Follow the Saint (32 page)

“That
American gangster who follows you around is called
Hoppy, isn’t he
?”

“If
you’re referring to Mr Uniatz,” said the Saint stiffly,
“he
is sometimes called that. But he hasn’t got any copyright
in the
name.”

The
detective took a fresh nutcracker purchase on his
gum.

“Perhaps
he hasn’t. But the tall one went into the living-
room. The radio was
switched off and on and off again, and
then it stayed off.
So the maid heard quite a bit of the con
versation. She heard
people talking about the Saint.”

“That’s
one of the penalties of fame,” said the Saint
sadly. “People
are always talking about me, in the weirdest
places. It’s quite
embarrassing sometimes. But do go on
telling me about it.”

Mr Teal’s
larynx suffered a spasm which interfered momentarily with his power of speech.

“That’s
all I have to tell you!” he yelped, when he had partially cleared the
obstruction. “I mean that you and that
Uniatz creature of
yours were the second two men who
arrived. After that, according to the
maid, there was a lot
of shooting, and presently some neighbours
arrived and
untied her. All the four men who had been there
disappeared,
and so did Mr Verdean. I want you on suspicion of kid
napping
him; and if we don’t find him soon there’ll probably
be a charge of murder
as well!”

Simon
Templar frowned. His manner was sympathetic
rather than disturbed.

“I
know how you feel, Claud,” he said commiseratingly.
“Naturally
you want to do something about it; and I know
you’re quite a
miracle worker when you get going. But I
wish I could figure
out how you’re going to tie me up with
it, when I wasn’t
anywhere near the place.”

The
detective’s glare reddened.

“You
weren’t anywhere near Chertsey, eh? So we’ve got
to break down another
of your famous alibis. All right,
then. Where were you ?”

“I was
at home.”

“Whose
home?”

“My
own. This one.”

“Yeah
? And who else knows about it ?”

“Not a
lot of people,” Simon confessed. “We were being
quiet. You
know. One of these restful, old-fashioned, fire-side
evenings. If it comes
to that, I suppose there isn’t an army of
witnesses. You can’t
have a quiet restful evening with an
army of witnesses cluttering up the place. It’s a
contradiction
in terms. There was just Pat,
and Hoppy, and of course good old Orace——
”

“Pat
and Hoppy and Orace,” jeered the detective. “Just
a quiet
restful evening. And that’s your alibi——
”

“I wouldn’t say it was
entirely my alibi,” Simon mentioned
diffidently.
“After all, there are several other houses in
England. And I wouldn’t mind betting that in at
least half of them, various people were having quiet restful evenings last
night. Why don’t you go and ask some of them
whether they
can prove it ? Because
you know that being a lot less tolerant
and forbearing than I am, they’d only tell you to go back to
Scotland Yard and sit on a radiator until you’d
thawed some
of the clotted suet out of
your brains. How the hell would you expect anyone to prove he’d spent a quiet
evening at
home ? By bringing in a
convocation of bishops for wit
nesses
? In a case like this, it isn’t the suspect’s job to prove
he was home. It’s your job to prove he
wasn’t.”

Chief
Inspector Teal should have been warned. The
ghosts of so many
other episodes like this should have risen
up to give him caution.
But they didn’t. Instead, they egged
him on. He leaned forward in a glow
of vindictive exultation.

“That’s
just what I’m going to do,” he said, and his voice
grew rich
with the lusciousness of his own triumph. “We
aren’t always so
stupid as you think we are. We found
fresh tyre tracks in the drive, and
they didn’t belong to
Verdean’s car. We searched every scrap of
ground for half a
mile to see if we could pick them up again. We found them
turning
into a field quite close to the end of Greenleaf Road. The car that made ‘em
was still in the field—it was reported
stolen in Windsor
early yesterday morning. But there were
the tracks of another
car in the field, overlapping and under-
lapping the tracks of
the stolen car, so that we know the kidnappers changed to another car for their
getaway. I’ve got casts of those tracks, and I’m going to show that they
match the
tyres on your car!”

The Saint
blinked.

“It
would certainly be rather awkward if they did,” he
said
uneasily. “I didn’t give anybody permission to borrow
my car
last night, but of course——
”

“But
of course somebody might have taken it away and
brought it back
without your knowing it,” Teal said with
guttural sarcasm.
“Oh, yes.” His voice suddenly went into a
squeak. “Well,
I’m going to be in court and watch the jury laugh themselves sick when you try
to tell that story! I’m
going to examine your car now, in front of
police witnesses,
and I’d like them to see your face when I do it!”

It was the
detective’s turn to march away and leave the
Saint to follow. He
had a moment of palpitation while he
pondered whether the Saint would do it. But as he flung
open
the front door and crunched into the
drive, he heard the
Saint’s footsteps
behind him. The glow of triumph that was
in him warmed like a Yule log on a Christmas hearth. The
Saint’s
expression had reverted to blandness quickly enough, but not so quickly that
Teal had missed the guilty start which
had
broken through its smooth surface. He knew, with a
blind ecstasy, that at long last the Saint had
tripped….

