The Saint Goes On (7 page)

“You miss the idea, Desmond.” He tapped the other firmly on the lower chest with his forefinger, and raised his eyebrows. “Hullo,” he remarked, “your stomach hasn’t got nearly so much bounce in it as dear old Teal’s.”

“Never mind my stomach!” Pryke almost screamed.

“I don’t mind it,” said the Saint generously. “I admit I haven’t seen it in all its naked loveliness; but in its veiled state, at this distance, there seems to be nothing offensive about it.”

The noise that Pryke made can only be likened to that of a kettle coming to the boil.

“I’ll hear that another time,” he said. “Simon Templar, I am taking you into custody––”

“But I’m trying to show you that that’s exactly what you mustn’t do, Desmond,” said the Saint patiently. “It would be fatal. Here you are, a rising young officer on the threshold of your career, trying to pull a flivver that’ll set you back four years’ seniority. I can’t let you do it. Why don’t you curb the excessive zeal, Rosebud, and listen to reason? I can tell you exactly what’s happened.”

“I can tell you exactly what’s going to happen––—”

“It was like this,” continued the Saint, as if the interruption not merely fell on deaf ears, but had failed miserably in its effort to occur at all. “This guy Enderby was robbed, as you say. Or he thought he was. Or, still more exactly, his secretary thought he was. A bloke calling himself an insurance agent blew into the office, and breezed out again with a parcel of jools. On account of various complications, the secretary was led to believe that this insurance agent was a fake, and the jools had been pinched. Filled with the same misguided zeal that’s pulling the buttons of that horrible waistcoat of yours, Desmond, she called the police. Hearing of this, you come puffing round to see me, with your waistcoat bursting with pride and your brain addled with all the uncomplimentary fairy-tales that Claud Eustace Teal has told you about me.”

“Who said so?”

“I did. It’s a sort of clairvoyant gift of mine. But you must listen to the rest of it. You come blowing round here, and wait for me from four o’clock onwards. Pepped up with the idea of scoring a solo triumph, you haven’t said anything to anyone about your scheme. Consequently, you don’t know what’s happened since you left Headquarters. Which is this. Shortly after the secretary female called for the police, Comrade Enderby himself returned to the office, the shemozzle was explained to him, he explained the shemozzle, and the long and the short of it was that the insurance agent was found to be perfectly genuine, the whole misunderstanding was cleared up, the whole false alarm exposed; and it was discovered that there was nothing to arrest anybody for-least of all me.”

“What makes you think that?”

Simon took in a lungful of tobacco smoke, and inhaled through his nose with a slight smile. What made him think that? It was obvious. It was the fundamental formula on which fifty per cent, of his reputation had been built up.

A man was robbed. Ninety-eight times out of a hundred, the fact was never published at all. But if ever, through some misguided agent, or during a spasm of temporary but understandable insanity on the part of the victim himself, the fact happened to be published, that same victim, as soon as he discovered the accident or came to his senses, was the first and most energetic on the field to explain away the problem with which Scotland Yard had been faced-for the simple reason that there would be things much harder to explain away if the robber were ever detected.

And the bereavement of Mr. Enderby was so perfectly on all fours with the formula that, with the horns of the dilemma touched in, it would have looked like a purple cow. There was no answer to it. So Mr. Enderby had been robbed of some jewels? Well, could he give a description of the jewels, so that if they were recovered … How did the Saint know? He smiled, with unusual tolerance.

“Just the same old clairvoyant gift-working overtime for your special benefit, Desmond. But I’ll back it for anything you like to bet-even including that perfectly repulsive shirt you’re wearing. If you only got wise to yourself, you’d find that nobody wanted me arrested any more; and it’d save both of us no end of trouble. Now, why don’t you get on the ‘phone to Headquarters, and bring yourself up to date? Let me do it for you; and then you can save your twopence to buy yourself a bar of milk chocolate on the way home… .”

He picked up the telephone on the porter’s desk, and pushed his forefinger persuasively into the initial V of the Victoria exchange. It was all ancient history to the Saint, an old game which had become almost stereotyped from many playings, even if with this new victim it had the semblance of a new twist to it. It hadn’t seriously occurred to him that the routine could be very different.

