The Saint Meets His Match (26 page)

“Of course,” he
murmured, “we have been criminally
careless.
We have been persistently bumping off the very
birds
who might have saved us a lot of trouble. I admit
Essenden
bumped himself off, but that was due to a
misunderstanding.
It’s the principle of the thing. Jill,
if
we’re going to vindicate Papa, we’re going to have to
be
awful careful we don’t bounce Number Three on the
programme
before he’s sung his song.”

“We shall.”

“And then,” said
the Saint dreamily, “you’ll have
your hands full
looking after that boy friend back in
Gee, Wis., won’t you?”

There was a silence.

Then she said: “And
you?”

“Oh,” said the
Saint, “you won’t want me there, will
you?”

She laughed.

“Won’t you be going
back to someone?”

“Who knows!”

The Saint’s cigarette end
reddened to a long inhala
tion, and faded.

“You butted in where
you shouldn’t have butted in,”
he said. “This
story started mostly as a joke, as I told you
one
time. I always have been crazy. But I certainly didn’t
mean
to get landed into all this. Since I’m here, I’m
enjoying
myself; but the entertainment was not among those listed for this season.
However, here we are, and
here is nobody else, and I
always believe in making the
best of a good job.
Possibly you noticed the tendency
at breakfast yesterday.”

“Oh!” said the
girl.

“There is,”
said the Saint firmly, “a piffling idea abroad
among
the sub-hominoids of Suburbia that a man may not kiss a girl for no other
reason than that he simply
wants to kiss her. Now
that is obviously absurd, because
although you’ve just saved my life I’m
going to kiss you
very passionately for no
other reason than that I want
to—and
you are going to like it.”
 

2

Inspector Teal arrived at
Essenden Towers later, be
fore the servants returned
from their ball, and found
four blasphemous men in the
library. His great regret
ever afterwards was that, in spite of the
extraordinary circumstance of their discovery and their known reputations, he
could never find a substantial charge to bring
against them in connection with that night’s mystery.
It was even more suspicious because the stories
they told were perfectly true, and they could not be made to con
tradict
either themselves or one another under the most
searching examination. Besides which, there were many
scraps of circumstantial evidence to bear them out.
And
it is not a crime for four
gangsters, however notorious,
to be
the guests of a peer.

This annoyed Teal, because
he was unable to find
any trace of the principal
actors in the mystery. And
even a minor scapegoat
would have been better than
none.

He went down through the
wine cellar and found the
flooded cave. When the
waters had subsided, an extensive search was made with electric torches, but
still the extent
of the cavern and the source of its strange subterranean
tides could not be discovered. And no human eyes
ever saw Lord Essenden again.

It was late the following
afternoon when a sleepless,
but not more than ordinarily sleepy, Chief
Inspector Teal
returned to Scotland Yard to
prepare his report .

“I don’t suppose
Essenden will ever be seen again,”
he
told the assistant commissioner gloomily.

“He was murdered, of course?”

“Probably he was. But
how are we ever going to
prove that if we can’t
produce a body? You know the law
as well as I do.”

Cullis rasped his chin.

“Waldstein first,
then Essenden. There must be a con
necting link
somewhere.”

“Of course there is.
Trelawney believes that her father
was framed, and
she’s out to get the men who did it.
Her idea is that
there was a ring of first-class crooks work
ing in with an
accomplice right inside this building. Sir
Francis
Trelawney was the man they wanted here, though
—and they couldn’t get him. What was more, he was get
ting hotter on their trail every day. So he had to
go.
He was framed, with the help of
their police accomplice;
and we know the rest. That’s her story, and
somehow or
other she’s made the Saint
believe it.”

“But that’s ridiculous! There were only
two people concerned in the show that really put the finger on Sir 
Francis Trelawney. The chief commissioner was one,
and I was the other. I told Templar the story
myself.
If you’re suggesting that one
of us was taking graft from
Waldstein——
”

“I’m suggesting
nothing,” said Teal. “I’m just telling
you
the tale we’re up against.”

Cullis frowned.

“It’s a tale that’s
making more trouble for us than
we’ve had for years—there
was another leading article
in the
Record
this
evening,” he said sourly. “Something
has got to be done
about it, or the chief will be wanting
resignations
all round. If there’s anything at all on Trelawney’s
side, there’ll be a clue to it in the Record’s
Office somewhere—if we can only find it.”

Teal nodded.

“It would help us if
we could,” he said. “She’ll be
going
after this accomplice in the Yard itself next, and
if
we knew whom she was going to pick on, we’d be ready
for
her. I wouldn’t be worrying so much if the Saint
wasn’t
in it, but when I see his trade-mark anywhere I
know
there’s going to be no bluff about the trouble. I wouldn’t put it above him to
kidnap the chief commis
sioner single-handed and
flood out Records with back
numbers of the
Vie
Parisienne.”

