The Saint and Mr. Teal: Formerly Called "Once More the Saint" (27 page)

[Signed] ABDUL OSMAN.

The defense made a valiant effort to save their case by making great play with the fact that the notorious Simon Templar was not only in the district, but was actually on board the Luxor when the murder was committed; but the judge promptly repressed all questions that were not directly concerned with the circumstances of the murder.

”The police,” he said, “have charged Galbraith Stride with the murder, and I cannot have alternative murderers dragged in at this stage of the proceedings. We are here to decide whether the prisoner, Galbraith Stride, is guilty or not guilty; and if he should eventually be found not guilty it will be open to the police to bring charges against such other persons as they think fit.”

There was also, somewhat inconsistently, an attempt on the part of the defense to represent their client as a repentant hero hastening to rescue his stepdaughter from her fate. The case for the prosecution lasted two days, and this happened when the Crown’s position was rapidly becoming unassailable. And then Clements was called, and that finished it.

He was a very different man from the whimpering wreck who had suffered all the indignities that Osman’s warped brain could think of to heap upon him. From the moment of Osman’s death he had become free of the supplies of cocaine that were stocked in that concealed cupboard in the saloon: he had used them liberally to maintain himself in the normal state that he would never be able to return to again without the help of drugs, keeping their existence secret until the case was transferred to the mainland and he could secure proper treatment. But there was no treatment that could give him back the flame of life; and so the police surgeon told him.

“Honestly, Clements, if I’d been told that a man could develop the resistance to the stuff that you’ve got, so that he would require the doses that you require to keep him normal, without killing himself, I shouldn’t have believed it. You must have had the constitution of an ox before you started that-that —”

“Folly?” queried Clements, with a flicker of expression passing over his wasted features. “Yes, I used to be pretty strong, once.”

“There’s no cure for what you’ve got,” said the doctor bluntly; for he was still a young man, an old Rugger blue, and some of the things that he saw in his practice hurt him.

But Clements only smiled. He knew that the poisons they were pumping into him six times a day to keep him human would kill him within a matter of weeks, but he could not have lasted much longer anyway. And he had one thing to finish before he died.

He went into the witness box steady-nerved, with his head erect and the sparkle of cocaine in his eyes. The needle that the young doctor had rammed into his arm half an hour before had done that; but that was not in evidence. They knew he was a cocaine addict, of course-he told them the whole story of his association with Abdul Osman, without sparing himself. The defense remembered this when their turn came to cross-examine.

“In view of these sufferings which you endured at the hands of the dead man,” counsel put it to him, “didn’t you ever feel you would like to kill him ?”

“Often,” said Clements calmly. “But that would have cut off my supplies of the drug.”

“Wouldn’t it be quite conceivable, then,” counsel continued, persuasively, “that if you had killed him you would be particularly anxious to keep yourself out of the hands of the police at any cost?”

Just for that moment the witness’s eyes flashed.

“You’d better ask the doctor,” he said. “He’ll tell you that I shall probably be dead in a couple of months anyway. Why should I waste my last days of life coming here to tell you lies? It would make no difference to me if you sentenced me to death today.”

Counsel consulted his notes.

“You had never met Galbraith Stride before?”

“Never.”

Then came the attempt to represent the killing as an act in the defense of a girl’s honour.

“I have told the court already,” said Clements, with that terribly patient calm of a man for whom time has no more meaning, which somehow set him apart from the reproof that would immediately have descended upon any ordinary witness who attempted to make a speech from the box, “that nothing of the sort was suggested. Miss Berwick had fainted; and during the time that she was being attacked I was only occupied with taking advantage of the confusion to get at Osman’s supply of cocaine. I cannot make any excuses for that-no one who has been spared that craving can understand how it overrules all other considerations until it has been satisfied. Deprived of it, I was not a man-I was a hungry animal. I went to the cabinet and gave myself an injection, and sat down to allow the drug time to take effect. When I looked up, Galbraith Stride was there. He had a pistol in his hand, and he appeared to have been drinking. He said: ‘Wait a minute, Osman. She’s worth more than that. I’m damned if I’ll let you have her and get rid of me as well. You can make another choice. If you take her, we’ll divide things differently.’ Osman flew into a rage and tried to hit him. Stride fired, and Osman fell. I thought Stride was going to fire again, and I caught hold of the nearest weapon I could find-a brass vase-and hit him with it. I hadn’t much strength, but luckily it struck him on the chin and knocked him out.”

