensation must be provided from day to day, and each sensation must eclipse its predecessor, till the dictionary is bled dry of superlatives, and the imagina­tion pales before the task of finding or inventing for to-mor­row a story fantastic and colossal enough to succeed the masterpiece of yesterday.

  That the notorious adventurer known as the Saint should have contrived to keep in the public eye for more than three months from the date of his first manifestation, thereby smithereening all records of that kind, was due entirely to his own energy and initiative. The harassed sensationalists of Fleet Street welcomed him with open arms. For a time the fevered hunt for novelty could take a rest. The Saint himself did everything in that line that the most exacting editor could have asked for—except, of course, that he failed to provide the culminating sensation of his own arrest and trial. But each of his adventures was more audacious than the last, and he never gave the interest aroused by his latest activity time to die down before he burst again upon a startled public with a yet more daring coup.

  And the same enterprising lawlessness continued for over three months, in the course of which time he brought to a triumphant conclusion some twenty raids upon the persons and property of evildoers.

  Thus it came to pass that in those three months the name of the Saint gathered about itself an aura of almost supernatural awe and terror, so that men who had for years boasted that the law could not touch them began to walk in fear; and the warning of the Saint—a ridiculous picture of a little man with one-dimensional body and limbs, such as children draw, but wearing above his blank round head an absurd halo such as it rarely occurs to children to add to their drawings—delivered to a man's door in a plain envelope, was found to be as fatal as any sentence ever signed by a Judge of the High Court. Which was exactly what the Saint himself had desired should happen. It amused him very much.

  For the most part, he worked secretly and unseen, and his victims could give the police nothing tangible in the way of clues by which he might have been traced. Yet sometimes it was inevitable that he should be known to the man whose downfall he was engineering; and, when that happened, the grim silence of the injured party was one of the most surprising features of the mystery. Chief Inspector Teal, after a num­ber of fruitless attempts, had resigned himself to giving up as a bad job the task of trying to make the victims of the Saint give evidence.

  "You might as well try to get a squeak out of a deaf-and-dumb oyster in a tank of chloroform," he told the Commis­sioner. "Either the Saint never tackles a man on one count unless he's got a second count against him by which he can blackmail him to silence, or else he's found the secret of threat­ening a man so convincingly that he still believes it the next day—and all the days after that."

  His theory was shrewd and sound enough, but it would have been shrewder and sounder and more elaborate if he had been a more imaginative man; but Mr. Teal had little confidence in things he could not see and take hold of, and he had never had a chance of watching the Saint in action.

  There were, however, other occasions when the Saint had no need to fall back upon blackmail or threats to insure the silence of those with whose careers he interfered.

  There was, for instance, the case of a man named Golter, an anarchist and incorrigible firebrand, whose boast it was that he had known the inside of every prison in Europe. He belonged to no political faction, and apparently had no gospel to forward except his own mania for destruction; but he was anything but a harmless lunatic.

  He was the leader of a society known as the Black Wolves, nearly every member of which had at some time or another served a heavy sentence for some kind of political offence— which, more often than not, consisted of an attempted assas­sination, usually by bomb.

  The reason for such societies, and the mentality of their ad­herents, will always provide an interesting field of speculation for the psychiatrist; but occasions will arise when the interest ceases to be the abstract diversion of the scientist, and be­comes the practical problem of those whose business it is to keep peace under the law.

  The law awoke to this fact, and simultaneously to a rather alarmed recognition of the existence of the Black Wolves, after a week in which two factories in the North of England were the scenes of explosions which resulted in no little loss of life, and the bullet of an undiscovered sniper actually grazed across the back of the Home Secretary as he stepped into his car outside the House of Commons.

  The law found Golter; bu
t the man who had been detailed to follow him and report on his movements somehow contrived to lose him on the afternoon in which a Crown Prince drove in state through the streets of London on his way to a lunch­eon given by the Lord Mayor.

  The procession was arranged to pass by way of the Strand and Fleet Street to the City. From a tiny office which he had rented for the purpose in Southampton Row, of which the police knew nothing, Golter had found an easy way to the roofs of the houses on the north side of Fleet Street. He sat there, in a more or less comfortable position, among the chim­ney-stacks, from which he could look down and see the street below, while armed men scoured London for a trace of him, and a worried Commissioner ordered a doubling of the plain-clothes detectives stationed along the route.