“He’d have to be a
clever man to do it,” said Cullis,
who
had no sense of humour.

“The Saint is a
clever man.”

Cullis grunted.

“I’ll go through that
Trelawney dossier again myself,”
he said.

That dossier was put
before Mr. Assistant Commissioner Cullis the very next day; and he spent a
whole twelve hours with it, neglecting all other business.

This record of Jill
Trelawney was of great interest
to Mr. Cullis, for it
dealt with the career of that dangerous lady for some time before she had
burst upon Lon
don, as the leader of the Angels of
Doom. It went back,
in fact, to the event which had led to the creation of the
Angels—the time when Sir Francis Trelawney, her
father, himself at one time assistant
commissioner, had
been detected almost in the act of betraying his
position
and submitting to bribery and
corruption. And after
his death,
which some said was directly due to his discovery and disgrace, had come the
Angels of Doom, with his
daughter at
their head.
…

As he went through that
dossier, Cullis remembered
the day, nearly three years
ago, when he himself, then
only a superintendent, had
helped to bring home the
charge—the day in Paris
when he had gone there with the
chief commissioner to watch
Sir Francis in the very act
of betraying a police secret.

And Cullis remembered the
day after that. An after
noon in Scotland Yard
when, in the presence of Tre
lawney and the chief commissioner,
he had opened a box
taken from the Chancery Lane Safe
Deposit, and had
found in it a bundle of new five-pound
notes which
it had been possible to trace back
directly to Waldstein.
He remembered Trelawney’s
protestations—that he had
never put the notes in his
strong box, that he had never
seen them before, that he
could not explain how they came to be there at all. And the chief
commissioner’s
cold, accusing eyes.
…

All these memories came
back to Cullis as he went
through page after page of
the dossier, and they were
still with him when he went
home late that night. For
although Teal was humanly
inclined to spread himself on the subject of his pet aversion, there was no
doubt
even in Cullis’s mind that the Saint was a factor to
be
reckoned with, and anyone might have been pardoned
for wondering what was going to happen next.

But the next morning there
seemed to be no more
reason to wonder, for when
Cullis arrived at the Yard
and went up to his office
he found Chief Inspector Teal waiting for him there, and there was something in
Teal’s lugubrious countenance which foreboded bad news; and,
since Cullis’s mind was full of Jill Trelawney, he was not
so surprised as he might have been when he discovered
what that bad news was.

“Weren’t you the last
man to handle that Trelawney
dossier?” asked Teal,
coming straight to the point.

Cullis nodded.

“I should think so. I
had it out all yesterday afternoon.”

“I
believe you
returned it to Records yourself?”

“That’s right,”
said Cullis. “It was late when I left, and I turned it in on my way
out.”

Teal jerked his thumb at
the commissioner’s desk.

“Take a look,”
he said.

The folder was there, with
its neat label. Cullis opened
it and was moved to a
profane exclamation.

The first thing that met
his eye was a sheet of paper
bearing a sketch like many
others that he had seen before,
and one line of writing:

With
 
compliments and
 
thanks.

Under the note was a blank
sheet of paper. Under the
blank sheet the third was
also blank. There were twenty-
seven blank sheets
altogether—he counted them.

“When was this
discovered?”

“About an hour
ago,” said Teal. “I sent down for
the
file myself to look something up. You’ll find that
every
sheet relating to the original Trelawney affair
has
been taken. The rest has been left, and the bulk made
up
with those blank sheets.”

“But it’s
impossible!” snapped Cullis.

“Absolutely,”
agreed Teal acidly. “And yet it’s been
done.”

The trials that it had been
enduring of late had not improved the detective’s temper.

“No one could raid
Scotland Yard,” Cullis persisted. “Was there any sign of the files
having been tampered
with?”

“None at all.”

“Then it must have
been someone in the building–
somebody actually in the
Records Office.”

Teal extracted a battered
piece of gum from his mouth
as if he disliked the taste
of it. Or it may have been some
thing else that he
disliked.

“If we go on making
progress at this rate,” he said mor
bidly,
“one of the stunt newspapers will be running us as
modern reincarnations of Sherlock Holmes.”

Cullis scowled.

“That doesn’t get us
much further. Even if someone
in the Records Office was
responsible, it might have been
any one of a dozen men you
could name.”

Teal shrugged.

“And which?” he
asked tersely.

“There’ll be an
inquiry, of course,”

“And what will that
find out? We know the Angels
had a lot of money, and I
know the Saint still has. Sup
pose they’ve bought someone
actually in the Yard, why
should it be one man more
than another?” Teal reached
out a slothful arm and
picked up one of the blank sheets.
It was creased down
the centre, as were the other sheets.
Teal shuffled the
pile together and folded them over
the crease.
“They’d go into a man’s breast pocket,” he said. “It’s cheap and
ordinary paper—the kind they use
in a few hundred offices.
We shan’t find any clue there.”