The Saint Goes On (10 page)

The driver peered at him keenly in the light of the melancholy street lamp under which the cab was parked.

“You’re wet,” he said at last, with the same pride of discovery that must have throbbed in Charles Darwin’s breast when he gave the fruit of his researches to the world.

“You know, George, I believe you’ve hit it,” said the Saint, in a whisper of admiring awe in which the old unconquerable mockery was beginning to lift itself again. “I thought something was wrong, but I couldn’t make out what it was. Do you think I can have been in some water?”

The driver frowned at him suspiciously.

“Are you drunk?” he asked, with disarming frankness; and the Saint shook his head.

“Not yet-but I have a feeling that with very little encouragement I could be. I want to go to Cornwall House, Piccadilly; and I’ll pay for any damage I do to your lovely cushions.”

Probably it was the tone and manner of what the chauffeur would have described as a toff which dissolved suspicion away into a tolerant appreciation of aristocratic eccentricity, and induced him to accept the fare. At any rate, he accepted it, and even went so far as to oblige Simon with a cigarette.

Lounging back in a corner with the smoke sinking luxuriously into his lungs, the Saint felt his spirits rising with the speed of an irresponsible rocket. The ordeal he had been through, the shadow of death and the strange supreme joy of life after it, slipped back into the annals of memory. To the High Fence, he was dead: he had been dropped off a boat into the lower waters of the Thames with a lump of iron tied to his feet-swallowed up in the bottom ooze and slime of the river, where any secret might well be safe. Both as a proven interferer and a potentially greater menace, he had been removed. But before being drowned, he had given up his secret. He had told exactly what he had done with the parcel of precious stones of which Mr. Clive Enderby had been bereaved-and the High Fence was going to Harwich to take the name of Joshua Pond in vain… . And Simon Templar had an increasingly blissful idea that he was going to be there to witness the performance.

As the cab drew up before Cornwall House he saw a girl and a man coming out, and decanted himself on to the pavement before the taxi had properly reached a standstill.

“Are you looking for some fun, souls?” he murmured. “Because if so, I could use you.”

Patricia Holm stared at him for a moment in breathless silence; and then, with an incoherent little cry, she threw herself into his arms… .

Mr. Uniatz swallowed, and touched the Saint with stubby fingers, as if he were something fragile.

“Howja get wet, boss?” he asked.

Simon grinned, and indicated the interested taxi driver with a movement of his head.

“George here thinks I must have been in some water,” he said. “Give him a quid for the inspiration, will you?-I only had a fiver on me when I went out, but they pinched it.”

He led Patricia back into the building with a damp arm round her shoulders, while Hoppy paid off the taxi and rejoined them in the foyer. They rode up in the elevator in an enforced silence; but Patricia was shaking him by the arm as soon as the door of the apartment had closed behind them.

“Where have you been, boy? What’s happened?”

“Were you worried?”

“You know that.”

He kissed her.

“I guess you must have been. Where were you off to?”

“We were going to call on Enderby.” She was still holding herself in the curve of his arm, wet as he was. “It was the only line we had-what you told me outside here, before Pryke took you off.”

“I could of made him talk, boss,” said Mr. Uniatz, in a tone of pardonable disappointment. “After I’d got t’ru wit’ him–––”

The Saint smiled.

“I suppose he’d ‘ve been lucky to be able to talk. Well, the scheme might still be a good one… .” He toyed with the idea for a thoughtful moment; and then he shook his head. “But no-we don’t need it now. And there may be something much more useful for you to do. Get me a drink, Pat, if Hoppy’s left anything, and I’ll tell you.”

Half an hour in his sodden clothes had left him chilled and shivery, but a steep tot of whisky would soon put that right. He lay submerged in a hot bath, with the glass balanced on the edge, and told them the story of his adventures through the open door. It was a tale that made Patricia bite her lips towards the end; but for him it was all in the past. When he came through into the living room again, cheerful and glowing from the massage of a rough towel, with his hair sleekly brushed again and a woolly bath-robe slung round him, lighting a cigarette with steady hands and the old irrepressible laughter on his lips, it was difficult to imagine that barely an hour ago he had fought one of his most terrific fights with death.

