There was an instant’s terrible stillness, while the echoes of the reverberation seemed to vibrate tenuously through the tense air like the vibrations of a cello-string humming below the pitch of hearing, and then Lady Yearleigh came to her feet like a ghost rising, with her ivory skin and flaxen hair making her a blanched apparition in the dimly lighted room.
“My God,” she breathed, “he’s killed him!”
Teal, who was nearest the door, awoke from his momentary stupor and rushed towards it, but the Saint reached it first. He ran at the Saint’s shoulder to the study, and as they came to it the door was flung open and Lord Yearleigh stood there, a straight steady figure with a revolver in his hand.
“You’re too late,” he said, with a note of triumph in his voice. “I got him myself.”
“Who?” snapped Teal, and burst past him into the room, to see the answer to his question lying still and sprawled out in the middle of the rich carpet.
It was Maurice Vould.
Teal went over to him. He could barely distinguish the puncture of the bullet in the back of Vould’s dinner jacket, but the scar in his shirt-front was larger, with a spreading red stain under it. Teal opened the dead man’s fingers and detached an old Italian dagger, holding it carefully in his handkerchief.
“What happened?” he asked.
“He started raving,” said Yearleigh, “about that bill of mine. He said it would be better for me to die than to take that bill into the House. I said, ‘Don’t be silly,’ and he grabbed that dagger—I use it as a paper-knife—off the desk, and attacked me. I threw him off, but he’d become a maniac. I got a drawer open and pulled out this revolver, meaning to frighten him. He turned to the window and yelled, ‘Come in, comrades! Come in and kill!’ I saw another man at the window with a scarf round his face, and fired at him. Maurice must have moved, or I must have been shaken up, or something, because I hit Maurice. The other man ran away.”
Still holding the knife, Teal turned and lumbered towards the open french windows. Ormer and Walmar, who had arrived while Yearleigh was talking, went after him more slowly, but the Saint was beside him when he stood outside, listening to the murmurs of the night.
In Teal’s mind was a queer amazement and relief, that for once Simon Templar was proved innocent and he had not that possibility to contend with, and he looked at the Saint with half a mind to apologise for his suspicions. And then he saw that the Saint’s face was deeply lined in the dim starlight, and he heard the Saint muttering in a terrible whisper, “Oh, hell! It was my fault. It was my fault!”
“What do you mean?” asked the startled detective. Simon gripped him by the arm, and looked over his shoulder. Ormer and Walmar were behind them, venturing more cautiously into the dangerous dark. The Saint spoke louder.
“You’ve got your job to do,” he said rather wildly. “Photographers—finger-prints—”
“It’s a dear case,” protested Teal, as he felt himself being urged away.
“You’ll want a doctor—coroners—your men from the village. I’ll take you in my car…”
Feeling that the universe had suddenly sprung a high fever, Teal found himself hustled helplessly around the broad terrace to the front of the house. They had reached the drive before he managed to collect his wits and stop.
“Have you gone mad?” he demanded, planting his feet solidly in the gravel and refusing to move further. “What do you mean—it was your fault?”
“I killed him,” said the Saint savagely. “I killed Maurice Vould!”
“You?” Teal ejaculated, with an uncanny start. “You’re crazy,” he said.
“I killed him,” said the Saint, “by culpable negligence. Because I could have saved his life. I was mad. I was crazy. But I’m not now. All right. Go back to the house. You have somebody to arrest.”
A flash of memory went across Teal’s mind—the memory of a pale ghostly woman rising from her chair, her voice saying, “My God, he’s killed him!”—the hint of a frightful foreknowledge. A cold shiver touched his spine.
“You don’t mean—Lady Yearleigh?” he said incredulously. “It’s impossible. With a husband like hers—”
“You think he was a good husband, don’t you?” said the Saint. “Because he was a noble sportsman. Cold baths and cricket. Hunting, shooting, and fishing. I suppose it’s too much to expect you to put yourself in the place of a woman—a woman like her—who was married to that?”
“You think she was in love with Vould?”
