Saint Intervenes (20 page)

“What’s
your opinion, Mr. Templar?” asked Yearleigh.
“Don’t you think
Maurice is talking like one of these damned
street-corner Reds
?”
The Saint nodded.

“Yes,
I do,” he said. There was a moment’s silence; and
then he added
thoughtfully: “I rather like these street-corner
Reds—one or two of
them are really sincere.”

Chief
Inspector Teal nibbled a crust of bread secure in
his voluntary
self-effacement, while Mrs. Ormer made some
twittering remark and
the thread of conversation drifted off
into a less
dangerously controversial topic. He had, he admit
ted, failed dismally
in his little solitaire game of spotting the prospective murderer. A Cabinet
Minister, a multi-millionaire,
and a poet did not seem to comprise a
gathering amongst
whom a practical detective could seek hopefully for
felons.
The only suspect left for him was still the Saint; and yet
even when the meal was finished,
after the ladies had retired
and the port
and cigars had been passed around, he had no
reason, actual or intuitive, to believe that Simon Templar was
meditating
the murder of his host.

Yearleigh
rose, and there was a general pushing back of
chairs. The noble
sportsman caught the detective’s eye; and
for the first time
since Teal’s arrival the object of his in
vitation was brought up again.

“I’ve
had another of those damned letters,” he said.

He produced
it from his pocket, and held it out in a
movement that was a
general announcement that anyone who
cared to might peruse it. Vould and
the Saint, who were
nearest, shared it with Mr. Teal.—

The message contained two lines
in laboured script.

Since you
have ignored my previous warnings, you will
learn your lesson
tonight.

There was
no signature — not even the skeleton haloed
figure which Teal had
half expected to see.

The
detective folded the letter and put it away in his
wallet. His faded
sleepy eyes turned back to his host.

“I’d
like to have a talk with you later on, sir,” he said.
“I
have some men in the village, and with your permission
I’d like to post
special guards.”

“Certainly,”
agreed Yearleigh at once. “Have your talk
now. I’m sure the
others will excuse us.
…
Wait a moment,
though.”
He turned to Maurice Vould. “You wanted to have
a talk with me as
well, didn’t you?”

Vould
nodded.

“But
it can wait a few minutes,” he said; and both Teal
and the
Saint saw that his pale face was even paler, and the
eyes behind his big glasses
were bright with sudden strain.

“Why should it?”
exclaimed Yearleigh good-humouredly.
“You
modern young intellectuals are always in a hurry, and
I promised you this talk three or four days ago.
You should
have had it sooner if I hadn’t had to go away. Inspector Teal
won’t mind waiting, and I don’t expect to be
murdered for
another half-hour.”

Simon fell
in at Teal’s side as they went down the hall,
leaving the other two
on their way to Yearleigh’s study; and
quite naturally the
detective asked the question which was uppermost in his mind.

“Have
you any more ideas?”

“I
don’t know,” was the Saint’s unsatisfactory response.
“Who
were you most interested in at dinner?”

“I was
watching Vould,” Teal confessed.

“You
would be,” said the Saint. “I don’t suppose you even noticed Lady
Yearleigh.”

Teal did not answer; but he
admitted to himself that the
accusation was
nearly true. As they went into the drawing-
room his sleepy eyes looked for her at once, and saw her
talking to Ormer on one side of her and Walmar on
the
other. He suddenly realised that
she was young enough to be
Yearleigh’s
daughter—she might have been thirty-five, but
she scarcely looked thirty. She had the same pale and curiously
transparent complexion as her cousin Vould, but in
her it
combined with blue eyes and flaxen hair to form an almost
ethereal beauty. He could not help feeling the
contrast be
tween her and her
husband—knowing Yearleigh only by
reputation,
and never having visited the house, he would have
expected Lady Yearleigh to be a robust horsey
woman, at her
best in tweeds and
given to brutal bluntness. Mr. Teal had
never read poetry; but if
he
had,
Rossetti’s
Blessed Damosel
would
have perfectly expressed what he felt about this Lady
Yearleigh whom Simon Templar had made him notice
prac
tically for the first time.

“She’s
very attractive,” said Teal, which was a rhapsody
from him.

“And
intelligent,” said the Saint. “Did you notice that?”

The
detective nodded vaguely.

“She
has a wonderful husband.”

Simon put
down his cigar-butt in an ashtray and took out his cigarette-case. Teal knew
subconsciously that his hesita
tion over those commonplace movements was
merely a piece
of that theatrical timing in which the Saint delighted to
in
dulge; he knew that the Saint was about to say something
illuminating;
but even as Simon Templar opened his mouth the sound of the shot boomed through
the house.

There was
an instant’s terrible stillness, while the echoes
of the reverberation
seemed to vibrate tenuously through the
tense air like the
vibrations of a cello-string humming below
the pitch of hearing;
and then Lady Yearleigh came to her
feet like a ghost rising, with her
ivory skin and flaxen hair
making her a blanched apparition in the dimly
lighted room.

“My
God,” she breathed, “he’s killed him!”

