The Saint in London: Originally Entitled the Misfortunes of Mr. Teal (21 page)

He stood up; and for some unearthly reason Teal also rose to his feet. An exasperating little bug of uncertainty was hatching out in the detective’s brain and starting to dig itself in. He had been through these scenes before, and they had lopped years off his expectation of life. He had known the Saint guilty of innumerable felonies and breaches of the peace, beyond any possible shadow of human doubt, and had got nothing out of it— nothing but a smile of infuriating innocence and a glimmer of mocking amusement in the Saint’s eyes, which was not evidence. He was used to being outwitted, but it had never occurred to him that he might be wrong. Until that very moment, when the smile of infuriating innocence was so startlingly absent… . He didn’t believe it even then—he had reached the stage when nothing that Simon Templar said or did could be taken at its face value—but the germ of preposterous doubt was brooding in his mind, and he followed the Saint out into the street in silence, without understanding why he did it.

“Where did this news come from?” Simon inquired, as he slid in behind the wheel of the great shining Hirondel which was parked close by.

“Horley,” Teal replied curtly, and couldn’t help adding: “You ought to know.”

The Saint made no retort; and that again was unusual. The tiny maggot of incertitude in Teal’s brain laid another egg, and he chewed steadily on his remaining sludge of spearmint in self-defensive taciturnity while the long thrumming nose of the car threaded its way at breath-taking speed through the thinning traffic of south London.

Simon kindled a fresh cigarette from the lighter on the dash and thrust the Hirondel over the southward artery with one hand on the wheel and the speedometer quivering around seventy, driving automatically and thinking about other things.

Before that, he had sometimes wondered why such a notorious scapegoat as himself should have been passed over for so long by the alibi experts of the underworld, and he had only been able to surmise that the fear of attracting his own attention was what had deterred them. The man who had set a new precedent this night must either have been very confident or very rash; and the Saint wanted to know him. And there was an edge of quiet steel in the Saint’s narrowed eyes as they followed the road in the blaze of his sweeping headlights which indicated that he would have an account to settle with his unauthorized substitute when they met… .

Perhaps it was because he was very anxious to learn something more which might help to bring that meeting nearer, or perhaps it was only because the Saint never felt really comfortable in a car unless it was using the king’s highway for a race track, but it was exactly thirty-five minutes after they left the restaurant when he swung the car round the last two-wheeled corner and switched off the engine under the blue lamp of Horley police station. For the latter half of the journey Mr. Teal had actually forgotten to chew; but he released his hold on his bowler hat and climbed out phlegmatically enough. Simon followed him up the steps and heard Teal introduce himself to the night sergeant.

“They’re in the inspector’s office, sir,” said the man.

Simon went in at Teal’s shoulder and found three men drinking coffee in the bare distempered room. One of them, from his typical bulk and the chair he occupied at the desk, appeared to be the inspector; the second, a grey-haired man in pince-nez and an overcoat, was apparently the police surgeon; the third was a motorcycle patrol in uniform.

“I thought I’d better come down at once,” Teal said laconically.

The inspector, who shared the dislike of all provincial inspectors for interference from Scotland Yard, but accepted it as an unfortunate necessity, nodded no less briefly and indicated the motorcycle patrol.

“He can tell you all about it.”

“There ain’t much to tell, sir,” said the patrol, putting down his cup. “Just about two mile from here, it was, on the way to Balcombe. I was on me way home when I saw a car pulled up by the side of the road an’ two men beside it carryin’ what looked like a body. Well, it turned out it was a body. They said they saw it lyin’ in the road an’ thought it was someone been knocked down by another car, but when I had a look I saw the man had been shot. I helped ‘em put the body in their car and rode in alongside of ‘em to the police station here.”

“What time was this?” Teal asked him. “About half-past ten, sir, when I first stopped.

It was exactly a quarter to eleven when we got here.”

“How had this man been shot?”

It was the doctor who answered:

“He was shot through the back of the head, at close range—probably with an automatic or a revolver. Death must have been instantaneous.”’

Mr. Teal rolled his gum into a spindle, pushed his tongue into the middle to shape a horseshoe, and chewed it back into a ball.

