The Saint vs Scotland Yard (33 page)

Simon singed the inoffensive air with a line of oratory that
would have
scorched the hide of a salamander. He did it as if
his heart was in the
job, which it was. Carefully and compre
hensively, he covered
every aspect and detail of the situation
with a calorific
lavishness of imagery that would have warmed
the cockles of a
sergeant-major’s heart. Nobody and nothing, however remotely connected with the
incident, was left outside
the wide embrace of his oration. He started
with the paleo
lithic progenitors of the said George Stephenson, and
worked steadily down to the back teeth of Isadore Elberman’s grand
children.
At which point Patricia interrupted him.

“He might be having a wash or something,” she said.

“Yeah!” The Saint was scathing. “Sure, he might be having
a wash. And he took his bag with him in case the flies laid eggs
on it. Did
you notice that bag? I did. It was brand-new—hadn’t a scratch on it. He’d been
doing some early morning shopping
before he caught the train, hustling up
some kit for the
voyage.
All his own stuff was at Isadore’s, and he wouldn’t risk
going back there. And his bag’s gone!”

The embarkation officer passed them, and opened the door
of the
compartment.

“Miss Lovedew?” The pimply female acknowledged it.
“Your
papers are quite in order ——
”

Simon took Patricia’s arm and steered her gently away.

“Her name is Lovedew,” he said sepulchrally. “Let us go
and find
somewhere to die.”

They tottered a few steps down the corridor; and then Patricia said:
“He must be still on the train! We haven’t
slowed up once since
we started, and he couldn’t have jumped
off without breaking his neck——”

The Saint gripped her hands.

“You’re right!” he whooped. “Pat, you’re damn right! I
said
you wanted a brain for this sort of thing. Bertie must be on
the train
still, and if he’s on the train we’ll find him—if we
have to take the
whole outfit to pieces. Now, you go that way
and I’ll go this way,
and you keep your eyes peeled. And if
you see a man with a huge tufted beard,
you take hold of it
and give it a good pull!”

“Right-o, Saint!”

“Then let’s go!”

He went flying down the alley, lurching from side to side
from the
rocking of the train, and contriving to light another
cigarette as he went.

He did his share thoroughly. In the space of ten minutes he
reviewed a
selection of passengers so variegated that his brain
began to reel.
Before his eyes passed an array of physiognomies
that would have made
Cesare Lombroso chirrup ecstatically
and reach for his tape-measure.
Americans of all shapes and
sizes, Englishmen in plus fours, flannel
bags, and natty
suitings, male children, female children, ambiguous
children,
large women, small women, three cosmopolitan
millionaires— one fat, one thin, one sozzled—three cosmopolitan millionaires’
wives—ditto,
but shuffled—a novelist, an actor, a politician,
four Parsees, three
Hindus, two Chinese, and a wild man from
Borneo. Simon Templar
inspected every one of them who could by any stretch of imagination have come
within the
frame of the picture, and acquired sufficient data to
write
three books or six hundred and eighty-seven modern novels.
But he did
not find Gunner Perrigo.

He came to the end of the last coach, and stood gazing
moodily
out of the window before starting back on the return journey.

And it was while he was there that he saw a strange sight.

The first manifestation of it did not impress him immedi
ately. It
was simply a scrap of white that went drifting past the window. His eyes
followed it abstractedly, and then reverted to
their gloomy
concentration on the scenery. Then two more
scraps of white
flittered past his nose, and a second later he
saw a spread of red
stuff fluttering feebly on the wire fence
beside the line.

The Saint frowned, and watched more attentively. And a
perfect cataract of whatnots
began to aviate past his eyes and
distribute
themselves about the route. Big whatnots and little
whatnots, in divers formations and half the
colours of the
rainbow, went wafting
by the window and scattered over the
fields and hedges. A mass of green
taffeta flapped past, looking
like a bilious
vulture after an argument with a steam hammer, and was closely followed by a
jaundiced cotton seagull that
seemed
to have suffered a similar experience. A covey of miscel
laneous bits and pieces drove by in hot pursuit. No
less than
eight palpitating banners of
assorted hues curvetted down the
breeze
and perched on railings and telegraph poles by the
wayside. It went on until the entire landscape
seemed to be littered with the loot of all the emporia of Knightsbridge and
the Brompton Road.

And suddenly the meaning of it flashed upon the Saint—so
suddenly
and lucidly that he threw back his head and bowed
before a gust of helpless mirth.

He spun round to the door beside him. He had made sure
that it was
locked, but he must have been mistaken. He
heaved his shoulder at
it, and it burst open—-it had been temporarily secured with a gimlet, as he
discovered later. But
at that moment he was not curious about that.
He hadn’t a
doubt in his head that his latest and most sudden
inspiration
was right, and he knew exactly what he was going to do
about
it.

Five minutes later, after a brief interlude for wash and
brush-up purposes, he was
careering blissfully back along the
corridor
on one of the most supremely joyous journeys of his
life.

At the compartment at which Perrigo had been, he stopped,
and opened
the door.

