The Saint and Mr. Teal: Formerly Called "Once More the Saint" (8 page)

They rolled over together, with the Saint groping for a toehold. One of the big man’s insteps came under the palm of his hand, and he hauled it up and bent it over with a brutal efficiency that made his victim gasp. But the big man was wise to that one-the hold only hurt him for a couple of seconds, before he flung it off with a mighty squirm of his body that pitched the Saint over on his face. In an instant the big man’s legs were scissoring for a clasp round the Saint’s neck and shoulders, and his hands were clamping again on the Saint’s wrist. Simon heard his muscles creaking as he strained against the backward pressure that was slowly straightening his arm. Once that arm was locked out straight from the shoulder, with the elbow over the big man’s knee joint, he would have to move like a supercharged eel to get away before a bone was snapped like dry wood. He fought it desperately, but it was his one arm against the big man’s two; and he knew he was losing inch by inch. His free hand clawed for a nerve centre under one of the thighs that were crushing his chest: he found it, and saw the big man wince, but the remorseless straightening of his arm went on. In the last desperate moment that he had, he struggled to break the nutcracker grip around his upper body. One of the big man’s shoes came off in his hand, and with a triumphant laugh he piled all his strength into another toetwist. The man squeaked and kicked, and Simon broke away. As he came up on all fours, the other rolled away. They leapt up simultaneously and circled round each other, breathing heavily.

“Thanks for the fight,” said the Saint shortly. “I never cared for cold-blooded killings.”

For answer the big man came forward off his toes like a charging bull; but he had not moved six inches before the Saint’s swift dash reached him. Again those pile-driving fists jarred on the weak spot just below the other’s breastbone. Jones grabbed for a stranglehold, but the drumming of iron knuckles on his solar plexus made him stagger backwards and cover up with his elbows. His mouth opened against the protest of his paralyzed lungs, and his face went white and puffy. Simon drove him to the door and held off warily. He knew that the big man was badly hurt, but perhaps his helplessness looked a little too realistic… . The Saint feinted with a left to the head, and in a second the big man was bear-hugging him in a wild rush that almost carried him off his feet.

They went back towards the gleaming dome in a fighting tangle. Simon looked over his shoulder and saw it a yard away, with its brilliant surface shining like silver around the charred blackness of the professor’s hand. The strip of wire that he had seen melted on it had left streaky trails of smeared metal down the curved sides, like the slime of a fantastic snail. The Saint saw them in an instant of photographically vivid vision in which the minutest details of that diabolical apparatus were printed forever on his memory. There must have been tens of thousands of volts pulsing invisibly through that section of the secret process, hundreds of amperes of burning annihilation waiting to scorch through the first thing that tapped them with that crackle of blue flame and hiss of intolerable heat which he had seen once and heard again. His shoes slipped over the floor as he wrestled superhumanly against the momentum that was pressing him back towards certain death: the big man’s face was cracked in a fiendish grin, and he heard Patricia cry out… . Then one of his heels tripped over the professor’s outstretched legs, and he was thrown off his balance. He put all his strength into a frantic twist of his body as he fell, and saw the dome leap up beside him, a foot away. The fall knocked half the wind out of his body, and he fought blindly away to one side. Suddenly his hands grasped empty air, and he heard Patricia cry out again.

The splitting detonation of a shot racketed in his ears as he rolled up on one elbow. Patricia had missed, somehow, and the big man was grappling for the gun. Simon crawled up and flung himself forward. As he did so, the big man saw his own gun lying in the corner where the Saint had kicked it, and dived for it. Simon caught him from behind in a circling sweep, locking the big man’s arms to his sides at the elbows; but the big man had the gun. The Saint saw it curling round for a backward shot that could not help scoring somewhere: he made a wild grab at the curving wrist and caught it, jerking it up as the trigger tightened, and the shot smashed through the floor. Simon flung his left leg forward, across the big man’s stance. The steel dome was a yard away on his left. He heaved sideways, across the leverage of his thigh, and sprang back… . The man’s scream rang in his ears as he staggered away. Once again that spurt of eye-aching blue flame seared across his eye’s and turned suddenly orange. The big man had hit the dome with his shoulder, and his coat was burning; the smell of singeing cloth stung the Saint’s nostrils, and the crack of cordite sang through his head as the galvanic current clamped a dead finger convulsively on the trigger and held it there rigidly in one last aimless shot… .

