The Saint Meets his Match (The Saint Series)

by Leslie Charteris

  “And while you were making a fool of yourself up here,” said Teal bitterly, “Jill Trelawney was walking out of the front door and getting clean away. And you call yourself a policeman!”

  Simon coughed gently.

  “I think,” he said diffidently, “that the constable meant well.”

  Teal turned on him. The detective’s heavy-lidded eyes glittered on the dangerous verge of fury.

  The Saint smiled.

  Slowly, deliberately, Teal’s mouth closed upon the word it had been about to release. Slowly Teal’s heavy eyelids dropped down.

  “Saint,” said Teal, “I told you you were a bright boy.”

  “So did Auntie Ethel,” said the Saint.

  2

  Simon Templar, refreshed by a good night’s sleep, set out for the Ritz at 9:30 next morning.

  He had not been kept up late the night before. Teal gathering himself back into the old pose of mountainous sleepiness out of which he had so nearly allowed himself to be disturbed, had gone very quietly. In fact, Simon had been sound asleep three-quarters of an hour after the detective’s return visit.

  Teal hadn’t a leg to stand on. True, the Saint had behaved very curiously, but there is no law against men behaving curiously. The Saint had lied, but lying is not in itself a criminal offence. It is not even a misdemeanour for a man to arrange a dummy in a chair in such a way that a realistic silhouette is thrown upon a blind. And there is no statute to prevent a man claiming a Lithuanian princess for an aunt, provided he does not do it with intent to defraud…So Teal had gone home.

  Suspicion is not evidence—that is a fundamental principle of English law. The law deals in fact, and a thousand suspicious circumstances do not make a fact.

  No one had seen the Princess Selina von Rupprecht. No one could even prove that her real name was Jill Trelawney. Therefore no charge could ever be substantiated against Simon Templar for that night’s work. And Teal was wise enough to know when he was wasting his time. There was a twinkle in the Saint’s eye that discouraged bluff.

  “And yet, boys and girls,” murmured Simon to himself, the next morning, as he went down the stairs, “Claud Eustace Teal is reputed to have a long memory. And last night’s entertainment ought to make that memory stretch from here to the next blue moon. No, I don’t think we’re going to find life quite so easy as it was once.”

  The house was watched, of course. As he turned out into the street, he observed, without appearing to observe, the two men who stood immersed in conversation on the opposite pavement, and as he walked on he knew, without looking round, that one of the men followed him.

  There was nothing much in that, except as an omen.

  It made no difference to the Saint’s intention of breakfasting at the Ritz as Mr Joseph M. Halliday, of Boston, Mass. In fact, it was to allow for exactly that event that he had left his flat earlier than he need have done. It was nothing new in Simon Templar’s young life to be shadowed by large men in very plain clothes, and such minor persecutions had long since ceased to bother him.

  He left the sleuth near Marble Arch, and took a taxi to the Ritz with the comfortable certainty of being temporarily lost to the ken of the police, and the pair of horn-rimmed glasses which he donned in the cab effectively completed his simplest disguise.

  He arrived on the stroke of ten, entering behind the breakfast-tray. Taking advantage of the presence of the waiter, he kissed Jill like a dutiful husband, and sat down feeling that the day was well begun.

  As soon as they were alone—

  “The self-control of the police,” said the Saint hurriedly, “is really remarkable.”

  The girl maintained her gravity with an effort.

  “Did he go quietly?” she asked.

  “To say that he went like a lamb,” answered the Saint, “means nothing at all. He would have made a lamb look like a hungry tiger outside a butcher’s shop on early-closing day.”

  He retailed the part of his ruse at which she had not been audience, and had his reward in the way she sat back and looked at him.

  “You’re a marvel,” she said, and meant it.

  “All this flattery,” said the Saint, “is bad for my heart.”

  He picked up one of the newspapers that had come in with the tray, and read through the agony column carefully, without finding what he sought. He had no more luck with any of the others.

  “He hasn’t had time,” said Jill.

