The Saint vs Scotland Yard (26 page)

For the first search had yielded nothing at all.

And the second search produced no more.

“Is—that—really—so!” drawled the Saint.

He stared at Perrigo without goodwill, and read the sneer in the other’s
eyes. It touched the rawest part of the Saint’s most
personal vanity—but he
didn’t tell the world.

“Thinking again?” Perrigo gibed.

“Why, yes,” said the Saint mildly. “I often do it.”
He stood
up unconcernedly, fishing for his cigarette-case,
and lighted another
cigarette, still allowing nothing to distract
the relentless aim of
his automatic.

Somewhere there was a leak in the pipe, and his brain was
humming out
to locate it.

From Elberman there was nothing to be learned—he sat
placidly
where the Saint had roped him, outwardly unper
turbed by what was
happening, apparently satisfied to leave
what small chance
there was of effective opposition in the
hands of Perrigo. And
Elberman probably knew no more than
the Saint, anyhow.

No—the secret was locked up behind the narrowed glinting
eyes of
Perrigo. Somewhere in the mind of that tough baby
was stored the sole living human knowledge
of the fate of the
biggest packet of illicit
diamonds ever brought into England
in
one batch; and Simon Templar was going to extract that knowledge if he had to
carve it out with dynamite and rock-
drills.

Chapter III

“I heard you were clever.” Perrigo spoke again, rasping
into the
breach in a voice that was jagged with spiteful
triumph. “Got a
reputation, haven’t you? I’ll say you must
have earned it.”

“Sure I did,” assented the Saint, with a gaze like twin pin
points of
blue fire.

And then a thunder of knocking on the front door
drummed up through the
house and froze the three of them
into an instant’s bewildered
immobility.

It was, if the Saint had but known it at that moment, the
herald of
an interruption that was destined to turn that ex
ceedingly simple
adventure into the most riotous procession that the chronicler has yet been
called upon to record. It was
the starting-gun for the wildest of all
wild-goose chases. It was, in its essence, the beginning of the Melancholy
Journey of Mr.
Teal. If the Saint had known it, he would have chalked up
the
exact time on the wall and drawn a halo round it. But he did
not know.

He stiffened up like a pointer, with his head cocked on one side and two
short vertical lines etching in between his eye
brows. The clamorous
insistence of that knocking boded no
welcome visitor. There was nothing
furtive or sympathetic
about it—nothing that one could associate
with any possible client of a receiver of stolen goods. It hammered up the
stair
way in an atmosphere of case-hardened determination. And
then it
stopped, and grimly awaited results.

Simon looked from Elberman to Perrigo, and back again.
He
intercepted the glances that passed between them, and gathered from them a
joint nescience equal to his own. In
Perrigo’s eyes there was suspicion and
interrogation, in Elberman’s nothing but an answering blank.

“Throwing a party?” murmured the Saint.

In silence he inhaled from his cigarette, and flicked it backwards into
the fire. Listening intently, he heard through the
window on his left the
single sharp pip of a motor-horn sound
ing on a peculiar
note. And the knocking below started again.

There was no doubt about its intentions this time. It
signified
its uncompromising determination to be noticed, and
added a rider to the
effect that if it wasn’t noticed damned
quickly it was
perfectly prepared to bust down the door and
march in regardless.

“So you’ve brought the cops, have you?” grated Perrigo.

He came
recklessly out of his chair.

The obvious solution had dawned upon him a second after
it dawned
upon the Saint, and he acted accordingly. His inter
pretation was all wrong, but his reasoning
process was simple.

To the Saint, however, the situation remained the same,
whatever
Perrigo thought. With the police outside, his gun
was temporarily as useless as a piece of
scrap-iron. And besides,
he wanted further
converse with Perrigo. Those three hundred carats of compact mazuma were still
somewhere in Perrigo’s
charge, and
Simon Templar was not going home without
them. Therefore the bluff was called. Perrigo had got to stay
alive, aesthetically distressing as his continued
existence might
be.

Simon pocketed his gun and stood foursquare to the fact.
He slipped
his head under Perrigo’s smashing fist, and lammed
into the gangster’s
solar plexus a half-arm jolt that sogged home like a battering-ram punching
into a lump of putty.
Perrigo gasped and went down writhing, and the
Saint
grinned.

“Sing to him, Isadore,” he instructed hopefully, and went
briskly out
on to the landing.

That toot on the horn outside the window had been Patri
cia’s
signal to say that something troublesome was looming up
and that
she was wide awake; but the first item of information was becoming increasingly
self-evident. As Simon went down
the stairs, the clattering on the front door
broke out again,
reinforced by impatient peals on the bell, and the door
itself
was shaking before an onslaught of ponderous shoulders as the
Saint
turned out the light and drew the bolts.

A small avalanche of men launched themselves at him out of
the gloom.
Simon hacked one of them on the shins and se
cured a crippling
grip on the nose of another; and then some
one found the switch
and put the light on again, and the Saint looked along his arm and found that
his fingers were firmly
clamped on the proboscis of Chief Inspector
Teal himself.