“Of course she was in love with Vould. That’s why I asked you if you’d looked at her at all during dinner—when Vould was talking. If you had, even you might have seen it. But you’re so full of conventions. You think that any woman ought to adore a great fat-headed blustering athlete—because a number of equally fat-headed men adore him. You think she oughtn’t to think much of a pale poet who wears glasses, because the fat-headed athletes don’t understand him, as if the ability to hit a ball with a bat were the only criterion of value in the world. But I tried to tell you that she was intelligent. Of course she was in love with Vould, and Vould with her. They were made for each other. I’ll also bet you that Vould didn’t want an interview with Yearleigh to make more protests about that bill, but to tell him that he was going to run away with his wife.”
Teal said helplessly, “You mean—when Yearleigh objected—Vould had made up his mind to kill him. Lady Yearleigh knew, and that’s what she meant by—”
“She didn’t mean that at all,” said the Saint. “Vould believed in peace. You heard him at dinner. Have you forgotten that remark of his? He pointed out that men had learned not to kill their neighbours so that they could steal their lawn mowers. Why should he believe that they ought to kill their neighbours so that they could steal their wives?”
“You can’t always believe what a man says—”
“You can believe him when he’s sincere.”
“Sincere enough,” Teal mentioned sceptically, “to try to kill his host.”
Simon was quiet for a moment, kicking the toe of his shoe into the gravel.
“Did you notice that Vould was shot in the back?” he said.
“You heard Yearleigh’s explanation.”
“You can’t always believe what a man says—can you?”
Suddenly the Saint reached out and took the dagger which Teal was still holding. He unwrapped the handkerchief from it, and Teal let out an exclamation. “You damn fool!”
“Because I’m destroying your precious finger-prints?” murmured the Saint coolly. “You immortal ass! If you can hold a knife in your handkerchief to keep from marking it, couldn’t anybody else?”
The detective was silent. His stillness after that instinctive outburst was so impassive that he might have gone to sleep on his feet. But he was very much awake. And presently the Saint went on, in that gentle, somewhat mocking voice which Teal was listening for.
“I wonder where you get the idea that a ‘sportsman’ is a sort of hero,” he said. “It doesn’t require courage to take a cold bath—it’s simply a matter of whether your constitution likes it. It doesn’t require courage to play cricket—haven’t you ever heard the howls of protest that shake the British Empire if a batsman happens to get hit with a ball? Perhaps it requires a little more courage to watch a pack of hounds pull down a savage fox, or to loose off a shot-gun at a ferocious grouse, or to catch a great man-eating trout with a little rod and line. But there are certain things you’ve been brought up to believe, and your mind isn’t capable of reasoning them out for itself. You believe that a ‘sportsman’ is a kind of peculiarly god-like gladiator, without fear and without reproach. You believe that no gentleman would shoot a sitting partridge, and therefore you believe that he wouldn’t shoot a sitting poet.”
A light wind blew through the shrubbery, and the detective felt queerly cold.
“You’re only talking,” he said. “You haven’t any evidence.”
“I know I haven’
t,” said the Saint, with a sudden weariness. “I’ve only got what I think. I think that Yearleigh planned this days ago—when Vould first asked for the interview, as Yearleigh mentioned. I think he guessed what it would be about. I think his only reason for putting it off was to give himself time to send those anonymous threats to himself—to build up the melodrama he had invented. I think you’ll find that those anonymous threats started on the day when Vould asked for a talk with him, and that Yearleigh had no sound reason for going away except that of putting Vould off. I think that when they were in the study tonight, Yearleigh pointed to the window and made some excuse to get Vould to turn round, and then shot him in the back in cold blood, and put this paper-knife in his hand afterwards. I think that that is what Lady Yearleigh, who must have known Yearleigh so much better than any of us, was afraid of, and I think that when she said ‘He’s killed him,’ she meant that Yearleigh had killed Vould, and not that Vould had killed Yearleigh.”
The Saint’s lighter flared, like a bomb bursting in the dark, and Teal looked up and saw his lean brown face, grim and curiously bitter in the light of the flame as he put it to his cigarette. And then the light went out again, and there was only Simon Templar’s quiet voice speaking out of the dark.