  Simon nodded.

  “Tomorrow,” he said, “for a fiver. Care to bet?”

  They spent the day inside the Ritz, very lazily, but neither of them was inclined to take a risk at that moment. Meanwhile, Scotland Yard, lashed by the biting comments of Chief Inspector Teal, tore its hair and ransacked London. The Ritz, naturally, was never thought of, and Mr and Mrs Joseph M. Halliday never once set foot outside the hotel.

  The advertisement appeared in The Times next morning. During the previous day they had amused themselves with speculating about the form it would take, and, as it happened, neither of them had come very near the mark.

  INJUSTICE.—A great wrong may be put right if the Lady of Paris will meet one who is anxious to make restitution in exchange for forgiveness.

  —The Lord Of Paris.

  “It brings tears to my eyes,” said the Saint.

  “Do you believe it?” asked Jill.

  Simon shrugged.

  “It isn’t impossible,” he said. “You say you’re certain he had a hand in the framing of your father. Well, we now know a few things about him. He’s got some reason to respect us. And, as a cautious man, he may think it a wise move to make a treaty.”

  Jill Trelawney nodded, buttering a slice of toast.

  “And yet,” she said, “it’s a trap.”

  “Not for the police. Essenden wouldn’t dare—not in the face of what we know. For trafficking in illicit drugs, five years’ penal servitude.”

  “No, not the police. Just himself.”

  Simon lighted a cigarette.

  “Do you want to buy?”

  “We buy.” She looked at him. “Or I buy. I shall see Essenden tonight.”

  “Where?”

  “At his house. I’ve been there before. Shall I forget it?” She smiled at him, and he laughed. “That’s where he’ll be expecting me, from today onwards. He wouldn’t expect me to write—he knows me too well.”

  “And if he knows you so well,” said the Saint, “he’ll be expecting trouble.”

  “Of course.”

  “And he’s going to get it?”

  With a cup of coffee in her hand, the girl answered, quite calmly: “A year ago I swore to kill every man who had a hand in ruining my father. Waldstein is dead. I suspect Essenden. If I find proof against him—”

  “That was my way, once,” said the Saint quietly. “But doesn’t it ever occur to you that you might be doing much better work if you looked for the evidence to clear your father’s name, instead of merely looking for revenge?”

  Jill Trelawney said, “My father died.”

  Simon had nothing to say.

  They spent another inactive day reading and talking desultorily. To Simon Templar, those long conversations were fascinating and yet maddening. She never spoke of the Angels of Doom, or the charge that lay against her, or the unchanged inflexibility of her purpose. These things remained as a dark background to her presence: they were never allowed to steal out of the background, and yet they could not be escaped. Against that background Simon Templar felt himself a stranger. Not once yet, in that bizarre alliance of theirs, had he been allowed to enter into the secret places of her mind. But he played up to her. Because she had that air of unawareness, he left her unaware. He tried no cross-examinations. She was the soloist: he was the accompaniment, heard, valuable, perfectly attuned, but subordinate and half-ignored. It was one of the most salutary experiences of the Saint’s violent life. But what else could he do? The mind of a woman with an idea is like a one-way street: you have to run w
ith the traffic, or get into trouble.

  She obliterated their forthcoming adventure until the evening. Until after dinner, when she smiled at him across the table and his cigarette-case and said, “Saint, it’s very nice of you to be coming with me.”

  “Very nice of you to be come with,” said the Saint politely.

  He offered her a match, but for a moment she looked past it.

  “Does the idea of being an accessory to another murder attract you?” she asked.

  “Tremendously,” said the Saint.

  “It will probably come to that, you know.”

  “I’ve always enjoyed a good murder.”

  She touched her waist. He knew what she carried there, under her coat. Since the night before, he had inspected the weapon again, with a professional eye.

  “Have you got a gun?” she asked him.

  “Don’t care for ’em,” he said. “Nasty, noisy things. Dangerous, too. Might go off.”

  She laughed, suddenly.

