The Saint Meets His Match (38 page)

For a moment he thought that Cullis would shoot
and
chance the consequences, and he loosened
his muscles for a desperate leap. And the assistant commissioner’s
pose slackened by a fraction.

“I’ll hear what you
have to say. But you needn’t
expect to get away with
another bluff like the one
Trelawney put over last
night.”

“And it was such a
good bluff, too,” said the Saint
sadly, with one
eyebrow cocked at the assistant commis
sioner’s bandaged
thumb. ‘

And then he smiled into
Cullis’s eyes.

“But we don’t need to
use bluff any more,” he said.
“I’m strong
for having everything in its right place, and
the place for bluff has
gone by, Cullis.”

“Get on!”

“I am a brilliantly
clever man,” said the Saint, in his airy way, “and picnics like this
are sitting rabbits to me.
I worked this one out for
your special benefit, and you’ve enjoyed it so much, too… . You see, it
would have been
perfectly easy to bump you off, but
that wasn’t all we
wanted. Waldstein and Essenden had
been bounced too
rapidly, and we weren’t making the
same error over
you. We wanted to hear you sing to us here before you
passed on to join the herald angels; but we quite
ap
preciated that we weren’t a sufficient audience. Jill and I
are simple souls whom the world has used hardly,
and Duodecimo is another piece of shop-soiled driftwood on
the sea of life—”

“Cut the
cackle,” rasped Cullis, with a new venom
in
his voice. “If you’re just trying to gain time——
”

“I’m unbosoming in my
own style, brother,” said the
Saint plaintively. “Give me a
break. And now where was
I?
…
Oh,
yes. Duodecimo is another piece of shop-
soiled driftwood on the——
”

“I’ll give you three
minutes more. If you’ve got any
thing to say——
”

“O. K., Algernon.
Then let’s put it that your word
would probably outweigh
anything that Jill or I or Duo
decimo could say. So there
had to be a witness who
couldn’t be challenged. And who could be a more
ideal
witness than the chief commissioner
himself?”

The Saint saw Cullis’s
eyes narrow down to mere pin
points, and laughed again.

“I went to the chief
commissioner. I borrowed his
own house. We came down
here this evening and set the
stage very carefully.
Those bullet holes which you saw in
the door upstairs were placed there
three hours ago by
special permission of the
proprietor. The bars on the
window were installed this afternoon and
chopped about
while you were travelling
down. I personally staged the scene, wrote the dialogue, and produced the
soul-stirring drama now drawing to its close—and all in one rehearsal.
A microphone behind that picture of an indecently
ex
posed lady throwing geraniums at a
nightingale has been
picking up all
your winged words and relaying them, if
not to all stations, at least to one—with a sergeant sitting
on his Pitman diploma at the other end and taking
them
all down. Another connection upstairs gave up the per
sonal lowdown on every word of your recent backchat
with Duodecimo—which would have been
enough to
hang you by itself. But we
are thorough. We didn’t even
stop
there. Half a minute after you heard the front door
slam behind the
chief commissioner just now, he was
creeping
in through the back door and sprinting up the back stairs to hear some more of
the story from his pri
vate
broadcasting station. No, I shouldn’t even shoot
now, Cullis, because I think I heard Auntie Ethel com
ing
back——”

Cullis heard the rattle of
the door behind him, and
spun round.

The chief commissioner
stood on the threshold. And
now he showed no signs of
the injury which had at first impressed his assistant. His bearing was erect,
he no long
er clutched his shoulder, and there was
a glitter in his
eyes which had nothing to do with
anything he had said
to Cullis before he left.

Also, there was an
automatic in his hand.

“I heard you,” he said; and Cullis
stepped back a pace.

Cullis still held a gun in
his hand, but it hung loose
at his side, and he knew
that the least movement would
be fatal. He stood quite
still, and the chief commissioner
went on speaking.

“You ought to
know,” he said, “that I’ve been watching
you
for some time. I think I first had my suspicions when
those
papers were taken from the Records Office; and
then the Saint came to
me with a story which I couldn’t
ignore,
fantastic though it was.”

“You believed a crook?” said Cullis
scornfully.

“For my own
reasons,” said the commissioner. “He
was,
perhaps, something more than an ordinary crook
when
he came to me, and I was able to believe him
when
I shouldn’t have believed anyone else in his place.
Even you should admit
that the Saint has a certain repu
tation.
There was a warrant out for his arrest at the
time.” The commissioner’s lips twitched. “It was one
of many that have been wasted on him. But he
placed
himself unreservedly in my
hands, and it seems as if the
result
has justified us.”

Cullis looked around him,
and saw that Simon Templar also held a gun; and Jill Trelawney was sitting up
on the sofa, mopping at her blouse with a handkerchief.