Teal, who
was nearest the door, awoke from his momentary
stupor and rushed
towards it; but the Saint reached it first.
He ran at the Saint’s
shoulder to the study, and as they came
to it the door was flung
open and Lord Yearleigh stood there,
a straight steady figure with a
revolver in his hand.

“You’re
too late,” he said, with a note of triumph in bis
voice. “I got
him myself.”

“Who?”
snapped Teal, and burst past him into the room
,
to see the answer to
his question lying still and sprawled out in the middle of the rich carpet.

It was
Maurice Vould.

Teal went
over to him. He could barely distinguish the punc
ture of the bullet in
the back of Vould’s dinner jacket, but
the scar in his
shirt-front was larger, with a spreading red
stain under it. Teal
opened the dead man’s fingers and de
tached an old Italian dagger, holding
it carefully in his
handkerchief.

“What
happened?” he asked.

“He
started raving,” said Yearleigh, “about that bill of
mine. He
said it would be better for me to die than to take
that bill into the
House. I said: ‘Don’t be silly,’ and he grabbed that dagger—I use it as a
paper-knife—off the
desk, and attacked me. I threw him off, but he’d become a
maniac. I got a drawer open and pulled out this revolver,
meaning to
frighten him. He turned to the window and
yelled: ‘Come in,
comrades! Come in and kill!’ I saw another man at the window with a scarf
round his face, and
fired at him. Maurice must have moved, or I must have
been
shaken up, or something, because I hit Maurice. The other
man ran
away.”

Still
holding the knife, Teal turned and lumbered towards
the open french
windows. Ormer and Walmar, who had ar
rived while Yearleigh was talking, went
after him more
slowly; but the Saint was beside him when he stood
outside,
listening to the murmurs of the night.

In Teal’s
mind was a queer amazement and relief, that for
once Simon Templar
was proved innocent and he had not
that possibility to contend with; and
he looked at the Saint
with half a mind to apologise for his
suspicions. And then he saw that the Saint’s face was deeply lined in the dim
starlight,
and he heard the Saint muttering in a terrible
whisper: ‘Oh, hell!
It was my fault. It was my fault!”

“What do you mean?’ asked
the startled detective.
Simon gripped him by
the arm, and looked over his
shoulder.
Ormer and Walmar were behind them, venturing more cautiously into the dangerous
dark. The Saint spoke
louder.

“You’ve
got your job to do,” he said rather wildly.
“Photographers—finger-prints——
”

“It’s
a dear case,” protested Teal, as he felt himself being
urged
away.

“You’ll
want a doctor—coroners—your men from the vi
llage. I’ll take you
in my car… .”

Feeling that the universe had
suddenly sprung a high fever,
Teal found
himself hustled helplessly around the broad ter
race to the front of the house. They had reached the drive
before he managed to collect his wits and stop.

“Have
you gone mad?” he demanded, planting his feet
solidly in the gravel
and refusing to move further. “What
do you mean—it was
your fault?”

“I killed him,” said
the Saint savagely. “I killed Maurice
Vould!”

“You?”
Teal ejaculated, with an uncanny start. “You’re
crazy,” he
said.

“I
killed him,” said the Saint, “by culpable negligence. Be
cause I
could have saved his life. I was mad. I was crazy.
But I’m not now. All right. Go back to the
house. You have
somebody to arrest.”

A flash of
memory went across Teal’s mind—the memory
of a pale ghostly
woman rising from her chair, her voice
saying:
“My
God, he’s killed him!”
—the hint of a frightful
foreknowledge.
A cold shiver touched his spine.

“You
don’t mean—Lady Yearleigh?” he said incredulously.
“It’s
impossible. With a husband like hers——
”

“You
think he was a good husband, don’t you?” said the Saint. “Because he
was a noble sportsman. Cold baths and
cricket. Hunting, shooting, and
fishing. I suppose it’s too
much to expect you to put yourself in the
place of a woman—
a woman like her—who was married to that?”

“You
think she was in love with Vould?”

“Of course she was in love
with Vould. That’s why I asked
you if you’d
looked at her at all during dinner—when Vould
was talking. If you had, even you might have seen it. But
you’re so full of conventions. You think that any
woman ought to adore a great fat-headed blustering athlete—be
cause a number of equally fat-headed men adore him.
You think she oughtn’t to think much of a pale poet who wears
glasses,
because the fat-headed athletes don’t understand him,
as if the ability to hit a ball with a bat were the only cri
terion of value in the world. But I tried to tell
you that she
was intelligent. Of
course she was in love with Vould, and Vould with her. They were made for each
other. I’ll also bet
you that Vould
didn’t want an interview with Yearleigh to
make more protests about that bill, but to tell him that he
was going to run away with his wife.”

Teal said
helplessly: “You mean—when Yearleigh objected
—Vould had made up
his mind to kill him. Lady Yearleigh
knew, and that’s what she meant by——
”

“She
didn’t mean that at all,” said the Saint. “Vould be
lieved in
peace. You heard him at dinner. Have you for
gotten that remark of
his? He pointed out that men had
learned not to kill their neighbours so that
they could steal
their lawn mowers. Why should he believe that they ought
to kill
their neighbours so that they could steal their wives?”

“You
can’t always believe what a man says ——
”