  “And yet,” she said, “you’ve proved you aren’t a fool. If you hadn’t, I’d have taken a lot of convincing…Are you ready?”

  He glanced at his watch.

  “The car should be here now,” he said.

  They went out to the car five minutes later—a luxurious limousine, with liveried chauffeur, ordered by telephone for the occasion.

  Simon handed the girl in, and paused to give directions to the chauffeur.

  It was a pure coincidence that Chief Inspector Teal should have been passing down Piccadilly at that moment. The car was not on Piccadilly, but at the side entrance of the hotel, on Arlington Street, which Teal was crossing. He observed the car, as he invariably observed everything else around him, with drowsy eyes that appeared to notice nothing and in fact missed nothing.

  He saw a man speaking to a chauffeur. The man wore an overcoat turned up around his chin, a soft hat worn low over his eyes, and a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles. It is surprising how much of a man’s face those three things can hide between them—especially at night. Teal thought there was something familiar about the man, but he could not connect up the association immediately.

  He stood at the corner of the Ritz and watched the man enter the car. He was not looking for Simon Templar at that moment. He was not, as a matter of fact, even thinking of Simon Templar. He had thought and talked of little else but Simon Templar for the last forty-eight hours, and his brain had wearied of the subject.

  Thus it was that he stood where he was, inertly pondering, until the car turned onto St James’s Street. As it did so, a woman leaned forward to throw a cigarette-end out of the window, and the light of a street lamp fell full across her face.

  She was hatless. He saw straight, jet-black hair, fine straight black eyebrows, eyes in deep shadow, carmine lips. These things belonged to no woman that he knew.

  Thoughtfully he spat out a scrap of spearmint in which the flavour had ceased to last, extracted a fresh wafer from the packet in his pocket, engulfed it, and chewed with renewed enthusiasm. Then, still thoughtfully, he proceeded on his way.

  The hiatus in his memory annoyed him, and even when he had filled it up it still annoyed him, for it was his boast that he never forgot a face. This was his first lapse in years, and he was never able to account for it to his satisfaction.

  It was nearly an hour later, when he was chatting to the Divisional Inspector in Walton Street police station, that the blind spot in Teal’s brain was suddenly uncovered.

  “If you don’t mind my saying so, sir,” remarked the Divisional Inspector, “we’ve probably been combing all the wrong places. A man and a woman like Templar and Trelawney can reckon up some nerve between them. They’re probably staying at some place like the Ritz—”

  Teal’s mouth flopped open, and his small blue eyes seemed to swell up in his face. The Divisional Inspector stared at him.

  “What’s the matter, sir?”

  “The Ritz!” groaned Teal. “Oh, holy hollerin’ Moses! The Ritz!”

  He tore out of the station like a stampeding alp, leaving the D.I. gaping blankly at the space he had been occupying. The back exit, a breathless sprint down Yeoman’s Row, brought him to the Brompton Road, and he was fortunate enough to catch a taxi without having to wait a moment.

  “The Ritz Hotel,” panted Teal. “And drive like blazes. I’m a police officer.”

  He climbed in, with bursting lungs. He had left his sprinting days behind him long ago.

  He was wide awake now—when, as he realised with disgust, it was somewhat late in the day to have woken up.

  A few minutes later he was interviewing the management of the Ritz. The management was anxious to be helpful, and at the same time anxious to preserve itself from any of the wrong sort of publicity. Teal was not interested in the private susceptibilities of the management. He made his inquisition coldly and efficiently, and it did not take him long to narrow the search down to just one name on the register—the charming Mr and Mrs Joseph M. Halliday, of Boston, Mass.

  Teal inspected the small suite they had occupied, and heard from the floor waiter the story of how Mrs Halliday had been in bed with a severe cold ever since her arrival, and how Mr Halliday, like a truly devoted American husband, had never left her side. This evening was the first evening they had been out. Mrs Halliday had felt so much better that Mr Halliday had decided that a short spin in the country, well wrapped up in a closed car, might do her a lot of good.