And then something hard and compact jabbed into his chest, and his eyes shifted over with genuine surprise from the telephone dial. There was a nickel-plated little automatic in Junior Inspector Pryke’s hand-the sort of footling ladylike weapon, Simon couldn’t help reflecting, which a man with that taste in clothes must inevitably have affected, but none the less capable of unpleasant damage at contact range. His gaze roamed up to the detective’s flaming eyes with a flicker of pained protest that for once was wholly spontaneous and tinged with a glitter of urgent curiosity.

“Put that telephone down,” said Pryke sizzlingly.

Simon put the telephone down. There was something in the other’s rabid glare which told him that disobedience might easily make Pryke do something foolish-of which the Saint had no desire to suffer the physical effects.

“My dear old daffodil,” he murmured, “have you stopped
to think that that dinky little pop-gun–––”

“Never mind what I think,” rasped the detective, whose range of repartee seemed to make up in venom what it lacked in variety. “If there’s any truth in what you’re saying, we can verify it when we get you to the station. But you aren’t going to run away until it has been verified. Come along!”

His finger was twitching over the trigger; and the Saint sighed.

He felt rather sorry for Junior Inspector Pryke. While he disliked the man’s face, and his voice, and his clothes, and almost everything else about him, he had not actually plumbed such implacable depths of hatred as to wish him to turn himself into a horrible example which would be held up for the disgusted inspection of students of the Police College for the next decade. But it seemed as if this was the only ambition Desmond Pryke had to fulfil, and he had left no stone unturned in his efforts to achieve it. From permitting himself to be lured into an argument on comparative gastrometry to that final howler of pulling a gun to enforce an ordinary arrest, Junior Inspector Pryke had run doggedly through the complete catalogue of Things A Young Policeman Should Not Do; but it was not Simon Templar’s fault.

The Saint shrugged.

“Okay, Desmond,” he murmured. “If that’s the way you feel about it, I can’t stop you. I’ve done my best. But don’t come around asking me for a pension when they drum you out of the Force.”

He put on his hat, and pulled the brim out to the perfect piratical tilt. There was not a shadow of misgiving in the smile that he gave Patricia, and he saw no reason for there to be a shadow.

“Be seein’ ya, keed,” he said. “Don’t worry-I’ll be back for dinner. But I’m afraid Desdemona is going to have a pain in her little turn-turn before then.”

He sauntered out unhurriedly into Stratton Street, and himself hailed the nearest taxi. Pryke put away his gun and climbed in after him. The cab turned into Piccadilly with a burden of internal silence that was almost broken by the exuberance of its own one-sided rancour.

Simon’s nostrils detected a curious sweet scent in the air he was breathing. Ever the genial optimist, he tried to thaw out the polar obmutescence with a fresh turn of pleasant gossip.

“That perfume you’re using, Desmond,” he said. “I don’t think I’ve come across it before. What’s it called-Pansy’s Promise? Or is it Quelques Tantes?”

“You wait till we get to the station,” said the detective, with sweltering monotony. “Perhaps you won’t feel so funny then.”

“Perhaps I won’t,” Simon agreed languidly. “And perhaps you won’t look so funny.”

He yawned. The cab, with all its windows tightly closed, was warm and stuffy; and the conversational limitations of Inspector Pryke were also conducive to slumber.

The Saint closed his eyes. He felt limp and bored, and his brain was starting to wander in a most remarkable and disjointed manner. It was all rather voluptuous and dreamy, like sinking away in some Elysian hop-joint… . Suddenly he felt faintly sick.

He sat up, with a tremendous effort. A message was trying to get through to his brain, but it seemed to be muffled in layer after layer of cotton-wool. His chest was labouring, and he could feel his heart pounding at a crazy speed. The face of Junior Inspector Pryke stared back at him through a kind of violet haze. Pryke’s chest was heaving also, and his mouth was open: it crossed the Saint’s mind that he looked like an agitated fish… . Then everything within his blurring vision whirled round like a top, and the blood roared in his ears like a thousand waterfalls. The message that had been trying to break through to him flashed in at last, and he made a convulsive lunge towards the window behind the driver’s impassive back; but he never reached it. It seemed as if the bottom fell out of the world, and he went plunging down through fold after fold of numbing silence, down and down through cold green clouds of that curious perfume into an infinity of utter nothingness… .

