The Saint vs Scotland Yard (12 page)

“I insist on having police protection,” he said.
“Scorpions I can manage, but when it comes to tax collectors … Not
that
there’s a great difference. The same threatening letters, the
same
merciless bleeding of the honest toiler, the same bleary

“All right,” said Teal wearily.

He climbed out of the car, and followed behind Patricia;
and so
they climbed to the general office. At the high counter
which had
been erected to protect the clerks from the savage
assaults of their
victims the Saint halted, and clamoured in a
loud voice to be
ushered into the presence of Mr. Delborn.

Presently a scared little man came to the barrier.

“You
wish to see Mr. Delborn, sir?”

“I do.”

“Yes, sir. What is your business, sir?”

“I’m a burglar,” said the Saint innocently.

“Yes, sir. What did you wish to see Mr. Delborn about, sir?”

“About the payment of my income tax, Algernon. I will see
Mr. Delborn
himself and nobody else; and if I don’t see him
at once, I shall not
only refuse to pay a penny of my tax, but I
shall also take this
hideous office to pieces and hide it in
various drains
belonging to the London County Council. By the way, do you know Chief Inspector
Teal? Mr. Teal, Mr.
Veal. Mr. Veal——
”

“Will
you take a seat, sir?”

“Certainly,” said the Saint.

He was half-way down the stairs when Teal caught him.

“Look here, Templar,” said the detective, breathing heavily
through the nose, “I don’t care if you have got the Scorpion in
your
pocket, but if this is your idea of being funny——
”

Simon put down the chair and scratched his head.

“I was only obeying instructions,” he said plaintively.
“I
admit it seemed rather odd, but I thought maybe Lionel
hadn’t got
a spare seat in his office.”

Teal and Patricia between them got him as far as the top of
the stairs
where he put the chair down, sat on it, and refused
to move.

“I’m going home,” said Patricia finally.

“Bring some oranges back with you,” said the Saint. “And
don’t
forget your knitting. What time do the early doors
open?”

The situation was only saved by the return of the harassed
clerk.

“Mr. Delborn will see you, sir.”

He led the way through the general office and opened a
door at
the end.

“What name, sir?”

“Ghandi,” said the Saint, and stalked into the room.

And there he stopped.

For the first time in his life, Simon Templar stood frozen into a kind of
paralysis of sheer incredulous startlement.

In its own
genre,
that moment was the supremely flabber
gasting
instant of his life. Battle, murder, and sudden death of
all kinds
and varieties notwithstanding, the most hectic moments of the most
earth-shaking cataclysms in which he had
been involved paled their ineffectual
fires beside the eye-shriv
elling dazzle of
that second. And the Saint stood utterly still,
with every shadow of
expression wiped from his face, momen
tarily
robbed of even his facile power of speech, simply staring.

For the man at the desk was Wilfred Garniman.

Wilfred Garniman himself, exactly as the Saint had seen
him on that
very first expedition to Harrow—black-coated,
black-tied, the
perfect office gentleman with a fifty-two-inch waist. Wilfred Garniman sitting
there in a breathless immobility that matched the Saint’s, but with the
prosperous colour
draining from his face and his coarse lips going grey.

And then the Saint found his voice.

“Oh, it’s you, Wilfred, is it?” The words trickled very softly
into the
deathly silence. “And this is Simon Templar speaking
—not a
ghost. I declined to turn into a ghost, even though I
was buried. And
Patricia Holm did the same. She’s outside at
this very moment, if
you’d like to see her. And so is Chief In
spector Teal—with your
photograph in his pocket… . Do
you know that this is very tough on
me, sweetheart? I’ve prom
ised you to Teal, and I ought to be killing
you myself. Buried
Pat alive, you did—or you meant to.
…
And
you’re the
greasy swine that’s been pestering me to pay your
knock-kneed
taxes. No wonder you took to Scorping in your spare time.
I
wouldn’t mind betting you began in this very office, and the
capital you
started with was the things you wormed out of
people under the
disguise of official inquiries… . And I
came in to give you
one thousand, three hundred and thirty-
seven pounds,
nineteen and fivepence of your own money, all
out of the strong-box
under that very interesting chair,
Wilfred——
”

He saw the beginning of the movement that Garniman made, and hurled
himself sideways. The bullet actually
skinned one of his lower ribs, though
he did not know it until
later. He swerved into the heavy desk, and got
his hands under the edge. For one weird instant he looked from a range of two
yards into
the eyes of Wilfred Garniman, who was in the act of
rising out of his
chair. Garniman’s automatic was swinging
round for a second
shot, and the thunder of the first seemed to
still be hanging in
the air. And behind him Simon heard the
rattle of the door.

And then—to say that he tipped the desk over would be
absurd. To
have done anything so feeble would have been a
sentence of death
pronounced simultaneously upon Patricia
Holm and Claud Eustace
Teal and himself—at least. The Saint
knew that.

