The Saint and the Happy Highwayman (14 page)

Simon looked at the quivering sheet.

” ‘Film Star Says She Prefers Love,’ ” he read off it innocently. “Well, I suppose it means just that, Fernack. Some people are funny that way.”

“I mean this!” blared the detective, dabbing at Morgan Dean’s headline with a stubby forefinger. “I’ve warned you once, Templar; and, by God, if you try to win this bet I’ll get you for it if it’s the last thing I do!”

The Saint lighted a cigarette and leaned back.

“Aren’t you being just a little bit hasty?” he inquired reasonably; but his blue eyes were twinkling with imps of mockery that sent cold shivers up and down the detective’s spine. “All I’ve done is to bet that there’ll be a burglary at Vascoe’s within the week. It may be unusual, but is it criminal? If I were an insurance company–-“

“You aren’t an insurance company,” Fernack said pungently. “But you wouldn’t make a bet like that if you thought there was any risk of losing it.”

“That’s true. But that still doesn’t make me a burglar. Maybe I was hoping to put the idea into somebody else’s head. Now if you want to give your nasty suspicious mind something useful to work on, why don’t you find out something about Vascoe’s insurance ?”

For a moment the audacity of the suggestion took Fernack’s breath away. And then incredulity returned to his rescue.

“Yeah—and see if I can catch him burgling his own house so he can lose twenty thousand dollars!” He hooted. “Do you know what would happen if I let my suspicious mind have its own way? I’d have you arrested for vagrancy and keep you locked up for the rest of the week!”

The Saint nodded enthusiastically.

“Why don’t you do that?” he suggested. “It ‘d give me a gorgeous alibi.”

Fernack glared at him thoughtfully. The temptation to take the Saint at his word was almost overpowering. But the tantalizing twinkle in the Saint’s eyes and the memory of many past encounters with the satanic guile of that debonair freebooter, filled Fernack’s heated brain with a gnawing uneasiness that paralyzed him. The Saint must have considered that contingency: if Fernack carried out his threat, he might be doing the very thing that the Saint expected and wanted him to do—he might be walking straight into a baited trap that would elevate him to new pinnacles of ridiculousness before it turned him loose. The thought made him go hot and cold all over.

Which was exactly what Simon meant it to do.

“When I put you in the cooler,” Fernack proclaimed loudly, “you’re going to stay there for more than a week.”

He stormed out of the apartment and went to interview Vascoe.

“With your permission, sir,” he said, “I’d like to post enough men around this house to make it impossible for a mouse to get in.”

Vascoe shook his head.

“I haven’t asked for protection,” he said coldly. “If you did that, the Saint would be forced to abandon the attempt. I should prefer him to make it. The Ingerbeck Agency is already employed to protect my collection. There are two armed guards in the house all day, and another man on duty all night. And the place is fitted with the latest burglar alarms. The only way it could be successfully robbed would be by an armed gang, and we know that the Saint doesn’t work that way. No, Inspector. Let him get in. He won’t find it so easy to get out again. And then I’ll be very glad to send for you.”

Fernack argued, but Vascoe was obstinate. He almost succeeded in convincing the detective of the soundness of his reasoning. There would be no triumph or glory in merely preventing the Saint from getting near the house, but to catch him red-handed would be something else again. Nevertheless, Fernack would have felt happier if he could have convinced himself that the Saint was possible to catch.

“At least, you’d better let me post one of my own men outside,” he said.

“You will do nothing of the sort,” Vascoe said curtly. “The Saint would recognize him a mile off. The police have had plenty of opportunities to catch him before this and I don’t remember your making any brilliant use of them.”

Fernack left the house in an even sourer temper than he had entered it, and if he had been a private individual he would have satisfied himself that anything that happened to Vascoe or his art treasures would be richly deserved. Unfortunately his duty didn’t allow him to dispose of the matter so easily. He had another stormy interview with the Assistant Commissioner, who for the first time in history was sympathetic.

“You’ve done everything you could, Mr Fernack,”

he said. “If Vascoe refuses to give us any assistance he can’t expect much.”

“The trouble is that if anything goes wrong, that won’t stop him squawking,” Fernack said gloomily.