VII
There was a decanter and three sherry-glasses on the table-and one of the glasses was untouched. They had been set out there more than an hour ago; and the decanter was nearly empty.

Patricia Holm wandered restlessly about the living-room. Her face was quiet and untroubled, but she couldn’t relax and sit down. The dark had come down; and the view of the Green Park from the tall windows was hidden by a grey-blue veil in which the yellow specks of the street lamps shone brighter than the stars, and the lights of cars travelling up and down the Mall gleamed like flocks of dawdling comets. She drew the curtains, for something to do, and stole her thirty-seventh glance at the clock. It was a couple of minutes after nine.

“What’s happened to him?” she said.

Mr. Uniatz shook his head. He stretched out a spade-shaped hand for the decanter, and completed his solo conquest of its contents.

“I dunno,” he said feebly. “Maybe he couldn’t shake de diddo. Dey come dat way, sometimes.”

“He’s been arrested before,” she said. “It’s never kept him as long as this. If anything had gone wrong, he ought to have got word through to us somehow.”

Mr. Uniatz chewed desperately at his poisonous cigar. He wanted to be helpful. As we have already explained, he was not naturally hot on the higher flights of the intellect; but on such an occasion as this he was not the man to shirk his obligations. The deep creases in his rudimentary forehead bore their own witness to the torture he was enduring from these unaccustomed stresses on his brain.

“Maybe he’s on his way, right now,” he hazarded encouragingly.

Patricia threw herself into a chair. It was another restless movement, rather than an attempt to rest.

“That’s not enough, Hoppy.” She was thinking aloud, mechanically, more for the anaesthetic effect of actual speech than with any hope of coaxing something useful out of her companion. “If anything’s gone wrong, we’ve got to be ready for it. We’ve got to pick up our own cue. He’d expect us to find the answer. Suppose he isn’t on his way-what has he done?”

“He’s got de ice,” said Mr. Uniatz, vaguely.

“I don’t know whether he’s got it now. Probably he parked it somewhere on his way here. That’s what he’d have done if he was expecting trouble. Sometimes he simply puts things in the mail-sends them to a hotel or a poste restante somewhere, and picks them up later on when it’s all clear. Usually they aren’t even addressed to his own name.”

Hoppy frowned.

“But if dey ain’t addressed to his own name,” he said, “how does he pick dem up?”

“Well, when he goes to pick them up, he gives the name that they were addressed to,” explained Patricia kindly.

Mr. Uniatz nodded. He had always been lost in admiration of the Saint’s intellectual gifts, and this solution was only one more justification of his faith. Obviously a guy who could work out things like that in his own head had got what it takes.

“But this time we don’t know where he’s sent them, or what name he addressed them to,” she said.

The tentative expression of pleased complacency faded away from Hoppy’s face, and the flutings of honest effort crowded themselves once more into the restricted space between his eyebrows and his hair. He was too loyal to give way to the feeling that this was an unnecessary complication, invented simply to make things more difficult for him; but he wished people wouldn’t ask him to tackle problems like that. Reaching again for the decanter and finding it empty, he glowered at it plaintively, like a trusted friend who had done him a gratuitous injury.

“So what?” he said, passing the buck with an air of profound reluctance.

“I must know what’s happened to him,” said Patricia steadily.

She got up and lighted a cigarette. Twice more she paced out the length of the room with her supple boyish stride; and then with a sudden resolution she slipped into the chair by the telephone, and dialled Teal’s private number.

He was at home. In a few moments his drowsy voice came over the wire.

“Who’s that?”

“This is Patricia Holm.” Her voice was as cool and careless as the Saint’s own. “Haven’t you finished with Simon yet? We’re waiting for him to join us for dinner, and I’m getting hungry and Hoppy is getting away with all the sherry.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” he answered suspiciously.

“You ought to know, Claud.”

He didn’t seem to know. She explained. He was silent for so long that she thought she had been cut off; and then his suspicious perplexity came through again in the same lethargic monotone.

“I’ll ring you again in a few minutes,” he said.