“So here we are,” he said, with the blue lights crisp and dancing in his eyes. “We don’t know who the High Fence is; but we know where he’s going, and we know the password he’s going to give. It’s rather quiet and logical; but we’ve got him. Just because he’s made that one natural mistake. If I were swinging at the bottom of the Pool, as he thinks I am, there wouldn’t be a snag in his life. He’d just go to Harwich and recover his boodle; and that would be the end of a spot of very satisfactorily settled bother. But he’s going to have a surprise.”

“Can we come with you?” said Patricia.

The Saint shook his head.

“I’d like you to. But I can’t be everywhere at once, and I shall want someone in London. You mayn’t have realised it, but we still have our own bills to pay. The swine knocked a fiver off me when they took me for that ride, and I want it back. Teal’s going to achieve his ambition and lag the High Fence, and that parcel of jools that’s going to give the High Fence away is evidence now; but we’ve got our Old Age Pensions to think about. Anyone who wants to amuse himself by pumping me up with gas and dope and heaving me into the river has got to pay for his fun. And that’s where you two come in.”

He told them more of what was in his mind, in terse sparkling sentences, while he dressed. His brain was working at high pressure by that time, throwing ideas together with his own incomparable audacity, building a plan out of a situation that had not yet come to pass, leaving them almost out of breath behind the whirlwind pace of his imagination. And yet, despite the breakneck pace at which he had swept his strategy together, he had no misgivings about it afterwards-not even while he drove his great thundering car recklessly through the night to Harwich, or when he stood outside the post-office in the early morning waiting for the doors to open.

It should be all right…. About some things he had a feeling of sublime confidence, a sense of joyous inevitability, that amounted to actual foreknowledge; and he had the same feeling that morning. These things were ordained: they were the rewards of adventure, the deserved corollaries of battle, murder, and-a slight smile touched his lips-the shadow of sudden death. But with all this assurance of foreknowledge, there was still a ghostly pulse of nervous excitement flickering through his spinal cells when the doors opened to let him in- a tingle of deep delight in the infinitely varied twists of the game which he loved beyond anything else in life.

He went up to the counter and propped his elbows on the flat of the telegraph section. He wanted to send a cable to Umpopo in British Bechuanaland; but before he sent it he wanted to know all about the comparative merits of the various word rates. He was prepared, according to the inducements offered, to consider the relative attractions of Night Letters, Weed-end Letters, or Deferreds; and he wanted to know everything there was to know about each. Naturally, this took time. The official behind the grille, although he claimed a sketchy familiarity with the whereabouts of British Bechuanaland, had never heard of Umpopo; which is not surprising, because the Saint had never heard of it either before he set out to invent a difficult place to want to send a cable to. But with that indomitable zeal which is the most striking characteristic of post-office officials, he applied himself diligently to the necessary research, while Simon Templar lighted another cigarette and waited patiently for results.

He was wearing a brown tweed cap of a pattern which would never ordinarily have appealed to him, and a pair of tortoiseshell glasses and a black military moustache completed the job of disguising him sufficiently to be overlooked on a casual glance even by anyone who knew him. As the last man on earth whom the High Fence would be expecting to meet, he was as well hidden as if he had been buried under the floor… . The official behind the counter, meanwhile, was getting buried deeper and deeper under a growing mound of reference books.

“I can’t seem to find anything about Umpopo,” he complained peevishly, from behind his unhelpful barricade. “Are you sure there is a telegraph office there?”

“Oh, yes,” said the Saint blandly. “At least,” he added, “there’s one at Mbungi, which is only half a mile away.”

The clerk went back through his books in a silence too frightful to describe; and the Saint put his cigarette back between his lips, and then suddenly remained very still.

Another early customer had entered the office. Simon heard his footsteps crossing the floor and passing behind him, but he did not look round at once. The footsteps travelled along to the Poste Restante section, a couple of yards away, and stopped there.

“Have you anything for Pond?”

The soft voice came clearly to Simon’s ears, and he lifted his eyes sidelong. The man was leaning on the counter, like himself, so that his back was half turned; but the Saint’s heart stopped beating for a moment.

“What is the first name?” asked the clerk, clearing out the contents of one of the pigeon-holes behind him.