He waved
imperiously to the two officers in the prowl car
outside, and marched
on towards the garage. The Saint’s
Hirondel stood there in its glory, an
engineering symphony
in cream and red trimmed with chromium, with
the more
sedate black Daimler in which Patricia had driven down
standing beside it; but Teal had no aesthetic admiration for
the sight. He stood by like a
pink-faced figure of doom while
his
assistants reverently unwrapped the moulage impres
sions ; and then, like a master chef taking charge
at the vital
moment in the preparation
of a dish for which his underlings had laid the routine foundations, he took
the casts in
bis own hands and
proceeded to compare them with the
tyres
on the Hirondel.

He went
all round the Hirondel twice.

He was
breathing a trifle laboriously, and his face was
redder than
before—probably from stooping—when he
turned his attention to the Daimler.

He went all
round the Daimler twice, too.

Then he
straightened up and came slowly back to the
Saint. He came back
until his face was only a few inches
from the Saint’s. His capillaries were
congested to the point
where his complexion had a dark purple hue.
He seemed to be
having more trouble with his larynx.

“What
have you done to those tyres?” he got out in a
hysterical blare.

The Saint’s
eyebrows drew perplexedly together.

“What
have I done to them ? I
don’t get you, Claud. Do
you mean
to say they don’t match?”

“You
know damn well they don’t match! You knew it all
the time.”
Realization of the way the Saint had deliberately
lured him up to greater heights of
optimism only to make his
downfall more
hideous when it came, brought something
like a sob into the detective’s gullet. “You’ve changed the
tyres!”

Simon
looked aggrieved.

“How
could I, Claud ? You can see for yourself that these tyres are a long way from
being new——
”

“What
have you done with the tyres you had on the car last night?” Teal almost
screamed.

“But
these are the only tyres I’ve had on the car for weeks,”
Simon
protested innocently. “Why do you always suspect
me of such horrible
deceits ? If my tyres don’t match the tracks you found in that field, it just
looks to me as if you
may have made a mistake about my being
there.”

Chief
Inspector Teal did a terrible thing. He raised the
casts in his hands
and hurled them down on the concrete
floor so that they shattered into a thousand fragments. He
did not actually dance on them, but he looked as
if only an
effort of self-control
that brought him to the brink of an apoplectic stroke stopped him from doing
so.

“What have you done with
Verdean ?” he yelled.

“I haven’t done anything
with him. Why should I have ? I’ve never even set eyes on the man.”

“I’ve got a search
warrant——”

“Then
why don’t you search?” demanded the Saint
snappily, as though
his patience was coming to an end. “You
don’t believe
anything I tell you, anyhow, so why don’t you look for yourself? Go ahead and
use your warrant. Tear the
house apart. I don’t mind. I’ll be waiting
for you in the living-
room when you’re ready to eat some of your
words.”

He turned
on his heel and strolled back to the house.

He sat down in the living-room,
lighted a cigarette, and
calmly picked up a
magazine. He heard the tramp of Teal
and
his minions entering the front door, without looking
up. For an hour he listened to them moving about
in various
parts of the house,
tapping walls and shifting furniture; but
he seemed to have no interest beyond the story he was
reading, Even when they invaded the living-room
itself, he didn’t even glance at them. He went on turning the pages as
if they made no more difference to his idleness
than a trio of
inquisitive puppies.

Teal came
to the living-room last. Simon knew from the
pregnant stillness that
presently supervened that the search had come to a stultifying end, but he
continued serenely to finish his page before he looked up.

“Well,” he said at
length, “have you found him?”

“Where
is he?” shouted Teal, with dreadful savagery.

Simon put
down the magazine.’

“Look here,” he said
wearily. “I’ve made a lot of allow
ances
for you, but I give up. What’s the use ? I tell you I was
at home last night, and you can’t prove I wasn’t;
but just
because you want me to have
been out, I must be faking an
alibi. You’ve got casts of the tyre tracks
of a car that was mixed up in some dirty business last night, and they don’t
match the tracks of either of my cars; but just
because you think they ought to match, I must have changed my tyres. I tell you
I haven’t kidnapped this fellow Verdean, and you
can’t find him anywhere
in my house; but just because you
think I
ought to have kidnapped him, I must have hidden
him somewhere else.
Every shred of evidence is against you,
and
therefore all the evidence must be wrong. You couldn’t possibly be wrong
yourself, because you’re the great Chief
Inspector Claud Eustace Teal, who knows everything and
always gets his man. All right. Every bit of proof
there is
shows that I’m innocent, but
I must be guilty because your
theories
would be all wet if I wasn’t. So why do we have to
waste our time on silly little details like this ?
Let’s just take
me down to the police
station and lock me up.”

“That’s
just what I’m going to do,” Teal raved blindly.

The Saint
looked at him for a moment, and stood up.

“Good
enough,” he said breezily. “I’m ready when you
are.”

He went to
the door and called: “Pat!” She answered him, and came down the
stairs. He said: “Darling, Claud Eustace
has had an idea.
He’s going to lug me off and shove me in the
cooler on a charge of
being above suspicion. It’s a new
system they’ve introduced at Scotland
Yard, and all the laws
are being altered to suit it. So you’d better
call one of our
lawyers and see if he knows what to do about it. Oh, and
you might
ring up some of the newspapers while you’re on
the job—they’ll
probably want to interview Claud about his
brainwave.”