The Saint Closes the Case (2 page)

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 smith
ereening
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
surpris
ing features of the mystery. Chief Inspector Teal, after a num
ber 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
Commis
sioner. “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 threat
ening 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 con
fidence 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 be
longed 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 assas
sination, usually by bomb.

The reason for such societies, and the
mentality of their ad
herents, 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 be
comes 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; but 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 lunch
eon 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 ad
justed 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 dis
cover 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 calcula
tion, 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 him
self 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 affecta
tion 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 gro
tesque 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
po
lice, 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, won
dering 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 dream
ing.

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.