The Saint Goes On (12 page)

It was not until he switched on the hall light that he saw what his fate ought to have been.

There was a cheap fibre attache-case standing close to the entrance-if he had moved another step to one side he would have kicked it. Two thin insulated wires ran from it to the door and terminated in a pair of bright metal contacts like a burglar alarm, one of them screwed to the frame and the other to the door itself. If he had entered in the normal way, they would have completed the circuit directly the door began to open; and he had no doubt what the sequel would have been.

An ingenious mixture of an electrical detonator, a couple of pounds of gelignite, and an assortment of old scrap-iron, was indicated inside that shabby case; but the Saint did not attempt to make certain of it, because it was not beyond the bounds of possibility that some eccentric entrance as he had made could have been foreseen, and a second detonator provided to act on anyone who opened the valise to investigate it. He disconnected the wires, and drove out to Hammersmith Bridge with the souvenir, very cautiously, as soon as he could fetch his car from the garage, and lowered his potential decease on a string to the bottom of the Thames.

So far as he could tell, only the three five-pound notes which he had put away in his desk had been taken. It was this fact which made him realise that the search of his rooms had not been a merely mechanical preliminary to the planting of a booby-trap by one of the many persons who had reason to desire his funeral. But it was not until the next morning that he realised how very important the disappearance of Mr. Ellshaw must be, when he learned how Mrs. Ellshaw had left her troublesome veins behind her for all time.

II
THE body was taken out of the Thames just below London Bridge by the river police. There were no marks of violence beyond a slight bruise on the forehead which might have been caused by contact with the piers of one of the upper bridges. Death was due to drowning.

“It’s as obvious as any suicide can be,” said Chief Inspector Claud Eustace Teal. “Apparently the woman’s husband left her about a year ago, and she had to work like a slave to keep the children. Her neighbours say she was very excited the night before, talking incoherently about having seen her husband and him having refused to recognise her. If that was true, it provides a motive; if it wasn’t, it covers ‘unsound mind.’ “

The Saint lounged back in his chair and crossed his feet on a sheaf of reports on Mr. Teal’s sacred desk.

“As a matter of fact, it was true,” he said. “But it doesn’t provide a motive-it destroys it.”

If anybody else had made such a statement Mr. Teal would have jeered at him, more or less politely according to the intruder’s social standing; but he had been sitting at that desk for too many years to jeer spontaneously at anything the Saint said. He shuffled his chewing gum to the back of his mouth and gazed across the Saint’s vandal shoes with soporously clouded eyes.

“How do you know?”

“Because she came to see me yesterday morning with the same story, and I’d promised to see what I could do for her.”

“You think it was murder?” asked Teal, with cherubic impassivity.

Simon shrugged.

“I’d promised to look into it,” he repeated. “In fact, she had a date to come and see me again on Friday evening and hear if I’d managed to find out anything. If she had enough faith in me to bring me her troubles in the first place, I don’t see her diving into the river before she knew the verdict.”

Teal brought his spearmint back into action, and worked on it for a few seconds in silence. He looked as if he were on the point of falling asleep.

“Did she say anything to make you think she might be murdered?”

“Nothing that I understood. But I feel kind of responsible. She was killed after she’d been to see me, and it’s always on the cards that she was killed because of it. There was something fishy about her story, anyhow, and people in fishy rackets will do plenty to keep me out of ‘em. … I was nearly murdered myself last night.”

“Nearly?” said Mr. Teal.

He seemed disappointed.

“I’m afraid so,” said the Saint cheerfully. “Give me something to drink and find out for yourself whether I’m a ghost.”

“Do you think it was because of something Mrs. Ellshaw told you?”

“I’m damned if I know, Claud. But somebody put down all the makings of a Guy Fawkes picnic in Cornwall House last night, and I shouldn’t be talking to you now if I hadn’t been born careful as well as lucky-there’s something about the way I insist on keeping on living which must be frightfully discouraging to a lot of blokes, but I wouldn’t believe for a moment that you were one of them.”