“I was told you’d found the Saint’s mark on the body,” he said. “When was that?”

The inspector turned over the papers on his desk.

“That was when we were going through his things. It was in his outside breast pocket.”

He found a scrap of paper and handed it over. Teal took it and smoothed it out. It was a leaf torn from a cheap pocket diary; and on one side of it had been drawn, in pencil, a squiggly skeleton figure whose round blank head was crowned with a slanting elliptical halo.

Teal’s heavy eyes rested on the drawing for a few seconds, and then he turned and held it out to the Saint.

“And I suppose you didn’t do that?” he said.

There was a sudden stillness of incomprehension over the other men in the room, who had accepted Simon without introduction as an assistant of the Scotland Yard man; and Teal glanced back at them with inscrutable stolidity.

“This is the Saint,” he explained.

A rustle of astonishment stirred the local men, arid Teal bit on his gum and met it with his own soured disillusion: “No, I haven’t done anything clever. He’s been with me all the evening. He hasn’t been out of my sight from seven o’clock till now—not for five minutes.”

The police surgeon blew a bubble in his coffee cup and wiped his lips on his handkerchief, gaping at him stupidly.

“But that’s impossible!” he spluttered. “The body was still warm when I saw it, and the pupils contracted with atropine. He couldn’t have been dead three hours at the outside!”

“I expected something like that,” said the detective, with sweltering restraint. “That’s all it wanted to round off the alibi.”

Simon put the torn scrap of paper back on the inspector’s desk. It had given him a queer feeling, looking at that crude sketch on it. He hadn’t drawn it; but it was his. It had become too well known for him to be able to use it very often now, for the precise reason which Mr. Teal had overlooked—that when that little drawing was found anywhere on the scene of a crime, there was only one man to search for. But it still had its meaning. That childish haloed figure had stood for an ideal, for a justice that struck swiftly where the law could not strike, a terror which could not be turned aside by technicalities: it had never been used wantonly… . The three local men were staring at him inquisitively, more like morbid sightseers at a sensational trial than professional sifters of crime; but the Saint’s gaze met them with an arctic calm.

“Who was this man?” he asked.

The inspector did not answer at once, until Teal’s shifting glance repeated the question. Then | he turned back to the things on his desk.

“He had a Spanish passport—nothing seems to have been stolen from him. The name is—here it is—Enrique. Manuel Enrique. Age thirty; domi-cile, Madrid.”

‘Occupation?”

The inspector frowned over the booklet.

“Aviator,” he said.

Simon took out his cigarette case, and his eyes travelled thoughtfully back to the drawing which was not his. It was certainly rather squiggly.

“Who were these men who picked him up on the road?”

Again the inspector hesitated, and again Teal’s attitude repeated the interrogation. The inspector compressed his lips. He disapproved of the proceedings entirely. If he’d had his way, the Saint would have been safely locked away in a cell in no time—not taking up a cross-examination of his own. With the air of a vegetarian being forcibly fed with human flesh, he picked up a closely written report sheet.

“Sir Hugo Renway, of March House, Betfield, near Folkestone, and his chauffeur, John Kel-lard,” he recited tersely.

”I suppose they didn’t stay long.”

The inspector leaned back so that his chair creaked.

“Do you think I ought to have arrested them?” he inquired ponderously.

The doctor smirked patronizingly and said: “Sir Hugo is a justice of the peace and a permanent official of the Treasury.”

“Wearing top hat and spats?” asked the Saint dreamily.

“He was not wearing a top hat.”

The Saint smiled; and it was a smile which made Mr. Teal queerly uneasy. The little beetle of dubiety in his mind laid another clutch of eggs and sat on them. In some way he felt that he was losing his depth, and the sensation lifted his temperature a degree nearer to boiling point.

“Well, Claud,” the Saint was saying, “we’re making, progress. I arrested myself to come down here, and I’m always ready to go on doing your work for you. Shall I charge myself, search myself, and lock myself up in a cell? Or what?”

“I’ll think it over and let you know,” said the detective jaggedly.

“Go on a fish diet and give your brain a chance,” Simon advised him.

