The Saint vs Scotland Yard (31 page)

“Yes,
and I know who it is!”

“But it was bound to happen, wasn’t it?” said the Saint,
continuing
in that philosophically persuasive strain under
which the razor-keen
knife-edges were gliding about like hun
gry sharks in a
smooth tropical sea. “In my misguided efforts
to do good, I once
made myself so notorious that someone or
other was bound to
think of hanging his sins on me. The
wonder is that it wasn’t thought of
years ago. Now look at that recent affair in Hampstead——
”

“I don’t want to know any more about that affair in Hamp
stead,”
said Teal torridly. “I want to know how you’re going
to swing
it on me this time. Come on. Let me have the names and addresses of these
twelve liars. I’ll run them for perjury at
the same time as I’m
running you.”

“You won’t. But I’ll tell you what
I’ll
do——
”

The Saint’s forefinger shot out. Teal struck it aside.

“Don’t do that!” he yapped.

“I have to,” said the Saint. “I love the way your tummy
dents in
and pops out again. Talking of tummies——
”

“You tell me what you think you’re going to do.”

“I’ll run you for bribery, corruption, and blackmail!” said
the Saint.

His languid voice tightened up on the sentence with a sud
den
crispness that had the effect of a gunshot. It rocked the atmosphere like an
exploding bomb. And it was followed by a
silence that was ear-splitting.

The detective gaped at him with goggling eyes, while a
substratum
of dull scarlet sapped up under the skin of his
face. It was the most
flabbergasting utterance that Chief Inspec
tor Teal had listened
to. He blinked as if he had been smitten
with doubts of his
own sanity.

“Have you gone off your head?” he hooted.

“Not that I know of.”

“And who’s supposed to have been bribing me?”

“I have.”

“You?”

“Yeah.” The Saint took another cigarette from the box, and
lighted it
composedly. “Haven’t seen your pass-book lately,
have you? You’d better
ask for it tomorrow morning. You’ll
discover that in the last six weeks
alone you’ve taken eight
hundred and fifty pounds off me. Two hundred
pounds on
February the sixteenth, two-fifty on March the sixth,
four
hundred on March the twenty-second—apart from smaller regu
lar
payments extending over the previous six months. All the
cheques
have got your endorsement on ‘em, and they’ve all
been passed through
your account: they’re back in my bank now, available for inspection by any
authorised person. It’s quite a tidy little sum, Claud—eighteen hundred quid
alto
gether. You’ll have a grand time explaining it away.”

Some of the colour ebbed slowly out of Teal’s plump cheeks,
and he
seemed to sag inside his overcoat. Only the expression
in his eyes remained
the same—a stare of blank, frozen, incredulous stupefaction.

“You framed me for that?” he got out.

“I’m afraid I did.” Simon inhaled, and blew a smoke-ring.
“It
was just another of my brilliant ideas. Are you thinking
you can
deny the endorsements? It won’t be easy. Eight
hundred and fifty
pounds in six weeks is real money. I wrote
it off as insurance,
but I still hated parting with it. And how
many juries would
believe that I paid a detective eighteen
hundred pounds inside
six months just with the idea of being
funny? It’d be a steep
gamble for you if we had to go through
the courts, old dear.
I admit it was very naughty of me to
bribe you, but there it is.
…
Unfortunately, you couldn’t be content with what I gave you. You wanted more,
and you tried
all sorts of persecutions to get it. First that Hampstead
affair, and then this show tonight… . Oh, well, Claud, it looks as if
we shall
have to swing together.”

Chapter VIII

The detective seemed to have shrunk. His complexion
had gone
lined and blotchy, and there was a dazed look in his
eyes that stabbed the
Saint with a twinge of pity.

Teal was a man facing the end. The bombshell that the
Saint had
flung at him had knocked the underpinning from
the very foundations
of his universe. The fight and bluster had
gone out of him. He
knew, better than anyone, the full and
devastating
significance of the trap that had been laid for him.
There was no way out
of it—no human bluff or subterfuge
that would let him out. He could stick
to his guns and give
battle to the last ditch—arrest the Saint as
he had intended, take his chance with the threatened alibi, fight out the
counter-charge
of bribery and corruption when it came along,
perhaps even win an
acquittal—but it would still be the end of
his career. Even if
he won, he would be a ruined man. A
police officer must be above suspicion. And those endorsed
and
cancelled cheques of which the Saint had
spoken, produced in
court, would be
damning evidence. Acquitted, Teal would still be under a cloud. Ever
afterwards, there would be gossips to
point
to him and whisper that he was a man who had broken
the eleventh commandment and escaped the
consequences by
the skin of his teeth.
And he was not so young as he had been
—not so young that he could snap
his fingers at the gossips and
buckle grimly
back into the task of making good again. He
would have to resign. He would be through.

He stood there, going paler, but not flinching; and the Saint
blew two
more smoke-rings.

Teal was trying to think, but he couldn’t. The suddenness
with which
the blow had fallen had pulverised his wits. He
felt himself going
mentally and physically numb. Under the
surveillance of those
devilishly bleak blue eyes, and in the
vivid presence of what
they stood for, he couldn’t dp any
consecutive and sober thinking.

Abruptly, he settled his belt and shook down his coat.