Chief Inspector Teal chewed his way through another silence. He knew that the Saint had called on him to extract information, not to give it. Simon Templar gave nothing away, where Scotland Yard was at the receiving end. A Commissioner’s post-mortem on the remains of a recent sensational case in which the Saint had played a leading and eventually helpful part had been held not long ago: it had, however, included some unanswerable questions about the fate of a large quantity of stolen property which the police had expected to recover when they laid the High Fence by the heels, and Mr. Teal was still smarting from some of the things which had been said. He had been wielding his unavailing bludgeon in the endless duel between Scotland Yard and that amazing outlaw too long to believe that the Saint would ever consult him with no other motive than a Boy Scout ambition to do him a good turn. Every assistance that Simon Templar had ever given the Metropolitan Police had had its own particular string tied to it, but in Teal’s job he had to take the strings with the favours. The favours had helped to put paid to the accounts of many elusive felons; the strings accounted for many of the silver threads among Mr. Teal’s dwindling fleece of gold, and seemed likely to account for many more.

“If you think Mrs. Ellshaw was murdered, that’s your affair,” he said at last. “We haven’t any reason to suspect it- yet. Or do you want to give us any?”

Simon thought for a moment, and said: “Do you know anything about the missing husband?”

“As a matter of fact, we did use to know him. He was about the worst card sharp we ever had on our records. He used to work the race trains, usually-he always picked on someone who’d had too much to drink, and even then he was so clumsy that he’d have been lagged a dozen times if the mugs he found hadn’t been too drunk to remember what he looked like. Does that fit in with your theory?” Teal asked, with the disarming casualness of a gamboling buffalo.

The Saint smiled.

“I have no theory, Claud. That’s what I’m looking for. When I’ve got one, we might have another chat.”

There was nothing more to be got out of him; and the detective saw him go with an exasperated frown creasing down over his sleepy blue eyes.

As a matter of fact, the Saint had been perfectly straightforward-chiefly because he had nothing to conceal. He had no theory, but he was certainly looking for one. The only thing he had kept back was the address where Mrs. Ellshaw had seen her mysterious husband. It was the only information he had from which to start his inquiries; and Mr. Teal remembered that he had forgotten to ask for it five minutes after the Saint had left.

It was not much consolation for him to realise that the Saint would never have given him the information even if he had asked for it. Simon Templar’s idea of criminal investigation never included any premature intrusions by the Department provided by London’s ratepayers for the purpose, and he had his own methods of which that admirable body had never approved.

He went out of Scotland Yard and walked round to Parliament Square with a strange sensation going through him as if a couple of dozen fleas in hobnailed boots were playing hopscotch up and down his spine. The sensation was purely psychic, for his nerves were as cold as ice, as he knew by the steadiness of his hand when he stopped to light a cigarette at the corner of Whitehall; but he recognised the feeling. It was the supernatural, almost clairvoyant tingle that rippled through his consciousness when intuition leapt ahead of logic-an uncanny positive prescience for which logic could only trump up weak and fumbling reasons. He knew that Adventure had opened her arms to him again-that something had happened, or was happening, that was bound to bring him once more into the perilous twisted trails in which he was most at home -that because a garrulous charwoman had taken it into her head to bring him her troubles, there must be fun and games and boodle waiting for him again under the shadow of sudden death. That was his life, and it seemed as if it always would be.

He had nothing much to go on, but that could be rectified. The Saint had a superb simplicity of outlook in these matters. A taxi came cruising by, and stopped when he put up his hand.

“Take me to Duchess Place,” he said. “It’s just at the back of Curzon Street. Know it?”

The driver said that he knew it. Simon relaxed in a corner and propped up his feet on the spare seat diagonally opposite, while the cab turned up Birdcage Walk and wriggled through the Green Park towards Hyde Park Corner. Once he roused himself to test the mechanism of the automatic in his hip pocket; once again to loosen the thin-bladed knife in its sheath under his left sleeve. Neither of those weapons were part of the conventional outfit which anyone so impeccably dressed as he was would have been expected to wear, but for many years the Saint had placed caution so far before convention that convention was out of sight.

