Follow the Saint (25 page)

Tamblin
nodded.

“You
only made two mistakes,” he said. “Forrest would
have been
killed anyway, only I should have chosen a better
time for it. I heard
Rosemary talking to him one night
outside the front door, directly under
my window, when he
was leaving—that is how I found out that Nora had written
to you and
where she was going to meet you.”

“And
the other mistake?” Simon asked coolly.

“Was
when you let your own cleverness run away with you. When you arranged your
clever scheme to get me to
walk in here to provide the climax for your
dramatic revela
tions, and even left the front door ajar to make it easy
for
me. You conceited fool! You’ve got your confession; but
did you
think I’d let it do you any good ? Your bluff only
bothered me for a
moment when I was afraid Quintus had
ratted. As soon as I found he hadn’t, I
was laughing at you.
The only difference you’ve made is that now I
shall have to kill Rosemary as well. Quintus had ideas about her, and we
could have
used her to build up the story——
”

“Bertrand,”
said the Saint gravely, “I’m afraid you are
beginning to
drivel.”

The
revolver that was trained on him did not waver.

“Tell
me why,” Tamblin said interestedly.

Simon
trickled smoke languidly through his nostrils. He
was still leaning back in his chair,
imperturbably relaxed, in
the attitude in
which he had stayed even when Tamblin entered the room.

“Because
it’s your turn to be taking too much for granted.
You thought my
cleverness had run away with me, and so
you stopped thinking.
It doesn’t seem to have occurred to
you that since I expected you to come
in, I may have expected
just how sociable your ideas would be when you
got here.
You heard me give Jeeves a gun, and so you’ve jumped to
the conclusion that I’m unarmed. Now will you take a look
at my left
hand ? You notice that it’s in my coat pocket. I’ve
got you covered with
another gun, Bertrand, and I’m ready to bet I can shoot faster than you. If you
don’t believe me,
just start squeezing that trigger.”

Tamblin
stood gazing motionlessly at him for a moment;
and then his head
tilted back and a cackle of hideous laughter
came through the slit
in the bandages over his mouth.

“Oh,
no, Mr Templar,” he crowed. “You’re the one who
took too
much for granted. You decided that Quintus was a phoney doctor, and so you
didn’t stop to think that he might
be a genuine pickpocket. When he was
holding on to you in
the corridor upstairs—you remember?—he took
the maga
zines out of both your guns. You’ve got one shot in the
chamber of
the gun you’ve got left, and Quintus has got
you covered as well
now. You can’t get both of us with one
bullet. You’ve been
too clever for the last time——
”

It was no
bluff. Simon knew it with a gambler’s instinct,
and knew that Tamblin
had the last laugh.

“Take
your hand out of your pocket,” Tamblin snarled. “Quintus is going to
aim at Rosemary. If you use that gun,
you’re killing her as surely as if ——
”

The Saint
saw Tamblin’s forefinger twitch on the trigger,
and waited for the
sharp bite of death.

The crisp
thunder of cordite splintered the unearthly still
ness; but the Saint
felt no shock, no pain. Staring incredu
lously, he saw
Tamblin stagger as if a battering-ram had hit
him in the back; saw
him sway weakly, his right arm
drooping until the revolver slipped through
his fingers; saw
his knees fold and his body pivot slantingly over them
like a falling tree… . And saw the cubist figure and pithecanthropoid
visage of
Hoppy Uniatz coming through the door with
a smoking Betsy in its
hairy hand.

He heard
another thud on his right, and looked round.
The thud was caused
by Quintus’s gun hitting the carpet. Quintus’s hands waved wildly in the air as
Hoppy turned
towards him.

“Don’t
shoot!” he screamed. “I’ll give you a confession. I
haven’t
killed anyone. Tamblin did it all. Don’t shoot
me——
”

“He
doesn’t want to be shot, Hoppy,” said the Saint. “I
think we’ll let the police have
him—just for a change. It may
help to
convince mem of our virtue.”

“Boss,”
said Mr Uniatz, lowering his gun, “I done it.”

The Saint
nodded. He got up out of his chair. It felt rather
strange to be alive
and untouched.

“I
know,” he said. “Another half a second and he’d ‘ve
been the
most famous gunman on earth.”

Mr Uniatz
glanced cloudily at the body on the floor.

“Oh,
him,” he said vaguely, “Yeah…. But listen, boss—
I done
it!”

“You
don’t have to worry about it,” said the Saint.
“You’ve done it
before. And Comrade Quintus’s squeal will
let you out.”

Rosemary
Chase was coming towards him, pale but steady. It seemed to Simon Templar that
a long time had been wasted
in which he had been too busy to remember how
beautiful
she was and how warm and red her lips were. She put out a
hand to him; and because he was still the Saint and always
would be,
his arm went round her.

“I
know it’s tough,” he said. “But we can’t change it.”

“It
doesn’t seem so bad now, somehow,” she said. “To
know that
at least my father wasn’t doing all this…. I wish
I knew how to thank
you.”

“Hoppy’s
the guy to thank,” said the Saint, and looked at
him. “I never
suspected you of being a thought-reader,
Hoppy, but I’d give a
lot to know what made you come out of the kitchen in the nick of time ?”