“I’ll see you in the morning,” he said, in a sort of gulp, and
walked
jerkily out of the room.

Simon heard the front door close, and listened to the detec
tive’s
footsteps clumping past the window and dying away
towards Berkeley Square. Something seemed
to have paralysed
their ordinary ponderous
self-reliance. There was the least
little
tell-tale drag in them… . And the Saint turned, and
found Patricia watching him.

“A notable triumph,” he said quietly.

The girl stood up.

“Were you bluffing?” she asked.

“Of course not. I knew that Teal and I were certain to have
that
showdown sooner or later, and I was prepared for it. I’d
got half a
dozen more shocks waiting for him, if he’d stayed to
hear them. I just
wanted to put the wind up him. But I’d no
idea it’d be such a
smash.”

Patricia looked away.

“It was pathetic,” she said. “Oh, I could see him go ten
years older while you were talking.”

Simon nodded. The fruits of victory were strangely bitter.

“Pat, did you know that an hour or so ago I was planning
for this
to be the sorriest show Teal ever stuck his nose into? The noble game of
Teal-baiting was going to be played as it had never been played before. That’s
all I’ve got to say… .
What a damn-fool racket it is!”

He turned on his heel, and left her without another word.

His mind was too full to talk. Upstairs, he threw off his clothes and
tumbled into bed, and almost instantly he fell
asleep. That gift of
sleep is one that all great adventurers have shared—a sleep that heals the mind
and solves all problems.
Patricia, coming up later, found his face as
peaceful as a
child’s.

He must have slept very soundly, for the sound of a stealthy
rustle only
half roused him. Then he heard a click, and he was
wide awake.

He opened his eyes and glanced round the room. There was
enough
light for him to see that there was no unusual shadow anywhere. He looked at
his watch, and saw that it was nearly
seven o’clock in the morning. For some
moments he lay still,
gazing at the indicator panel on the opposite
wall. An ingenious system of invisible alarms connected up with that panel
from every
part of the house, and it was impossible for anyone to move about inside No. 7,
Upper Berkeley Mews at night
without every yard of his progress being
charted by winking
little coloured bulbs on the panel. But not one bulb was
flickering,
and the auxiliary buzzer under the Saint’s pillow
was silent.

Simon frowned puzzledly, wondering if his imagination had
deceived
him. And then a breath-taking duet of inspirations
whirled into his
brain, and he wriggled noiselessly from be
tween the sheets.

He pushed the pier-glass aside, and touched a switch that
illuminated
the secret passage. Right at his feet, he saw a charred match-end lying on the
felt matting, and his lips tightened. He sped down the corridor, and entered
the end house. In front of him, the door of a cupboard, and its false
back
communicating with the bathroom in 104, Berkeley
Square, were both
wide open; and he remembered that he had
left them ajar behind
him on the previous night, in his haste
to get home and
resume the feud with Chief Inspector Teal.
The bathroom door was
also ajar; he slipped through it, and
emerged on the landing. A tiny glow of
light farther down the
stairs caught his eye, and vanished
immediately.

Then he established a second link between the two parts of
the duet
that had brought him to where he was and wished he
had delayed the chase
while he picked up his gun. He crept
downwards, and saw a shadow that
moved.

“Stay where you are,” he rapped. “I’ve got you
covered!”

The shadow leapt away, and Simon hurled himself after it.
He was
still four steps behind when he sprang through the air
and landed on the
man’s shoulders. They crashed down together, rolled down the remaining treads,
and reached the
bottom with a bump. The Saint groped for a strangle-hold.
He
had found it with one hand when he saw a dull gleam of steel
in the
light of a street lamp that flung a faint nimbus of rays through the transom
above the front door. He squirmed aside,
and the point ripped
his pyjamas and thudded into the floor. Then a bony knee picked up into his
stomach, and he gasped
and went limp with agony. The front door
banged while he
lay
there twisting helplessly.

It was ten minutes before he was able to stagger to his feet and go on a
tour of investigation. Down in the basement, he
found the cellar door
wide open. A hole big enough for a
man’s arm to pass through had been
carved out of it a foot
above the massive bolt, and the flagstones
were littered with
chips of wood. Simon realised that he had been incredibly
careless.

He returned to his bedroom and looked at the coat he had
been
wearing. It had been moved from where he had thrown
it down—that had been
the cause of the soft rustling that had
first disturbed his
slumbers. A further investigation showed
that Perrigo’s
passport and tickets were missing from the
pocket where Simon
had left them. This was no worse than
the Saint had expected.

Aching, he went back to bed and slept again. And this time
he dreamed
a dream.

He was running up the wrong side of a narrow moving
stairway.
Patricia was in front of him, and he couldn’t go fast
enough; he had to
keep pushing her. He wanted to get past
her and catch
Perrigo, who was dancing about just out of his
grasp. Perrigo was
dressed something like an organ-grinder’s
monkey, in a
ridiculous straw hat, a tail coat, and a pair of
white flannel
trousers. There was an enormous diamond necklace over his collar; and he jeered
and grimaced, and bawled:
“Not in these trousers.” Then the
scene changed, and Teal
came riding by on a giraffe, wearing a pair of
plus fours; and
he also said: “Not in these trousers.”