He paid off his taxi at the corner of Duchess Place and walked up towards number six. It was one of a row of those dingy unimaginative brick houses, with rusty iron railings and shabbily painted windows, which would be instantly ranked as cheap tenement cottages by any stranger who had not heard of the magic properties of the word “Mayfair.” Simon went up the steps and rang the tarnished brass bell without hesitation -he hadn’t the faintest notion how he would continue when the door was opened, if it was opened, but he had gone into and emerged from a great deal of trouble with the same blithe willingness to let circumstances provide for him.

The door opened in a few moments; and circumstances proceeded to provide for him so completely and surprisingly that he was ready for some unpleasantness.

The man who looked out of the door was rather small and wiry, with thin grey hair and a sallow bird-like Cockney face on which the reddish tint of his nose stood out so unexpectedly that it looked at first sight like one of those ageless carnival “novelties” which give so much harmless pleasure to adult infants engaged in the laborious business of having a good time. With his threadbare and baggy trousers, and his pink shirt fastened together with a stud at the neck but virginally innocent of collar or tie, he looked like the very last sort of man who ought to be answering a door-bell in that expensive slum.

“I want to see Mr. Ellshaw,” said the Saint, with sublime directness; and knew at once that he was talking to the man he wanted.

His first surprise was when this was admitted.

“I’m Ellshaw,” said the man at once. “You’re Mr. Templar, ain’t yer?”

The Saint drew at his cigarette with a certain added thoughtfulness. He never forgot a face; and he was sure that this little bird with the carmine beak could not have slipped out of his mind very easily if their paths had ever crossed before. But he acknowledged the identification with outwardly unaltered amiability.

“How did you know that, Archibald?”

“I was just comin’ round to see yer, guv’nor.” The little man opened the door wider, and stepped back invitingly. “Would yer like ter step inside fer a minute?-I’ve got somefink to tell yer.”

The Saint stepped inside. He put his hands in his pockets as he crossed the threshold, and one of them rested on the butt of his gun.

Ellshaw led him through the uncarpeted hall to the nearest door, which brought them into the front ground-floor room. There was hardly any furniture in it-a piece of cheap hair carpet, a painted deal table carrying a bottle and glasses and the scars of cigarette-ends, and a couple of ancient armchairs with soiled chintz covers, would have formed a practically complete inventory. There were grimy lace curtains nailed up on the windows at the street end, and a door communicating with the back room at the other. From the oak parquet floor, the tinted ceiling and tasteful electric light fittings, it was obvious that the room had once been lived in by someone of a definite class, but everything in it at that moment spoke loudly of the shoddiest stock of the secondhand sale room.

“Sit down, guv’nor,” said Ellshaw, moving over to the chair nearer the window and leaving Simon no choice about the other. ” ‘Ow abaht a drink?”

“No, thanks,” said the Saint, with a faint smile. “What is it you were so anxious to tell me?”

Ellshaw settled himself in his chair and lighted a drooping fag.

“Well, guv’nor, it’s abaht me ole woman. I left ‘er a year ago. Between you an’ I, she ‘ad a lot of bad points, not that I want to speak evil of the dead-oh, yush, I know ‘ow she committed suicide,” he said, answering the slight lift of the Saint’s eyebrows. “I sore it in the pypers this mornin’. But she ‘ad ‘er faults. She couldn’t never keep ‘er mouf shut. Wot could I do? The rozzers was lookin’ for me on account of some bloke that ‘ad a grudge against me an’ tried ter frame me up, an’ I knew if she’d knowed where I’d gorn she couldn’t ‘ave ‘elped blabbin’ it all over the plyce.”

Simon was beginning to understand that he was listening to a speech in which the little Cockney had been carefully rehearsed-there was an artificial fluency about the way the sentences rattled off the other’s tongue which gave him his first subtle warning. But he lay back in his chair and crossed his legs without any sign of the urgent questions that were racing through his mind.

“What was the matter?” he asked.

“Well, guv’nor, between you an’ I, seein’ as you understands these things, I used ter do a bit of work on the rice trains. Nothink dishonest, see?-just a little gamble wiv the cards sometimes. Well, one dye a toff got narsty an’ said I was cheatin’, an’ we ‘ad a sort of mix-up, and my pal wot I was workin’ wiv, ‘e gets up an’ slugs this toff wiv a cosh an’ kills ‘im. It wasn’t my fault, but the flatties think I done it, an’ they want me for murder.”