The Saint Meets His Match (27 page)

He picked up the note.

“What do you make of
that?” asked Cullis.

“It’s almost the same
handwriting as the note they
left on Essenden in Paris,
isn’t it?”

“Not exactly the
same, though. But the writing was
disguised, anyway.
A man can’t write a disguised hand
as consistently as
he writes his own natural fist.”

“Man?” queried
Cullis sharply.

“Simon Templar,”
said Teal sleepily. “I’ll swear he
wrote
that note to Essenden in Paris, anyway.”

“And this one?”

“Simon Templar,” said Teal, somewhat
inconsequently
, “is a very clever young
man.”

Cullis looked at him. He
remembered that the feud
between Chief Inspector
Teal and the Saint was one of
the epic legends of the
force. There had been truces
from time to time—truces
and breezy interludes—but the
fundamental feud had never
finished. And if anything
had been wanting to reawaken in Teal’s
expansive breast
the ambition to be the first
man to lag Simon Templar,
it should have been supplied to him on the
night in Lon
don, such a very short time ago,
when the Saint had
balked him of a coveted prey by a trick which a babe
in
arms should have spotted and which a
middle-aged police
constable had
somehow failed to spot.

“A very clever young
man,” said Teal.

“Have you any idea
where he is now?”

“He’s in London,
living in his own home. I saw him last night.”

“You saw him?”
exclaimed Cullis incredulously.-
“But—”

“Need we have any
more of that?” asked Teal wearily.
“I’m
tired of being told I ought to arrest him. I’m tired
of explaining that we
can’t do anything against him in
England for
robbing Essenden in Paris. And I’m tired
of explaining that you can suspect what you like about
him and Jill having been at Essenden’s the night
Essen
den disappeared. But you can’t
prove anything, and
Simon Templar knows it. He can admit anything he
likes in private conversations with me, but that evidence dis
appears the moment I walk out into the street
again.
He’s made a fool of me once,
and I’m not going to give
him the
chance of making a fool of me again by charging
me with unlawful arrest. Don’t you know that the Saint
has never yet been inside?” he added.

“With his
record?”

“He hasn’t got a
record,” said Teal. “He’s a suspi
cious character, and an
absconding policeman, but that’s
the worst
you can say about him without paying damages
for slander—except for that affair in Paris, which we
can’t do anything about. Once upon a time there
were
other things we could have held
him for, but he got a
pardon and
wiped all those out. Heavens above, sir,”
Teal broke out in a kind of helpless exasperation,
“haven’t I spent years of my life trying to
find something
I could put on the
Saint? I’ve had men he’s beaten up, in the old days, and he’s told me himself
he did it, and
I couldn’t make one of them say a word against him—not
a word we could have acted on, I mean. I’ve had the
Saint on the run, once, with a bundle of evidence against
him all tied up in my office and a real warrant in
my
pocket, and then he went and saved a royal train and had all his sins
forgiven. I’ve stood and
watched
him blow a man to blazes, and I haven’t
been able to prove it to this
day. I’m not a
miracle man, and I’m not even a convinc
ing liar. I’ll tell the world the Saint has beaten me in
every game I know and some I’d never heard of
before I
met him, and I’ll try to
smile while I’m saying it. But
I
won’t even try to tell a deaf-and-dumb half-wit that I
could pull the Saint in to-morrow and have him
sent
down for so much as seven days
in the second division, be
cause I
know all I should get would be the horse laugh.”

“But he’s known to be
an associate of Trelawney’s.”

“And what then?”

“He was Trelawney’s
accomplice at Essenden’s.”

“Accomplice?”
queried Teal patiently.

“He was with her. He must know where she’s
hiding
now.”

“Of course he must.
But who’s going to prove that in
a court of law? We shouldn’t do anything by
pulling him
in, even if we could. No, our
best hope is to go on watch
ing him
and hoping that sooner or later he’ll lead us to
Jill Trelawney. And I can’t help thinking that that’s not much of a
hope—with a man like Simon Templar.”

Cullis’s eyes returned to
the ransacked dossier.

“The chief will have
to be told about this,” he said.

“I’ve already told
him,” said Teal. “He was all set to
turn
Scotland Yard inside out, only I was able to per
suade
him not to. I’d like a chance to do something on
my
own before the whole world hears what fools we are.”

He stood up. He had been
seated in the assistant commissioner’s chair throughout the interview, leaning
back
and chewing gum as if the office belonged to him; for
Mr.
Teal was a very privileged person. His
extraordinarily
apathetic acceptance of that morning’s
startling discovery
puzzled his chief. It is not every day
that important
papers are abstracted without trace
from the Records
Office, yet Teal seemed as wearily
resigned to the fact as
if he had only had to
inform the commissioner that a plumber had been arrested the previous night for
being drunk and disorderly in the Old Kent Road. Cullis was
puzzled, for he seemed to detect a thread of melancholy
fatalism behind the few remarks that Teal had made on
the subject.

“I’ll be getting
along,” Teal said glumly.