“Joshua.”

Rather slowly and dreamily, the Saint hitched himself up off his elbow and straightened up. Behind his heaped breakwater of reference books, the steaming telegraph official was muttering something profane and plaintive; but the Saint never heard it. He saw the cardboard box which he had posted pushed over to its claimant, and moved along the counter without a sound. His hand fell on the man’s shoulder.

“Would you like to see a good-looking ghost?” he drawled, with a throb of uncontrollable beatitude in his voice.

The man spun round with a kind of gasp that was almost a sob. It was Junior Inspector Desmond Pryke.

X

THE writer, whose positively Spartan economy of verbiage must often have been noted and admired by every cultured student, recoils instinctively from the temptation to embellish the scene with a well-chosen anthology of those apt descriptive adjectives with which his vocabulary is so richly stocked. The pallor of flabbergasted faces, the glinting of wild eyes, the beading of cold perspirations, the trembling of hands, the tingling of spines, the sinking of stomachs, the coming and going of breath in little short pants-all those facile cliches which might lure less ruggedly disciplined scribes into the pitfall of endeavouring to make every facet of the situation transparent to the most nit-witted reader-none of these things, on this occasion at least, have sufficient enticement to seduce him. His readers, he assures himself, are not nit-wits: they are highly gifted and intelligent citizens, of phenomenal perspicacity and acceleration on the uptake. The situation, he feels, stated even in the baldest terms, could hide none of its facets from them.

It hid none of them from Simon Templar, or from Junior Inspector Pryke. But Simon Templar was the first to speak again.

“What are you doing here, Desmond?” he asked gently.

Pryke licked his lips, without answering. And then the question was repeated, but Simon Templar did not repeat it.

Chief Inspector Teal stepped out from behind a screen which cut off the Savings Bank section of the counter, and repeated it. His hands were in the pockets of his unnecessary raincoat, and his movement had the same suggestion of weary and reluctant effort that his movements always had; but there was something in the set of his round plump jaw and the narrowness of his sleepy-lidded eyes which explained beyond any need of words that he had watched the whole brief incident from beginning to end, and had missed none of the reactions which a police officer on legitimate business need not have shown.

“Yes-what are you doing?” he said.

Pryke’s head jerked round again, and his face went another shade greyer. For a further interval of thrumming seconds he seemed to be struggling to find his voice; and the Saint smiled.

“I told you the High Fence would be here to collect his boodle, Claud,” he said; and looked at Pryke again. “Qnincey told me,” he said.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Pryke had got some kind of control over his throat, but there was a quiver in his breathing which made odd little breaks in the sentence. “I heard that there were some stolen jewels here–—”

“Who from?” Teal asked quietly.

“From a man I found on the theory I was working on. You told me I could––”

“What was his name?”

“That’s a long story,” said Pryke hoarsely. “I met him …”

Probably he knew that the game was over-that the bluff was hopeless except as a play for time. The attack was too overwhelming. Watching him with smiling lips and bleak blue eyes, the Saint knew that there wasn’t a man living who could have warded it off-whose brain, under the shock, could yet have moved fast enough to concoct a story, instantaneously and without reflection, that would have stood the light of remorseless investigation which must have been directed into it.

“I met him last night,” said Pryke. “I suppose you have some reason-“

Simon nodded.

“We have,” he said gently. “We came here to play the grand old parliamentary game of Sitting on the Fence; and it looks as if you are what might be called the sittee.”

“You’re crazy,” said Pryke harshly.

His hand was sliding towards his hip, in a casual movement that should have been merely the conventional search for a cigarette-case; and Simon saw it a fraction of a second late.

He saw the flash of the nickel-plated gun, and the shot blasted his eardrums as he flung himself aside. Pryke swerved frantically, hesitated an instant, and turned his automatic on the broad target of Chief Inspector Teal; but before he could touch the trigger again the Saint’s legs had swung round in a flailing scissor-sweep that found its marks faultlessly on knee-joint and ankle-bone. Pryke cursed and went down, clean and flat as a dead fish, with a smack that squeezed half the breath out of his body; and the Saint rolled over and held him in an ankle lock while the local men who had been posted outside poured in through the doors.