“And we still don’t know his real name,” murmured the Saint.

He pushed a handkerchief across his brow and looked at Patricia with a crooked grin. Patricia was fingering her wrist tenderly, where the big man’s crushing grip had fastened on it. She looked back at the Saint with a pale face that was still hopelessly puzzled.

“That’s your fault,” she said.

“I know.” The Saint’s eyes had a mocking twist in their inscrutable blue that she couldn’t understand. “You see, when you’ve made up your mind about a thing like Brother Jones’s demise, the only way is to get it over quickly. And Claud Eustace will be along soon. But I promise you, Pat, I’ve never hated killing anyone so much-and there was never anyone who’d ‘ve been so dangerous to my peace of mind if he’d stayed alive. If you want any excuses for it, he’d got two deliberate murders on his own hands and one more for which he was deliberately responsible, so he only got what was coming to him.”

She waited alone in the room of death while the Saint vanished along the landing towards one of the bedrooms. It took the Saint a few minutes to repair the damage which the fight had done to his immaculate elegance, but when he had finished there was hardly a trace of it -nothing but a slight disorder that could have been caused by a brief scuffle. He used the dead man’s hair-brushes and clothesbrush, and wrapped a handkerchief round his hand before he touched anything. Everything went back on the dressing table exactly as he had found it; and he returned to the girl with a ready smile.

“Let’s finish the clean-up, Pat-I don’t know that we’ve a lot of time.”

He went over the floor with keen, restless eyes. Two cartridge cases he picked up from odd corners where they had rolled away after the snap action of the recoil had spewed them out of a pistol breech. He identified them as the products of his own gun, for he had marked each of them with a nick in the base. They went into his pocket: the others, which testified to the shots which Jones had fired, he left where they lay, and added to them the souvenir which he had preserved in a match-box from his breakfast table that morning. He searched the room once more for any other clues which he might have overlooked, and was satisfied.

His hand fell on Patricia’s shoulder. “Let’s go,” he said.

They went down to the hall. Simon left her again while he went out into the garden. His automatic, and the shells he had picked up, went deep under the earth of a neglected flower bed; and he uprooted a clump of weeds and pressed them into a new berth where they would hide the marks of freshly turned earth.

“Don’t you ever want me to know what you’re up to?” asked Patricia, when he came back; and the Saint took her by the arm and led her to a chair.

“Lass, don’t you realize I’ve just committed murder?

And times is not what they was. I’ve known much bigger things than this that were easy enough to get away with before Claud Eustace had quite such a life-and-death ambition to hang my scalp in his belt; but this is not once upon a time. We might have run away and left the mystery to uncover itself, but I didn’t think that was such a hot idea. I’d rather know how we stand from the start. Now sit down and let me write some more about Wilberforce Gupp-this is a great evening for brainwork.”

He propelled her gently into the chair and sat himself down in another. An envelope and a pencil came out of his pocket; and with perfect calm and detachment, as if he were sitting in his own room at home with a few minutes to spare, the amazing Saint proceeded to scribble down and read aloud to her the epilogue of his epic.

“Thus, on good terms with everyone,
Nothing accomplished, nothing done,
Sir Wilberforce, as history knows,
Earned in due course a k-night’s repose,
And with his fellow pioneers
Rose shortly to the House of Peers,
Which nearly (but not quite) woke up
To greet the noble Baron Gupp.

Citizens, praise careers like his,
Which have made England what she is,
And prove that only Lesser Breeds
Follow where a stuffed walrus leads.”

He had just finished when they both heard a car swing into the drive. Feet crunched over the gravel, and heavy boots grounded on the stone outside the front door. The resonant clatter of a brass knocker curtly applied echoed through the house.

Simon opened the door.