Cullis stood by the window
with three deep furrows of
thought in his forehead.
As Teal reached the door he
roused out of his
abstracted concentration.

“That man
Gugliemi?” he said.

“He’s being shipped
off to-morrow. The deportation
order came through this
morning. What about him?”

“Where is he
now?”

Teal raised his mournful
eyebrows.

“Brixton, I think.
I’ll find out for you. Why?”

“I’ve got an
idea.”

“I had one of those
myself, once,” said Teal reminiscently
.
“What is this idea?”

“I’m thinking of
taking a leaf out of the Saint’s book.
Dyson
was useful to him, if you remember, and I have an idea that Gugliemi may be
useful to me. Every one of the
men we’ve got on to watch
Trelawney and Weald has
been worse than useless.
Gugliemi might get by where an ordinary plain-clothes man would be spotted a
mile
off. Also——
”

He paused abruptly.

“Also?” prompted
Teal.

Cullis closed his mouth.

“That will keep,”
he said.

And he kept his idea to
himself, and Teal had to go out with his curiosity unsatisfied.

Gugliemi was duly located
in Brixton Prison half an
hour later, and Cullis,
receiving the information, spoke
personally to the governor
of the prison over the tele
phone.

Within the hour Gugliemi
arrived at Scotland Yard in
a taxicab between two
warders, and was taken straight
to the assistant
commissioner’s room. And a little while
later
the two warders returned alone.

Teal, an inquisitive man,
returned to the assistant com
missioner’s room later in
the afternoon, and found that
Gugliemi had mysteriously
disappeared, although no
escort had been detailed
to conduct him back to the
prison.

“The deportation order
will be stayed for seven days,”
said Cullis in
answer to Teal’s inquiry.

“What’s the big
idea?” asked Teal.

“Gugliemi,” said
Cullis heavily, “is an enthusiastic
collector
of butterflies. I’ve told him that a very rare
specimen
of butterfly, called Trelawney, has been seen in
England,
and I have agreed to let him go out with his
butterfly
net and try to find it before he’s sent back to
Italy.”

Mr. Teal was not amused.

Chapter X

HOW SIMON TEMPLAR SPOKE OF BIRDS-

NESTING,
   
AND
  
DUODECIMO
  
GUGLIEMI

ALSO BECAME AMOROUS

I
T MUST
be admitted at once that Duodecimo Gugliemi
had never been cited as
an advertisement for his native
land. A
sublime disregard for the laws of property would alone have been enough to
disqualify him in that respect;
as it
was, he was affected also with an amorous tempera
ment which, combined with a sudden and jealous
temper,
had not taken long to make
Italy too hot to hold him.
Leaving
Italy for the sake of his health, he had crossed the
Alps into Austria;
but the Austrian prisons did not agree
with
him, and, again for the sake of his health, he had
taken another
northward move into German territory. He
had
seen the insides of jails in Munich and Bonn, and had
narrowly escaped
even more unpleasant retribution in
Leipzig.
In Berlin he had led an unimpeachably re
spectable life for six weeks, during which time he was in
hospital with double pneumonia. Recovering, he
left
Berlin with an unspotted
escutcheon, and migrated into
France;
and from France, after some ups and downs, he
came to England, from which country, but for the inter
vention of Mr. Assistant Commissioner Cullis, he
would
speedily have departed back to
the land of his birth.
Actually the
thirteenth child of a family that had been christened in numerical order, he
had been permitted to slip into the appellation of a brother who had died of a
surfeit of pickled onions at the tender age of two;
but
that, according to his own story, was the only good for
tune that had come to him in a world that had
mercilessly
persecuted his most innocent enterprises.

He was a small and dapper
little man, very amusing
company in his perky way,
with a fascination for bar
maids and an innate skill
with the stiletto; and certainly
he looked less like an
English plain-clothes man than any
thing in trousers.
Which may account for the fact that
Simon Templar,
sallying forth one morning from Upper Berkeley Mews, and alert for waiting
sleuths, observed
two large men in very plain clothes on
the other side of
the road, and entirely overlooked
Duodecimo Gugliemi.

These large men in very plain clothes were
among the trials of his life which Simon Templar endured with the exemplary
patience with which he faced all his tribulations. Ever since his first brush
with the law, on and off,
he had been
favoured with these attentions; and the en
tertainment which he had at
first derived from this silent
persecution
was beginning to lose its zest. It was not that
the continual watching annoyed him, or even cramped
his style to
any noticeable extent; but he was starting to
find
it somewhat tiresome to have to shake off a couple of
inquisitive
shadowers every time he wanted to go about
any
really private business. If he made a private appoint
ment for midday, for instance, at a point ten
minutes
away from home, he had to
set out to keep it half an hour
earlier
than he need have done, simply to give himself
time to ditch a couple of doggedly unsuccessful blood
hounds; and this waste of time pained his
efficient soul.
More than once he had contemplated addressing a com
plaint to the Chief Commissioner of Police for
the Me
tropolis on the subject.