Prelude for War (13 page)

The room had been
ransacked. The two divans had been
ripped to pieces
and the upholstery of the chairs had been
cut
open. Cupboards were open and drawers had been
pulled
out and left where they fell. A shabby old rolltop
desk
in one corner looked as if a crowbar had been used
on
it. The table and the floor were strewn with papers.

Simon saw that much; and
then there was a sound of
tramping footsteps in the
hall. Automatically he pushed the
door to behind him,
subconsciously thinking that it would
only be some other
occupants of the building passing
through; his brain
was too busy with what he was looking
at to think very
hard. Before he realized his mistake the
footsteps
were right behind him and he was seized roughly
from
behind.

He whirled round with his
muscles instantly awake and
one fist driving out
instinctively as he turned. And then,
with some
superhuman effort, he checked the blow in mid-
flight.

In that delirious instant
his brain reversed itself with such fantastic speed that everything else seemed
to have
a nightmare slowness by comparison. He watched the
trajectory of his hand as if from a vast distance; and it
was exactly like sitting in a car with catastrophe leaping
up ahead, with the brakes already jammed on to the limit and nothing left
to do but to hold on and hope that they
would
do their work in time. And with a kind of hysterical
relief
he saw his zooming fist slow up and stop a bare inch
from
the round red face of the man who had grabbed him. For another split second he
simply stood blankly staring;
and then suddenly he went
weak with laughter.

“You shouldn’t give me
these shocks, Claud,” he said.
“My nerves
aren’t what they used to be.”

The man on the other side
of his fist went on gaping
at him, with his baby-blue
eyes dilating with a ferment of
emotions which whole volumes might be written
to describe.
And a tinge of royal purple
crept into his plump, cherubic
visage.

The reasons for that regal
hue were only distantly con
nected with the onrush of
that pile-driving fist which had
been
so miraculously held back from its mark. To Chief
Inspector
Claud Eustace Teal, a man who had never set
any
exaggerated value on his beauty, a punch on the nose
would
only have been a more or less unpleasant incident
to
be endured with fortitude in the execution of his duty,
and in that stoical spirit he had in his younger days suffered more
drastic forms of assault and battery than that. A punch
on the nose, indeed, would have been almost a joyous and
desirable experience compared with the spasm of unmiti
gated woe that speared through Mr Teal’s cosmogony
when he saw the face of the Saint. It was a pang that
summed up, in one poignant instant, all the years through
which Chief Inspector Teal had fought his hopelessly
losing battle with that elusive buccaneer, all the disappoint
ments and disasters and infuriating bafflements, all the wrath
and sarcasm that his efforts had brought down upon him
from his superiors, all the impudent mockeries of the Saint himself,
the Saint’s disrespectful forefinger prodding the rotundity of his stomach and
the assistant commissioner’s acidulated sniff. It was a sharp stab of memory
that brought
back all the occasions when Mr Teal
had seen triumph
dangling in front of his nose only to
have it jerked away
by invisible strings at the very
moment when he thought
his hands were closing
round it; and with it came a revival
of the barren
desolation that had followed so many of those
episodes,
when Mr Teal had felt that he was merely the
dumb
quarry of an unjust destiny, doomed to be harried
through
eternity with the stars themselves conspiring
against
him. And at the same time it was pervaded with
the
realization that the identical story was starting all over
again.

All these accumulated
indignations and despairs drained through Mr Teal’s intestines in one corrosive
moment of
appalling stillness before he finally
wrenched a response out
of his vocal cords.

“How the hell did you
get here?” he glurked.

It was not, perhaps, the
most fluent and comprehensive
speech that Mr Teal had
ever made. But it conveyed, with
a succinctness which more rounded oratory might
well have
failed to achieve, the distilled
essence of what was seething
through
the overloaded cauldrons of his mind. Its most
serious defect was in the enunciation, which lacked much
of that flutelike clarity which is favoured by the
cognoscenti
of the science of
elocution. It sounded in fact, as if his
throat were full of hot porridge.

Simon smiled at him rather
thoughtfully. He also had
his memories; and the prime
deduction which they offered
him was that the unexpected
intrusion of Chief Inspector
Teal, at that particular
moment of all moments, was defi
nitely an added
complication in an affair that was already
complicated enough. But
the sublimely bantering slant of his
brows
never wavered.

“I might ask you the
same,” he murmured. “But I see
that
your feet are looking as flat as ever, so I suppose
you’re
still wearing them down.”

The detective’s face under
his staid bowler hat remained
a glaring purple, but his inflated china-blue
eyes were reced
ing fractionally.

“I noticed your car
outside,” he said.

He was a liar. He had seen
it, but not noticed it. That
shining cream-and-red
monster was something that it would
have been almost
impossible to overlook in any landscape;
but
Mr Teal’s thoughts had been far away from any subject
so
disturbing as the Saint. They had simply been moving
in
a fool’s paradise where detectives from Scotland Yard
were
allowed to plod along investigating ordinary crimes
committed
by ordinary criminals without even a hint of
such
fantastic freaks as Simon Templar to mar the serenity
of
their dutiful labours. But Mr Teal had to say something like that to try and
recover the majestic dominance from
which in the agony
of the moment he had so ruinously
lapsed.

