The Saint and Mr. Teal: Formerly Called "Once More the Saint" (2 page)

“Claud Eustace himself, by the tum-tum of Tutankhamen! I thought I’d be seeing you.” Simon looked the detective over thoughtfully. “And I believe you’ve put on weight,” he said.

Teal sank his teeth in a well-worn lump of chewing gum.

“What have you come back for?” he asked shortly.

On the way down he had mapped out the course of the interview minutely. He had decided that his attitude would be authoritative, restrained, distant, perfectly polite but definitely warning. He would tolerate no more nonsense. So long as the Saint was prepared to behave himself, no obstacles would be placed in his way; but if he was contemplating any further misdeeds … The official warning would be delivered thus and thus.

And now, within thirty seconds of his entering the cell, in the first sentence he had uttered, the smooth control of the situation which he had intended to usurp from the start was sliding out of his grasp. It had always been like that. Teal proposed, and the Saint disposed. There was something about the insolent self-possession of that scapegrace buccaneer that goaded the detective into faux pas for which he was never afterwards able to account.

“As a matter of fact, old porpoise,” said the Saint, “I came back for some cigarettes. You can’t buy my favourite brand in France, and if you’ve ever endured a week of Marylands- “

Teal took a seat on the bunk.

“You left England in rather a hurry two months ago, didn’t you?”

“I suppose I did,” admitted the Saint reflectively. “You see, I felt like having a good bust, and you know what I am. Impetuous. I just upped and went.”

“It’s a pity you didn’t stay.”

The Saint’s blue eyes gazed out banteringly from under dark level brows.

“Teal, is that kind? If you want to know, I was expecting a better reception than this. I was only thinking just now how upset my solicitor would be when he heard about it. Poor old chap-he’s awfully sensitive about these things. When one of his respectable and valued clients comes home to his native land, and he isn’t allowed to move two hundred yards into the interior before some flat-footed hick cop is lugging him off to the hoosegow for no earthly reason—”

“Now you listen to me for a minute,” Teal cut in bluntly. “I didn’t come here to swap any funny talk of that sort with you. I came down to tell you how the Yard thinks you’d better behave now you’re home. You’re going loose as soon as I’ve finished with you, but if you want to stay loose you’ll take a word of advice.”

“Shall I?”

“That’s up to you.” The detective was plunging into his big speech half an hour before it was due, but he was going to get it through intact if it was the last thing he ever did. It was an amazing thing that even after the two months of comparative calm which he had enjoyed since the Saint left England, the gall of many defeats was as bitter on his tongue as it had ever been before. Perhaps he had a clairvoyant glimpse of the future, born out of the deepest darkness of his subconscious mind, which told him that he might as well have lectured a sun spot about its pernicious influence on the weather. The bland smiling composure of that lean figure opposite him was fraying the edges of his nerves with all the accumulated armoury of old associations. “I’m not suggesting,” Teal said tersely. “I’m prophesying.”

The Saint acknowledged his authority with the faintest possible flicker of one eyebrow-and yet the sardonic mockery of that minute gesture was indescribable.

“Yeah?”

“I’m telling you to watch your step. We’ve put up with a good deal from you in the past. You’ve been lucky. You even earned a free pardon, once. Anyone would have thought you’d have been content to retire gracefully after that. You had your own ideas. But a piece of luck like that doesn’t come twice in any man’s lifetime. You’d made things hot enough for yourself when you went away, and you needn’t think they’ve cooled off just because you took a short holiday. I’m not saying they mightn’t cool off a bit if you took a long one. We aren’t out for any more trouble.”

“Happy days,” drawled the Saint, “are here again. Teal, in another minute you’ll have me crying.”

“You shouldn’t have much to cry about,” said the detective aggressively. “There’s some excuse for the sneak thief who goes on pulling five-pound jobs. He hasn’t a chance to retire. You ought to have made a pretty good pile by this time —”

“About a quarter of a million,” said the Saint modestly. “I admit it sounds a lot, but look at Rockefeller. He could spend that much every day.”

“You’ve had a good run. I won’t complain about it. You’ve done me some good turns on your way, and the commissioner is willing to set that in your favour. Why not give the game a rest ?”