“I think that I killed Maurice Vould as surely as if I’d shot him myself, because I couldn’t see all those things until now, when it’s too late. If I had seen them, I might have saved him.”
“But in the back,” said Teal harshly. “That’s the part I can’t swallow.”
The tip of the Saint’s cigarette glowed and died.
“Yearleigh was afraid of him,” he said. “He couldn’t risk any mistake—any cry or struggle that might have spoilt his scheme. He was afraid of Vould because, in his heart, he knew that Vould was so much cleverer and more desirable, so much more right and honest than he would ever be. He was fighting the old hopeless battle of age against youth. He knew that Vould had seen through the iniquity of his bill. The bill could never touch Yearleigh. He was too old for the last war, when I seem to remember that he made a great reputation by organising cricket matches behind the lines. He would be too old for the next. He had no children. But it’s part of the psychology of life, whether you like it or not, that war is the time when the old men come back into their own, and the young men who are pressing on their heels are miraculously removed. Yearleigh knew that Vould despised him for it, and he was afraid…Those are only the things I think, and I can’t prove any of them,” he said, and Teal turned abruptly on his heel and walked back towards the house.
THE DAMSEL IN DISTRESS
“You need brains in this life of crime,” Simon Templar would say sometimes, “but I often think you need luck even more.”
He might have added that the luck had to be consistent.
Mr Giuseppe Rolfieri was lucky up to a point, for he happened to be in Switzerland when the astounding Liverpool Municipal Bond forgery was discovered. It was a simple matter for him to slip over the border into his own native country, and when his four partners in the swindle stumbled down the narrow stairway that leads from the dock of the Old Bailey to the terrible blind years of penal servitude, he was comfortably installed in his villa at San Remo with no vengeance to fear from the Law. For it is a principle of international law that no man can be extradited from his own country, and Mr Rolfieri was lucky to have retained his Italian citizenship even though he had made himself a power in the City of London.
Simon Templar read about the case—he could hardly have helped it, for it was one of those sensational scandals which rock the financial world once in a lifetime—but it did not strike him as a matter for his intervention. Four out of the five conspirators, including the ringleader, had been convicted and sentenced, and although it is true that there was a certain amount of public indignation at the immunity of Mr Rolfieri, it was inevitable that the Saint, in his career of shameless lawlessness, sometimes had to pass up one inviting prospect in favour of another nearer to hand. He couldn’t be everywhere at once—it was one of the very few human limitations which he was ready to admit.
A certain Domenick Naccaro, however, had other ideas.
He called at the Saint’s apartment in Piccadilly one morning—a stout bald-headed man in a dark blue suit and a light blue waistcoat, with an unfashionable stiff collar and a stringy black tie and a luxuriant scroll of black moustache ornamenting his face—and for the first moment of alarm Simon wondered if he had been mistaken for somebody else of the same name but less respectable morals, for Signor Naccaro was accompanied by a pale pretty girl who carried a small infant swathed in a shawl.
“Is this-a Mr Templar I have-a da honour to spik to?” asked Naccaro, doffing his bowler elaborately.
“This is one Mr Templar,” admitted the Saint cautiously.
“Ha!” said Mr Naccaro. “It is-a da Saint himself?”
“So I’m told,” Simon answered.
“Then you are da man we look-a for,” stated Mr Naccaro, with profound conviction.
As if taking it for granted that all the necessary formalities had therewith been observed, he bowed the girl in, bowed himself in after her, and stalked into the living-room. Simon closed the door and followed the deputation with a certain curious amusement.
“Well, brother,” he murmured, taking a cigarette from the box on the table. “Who are you, and what can I do for you?”
The flourishing bowler hat bowed the girl into one chair, bowed its owner into another, and came to rest on its owner’s knees.
“Ha!” said the Italian, rather like an acrobat announcing the conclusion of a trick. “I am Domenick Naccaro!”
“That must be rather nice for you,” murmured the Saint amiably. He waved his cigarette towards the girl and her bundle. “Did you come here to breed?”
“That,” said Mr Naccaro, “is-a my daughter Maria. And in her arms she hold-as a leedle baby. A baby,” he said, with his black eyes suddenly swimming, “wis-a no father.”