“Claud Eustace himself!” he murmured genially. “It seems years since I last saw you, Claud. And how’s the ingrowing toenail?” He glanced past the detective’s bulky presence at the four other men who were unloading themselves and their apparatus from the police car and lining up for the entrance. ” I rather thought you’d be bringing a party with you, old dear, but I don’t know that the caviare will go all the way round.”

The detective stepped past him into the hall, and the other men followed. They were of various shapes and sizes, deficient in sex appeal but unconversationally efficient. They clumped themselves together on the mat and waited patiently for orders.

Mr. Teal faced the Saint with a certain grimness. His round pink face was rather more flushed than usual, and his baby-blue eyes were creased up into the merest slits, through which pinpoints of red danger lights glinted like scattering embers. He knew that he had taken a chance in coming to that house at all, and the squad he had brought with him multiplied his potential regrets by more factors than he cared to think about. If this was one of the Saint’s practical jokes, Chief Inspector Teal would never hear the last of it. The whole C.I.D. would laugh itself sick-there were still giggles circulating over the gramophone-record incident -and the assistant commissioner’s sniff would flay him till he wanted to find a quiet place to die. And yet he had had no choice. If he was told about a murder he had to go out and investigate it, and his private doubts did not count.

“Well?” he barked.

“Fairly,” said the Saint. “I see you brought the homicide squad.”

Teal nodded briefly.

“I gathered from what you told me that a murder had been committed. Is that the case?”

“There are certainly some dead bodies parked about the house,” admitted the Saint candidly. “In fact, the place is making a great start as a morgue. If you’re interested —”

“Where are these bodies?”

Simon gestured impressively heavenwards.

“Upstairs-at least, so far as the mortal clay is concerned, Eustace.”

“We’ll go up and see them.”

Curtly Teal gave his orders to the silent squad. One man was left in the hall, and Patricia stayed with him. The others, who included a fingerprint expert with a little black bag, and a photographer burdened with camera and folding tripod, followed behind. They went on a tour that made every member of it stare more incredulously from stage to stage, until the culminating revelation left their eyeballs bulging as if they were watching the finale of a Grand Guignol drama coming true under their noses.

CHAPTER IX
CHIEF INSPECTOR TEAL twiddled his pudgy fingers on his knees and studied the Saint’s face soberly, digesting what he had heard.

“So after that you allowed this man Jones to kidnap Miss Holm so that you could follow him and find out his address?” he murmured; and the Saint nodded.

“That’s about it. Can you blame me? The guy Jones was obviously a menace to the community that we ought to know more about, and it was the only way. I hadn’t the faintest idea at that time what his graft was, but I figured that anything which included wilful murder in its programme must be worth looking into. I was all bubbling over with beans after that bust I told you about-talking of busts, Claud, if you ever
go to the Folies Bergčre —”

“Yes, yes,” interrupted the detective brusquely. “I want you to tell me exactly what happened when you got here.”

“Well, naturally I had to break into the house. I went up to the first floor and heard Jones talking to Miss Holm in the room where he’d taken her. I hid in another room when he came out to get her some food; then I went and spoke to Miss Holm through the door -which Brother J. had remembered to lock. We exchanged some bright remarks about the weather and the Test Match prospects, and then I carried on with the exploration. On the way I found that King’s Messenger. Then Jones came upstairs again, and I lay low for quite a while, cautious like. After a time I got tired standing about, and I went in search of him. I came up outside this laboratory door and listened. That’s when I heard what it was all about. Jones was just wheedling what sounded like the last details of the process out of Quell-the science I know wouldn’t cover a pinhead, but Jones seemed quite happy about it.”

“Can you remember any part of what you heard?”

“Not a thing that’d make sense-except the outstanding bit about the gold. Quell was making gold, there’s not a doubt about it. You can see it for yourself. I gathered that Jones had told the old man some yarn about saving England from going off the gold standard -manufacturing an enormous quantity of the stuff under the auspices of the Secret Service, and unloading it quietly in a way that’d put new life into the Bank of England-and Quell, who probably wasn’t so wise to the ways of crime as he was to the habits of electrons and atoms, had fallen for it like a dove. Anyway, Jones was happy.”