The bantering blue eyes were surveying Teal steadily all the time he was speaking. Their expression was almost seraphic in its innocence-only the most captious critic, or the most overwrought inferiority complex, could have found anything to complain about in their elaborate sobriety. The Saint’s face wore the register of a rapt student of theology absorbing wisdom from an archbishop.

And yet Chief Inspector Claud Eustace Teal felt his mouth drying up in spite of the soothing stimulus of spearmint. He had the numbing sensation of fatuity of a man who has embarked on a funny story in the hope of salvaging an extempore after-dinner speech that has been falling progressively flatter with every sentence, and who realizes in the middle of it that it is not going to get a laugh. His own ears began to wince painfully at the awful dampness of the platitudes that were drooling inexplicably out of his own mouth. His voice sounded like the bleat of a lost sheep crying in the wilderness. He wished he had sent someone else to Newhaven.

“Let me know the worst,” said the Saint. “What are you leading up to? Is the government proposing to offer me a pension and a seat in the House of Lords if I’ll retire?”

“It isn’t. It’s offering you ten years’ free board and lodging at Parkhurst if you don’t. I shouldn’t want you to make any mistake about it. If you think you’re —”

Simon waved his hand.

“If you’re not careful you’ll be repeating yourself, Claud,” he murmured. “Let me make the point for you. So long as I carry on like a little gentleman and go to Sunday school every week, your lordships will leave me alone. But if I should get back any of my naughty old ideas-if anyone sort of died suddenly while I was around, or some half-witted policeman lost sight of a packet of illicit diamonds and wanted to blame it on me-then it’ll be the ambition of every dick in England to lead me straight to the Old Bailey. The long-suffering police of this great country are on their mettle. Britain has awoken. The Great Empire on which the sun never sets —”

“That’s enough of that,” yapped the detective.

He had not intended to yap. He should have spoken in a trenchant and paralyzing baritone, a voice ringing with power and determination. Something went wrong with his larynx at the crucial moment.

He glared savagely at the Saint.

“I’d like to know your views,” he said.

Simon Templar stood up. There were seventy-four steel inches of him, a long, lazy uncoiling of easy strength and fighting vitality tapering down from wide, square shoulders. The keen, tanned face of a cavalier smiled down at Teal.

“Do you really want them, Claud?”

“That’s what I’m here for.”

“Then if you want the news straight from the stable, I think that speech of yours would be a knockout at the Mothers’ Union.” The Saint spread out his arms. “I can just see those kindly, wrinkled faces lighting up with the radiant dawn of a new hope-the tired souls wakening again to beauty —”

“Is that all you’ve got to say?”

“Very nearly, Claud. You see, your proposition doesn’t tempt me. Even if it had included the pension and the peerage, I don’t think I should have succumbed. It would make life so dull. I can’t expect you to see my point, but there it is.”

Teal also got to his feet, under the raking twinkle of those very clear blue eyes. There was something in their mockery which he had never understood, which perhaps he would never understand. And against that something which he could not understand, his jaw tightened up in grim belligerence.

“Very well,” he said. “You’ll be sorry.”

“I doubt it,” said the Saint.

On the way back to London, Teal thought of many more brilliant speeches which he could have made, but he had not made any of them. He returned to Scotland Yard in a mood of undiluted acid, which the sarcastic comments of the assistant commissioner did nothing to mellow.

“To tell you the truth, sir, I never expected anything else,” Teal said seriously. “The Saint’s outside our province, and he always has been. I never imagined anyone could make me believe in the sort of story-book Raffles who goes in for crime for the fun of the thing, but in this case it’s true. I’ve had it out with Templar before-privately. The plain fact is that he’s in the game with a few highfalutin’ ideas about a justice above the law, and a lot of superfluous energy that he’s got to get rid of somehow. If we put a psychologist on to him,” expounded the detective, who had been reading Freud, “we should be told he’d got an Oedipus Complex. He has to break tke law just because it if the law. If we made it illegal to go to church, he’d be heading a revivalist movement inside the week.”

The commissioner accepted the exposition with his characteristic sniff.