“Miss Lovedew,” he said pensively, and again the impetiginous
female looked up and acknowledged the charge, “Is your
luggage insured?”

“Of course,” said the woman. “Why?”

“You should begin making out your claim immediately,”
said the
Saint.

The woman stared.

“I don’t understand you. What’s happened? Are you one of
the company’s servants?”

“I am the head cook and bottle-washer,” said the Saint
gravely,
“and I did not like your red flannel nighties.”

He closed the door again and passed on, carolling hilar
iously to
himself, and leaving the lady to suffer from as
tounded fury as well
as acne.

In the Pullman he found Patricia gazing disconsolately in
front of
her. Her face lighted up as he arrived.

“Did you find him?”

Simon sat down.

“What luck did you have?”

“Just sweet damn-all,” said the girl wryly. “I’ve been
over
my part of the train four times, and I wouldn’t have missed
Perrigo if
he’d disguised himself as a mosquito.”

“I am inspired,” said the Saint.

He took the wine list and his pencil, and wrote rapidly.
Then he
held up the sheet and read:

“The mountains shook, the thunders came,
The very heavens wept for shame;
A Gigsworth in a white chemise
Visibly vortexed at the knees,
While Dan’s defection turned quite giddy
The ghost of Ancestor Dinwiddie.
If Dan had been a common cad
It wouldn’t have been half so bad;
If he had merely robbed a bank,
Or floated
companies that sank,
Or, with a piece of sharp bamboo,
Bashfully bumped off Mrs. Glue;
They might have understood his whim
And, in the end, forgiven him:
Such things, though odd, have now and then
Been done by perfect gentlemen;
But Daniel’s foul iniquity
Could hardly have been worse if he
Had bought (or so it seemed to them)
A chocolate after 9 p.m.”

Patricia
smiled.

“Will you always be mad?” she asked.

“Until the day I die, please God,” said the Saint.

“But if you didn’t find Perrigo——
”

“But I did find him!”

The girl gasped.

“You found him?”

Simon nodded; and she saw then that his eyes were
laughing.

“I did. He was in the luggage van at the end, heaving
mentionables
and unmentionables out of a wardrobe trunk. And just for the glory of it, Pat,
the trunk was labelled with
the immortal name of Lovedew—I found that out
afterwards
and tried to break the news to her, but I don’t think she
believed me. Anyway, I whaled into him, and there was a
breezy
exchange of pleasantries. And the long and the short of

“That Perrigo is locked up in that trunk, just where he
wanted to
be; but there’s an entirely new set of labels on it
that are going to
cause no small stir on board the
Berengaria
if Claud Eustace arrives in
time. Which I expect he will—
Isadore is almost certain to have squealed.
And all we’ve got to
do is wait for the orchestra to tune
up.” Simon looked at his
watch. “There’s half an hour to go yet,
old Pat, and I think we
might stand ourselves a bottle!”

Chapter X

A clock was booming the half-hour after twelve when
Chief Inspector
Teal climbed stiffly out of his special police
car at the gates of
the Ocean Dock. It had been half-past ten
when he left Albany
Street Police Station, and that single
chime indicated that
the Flying Squad driver had made a very
creditable run of it
from London to Southampton.

For Isadore Elberman had duly squealed, as the Saint had
expected,
and it had been no mean squeal. Considerably
stewed down after a
sleepless night in the cells, he had reiter
ated to the Divisional
Inspector the story with which he had failed to gain Teal’s ear the evening
before; and the tale had
come through with a wealth of embellishments
in the way of
circumstantial detail that had made the Inspector reach
hastily for the telephone and call for Mr. Teal to lend his personal
patronage
to the squeak.

Isadora Elberman was not the only member of the cast who
had spent a
sleepless night. Teal had been waiting on the
doorstep of his bank
when it opened in the morning. He asked
casually for his
balance, and in a few minutes the cashier
passed a slip of paper
across the counter. It showed exactly
one thousand eight hundred pounds more
to his credit than it
should have done, and he had no need to make
further inquir
ies. He took a taxi from the bank to Upper Berkeley Mews;
but a
prolonged assault on the front door elicited no response,
and the
relief watcher told him that Templar and the girl had
gone out at
nine-thirty and had not returned. Teal went back to New Scotland Yard, and it
was there that the call from
Albany Street found him.

And on the way down to Southampton the different frag
ments of
the jigsaw in which he had involved himself had
fitted themselves
together in his head, dovetailing neatly into
one another without a
gap or a protuberance anywhere, and
producing a shape with one coherent
outline and a sickeningly
simple picture lithographed upon it in three
colours. So far as the raw stark facts of the case were concerned, there wasn’t
a
leak or a loose end in the whole copper-bottomed consolida
tion of them.
It was as puerile and patent as the most elementary exercise in kindergarten
arithmetic. It sat up on its
hind legs and leered at him.

Slowly and stolidly, with clenched fists buried deep in the
pockets of
his overcoat, Chief Inspector Teal went up the
gangway of the
Berengaria
to see
the story through.