The Saint in Action (4 page)

The young man’s mouth fell slowly open as if his chin was being lowered like a drawbridge.

“You don’t say he’s—dead?”

“If you’re sensitive about it we’ll say he has awoken to life immortal. But the one certain thing is that he’ll never pay you your tenner now unless he’s left it to you in his will. I had an idea something had gone screwy—that’s why I sent you back here. It was sheer luck that I happened to see Chief Inspector Teal’s tummy bulging out of the front door as we were driving up; otherwise the party might have been even breezier than it was.”

Graham seemed to wobble a little as the full meaning of the Saint’s words worked into his brain. His face went paler, and he steadied himself against the back of a chair.

“Do you mean he was murdered?”

“That was the idea I was trying to put over,” Simon admitted. “Directly I saw Claud Eustace floating around I knew something had blown up—he doesn’t go chasing out with his magnifying glass and pedigree bloodhounds because somebody’s lost a collar stud. And there he was with his photographers and finger-printers and the body in the library, just like the best detective stories. So we had a cheery little chat.”

“I think I need a drink,” said Patricia faintly.

She got up and fetched a bottle of sherry and some glasses; and the Saint blew a smoke ring and spoilt it with a chuckle.

“Are you out on bail, or did you just run away?” she enquired. “I mean, I don’t want to interfere with you, but it ‘d be sort of helpful to know.”

“Not a bit of it, darling. It wasn’t that sort of chat. He puffed and trumpeted to some extent at the start, but that was only natural. I soothed him with my well-known charm; and then he got awfully cunning. If you’ve ever seen Claud Eustace being cunning you won’t want to go to the circus any more. He opened his heart to me and talked about the case and asked me all kinds of innocent questions, and he was working so hard at being affable that the perspiration was fairly streaming down his face; and every time I gave him an innocent answer his eyes got smaller and brighter and I thought he was going to burst a blood vessel. Of course in order to keep the conversation going and bait his traps for me he had to give me a certain amount of information, and I was supposed to drop a few bricks in reply; but it didn’t exactly work out that way, and eventually I thought I’d better push off before he had a seizure.” The Saint’s eyes danced behind the veils of smoke drifting across his face. “However, I didn’t do too badly out of the exchange myself; and one of the useful bits of gossip I picked up was the name of the chief current suspect.”

“Who’s that?” asked Graham feverishly.

“You!”

The word hit Graham in the midriff and almost doubled him up. He gaped at the Saint with his Adam’s apple jigging up and down like a yo-yo for some seconds before his voice came back.

“Me?” he croaked.

“Who else? You were the last person in the flat. You were very steamed up about seeing Ingleston. You were fuming when the maid slung you out. The last thing you told her was that you’d have something to say to Ingleston later. It’s the sort of clue that even a policeman couldn’t miss. They’re looking for you now… . Which reminds me.”

He reached out for the telephone and called the porter’s desk downstairs.

“That you, Sam? … Simon Templar speaking. You know that bloke who came to see me earlier this morning, who went out with me? … No, you’re wrong. He didn’t come back. In fact he never came here at all. You never saw him in your life. Nobody’s been to see me today. Have you got that? … Good man.”

Graham was still breathing heavily.

“But—but–-“

“I know,” said the Saint patiently. “But let’s take things one at a time. Teal’s sure to make enquiries here—in fact I wouldn’t mind betting that he’s already got a team of flatfeet galumphing along here to pick up my trail. So long as they can’t definitely hook you up with me it ‘11 be something in your favour, my reputation being what it is. They’ll draw your digs and your office, of course, but that doesn’t matter. It’s a good job you didn’t leave those bonds at home, though, or they’d have had a warrant out for you by this time.”

“Wouldn’t it be better for him to get back as quickly as possible?” suggested Patricia. “If they think he’s trying to dodge them it ‘11 only make it look worse.”

“The trouble is there may be people looking for him who’d be a lot more dangerous than poor old Teal,” said the Saint.

He spoke quite casually; but there was a shade of meaning in his voice that cut a tiny crease between Patricia’s eyebrows and made Graham stiffen up.

Simon opened out his blood-spotted handkerchief and touched the cut in his chin.