Of all the persons concerned, Simon Templar was probably the most untroubled. For two days he peacefully followed the trivial rounds of his normal law-abiding life; and the plain-clothes men whom Fernack had set to watch him, in spite of his instructions, grew bored with their vigil.

At about two o’clock in the morning of the third day his telephone rang.

“This is Miss Vascoe’s chauffeur, sir,” said the caller. “She couldn’t reach a telephone herself so she asked me to speak to you. She said that she must see you.”

Simon’s blood ran a shade faster—he had been half expecting such a call.

“When and where?” he asked crisply.

“If you can be at the second traffic light going north in Central Park in an hour’s time, sir—she’ll get there as soon as she has a chance to slip away.”

“Tell her I’ll be there,” said the Saint.

He hung up the instrument and looked out of the window. On the opposite pavement a man paced wearily up and down, as he had done for two nights before, wondering why he should have been chosen for a job that kept him out of bed to so little purpose.

But on this particular night the monotony of the sleuth’s existence was destined to be relieved. He followed his quarry on a brief walk which led to Fifty-second Street and into one of the many night haunts which crowd a certain section of that fevered thoroughfare, where the Saint was promptly ushered to a favoured table by a beaming headwaiter. The sleuth, being an unknown and unprofitable-looking stranger, was ungraciously hustled into an obscure corner. The Saint sipped a drink and watched the late floor show for a few minutes, and then got up and sauntered back through the darkened room towards the exit. The sleuth,‘noting with a practised eye that he had still left three quarters of his drink and a fresh packet of cigarettes on the table, and that he had neither asked for nor paid a check, made the obvious deduction and waited without anxiety for his return. After a quarter of an hour he began to have faint doubts of his wisdom, after half an hour he began to sweat, and in forty-five minutes he was in a panic. The lavatory attendant didn’t remember noticing the Saint, and certainly he wasn’t in sight when the detective arrived; the doorman was quite certain that he had gone out nearly an hour ago because he had left him two dollars to pay the waiter.

An angry and somewhat uncomfortable sleuth went back to the Saint’s address and waited for some time in agony before the object of his attention came home. As soon as he was relieved at eight o’clock he telephoned headquarters to report the tragedy; but by then it was too late.

Inspector Fernack’s eyes swept scorchingly over the company that had collected in Vascoe’s drawing room. It consisted of Elliot Vascoe himself, Meryl, the Earl of Eastridge, an assortment of servants and the night guard from Ingerbeck’s.

“I might have known what to expect,” he complained savagely. “You wouldn’t help me to prevent anything like this happening but after it’s happened you expect me to clean up the mess. It ‘d serve you right if I told you to let your precious Ingerbeck do the cleaning up. If the Saint was here now–-“

He broke off, with his jaw dropping and his eyes rounding into reddened buttons of half-unbelieving wrath.

The Saint was there. He was drifting through the door like a pirate entering a captured city, with an impotently protesting butler fluttering behind him like a flustered vulture—sauntering coolly in with a cigarette between his lips and blithe brows slanted banter-ingly over humorous blue eyes. He nodded to Meryl and smiled over the rest of the congregation.

“Hullo, souls,” he murmured. “I heard I’d won my bet, so I toddled over to make sure.”

For a moment Vascoe himself was gripped in the general petrifaction, and then he stepped forward, his face crimson with fury.

“There you are,” he burst out incoherently. “You come here—you–-There’s your man, Inspector. Arrest him!”

Fernack’s mouth clamped up again.

“You don’t have to tell me,” he said grimly.

“And just why,” Simon inquired lazily, as the detective moved towards him, “am I supposed to be arrested?”

“Why?” screamed the millionaire. “You—you stand there and ask why? I’ll tell you why! Because you’ve been too clever for once, Mr Smarty. You said you were going to burgle this house, and you’ve done it— and now you’re going to prison where you belong!”

The Saint leaned back against an armchair, ignoring the handcuffs that Fernack was dragging from his pocket. ‘

“Those are harsh words, Comrade,” he remarked reproachfully. “Very harsh. In fact, I’m not sure that they wouldn’t be actionable. I must ask my lawyer. But would anybody mind telling me what makes you so sure that I did this job?”