“Why, it’s Claud Eustace!” cried the Saint, without moving.

Teal shook the hand savagely off his nose, and wiped his
streaming
eyes.

“What the hell are you doing here?” he brayed.

“Playing dingbat through the daisies,” said the Saint.

All the
debonair gay impudence that he possessed was glim
mering around his presence like a sort of invisible aurora
borealis, and the perception of it made something
seethe up
through the detective like a
gush of boiling lava. His brows
knitted
down over a glare of actual malevolence.

“Yes? And where’s Perrigo?”

“He’s upstairs.”

“Since when?”

“About half an hour.”

“And when did you arrive?”

“Roughly simultaneous, I should say.”

“What for?”

“Well, if you must know,” said the Saint, “I heard a
rumour
that Perrigo had discovered the second rhyme to ‘Putney’,
which I
wanted for a limerick I was trying to compose. I
thought of an old
retired colonel of Putney, who lived on dill pickles and chutney, till one day
he tried chilis boiled with
carbide, tiddy dum tiddy dum didy utney. It’s
all very
difficult.”

Teal unfastened his coat and signed to one of the men who
were with him.

“Take him,” he ordered curtly.

Simon put his hands in his pockets and leaned against the
wall with
an air of injury.

“In your own words—what for?” he inquired; and a little of
Chief
Inspector Teal’s old pose of heavy sleepiness returned. It
was an
affectation on which the detective had lately been
losing a lot of his
grip.

“A man named Hormer, a diamond smuggler, was murdered
on the
train between Southampton and Waterloo this evening.
Perrigo was seen at
Waterloo. I want him on suspicion of
having committed the murder, and I’m
going to take you on
suspicion of being an accessory.”

“Sorry,” said the Saint; and something about the way he
said it
made Teal’s baby blue eyes go dark and beady.

“Going to tell me you’ve got another alibi?”

“I am.”

“I’ll hear about that later.”

“You’ll hear about it now.” The arrogant forefinger which Teal
had learned to hate as personally as if it had a separate
individual
existence prodded into the gibbosity of his waistline
with unequivocal
emphasis. “From seven o’clock till eight-
fifteen I was having
dinner at Dorchester House—which in
cludes the time that train got in. I
had two friends with me. I talked to the head waiter, I discussed vintages with
the wine
waiter, and I gave the
ma
î
tre d’h
ô
tel
a personal
lesson in the
art of making perfect
cr
ê
pes
suzette.
Go and ask ‘em. And ask
your own flat-footed oaf outside my
house what time he saw me come in
”

Teal champed grimly on his gum.

“I didn’t accuse you of committing the murder,” he said.
“I’m
having you for an accessory, and you can prove you were
Nova
Scotia at the time for all that’ll help you. Tell me y
ou’re going to prove
you’re in Nova Scotia right now, and
perhaps I’ll listen.”

The Saint’s brain functioned at racing speed.

A neat handful of spiky little facts prickled into its machin
ery, graded themselves, and
were dealt with. One—that Perrigo
had still
got the diamonds. Two—that the diamonds must be
detached from Perrigo. Three—that the detaching must not be done by Claud
Eustace Teal. Four—that the Saint must there
fore remain a free agent. Five—that the Saint would not
remain a free agent if Claud Eustace Teal could
help it.

Item five was fairly crackling about in the subtler under
tones of
the detective’s drowsy voice, and it was that item
which finally
administered the upward heave to the balloon.
The Teal-Templar feud
was blowing up to bursting-point, and
nobody knew it better than the Saint.
But he also knew some
thing else, which was that the burst was going
to spray out
into the maddest and merriest rodeo that ever was. Simon
Templar
proposed personally to supervise the spray.

He slipped his hands out of his pockets, and a very Saintly
smile touched his lips.

“I might even prove something like that,” he said.

And then he pushed Teal backwards and went away in one
wild leap.

He had reached the foot of the stairs before the detectives
had fully
grasped what was happening, and he took the steps
in flights of four at
a pace that no detective in England could
have approached. He
made the upper landing before they
were properly started. There was a big
oak chest on that
landing—Simon had noticed it on his way down—and he hulked
it off the wall and ran it to the top of the stairs.

“Watch
your toes, boys,” he sang out, and shoved.

The three men below looked up and saw the chest hurtling
down upon
them. Having no time to get from under, they
braced themselves and
took the shock. And there they stuck,
half-way up and half-way down. The huge iron-bound coffer
tobogganed massively into them, two hundredweight
of it if
there was an ounce, and jammed
them in their tracks. They
couldn’t
go round, they couldn’t go over, and it was several
seconds before some incandescent intellect
conceived the idea
of going back.

Which was some time after the Saint had renewed his hectic
acquaintance
with Gunner Perrigo.

He found the gangster on his feet by a side table, cramming
some
papers into a shabby wallet. Perrigo’s face was still con
torted with
agony, but he turned and crouched for a fight as
the Saint burst in. As
a matter of fact, the Saint was the last
person he had ever
expected to see again that night, and his
puzzled amazement
combined with the gesture of the Saint’s upraised hand to check him where he
was.