“Hadn’t any of you noticed the damage to my beauty?” he enquired. “Or did you think I’d been having a shave while I was out?”

They looked at him in perplexity merging into a groping fragment of comprehension. And the Saint smiled.

“I collected that on my way home—just after I left Ingleston’s, to be accurate. I was getting into a taxi when some sportsman came by and turned on the tap. All 1 got hit by was a bit of broken glass, but that wasn’t his fault. If he’d been a better shot it would have been the last time I made the headlines.”

Complete understanding left them still silent, absorbing the implications according to their different temperaments and backgrounds. The frown smoothed out of Patricia’s forehead, to be replaced by an expression of martyred resignation. Graham put down his tankard and mopped his brow with an unsteady hand.

“But who–-“

“It’s pretty obvious, I think,” said the Saint. “Somebody knocked Ingleston off—we know that. For the sake of simplicity let us call him Pongo. Pongo was hanging around last night, waiting for Ingleston to come home, and he saw you come out. He’d have been watching the place pretty closely, so he wouldn’t have forgotten your face, even if it didn’t mean much to him at the time. Later on Ingleston arrives, Pongo accosts him and goes in with him—the evidence shows that he was somebody Ingleston knew—and while Ingleston is pouring out some drinks Pongo gets to work on him with a hammer he’s brought along for the purpose. Then after Ingleston has been removed Pongo gets on with the real business of the evening and starts looking for whatever he came to find. He tears the whole place apart—it looked as if a tribe of monkeys had been through it—but my guess is that he doesn’t find what he’s looking for because it’s already gone.”

“You mean those bonds I took?”

“Exactly. So after a while Pongo gives it up and amscrays, muttering curses in his beard. But he isn’t ready to quit altogether, so this morning he’s back on watch, waiting to see if he can get a line on the lost boodle. And what does he see but a car containing yourself, the bloke who came out of the place last night, and me. We look as if we were going to pull up at the door, and then we suddenly whizz on and stop around the next corner. All very suspicious. Pongo curls his mustachios and lurks like anything. I hop out of the car, and you go on with it. Pongo has one awful moment while he wonders which way he ought to go and whether he can split himself in half, and then he decides to stick to me—(a) because I’m a new factor that might be worth investigating, (b) because I’m obviously going back to the scene of the crime and you aren’t, and possibly (c) because he knows who you are and knows he can pick you up again if he wants to. Pongo sees me speak to the cop at the door and go in; presently I come out again, so he takes his chance and lets fry.”

“But why?”

The Saint shrugged.

“Maybe he didn’t like my face. Maybe he knew who I was and was scared things might get too hot if I was butting in. Maybe he’d already trailed you here and he’d only just made up his mind what to do about both of us, which would mean you’re next on his list.

Maybe a lot of things. That’s one of the questions we’ve got to find the answer to.”

“But what’s it all about?”

“It appears to be about seven thousand quid’s worth of bearer bonds, which is enough reason for a good many things to happen. What I’d like to know is how a man who couldn’t pay you a tenner collected all that mazuma. What sort of a job was he in?”

“He was with a firm of sherry importers in the City.”

“Sherry!”

The Saint was motionless for a moment, and then he took another cigarette. He couldn’t have explained himself what it was that had struck that sudden new crispness into his nerves—it was as if he was trying to make his conscious mind catch up with a spurt of intuition that had outdistanced it.

“You told me that Ingleston had been abroad recently,” he said. “Would he have been likely to go to Spain?”

“I expect so. He’d been sent there several times before. He spoke Spanish very well, you see–-“

“Did he have a lot of Spanish friends?”

“I don’t know.”

“He had one anyway—there was a signed photograph inscribed in Spanish on his mantelpiece. Did you ever hear of Luis Quintana?”

“No.”

“He’s a representative that the Spanish Rebels sent over a few weeks ago… .”

Simon jumped up and moved restlessly across the room. There was a fierce drive of energy in the restrained movements of his limbs that had to reach some hidden objective quickly or burn itself to exhaustion.

“Sherry,” he said. “Spain. Spanish Rebels. American bearer bonds. And mysterious Pongos cutting loose with hammers and popguns. There must be something to mix them together and make soup.”