Mr Uniatz
blinked at him.

“Dat’s
what I mean, boss, when I say I done it,” he ex
plained, his brow
furrowed with the effort of amplifying a
statement which seemed
to him to be already obvious enough. “When you call out de butler, he is
just opening
me anudder bottle of Scotch. An’ dis time I make de
grade. I
drink it down to de last drop wit’out stopping. So I come
right out to tell ya.” A broad beam of ineffable pride opened
up a gold
mine in the centre of Mr Uniatz’s face. “I done it,
boss!
Ain’t dat sump’n ?”

PART 3:
THE AFFAIR OF
HOGSBOTHAM

I

T
HERE ARE
times,” remarked Simon Templar, putting
down the evening paper
and pouring himself a second
glass of Tio Pepe, “when I am on the
verge of swearing a great oath never to look at another newspaper as long as I
live. Here
you have a fascinating world full of all kinds of
busy people, being born, falling in love,
marrying, dying and
being killed, working,
starving, fighting, splitting atoms and
measuring stars, inventing trick corkscrews and relativity
theories, building skyscrapers and suffering hell
with toothache. When I buy a newspaper I want to read all about them. I want to
know what they’re doing and creating and planning
and striving for and going to war about — all the
exciting vital things that make a picture of a real world and real people’s
lives. And what do I get?”

“What
do you get, Saint?” asked Patricia Holm with a
smile.

Simon
picked up the newspaper again.

“This
is what I get,” he said. “I get a guy whose name,
believe it
or not, is Ebenezer Hogsbotham. Comrade
Hogsbotham, having
been born with a name like that and a
face to match it, if you can believe a
newspaper picture, has
never had a chance in his life to misbehave,
and has therefore
naturally
developed into one of those guys who feel that they
have a mission to protect everyone else from misbehaviour.
He has
therefore been earnestly studying the subject in order
to be able to tell other people how to protect themselves
from
it. For several weeks, apparently, he has been frequent
ing the bawdiest theatres and the nudest night clubs, dis
covering just how much depravity is being put out
to en
snare those people who are not
so shiningly immune to
contamination
as himself; as a result of which he has come
out hot and strong for a vigorous censorship of all public
entertainment. Since Comrade Hogsbotham has
carefully
promoted himself to be
president of the National Society
for
the Preservation of Public Morals, he hits the front-page
headlines while five hundred human beings who get
them
selves blown to bits by
honourable Japanese bombs are only
worth
a three-line filler on page eleven. And this is the
immortal utterance that he hits them with: ‘The
public has
a right to be protected,’ he says, ‘from displays of
suggestive
ness and undress which are
disgusting to all right-thinking
people.’
… ‘Right-thinking people’, of course, only means people who think like
Comrade Hogsbotham; but it’s one of
those
crushing and high-sounding phrases that the Hogsbothams
of this world seem to have a monopoly on. Will
you excuse me while I vomit ?”

Patricia
fingered the curls in her soft golden hair and considered him guardedly.

“You
can’t do anything else about it,” she said. “Even
you can’t
alter that sort of thing, so you might as well save
your energy.”

“I
suppose so.” The Saint scowled, “But it’s just too hope
less to
resign yourself to spending the rest of your life
watching nine-tenths
of the world’s population, who’ve got more than enough serious things to worry
about already,
being
browbeaten into a superstitious respect for the humbug of a handful of yapping
cryptorchid Hogsbothams. I feel that
somebody
on the other side of the fence ought to climb over
and pin his ears back… I have a pain in the
neck. I should
like to do something to
demonstrate my unparalleled immorality. I want to go out and burgle a convent;
or borrow
a guitar and parade in front
of Hogsbotham’s house, singing obscene songs in a beery voice.”

He took his
glass over to the window and stood there
looking down over
Piccadilly and the Green Park with a
faraway dreaminess in his blue eyes
that seemed to be playing
with all kinds of electric and reprehensible ideas beyond the
humdrum view on which they were actually focused;
and
Patricia Holm watched him with
eyes of the same reckless
blue but
backed by a sober understanding. She had known
him too long to dismiss such a mood as lightly as any other
woman
would have dismissed it. Any other .man might have
voiced the same grumble without danger of anyone else
remembering it beyond the next drink; but when the
man who
was so fantastically called
the Saint uttered that kind of
unsaintly thought, his undercurrent of
seriousness was apt to
be translated into a
different sort of headline with a frequency
that Patricia needed all her reserves of mental stability to cope
with. Some of the Saint’s wildest adventures had
started from
less sinister openings
than that, and she measured him now
with
a premonition that she had not yet heard the last of that
random threat. For a whole month he had done
nothing
illegal, and in his life thirty days of untarnished virtue was a
long time. She studied the buccaneering
lines of his lean
figure, sensed the precariously curbed restlessness
under his
lounging ease, and knew that even
if no exterior adventure
crossed his
path that month of peace would come to spon
taneous disruption. …

And then
he turned back with a smile that did nothing to
reassure her.

“Well,
we shall see,” he murmured, and glanced at his watch. “It’s time you
were on your way to meet that mori
bund aunt of yours. You can make sure
she hasn’t changed
her will, because we might stir up some excitement by
bumping her off.”