“Careless of her,” Simon remarked. “What does the baby think about it?”
“Da father,” said Mr Naccaro, contradicting himself dramatically, “is-a Giuseppe Rolfieri.”
Simon’s brows came down in a straight line, and some of the bantering amusement fell back below the surface of his blue eyes. He hitched one hip on to the edge of the table and swung his foot thoughtfully.
“How did this happen?” he asked.
“I keep-a da small-a restaurant in-a Soho,” explained Mr Naccaro. “Rolfieri, he come-a there often to eat-a da spaghetti. Maria, she sit at-a da desk and take-a da money. You, signor, you see-a how-a she is beautiful. Rolfieri, he notice her. When-a he pay his bill, he stop-a to talk-a wis her. One day he ask-a her to go out wis him.”
Mr Naccaro took out a large chequered handkerchief and dabbed his eyes. He went on, waving his hands in broken eloquence.
“I do not stop her. I think-a Rolfieri is-a da fine gentleman, and it is nice-a for my Maria to go out wis him. Often, they go out. I tink-a that Maria perhaps she makes-a presently da good-a marriage, and I am glad for her. Then, one day, I see she is going to have-a da baby.”
“It must have been a big moment,” said the Saint gravely.
“I say to her, ‘Maria, what have-a you done?’ ” recounted Mr Naccaro, flinging out his arms. “She will-a not tell-a me.” Mr Naccaro shut his mouth firmly. “But presently she confess it is-a Rolfieri. I beat-a my breast.” Mr Naccaro beat his breast. “I say, I will keell-a heem, but first-a he shall marry you.’ ”
Mr Naccaro jumped up with native theatrical effect.
“Rolfieri does-a not come any more to eat-a da spaghetti. I go to his office, and they tell me he is-a not there. I go to his house, and they tell me he is-a not there. I write-a letters, and he does-a not answer. Da time is going so quick. Presently I write-a da letter and say, ‘If you do not-a see me soon I go to da police.’ He answer that one. He say he come soon. But he does-a not come. Then he is-a
go abroad. He write again, and he say he come-a to see me when he get back. But he does not-a come back. One day I read in da paper that he is-a da criminal, and da police are already look-a for him. So Maria she have-a da baby—and Rolfieri will-a never come back!”
Simon nodded.
“That’s very sad,” he said sympathetically. “But what can I do about it?”
Mr Naccaro mopped his brow, put away his large chequered handkerchief, and sat down again.
“You are-a da man who help-a da poor people, no?” he said pleadingly. “You are-a da Saint who always work-a to make justice?”
“Yes, but—”
“Then it is settled. You help-a me. Listen, signor, everything, everything is-a arrange. I have-a da good friends in England and in-a San Remo, and we put-a da money together to make-a this right. We kidnap-a Rolfieri. We bring him here in da aeroplane. But we do not-a know anyone who can fly. You, signor, you can fly-a da aeroplane.” Mr Naccaro suddenly fell on his knees and flung out his arms. “See, signor—I humble myself. I kiss-a your feet. I beg-a you to help us and not let Maria have-a da baby wis-a no father!”
Simon allowed the operatic atmosphere to play itself out, and thereafter listened with a seriousness from which his natural superficial amusement did not detract at all. It was an appeal of the kind which he heard sometimes, for the name of the Saint was known to people who dreamed of his assistance as well as to those who lived in terror of his attentions, and he was never entirely deaf to the pleadings of those troubled souls who came to his home with a pathetic faith in miracles.
Mr Naccaro’s proposition was more practical than most.
He and his friends, apparently, had gone into the problem of avenging the wickedness of Giuseppe Rolfieri with the conspiratorial instinct of professional vendettists. One of them had become Mr Rolfieri’s butler in the villa at San Remo. Others, outside, had arranged the abduction down to a precise time-table. Mr Naccaro himself had acquired an old farmhouse in Kent at which Rolfieri was to be held prisoner, with a large field adjoining it at which an aeroplane could land. The aeroplane itself had been bought, and was ready for use at Brooklands Aerodrome. The only unit lacking was a man qualified to fly it.
The Saint Intervenes (The Saint Series) Page 13