  Golter was a careful and a thoughtful man, and he had a fair grounding in the principles of dynamics. He knew to an inch how high he was from the ground, and he had calculated exactly how many seconds a bomb would take to fall to the street; the fuses of the Mills bombs in his pockets were ad­justed accordingly. Again, in Fleet Street, a little farther down towards the Strand, he had measured the distance between two lamp-posts. With the aid of a stop-watch he would dis­cover how long the leading car took to pass between them; then, by consulting an elaborate chart which he had prepared, he would be able to learn at once, without further calcula­tion, exactly at what instant he had to launch his bombs so that they would fall directly into the back of the Crown Prince's car as it passed. Golter was proud of the scientific precision with which he had worked out every detail.

  He smoked a cigarette, drumming his heels gently against the leads. It was fifteen minutes before the procession was due to arrive at that point, according to the official time-table, and already the street below was packed with a dense crowd which overflowed the pavements and wound hampering tentacles into the stream of traffic. The mass of people below looked like ants, Golter thought. Bourgeois insects. He amused him­self by picturing the ant-like confusion that would follow the detonation of his three bombs. . . .

  "Yes, it should be an interesting spectacle."

  Golter's head snapped round as though it had been jerked . by an invisible wire.

  He had heard nothing of the arrival of the man who now stood over him, whose gentle, drawling voice had broken into his meditations far more shatteringly than any explosion could have done. He saw a tall, trim, lean figure in a grey fresco suit of incredible perfection, with a soft grey felt hat whose wide brim shaded pleasant blue eyes. This man might have posed for any illustration of the latest and smartest effort of Savile Row in the way of gents' natty outfitting—that is, if he could have been persuaded to discard the automatic pistol, which is not generally considered to form an indispensable adjunct to What the Well‑Dressed Man will Wear this Season.

  "Extraordinarily interesting," repeated the unknown, with his blue eyes gazing down in a rather dreamy way at the throng a hundred feet below. "From a purely artistic point of view, it's a pity we shan't be able to watch it."

  Golter's right hand was sidling towards a bulging pocket. The stranger, with his automatic swinging in a lazy arc that centred over Golter's stomach, encouraged the movement.

  "But leave the pins in, Beautiful," he murmured, "and pass 'em to me one by one. . . . That's a good boy!"

  He took the bombs in his left hand as Golter passed them over, and handed them to someone whom Golter could not see—a second man who stood behind a chimney-stack.

  A minute passed, in which Golter stood with his hands hanging loosely at his sides, waiting for a chance to make a grab at the gun which the stranger held with such an affectation of negligence. But the chance never came.

  Instead, came a hand from behind the chimney-stack—a hand holding a bomb. The stranger took the bomb and handed it back to Golter.

  "Put it in your pocket," he directed.

  The second and third followed, and Golter, with his coat once again dragged out of shape by the weight, stood staring at the stranger, who, he thought, must be a detective, and who yet behaved in such an incomprehensible manner.

  "What did you do that for?" he demanded suspiciously.

  "My own reasons," answered the other calmly. "I am now leaving you. Do you mind?"

  Suspicion—fear—perplexity—all these emotions chased and mingled with one another over Golter's unshaven face. Then inspiration dawned in his pale eyes.

  "So you aren't a busy!"

  The stranger smiled.

  "Unfortunately for you—no. You may have heard of me. I am called the Saint. . . ."

  His left hand flashed in and out of his coat pocket in a swift movement, and Golter, in the grip of a sudden paralysis of terror, stared as if hypnotised while the Saint chalked his grotesque trade-mark on the chimney-stack.

  The the Saint spoke again.

  "You are not human. You are a destroyer—an insane killer without any justification but your own lust for blood. If you had had any motive, I might have handed you over to the police, who are at this moment combing London for you. I am not here to judge any man's creed. But for you there can be no excuse. ..."