  “On a nice warm winter’s night!” commented Teal sarcastically. “And, of course, in the dark she could enjoy the scenery! Yes, that’s a very good story.”

  The source of information was understood to remark that such eccentricities were to be expected of wealthy Americans.

  “Yes, very wealthy Americans,” agreed Teal.

  He picked up a small leather valise. It was empty. Further investigation showed that it was the one and only item of their property that Mr and Mrs Halliday had left in the suite.

  “Did they take any rugs with them?” asked Teal.

  “They borrowed two from the hotel, sir, for the drive.”

  “It’s amazing what a lot of stuff you can carry under a rug,” said Teal, “if you know the trick of packing it.”

  Returning downstairs to the manager’s office, he learnt, as he expected, that the car had been ordered by the hotel on behalf of Mr Halliday.

  “We arrange these things,” said the manager.

  “And sometimes,” said Teal, with a certain morose enthusiasm, “you pay for them, too.”

  The manager was not entirely green.

  “I suppose,” he said, “we needn’t expect them back?”

  “You needn’t,” said Teal. “That’s another eccentricity of these very wealthy Americans.”

  He hurried back to Scotland Yard, and by the time he arrived there he had decided that there was only one place in England where Jill Trelawney and Simon Templar could plausibly be going that night.

  He tried to telephone to Essenden, and was informed that the line was out of order. Then he tried to get in touch with the Assistant Commissioner, but Cullis had left the Yard at six o’clock, and was not to be found either at his private address or at his club.

  Teal was left with only one thing to do; for he had a profound contempt for all police officials outside the Metropolitan area.

  At ten minutes to ten he was speeding through the west of London in a police car, and he realised, grimly, that he was unlikely to arrive at Essenden’s anything less than two hours too late.

  CHAPTER SEVEN:

  HOW JILL TRELAWNEY KEPT AN APPOINTMENT AND SIMON TEMPLAR WENT PADDLING

  1

  Essenden poured himself out another drink, and pushed the decanter towards the centre of the table.

  It was quiet in Essenden Towers that night. Lord Essenden had seen to that. With some ingenuity, and a solicitude which hitherto he had not been in the habit of manifesting, he had suggested to Lady Essenden that her appreciati
on of country life would be enhanced by an occasional visit to London. In fact, he said, he had taken a box at the Orpheum Theatre, for that very night.

  It was unfortunate that at the last moment, when they had been on the point of setting out for London, Lord Essenden had been overcome by a violent and agonising attack of toothache. But he refused to allow his misfortune to interfere with his wife’s amusement, and insisted that she should go to London alone. He had telephoned to friends and arranged for them to accompany his lady.

  That was one thing. The servants had been a second problem. But, in the matter of disposing of the servants, Fate had played kindly into his hand. That night there was a dance in the next village. His staff had previously applied to him for permission to attend, which he had refused. Now he repented, and, in an astonishing burst of generosity, he gave the evening off to every man and woman in Essenden Towers. The butler would have stayed, but Essenden packed him off with the others, saying he would much rather be left alone with his ache.

  Thus it had been easy for Lord Essenden to introduce into the house the four men who now bore him company.

  They had been carefully chosen. Lord Essenden had very few more criminal acquaintances than any other successful financier, but from the hoodlums of his acquaintance he had selected those four with care and forethought.

  They sat round the table, helping themselves from the whisky bottle which he had placed at their disposal—four carefully chosen men. There was “Flash” Arne, a ferrety-faced man with a taste for diamond rings and horsey tweeds, a prominent member of a race gang that many North of England bookmakers had known to their cost. There was “Snake” Ganning, recently released from Pentonville, tall and lean and supple, with the sleek black hair and long neck and beady eyes that had earned him his name. There was “Red” Harver, with the permanent scowl and the huge hasty fists. And there was Matthew Keld, who had once had his face slashed from temple to chin with a razor by a man who was never given the chance to slash another face in his life. Four very carefully chosen men.