He took the bundle of bonds out of his pocket and studied one of them again more closely. And then he was wrapped in stillness for so long that the others felt as if they were gripped in the same trance, without knowing why.

At last he spoke.

“They look genuine,” he said softly. “Engraving, ink, paper, everything. They look all right. You couldn’t say they were fakes without some special tests. And yet they might be… . “But there’s only been one man in our time who could do a forgery like this—if it is a forgery.”

“Who was that?” said Patricia.

The Saint met her gaze with blue eyes glinting with lights that held the essence of the mystery which he himself had just been trying to fathom.

“He was a Pole called Ladek Urivetzky—and I read in the paper that he was executed by a firing squad in Oviedo about a month ago.”

V

And an elegant bowl of soup it made when you got it all stirred up, Simon reflected that evening as he was being trundled down the dim baronial corridors of Cornwall House. But of all the extraneous characters who had been spilled by some coincidence or other into the pot, he was the only one who could make that reflection with the same ecstatic confidence.

“It doesn’t seem to make sense,” Patricia had said helplessly when he contributed the last item of certain knowledge that he had.

“It sings songs to me,” said the Saint.

But he had gone into no more details, for the Saint had a weakness for his mysteries. They had only been able to make desperate guesses at what was in his mind, knowing that there must be something seething there from the mocking amusement in his eyes and the unholy Saintliness of his smile. It was as if a rocket had exploded inside him, flooding all the dark places in his mind with light, when he had caught up in that dynamic moment with the lead his instinct for adventure had given him.

At this particular time, however, neither his eyes nor his smile could have given any information to anyone who might have been watching him, for they were completely hidden by the white beard and moustache and dark glasses which left very little of his face uncovered. He had put on those useful pieces of scenery with some care before he let himself through a panel in the back of a built-in wardrobe in his bedroom which brought him into a similar built-in wardrobe in the bedroom of the adjoining flat, which was occupied by an incurable invalid of great age who rejoiced in the name of Joshua Pond, as any inquisitive person might have discovered from the head porter, Sam Outrell, or the register of tenants. What it would not have been so easy for the inquisitive person to discover was that Mr Pond’s existence was entirely imaginary and took concrete form only when it suited the Saint’s purposes. Mr Pond rarely went out at all, a fact which was easily explained by his antiquity and failing health.

Securely screened behind his smoked glasses and masses of snowy facial shrubbery, with a white muffler wound round his neck and a black homburg planted squarely on his head, Mr Pond sat in his wheeled chair and was tenderly propelled down the passage by Sam Outrell and a smart young chauffeur in livery. Two men in overalls working on some telephone wiring with a mass of tools spread round them looked up as the door of the flat opened and ignored him as he went by. The chair was pushed into the lift and passed out of their ken. In the lobby downstairs a man reading a newspaper looked up as the lift doors opened and returned automatically to his reading. The chair passed him and was wheeled out into the street, where a sedate black limousine stood waiting. Sam Outrell and the chauffeur each took one of the invalid’s elbows and helped him to totter through the door of the car. The chauffeur wrapped a rug round his knees, Sam Outrell closed the door and saluted, the chauffeur took the wheel, and the car whisked away into the night, followed by the disinterested eyes of another large man who stood making a half-hearted attempt to sell newspapers on the opposite side of the street.

“And what exactly,” asked the chauffeur as the car streaked westwards along Piccadilly, “are we out for tonight?”

The Saint laughed.

“I’m sorry I had to drag you away from that cocktail party, Peter, old lad, but Claud Eustace is having one of his spasms. Did you see ‘em all? Four of ‘em— about three square yards of feet all told. That is, if there weren’t any more.”

He was looking back through the rear window, deciding whether they were being followed. Presently he was satisfied and turned round again.

“Take a cruise through the park, Peter, while I peel off my whiskers.”

He stowed the outfit carefully away in a concealed locker in front of him, ready to be put on again when it was required. The venerable black homburg joined it, along with the grey suede gloves; and he took off the lightweight black overcoat and laid it folded on the seat beside him. In a few minutes he was smoothing down his own dark hair and lighting a cigarette.