But as the others burst into the room, it seemed as if the
Saint
gathered up the whole desk in his two hands, from the
precarious hold that
he had on it, and flung it hugely and
terrifically into the wall; and
Wilfred Garniman was carried
before it like a great bloated fly before a
cannon-ball… .
And, really, that was that… .
The story of the Old Bailey trial reached Palma about six weeks later, in
an ancient newspaper which Patricia Holm
produced one morning.

Simon Templar was not at all interested in the story; but he was vastly
interested in an illustration thereto which he dis
covered at the top of
the page. The Press photographer had
done his worst; and Chief Inspector
Teal, the hero of the case,
caught unawares in the very act of inserting
some fresh chew
ing gum in his mouth as he stepped out on to the pavement
of
Newgate Street, was featured looking almost libellously like an
infuriated codfish afflicted
with some strange uvular growth.

Simon clipped out the portrait and pasted it neatly at the
head of a
large plain postcard. Underneath it he wrote:

Claud
Eustace
 
Teal, when
 
overjoyed,

Wiggled his
dexter adenoid;

For
well-bred policemen think it rude

To show
their tonsils in the nude.

“That ought to come like a ray of sunshine into Claud’s
dreary life,”
said the Saint, surveying his handiwork.

He may have been right; for the postcard was delivered in
error to an
Assistant Commissioner who was gifted with a
particularly acid
tongue, and it is certain that Teal did not
hear the last of it
for many days.

PART II

The Million Pound Day

Chapter 1

The scream pealed out at such point-blank range, and
was
strangled so swiftly and suddenly, that Simon Templar
opened his eyes and
wondered for a moment whether he had
dreamed it.

The darkness inside the car was impenetrable; and outside,
through the
thin mist that a light frost had etched upon the
windows, he could
distinguish nothing but the dull shadows of
a few trees
silhouetted against the flat pallor of the sky. A
glance at the
luminous dial of his wrist-watch showed that it
was a quarter to
five; he had slept barely two hours.

A week-end visit to some friends who lived on the remote
margin of
Cornwall, about thirteen inches from Land’s End,
had terminated a
little more than seven hours earlier, when
the Saint, feeling
slightly limp after three days in the company
of two young souls
who were convalescing from a recent honey
moon, had pulled out
his car to make the best of a clear night
road back to London. A few miles beyond
Basingstoke he had
backed into a side lane
for a cigarette, a sandwich, and a nap.
The cigarette and the sandwich he had had; but the nap
should have lasted until the hands of his watch met
at six-
thirty and the sky was white
and clear with the morning—he
had
fixed that time for himself, and had known that his eyes would not open one
minute later.

And they hadn’t. But they shouldn’t have opened one min
ute
earlier, either… . And the Saint sat for a second or two
without
moving, straining his ears into the stillness for the
faintest whisper of
sound that might answer the question in
his mind, and driving
his memory backwards into those last
blank moments of sleep to recall the
sound that had woken
him. And then, with a quick stealthy
movement, he turned the
handle of the door and slipped out into the
road.

Before that, he had realised that that scream could never
have been
shaped in his imagination. The sheer shrieking
horror of it still
rang between his eardrums and his brain; the
hideous high-pitched
sob on which it had died seemed still to
be quivering on the
air. And the muffled patter of running
feet which had
reached him as he listened had served only to
confirm what he already knew.

He stood in the shadow of the car with the cold damp smell
of the
dawn in his nostrils, and heard the footsteps coming
closer. They were
coming towards him down the main road—
now that he was
outside the car, they tapped into his brain
with an unmistakable
clearness. He heard them so distinctly,
in the utter silence
that lay all around, that he felt he could
almost see the man who
had made them. And he knew that that was the man who had screamed. The same
stark terror
that had gone shuddering through the very core of the
scream
was beating out the wild tattoo of those running feet—the
same stomach-sinking dread
translated into terms of muscular
reaction.
For the feet were not running as a man ordinarily
runs. They were kicking, blinding, stumbling,
hammering along in the mad muscle-binding heart-bursting flight of a
man whose reason has tottered and cracked before a
vision of all the tortures of the Pit.
…

Simon felt the hairs on the nape of his neck prickling. In
another
instant he could hear the gasping agony of the man’s
breathing, but he
stayed waiting where he was. He had moved
a little way from the
car, and now he was crouched right by
the corner of the lane, less than a
yard from the road, com
pletely hidden in the blackness under the
hedge.

The most elementary process of deduction told him that no
man would
run like that unless the terror that drove him on
was close upon his
heels—-and no man would have screamed
like that unless he had felt cold upon
his shoulder the clutch
ing hand of an intolerable doom. Therefore
the Saint waited.

And then the man reached the corner of the lane.

Simon got
one glimpse of him—a man of middle height and
build,
coatless, with his head back and his fists working. Under
the feebly lightening sky his face showed thin and
hollow-
cheeked, pointed at the chin
by a small peaked beard, the eyes starting from their sockets.