“I don’t anticipate that the Home Secretary will approve of that method of curtailing the Saint’s activities,” he said. “Failing the adoption of your interesting scheme, I shall hold you personally responsible for Templar’s behaviour.”

It was an unsatisfactory day for Mr. Teal from every conceivable angle, for he was in the act of putting on his hat preparatory to leaving Scotland House that night when a report was brought to him which made his baby-blue eyes open wide with sheer incredulous disgust.

He read the typewritten sheet three times before he had fully absorbed all the implications of it, and then he grabbed the telephone and put through a sulphurous call to the department responsible.

“Why the devil didn’t you send me this report before?” he demanded.

“We only received it half an hour ago, sir,” explained the offending clerk. “You know what these country police are.”

Chief Inspector Claud Eustace Teal slammed back the receiver and kept his opinion of those country police to himself. He knew very well what they were. The jealousy that exists between the provincial C.I.D.‘s and Scotland Yard is familiar to anyone even remotely connected with matters of criminal investigation: on the whole, Teal could have considered himself fortunate in that the provincial office concerned had condescended to communicate with him at all on its own initiative, instead of leaving him to learn the news from a late evening paper.

He sat on in his tiny office for another hour, staring at the message which had filtered the last ray of sunshine out of his day. It informed him that a certain Mr. Wolseley Lormer had been held up in broad daylight in his office at Southend that afternoon and robbed of close on two thousand pounds by an intruder whom he never even saw. It would not have been a particularly remarkable crime by any standards if the caretaker who discovered the outrage had not also discovered a crude haloed figure chalked on the outer door of Mr. Lormer’s suite. And the one immutable fact which Chief Inspector Teal could add to the information given him was that at the very time when the robbery was committed the Saint was safely locked up in Newhaven police station-and Mr. Teal was talking to him.

CHAPTER III
ONE of the charms of London, as against those of more up-to-date and scientific cities, is the multitude of queer little unscientific dwellings which may be found by the experienced explorer who wanders a mere hundred yards out of the broad regular thoroughfares and pries into the secrets of dilapidated alleys and unpromising courtyards. At some time in the more recent history of the city there must have been many adventurous souls who felt the urge to escape from the creeping development of modern steam-heated apartments planned with Euclidean exactitude and geometrically barren of all individuality. Wherever a few rooms with an eccentric entrance could be linked up and made comfortable, a home was established which in the days when there came a boom in such places was to repay a staggering percentage to the originality of its creators.

With his infallible instinct for these things, Simon Templar had unearthed this very type of ideal home within a matter of hours after he returned to London.

His old stronghold in Upper Berkeley Mews, which he had fitted up years ago with all the expensive gadgets essential to a twentieth-century robber baron, had been the centre of an undue amount of official curiosity just before he embarked on his last hurried trip abroad. It no longer had any ingenious secrets to conceal from the inquisitive hostility of Scotland Yard; and the Saint felt in the mood for a change of scene. He found a suitable change in a quiet cul-de-sac off the lower end of Queen’s Gate, that broad tree-lined avenue which would be a perfect counterpart of the most Parisian boulevard if its taxis and inhabitants were less antique and moth-eaten. The home of his choice was actually situated in a mews which ran across the end of the cul-de-sac like the cross-bar of a T, but some earlier tenant had arranged to combine respectability with a garage on the premises, and had cut a street door and windows through the blank wall that closed the cul-de-sac, so that the Saint’s new home was actually an attractive little two-storied cottage that faced squarely down between the houses, while the garage and mews aspect was discreetly hidden at the rear. It was almost perfectly adapted to the Saint’s eccentric circumstances and strategic requirements; and it is a notable fact that he was able to shift so much lead out of the pants of the estate agents concerned that he was fully installed in his new premises within forty-eight hours of finding that they were to let, which anyone who has ever had anything to do with London estate agents will agree was no mean piece of lead-shifting.

Simon was personally supervising the unpacking of some complicated electrical apparatus when Mr. Teal found him at home on the third day. He had not notified his change of address, and it had taken Mr. Teal some time to locate him; but the Saint’s welcome was ingenuous cordiality itself.