“And it was you who went over to St. Mary’s and informed Sergeant Hancock what had happened?”

“Yes.”

“On your own initiative?”

“Entirely.”

“I suggest that Templar said: ‘Look here, Osman’s dead, and there’s no need for us to get into trouble. Let’s go over to Sergeant Hancock and tell him that Stride did it.’”

“That is absurd.”

“You remember the statement that Stride made to Sergeant Hancock when he was arrested?”

“Fairly well.”

“You will recall, perhaps, that Stride described how he was attacked in his cabin on the Claudette by this man Templar, and that significant mention of a knife that was alleged to have been thrown into a door. Did you hear Sergeant Hancock give evidence that he examined the door in the saloon of the Claudette, and found the mark of a” knife having been driven deeply into it?”

“Yes.”

” How would you account for that ?”

“If you ask me, I should say that a man like Stride might well have foreseen the possibility of accidents, and he could easily have prepared that mark to substantiate his story in case of trouble.”

It was on this point that the greatest weakness of the case for the prosecution seemed to rest. Simon Templar was recalled before the end, and his evidence reëxamined.

“You have admitted that you went out to the Luxor on the night in question with the intention of assaulting Osman?”

“I’ve never denied it,” said the Saint.

“Why, if you were so anxious to take the law into your own hands, did you confine your attentions to the deceased?”

“Because I’d heard of him, and I hadn’t heard of Stride. Mr. Smithson Smith told me about Osman- that’s already been given in evidence.”

“And you,” said counsel, with deliberate irony, “were immediately filled with such a passion for justice that you couldn’t sleep until you had thrashed this monster that Osman was represented to you to be?”

“I thought it would be rather a rag,” said the Saint, with a perfectly straight face.

“It has been suggested that you were the man who branded Osman five years ago-was that also intended to be rather a rag?”

“I never met the man before in my life.”

“You have heard Galbraith Stride say that you told him that you had done that ?”

“He must be dotty,” said the Saint-a reply that earned him a three-minute lecture from the learned judge.

In his closing speech, the counsel for the Crown suggested that the difficulty might not be so great as it appeared.

“In this case,” he said, “the only discrepancies which you need to take into consideration are those between the evidence given by Mr. Clements and Mr. Templar, and the story told by the prisoner. It is my submission to you that the defense has in no way succeeded in shaking the credibility of those two witnesses; and when you remember, in discarding the evidence of the prisoner that it is not supported by any other witness at any point, and that the only alternative to discarding it as the fantastic story of a man lying desperately to save his neck is to regard all the stories of all the other witnesses as nothing short of a deliberate conspiracy to send an innocent man to the gallows-then, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, in my humble submission, there is only one conclusion at which any reasonable person can arrive.”

The jury was away for three hours; but to the reporters in the crowded press seats it was a foregone conclusion. The fingerprints of Galbraith Stride had been found on the gun, and that seemed to clinch it.

So they found him guilty, as we know; and the warders had to hold him up when the judge put on the black cap.

CHAPTER IX

THREE weeks later an early post brought Toby Halidom a letter.

He was awake to receive it; for during that night the story as it concerned him had dragged through its last intolerable lap. It was the end of three weeks of dreadful waiting-three weeks in which the lines of strain that had marked themselves on the face he loved had been etched in indelible lines of acid on his own memory. It was not that either of them bore any more affection for the man who had made his infamous bargain with Abdul Osman, and who was now awaiting the final irrevocable summons of the law; Galbraith Stride had placed himself beyond that; but they had known him personally, eaten at his table, seen him walking and talking as a human being of the same race as themselves instead of the impersonal deformed specimen in a glass case which the criminologists were already making of him, and they would not have been human themselves if that period of waiting for the relentless march of the law had not preyed on their waking and sleeping hours like an intermittent nightmare. And that night had been the last and worst of all.