The Saint dissected his effort with a
sardonically generous
tolerance that made the
detective’s collar feel as if it were
shrinking
into his neck like a garrote.

“Of course,
Claud,” he said mildly. “Of course you did. I was forgetting what a
sleuth you were. And while we’re
on the subject of
sleuthing, I must say that you seem to have arrived in the nick of time. I
don’t know whether
you’ve noticed it yet, but there’s a
dead man on the floor
behind me. Without pretending to your
encyclopedic knowl
edge of crime I should say
that he appears to have been
murdered.”

“That’s right,”
Teal said raspingly. “And I should say
that
I knew who did it.”

The Saint raised his eyebrows.

“I don’t want to seem
unduly sensitive,” he remarked,
“but there’s
something about your tone of voice that makes
me
feel uncomfortable. Can you by any chance be suggesting——
”

“We’ll see about
that,” Teal retorted. He stepped aside
out
of the doorway. “Search him!” he barked.

Behind him a lanky
uniformed sergeant unfolded himself
into full view.
Somewhat apprehensively he stepped up to the Saint and went over his coat
pockets. He took out a
platinum cigarette case, a
wallet, an automatic lighter and
a fountain pen; and an
expression of outraged astonishment
came over his face.

” ‘Ere,” he said
suspiciously. “What ‘ve you done with
that
gun?”

“What gun?”
asked the Saint puzzledly. “You don’t
think
I’d carry a gun in a suit like this, do you? I’ve got
too
much respect for my tailor. Anderson would be horri
fied
and Sheppard would probably throw a fit.”

“Search his hip
pockets, you fool,” snarled Mr Teal.
“And
under his armpits. That’s where he’s most likely to
have
it.”

“And don’t
tickle,” said the Saint severely, “It makes
me
go all girlish.”

Breathing heavily, the
sergeant searched as instructed
and continued to find
nothing.

Simon lowered his arms.

“After which little
formality,” he said amiably, “let us
get
back to business. As I was tactfully trying to mention,
Claud, there seems to be a sort of corpse lying about on
the floor. Do you think we ought to do something about
it, or shall we shove it into the bathroom and pretend we
haven’t seen it?”

Chief Inspector Teal’s
lower jaw moved in a ponderous
surge like the first lurch
of the pistons of a locomotive
getting under way as he
dislodged a forgotten bolus of
chewing gum from behind
his wisdom teeth. The purple
tinge was dying out of his
face, allowing it to revert a little
closer to its normal
chubby pink. The negative results of
the sergeant’s
search had almost thrown him back on his
heels, but the shock
had something homeopathic in its effect.
It
had jarred him into taking one wild superhuman clutch
at the vanishing tail of his self-control; and now
he found himself clinging on to it with the frenzied fervour of a man who has
inadvertently taken hold of the steering end of a
starving alligator.

Behind him, while the
search was proceeding, a number
of other persons had sidled
cautiously into the room—a
melancholy plain-clothes
sergeant, a bald-headed man with
a camera, a small sandy man
with a black bag, a constable
in uniform. To the
experienced eye, they identified them
selves as the
members of a C.I.D. murder squad as unmis
takably
as if they had been labelled.

Simon had watched their
entrance with interest. He was
doing some rapid
reconstruction of his own. Mr Teal’s
advent had been far
too flabbergastingly apt to be pure
coincidence; and the
presence of that compact covey of supporters was extra confirmation of the
fact. Even chief
inspectors didn’t go forth with a
retinue of that kind unless
they were on a particular
and major assignment. And Simon
located the origin of the
assignment a moment later in the
shape of a fat blowzy woman
with stringy gray hair who
was hovering nervously in
the least-exposed part of the background.

Teal turned and looked for
her.

“Have you seen this
man before ?” he demanded.

She gulped.

“N-no. But I bet ‘e
done it, just the sime. ‘E looks just
like one o’ them
narsty capitalists as pore Mr Windlay
was always talkin’
abaht.”

Simon’s gaze rested on
her.

“Do you live in these
parts?” he inquired politely.

She bridled.

“This ‘ere is my
property, young man, so you mind yer
tongue. I come ‘ere
every week to collect the rent, not that I ‘aven’t wasted me time coming ‘ere
the larst two weeks.”

“You came here today
and found the body?”

“Yes, I did.”

“How long ago was
that ?”

“Not ‘arf an hour ago,
it wasn’t. You oughter know.”

“And then you went
straight out for the police, I sup
pose.”

“I went an’ phoned
Scotland Yard, that’s wot I done,
knowing as it’s
their business to catch murderers, an’ a good
thing,
too. They got
you,
all right.”

“You didn’t scream or
anything?” Simon asked inter
estedly.

The woman snorted.

“Wot, me? Me scream
an’ ‘ave all the neighbours in,
an’ get me ‘ouse a bad nime
? Not likely. This is a respectable place, this is, or it was before you come
to it.” A twinge
of grief shot through her
suety frame and made it quiver. “An’ now ooze going ter pie me rent,
that’s wot I wanter
know.”