  He had vanished when Golter looked round for him, won­dering why the condemnation did not continue, and the roof was deserted. The Saint had a knack of disappearing like that.

  The procession was approaching. Golter could hear the cheering growing rapidly louder, like the roar of many waters suddenly released from burst flood-gates. He peered down. A hundred yards away he could see the leading car crawling through the lane of human ants.

  His brain was still reeling to encompass the understanding of what the Saint had come to do. The Saint had been there, accusing—and then he had gone, giving Golter back his bombs. Golter could have believed himself to have been the victim of a hallucination. But the fantastic sketch on the chimney-stack remained to prove that he had not been dream­ing.

  With an hysterical sweep of his arm, he smeared his sleeve over the drawing, and took from his pocket his stop-watch and the time-chart he had made. The leading car had just reached the first of the two lamp-posts on which he had based his calculations. He watched it in a kind of daze.

  The Crown Prince drove in the third car. Golter recognised the uniform. The Prince was saluting the crowd.

  Golter found himself trembling as he took the first bomb from his pocket and drew the pin; but he threw it on the very instant that his stopwatch and chart indicated.

  "The true details of the case," wrote the Daily Record, some days later, "are likely to remain a mystery for ever, un­less the Saint should one day elect to come out into the open and elucidate them. Until then the curiosity of the public must be satisfied with the findings of the committee of Scotland Yard experts who have been investigating the affair—'that in some way the Saint succeeded in so tampering with the fuses of the Mills Bombs with which Golter intended to attempt the life of the Crown Prince, that they exploded the moment he released the spring handle, thereby blowing him to pieces. . . .'

  "Whatever the opinions which may be expressed concern­ing the arrogance of this gentleman who presumes to take the law into his own lawless hands, it cannot be denied that in this case his intervention undoubtedly saved the life of our royal guest; and few will be found to deny that justice was done—though perhaps it was justice of too poetic a character to be generally accepted as a precedent. . . ."

  With this sensational climax, which put the name of the Saint on the lips of every man and woman in the civilised world, came the end of a clearly defined chapter in his history.

  The sensation died down, as the most amazing sensations will die down for lack of re‑stimulation. In an open letter which was published in every newspaper throughout Europe, the Crown Prince offered his thanks to the unknown, and promised that the debt should not be forgotten if at any time the Saint should stand in need of help from high places. The British Government followed almost immediately with the offer of a free pardon for all past offences on condition that the Saint revealed
himself and took an oath to turn his energy and ingenuity into more legitimate channels. The only answer was a considered letter of acknowledgment and regretful re­fusal, posted simultaneously to all the leading news-agencies.

  "Unfortunately," wrote the Saint, "I am convinced, and my friends with me, that for us to disband at the very moment when our campaign is beginning to justify itself in the crime statistics of London—and (which is even more important) in those more subtle offences against the moral code about which there can be no statistics—would be an act of indefensible cowardice on my part. We cannot be tempted by the mere promise of safety for ourselves to betray the motive which brought us together. The game is more than the player of the game. . . . Also, speaking for myself, I should find a respect­able life intolerably dull. It isn't easy to get out of the rut these days: you have to be a rebel, and you're more likely to end up in Wormwood Scrubs than Westminster Abbey. But I believe, as I have never believed anything before, that I am on the right road. The things of value are the common, primitive things. Justice is good—when it's done fanatically. Fighting is good—when the thing you fight for is simple and sane and you love it. And danger is good—it wakes you up, and makes you live ten times more keenly. And vulgar swash­buckling may easily be the best of all—because it stands for a magnificent belief in all those things, a superb faith in the glamour that civilisation is trying to sneer at as a delusion and a snare. ... As long as the ludicrous laws of this country refuse me these, I shall continue to set those laws at defiance. The pleasure of applying my own treatment to the human sores whose persistent festering offends me is one which I will not be denied. . . ."

  And yet, strangely enough, an eagerly expectant public waited in vain for the Saint to follow up this astonishing man­ifesto. But day after day went by, and still he held his hand; so that those who had walked softly, wondering when the un­canny omniscience of the Unknown would find them out, began to lift up their heads again and boast themselves with increasing assurance, saying that the Saint was afraid.