At midnight Toby had seen Laura sent to bed by a kindly doctor with a draught which would send her the sleep that could not have come naturally; and he had gone back to his bachelor apartment to get what rest he could. All her sufferings had been his by sympathy: he had seen her stared at in the court by goggle-eyed vampires with no better use for their time than to regale themselves with the free entertainment provided for them by her ordeal-had read with a new-found disgust the sensational journalism that was inevitably splurged on the case, and seen press photographers descending on her like a pack of hounds every time she left the court. He had knocked down one who was too importunate, and it had given him some relief. But the rest of it had remained; and it had been made no easier by the sudden inaccessibility of the one man who might have been able to help him. Simon Templar had been as elusive as a phantom; a couple of days after the case, Chief Inspector Teal, who came down with a watching brief, told him that the Saint had gone abroad.

Toby had slept fitfully until six o’clock, and had woken up unrested. He got up and brewed himself a cup of tea, and paced restlessly up and down his tiny sitting room. The clatter of the postman’s knock on his front door was a kind of relief: anything that would serve to distract his mind for a few minutes was welcome.

He went out and found that single letter. It bore a Spanish stamp, and was postmarked from Barcelona.

“MY DEAR TOBY:
“I know you’ve been thinking some hard things about me since I became so obstinately impossible to lay hands on during the trial of Galbraith Stride. Will you understand that I only did what I thought was best, and what I think in the future you also will see was the best thing for you both ?

“You will remember that at our last meeting, after the police-court proceedings, you told me what was on your mind, and I could only give you the vaguest possible comfort. I didn’t want to try you too highly then; because not all of us are born to be self-appointed judges and executioners, and what you didn’t know you couldn’t possibly be tempted to reveal. We agreed that it would be better if you knew nothing until it was all over; and that Laura must never know.

“Well, that time has nearly come; and it has been brought much nearer by a cable I had this morning, which removes the last reason I might have had for keeping silent. Clements is dead.

“And he, Toby, was the man who killed Abdul Osman.

“I know all the things you’ve been thinking. That confession you made in the saloon, when you told me that you had done it, wasn’t quite such a foolish thing as I tried to make you believe; and perhaps you never did wholly believe it. Perhaps even now there are moments when you wonder … You couldn’t ask her, of course. Well, that’s one shadow I can take away from your young lives.

“And then there were other times when you thought I’d done it myself. Toby, old lad, you may have gathered some idea of my views on the Englishman and Public School Man legend; but here’s where I make an everlasting exception in your case. You rose to something much bigger then-something that makes me sorry you’ll always have that Public School background behind you in your ordinary life, and go on to become a highly respected county magistrate, chairman of the golf club, and member of the Athenaeum. But even though it wasn’t necessary, I think a hell of a lot of the loyalty that kept you from breathing a word of it when they were grilling you in the box.

“You figured to yourself that it was Galbraith Stride who sold Laura and I who saved her; and therefore even if I perjured myself to hell you had a debt to me that would never let you speak. And now, Toby, you’ve got to show yourself just as big a man to the memory of that poor devil who died the other day. “This is exactly what happened. “I arrived on the Claudette just as you and Laura were pushing off from the other side. I heard your boat buzzing away, and thought nothing of it at the time. I was after Galbraith Stride and Abdul Osman at the same time. You know all about me, and all the things I’ve done in the name of what I think is justice. I had decided that both Osman and Stride were far too foul to live any longer. I’ve killed men before, many of them -it didn’t mean anything like the same thing to me as it would have to you. I meant to carry the pair of them off on the Puffin, rope them together with half a ton of lead for ballast, and drop them quietly into the sea away off beyond Round Island where there’s forty fathoms of water and they could swing there on the tides till the lobsters had finished with them. There’d have been no bungling about it, no fuss; and I’d have had a peach of an alibi waiting back on St. Mary’s for me if there hadn’t been other things doing that night which upset all my plans.