He trod on his cigarette end and buttoned his coat; and his blue eyes went back to Mr. Teal with a level recklessness of challenge which was like a draught of wind on the embers of Teal’s temper.

“I’m telling you again that I don’t know a thing about this bird Manuel Enrique, beyond what I’ve heard here. I don’t expect you to believe me, because you haven’t that much intelligence; but it happens to be the truth. My conscience is as clean as your shirt was before you put it on––”

“You’re a liar,” brayed the detective.

“Doubtless you know your own laundry best,” said the Saint equably; and then his eyes chilled again. “But that’s about all you do know. You’re not a detective—you’re a homing pigeon. When in doubt, shove it on the Saint—that’s your motto. Well, Claud, just for this once, I’m going to take the trouble to chew you up. I’m going to get your man. I’ve got a quarrel with anyone who takes my trade-mark in vain; and the lesson’ll do you some good as well. And then you’re going to come crawling to me on your great fat belly––”

In a kind of hysteria, Teal squirmed away from the sinewy brown forefinger which stabbed at his proudest possession.

“Don’t do it!” he blared.

“—and apologize,” said the Saint; and in spite of himself, in spite of every obdurately logical belief he held, Chief Inspector Teal thought for a moment that he would not have liked to stand in the shoes of the man who ventured to impersonate the owner of that quiet satirical voice.

III

MARCH HOUSE, from one of the large-scale ordnance maps of which Simon Templar kept a complete and up-to-date library, appeared to be an estate of some thirty acres lying between the village of Betfield and the sea. Part of the southern boundary was formed by the cliffs themselves, and a secondary road from Betfield to the main Folkestone highway skirted it on the northwest. The Saint sat over his maps with a glass of sherry for half an hour before dinner the following evening, memorizing the topography—he had always been a firm believer in direct action, and, wanting to know more about a man, nothing appealed to him with such seductive simplicity as the obvious course of going to his house and taking an optimistic gander at the scenery.

“But whatever makes you think Renway had anything to do with it?” asked Patricia Holm.

“The top hat and spats,” Simon told her gravely. He smiled. “I’m afraid I haven’t got the childlike faith of a policeman, lass, and that’s all there is to it. Claud Eustace would take the costume as a badge of respectability, but to my sad and worldly mind it’s just the reverse. From what I could gather, Hugo wasn’t actually sporting the top hat at the time, but he seems to have been that kind of man. And the picture they found on the body was rather squiggly—as it might have been if a bloke had drawn it in a car, traveling along. … I know it’s only one chance in a hundred, but it’s a chance. And we haven’t any other clue in the whole wide world.”

Hoppy Uniatz had no natural gift of subtlety, but he did understand direct action. Out of the entire panorama of human endeavour, it was about the only thing which really penetrated through all the layers of bullet-proof ivory which protected his brain. Detaching his mouth momentarily from a tumbler of gin nominally diluted with ginger ale, he said: “I’ll come wit’ ya, boss.”

“Is it in your line?” asked the Saint.

“I dunno,” Hoppy confessed frankly. “I ain’t never done no boiglary. Whadda we have to wear dis costume for?”

Patricia looked at him blankly.

“What costume?”

“De top hat an’ spats,” said Hoppy Uniatz.

The Saint covered his eyes.

Six hours later, braking the Hirondel to a smooth standstill under an overarching elm where the road touched the northwest boundary of March House, Simon felt more practically cautious about accepting Hoppy’s offer of assistance. On such an expedition as he had undertaken, a sportive elephant would certainly have been less use; but not much less. All the same, he” had no wish to offend Mr. Uniatz, whose proud spirit was perhaps unduly sensitive on such points. He swung himself out into the road, detached the spare wheel, and opened up the tool kit, while Hoppy stared at him puzzledly.

“This is where you come in,” the Saint told him flatteringly. “You’re going to be an unfortunate motorist with a puncture, toiling over the wheel.”

Mr. Uniatz blinked at him dimly.

“Is dat part of de boiglary?” he asked.

“Of course it is,” said the Saint unscrupulously. “It’s probably the most important part. You never know when some village slop may come paddling around these parts, and if he saw a car standing by the road with nobody in it he’d naturally be suspicious.”

Hoppy reached round for his hip flask and nodded.