“I’ll tell you why.” Fernack spoke. “Last night the guard got tired of working so hard and dozed off for a while.” He shot a smoking glance at the wretched private detective who was trying to obliterate himself behind the larger members of the crowd. “When he woke up again, somebody had opened that window, cut the alarms, opened that centre showcase and taken about a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of small stuff out of it. And that somebody couldn’t resist leaving his signature.” He jerked out a piece of Vascoe’s own note-paper, on which had been drawn a spidery skeleton figure with an elliptical halo poised at a rakish angle over its round blank head. “You wouldn’t recognize it, would you?” Fernack jeered sarcastically.

Even so, his voice was louder than it need have been. For, in spite of everything, at the back of his mind there was a horrible little doubt. The Saint had tricked him so many times, had led him up the garden path so often and then left him freezing in the snow, that he couldn’t make himself believe that anything was certain. And that horrible doubt made his head swim as he saw the Saint’s critical eyes rest on the drawing.

“Oh yes,” said the Saint patiently. “I can see what it’s meant to be. And now I suppose you’d like me to give an account of my movements last night.”

“If you’re thinking of putting over another of your patent alibis,” Fernack said incandescently, “let me tell you before you start that I’ve already heard how you slipped the man I had watching you—just about the time that this job was done.”

Simon nodded.

“You see,” he said, “I had a phone message that Miss Vascoe wanted to see me very urgently and I was to meet her at the second traffic light going north in Central Park.”

The girl gasped as everyone suddenly looked at her.

“But Simon—I didn’t–-“

Her hand flew to her mouth.

Fernack’s eyes lighted with triumph as they swung back to the Saint.

“That’s fine,” he said exultantly. “And Miss Vascoe doesn’t know anything about it. So who else is going to testify that you spent your time waiting there—the man in the moon?”

“No,” said the Saint. “Because I didn’t go there.”

Fernack’s eyes narrowed with the fog that was starting to creep into his brain.

“Well, what–-“

“I was expecting some sort of call like that,” said the Saint. “I knew somebody was going to knock off this exhibition—after the bet I’d made with Vascoe, the chance of getting away with it and having me to take the rap was too good to miss. I meant it to look good —that’s why I made the bet. But of course our friend had to be sure I wouldn’t have an alibi, and he was pretty cunning about it. He guessed that you’d be having me shadowed, but he knew that a message like he sent me would make me shake my shadow. And then I’d have a fine time trying to prove that I spent an hour or so standing under a traffic light in Central Park at that hour of the night. Only I’m pretty cunning myself, when I think about it, so I didn’t go. I came here instead.”

Fernack’s mouth opened again.

“You–-“

“What are we wasting time for?” snorted Vascoe. “He admits he was here–-“

“I was here,” said the Saint coolly. “You know how the back of the house goes practically down to the East River, and you have a little private garden there and a landing stage? I knew that if anything was happening, it ‘d happen on that side—it’d be too risky to do anything on the street frontage, where anybody might come by and see it. Well, things were happening. There was a man out there, but I beat him over the head and tied him up before he could make a noise. Then I waited around, and somebody opened the window from inside and threw out a parcel. So I picked it up and took it home. Here it is.”

He took it out of his hip pocket—it was a very large parcel, and the bulge would have been easy to notice if anyone had got behind him.

Vascoe let out a hoarse yell, jumped at it and wrenched it out of his hands. He ripped it open with clawing fingers.

“My miniatures!” he sobbed. “My medallions—my cameos! My–-“

“Here, wait a minute!”

Fernack thrust himself forward again, taking possession of the package. For a second or two the denouement had blown him sky-high, turned him upside down and left him with the feeling that the pit of his stomach had suddenly gone away on an unauthorized vacation; but now he had his bearings again. He faced the Saint with homicidal determination.

“It’s a fine story,” he said raspily. “But this is one time you’re not going to get away with it. Yeah, I get the idea. You pull the job so you can win your bet and then you bring the stuff back with that fairy tale and think everything’s going to be all right. Well, you’re not going to get away with it! What happened to the guy you say you knocked out and tied up, and who else saw him, and who else saw all these things happen?”