“Only red ink,”
explained the Saint sweetly.

Cullis stood like a man
carved in stone.

And then he nodded slowly,
and the ghost of a smile
twitched at his mouth.
     

“I needn’t bother to
deny anything,” he said quietly.
“It’s all quite
clear. But it was a clever piece of work
on
your part to get the story from my own mouth as you
have
done.”

He looked the chief
commissioner in the eyes.

“You may as well hear
it in full,” he said. “I framed
Sir
Francis Trelawney under your very nose. Waldstein
and
Essenden were the leaders of the combine that Trelawney was out to smash, and
I was strapped at the time. They offered big money, and I came in with them.
Trelawney was dangerous. In another month or so he’d prob
ably have had them, if he’d been able to keep on. The
only thing to do was to get him out of the way, and we
fixed that up between us. It wasn’t so difficult as it
might have been, because he was always a man who
worked on his own. We knew that if once he was dis
credited, no one else would be able to take up his work
at the point where he left off. I paved the way by writing
that warning about the raid on his typewriter. Then I
telephoned the message which was supposed to have
come from
you, which sent him over to Paris and helped
us
to catch him out at Waldstein’s hotel. After that, the
rest was easy. I had Waldstein’s money in my pocket
when I opened his strong box in front
of you, and I’d
practised that little
conjuring trick for weeks. It wasn’t
very difficult. The notes came out
of his box in front of
your very eyes, and
there was nothing he could say about
that.
Later on, Waldstein, under one of his aliases, joined
up with the girl
to keep her out of mischief. He called
himself
lucky when he met her on the boat coming over
from New York to start the work of the Angels… . The
trouble started when the Saint came after me—when
my
house was burgled and my desk
broken open last night.”

“I heard about
that,” said the chief commissioner.

Cullis nodded.

“From the Saint, I
suppose? Well, it was a neat piece
of work, although
it was the girl who did it. Even before
that
I’d decided that Jill Trelawney was getting too dangerous, and sent Gugliemi
out after her; but he turned
against me, as you know.
Even when my desk was opened,
I didn’t think anything had
been taken, and when you
told me to come down here
I thought I’d got a chance.”

“Until Templar showed you that five-pound note?”
murmured the chief.

“Quite right.
…
Is there anything else you want to
know?”

“I don’t think
so.”

Cullis’s eyes shifted round
the room.

“But there’s one thing
I should like to know,” he said.

“What’s that?”

“When the Saint came
to you with that story, why
should you have taken any more notice of it
than if any
one else had brought it to
you?”

A dry smile touched the
commissioner’s lips.

“Because I happen to
know him well,” he said. “When
he
got his pardon, I coaxed him into the Secret Service
to keep him from
getting into more trouble. His methods
have
always been rather eccentric, but they’re effective.
Some time ago he got an idea that there was
something
more in the Trelawney
business than ever came out, and
I
let him take up the case in his own way. He’s been work
ing at it in his own way ever since: his police
appoint
ment was only part of the job, and his very irregular
resignation was only another part.”

There was one person who was more surprised
than
Cullis, and that was Jill Trelawney.

“You,
Saint?”

“When we first met,” said the Saint
sadly, “I
told you
I’d reformed,
but you wouldn’t believe me. And in the
last few days I seem to have done nothing but talk to you
about my respectable friend. Let me introduce
you—Sir
Hamilton Dorn, Chief
Commissioner of Police for the
Metropolis,
commonly known as Auntie Ethel. Pleased
to have you meet each other.”

Sir Hamilton bowed
slightly.
         

“I never was the
hell of a policeman,” said the Saint
apologetically.
“Scotland Yard will probably survive
without me—though I
can’t help thinking I might have
pepped them
up a heap if I’d stayed on.”

For that one moment Simon
Templar was the central
figure, and there was not an eye on Cullis. And
then the
Saint, out of the tail of his eye,
saw Cullis’s right hand leap up, and shouted a warning even as he turned. But
his voice was drowned by the roar of Cullis’s
automatic,
and he saw the chief
commissioner’s gun drop to the floor, and saw a red stain suddenly splashed on
the chief com
missioner’s wrist.

He raised his own gun, but
the hammer clicked on
a dud cartridge, and he
threw himself down on the floor
as Cullis’s automatic
barked again.

He heard the bullet sing over his head and
smack into
the wall behind him with a tinkle
of glass from a smashed
picture, and
spun his legs round in a flailing semicircle
that aimed at Cullis’s ankles. Even so, he did not see how
Cullis could possibly miss with his next shot…
.

He missed his kick
…
but he had forgotten
Jill Trelawney. As he scrambled up, he saw both her hands locked
upon Cullis’s wrist, and Cullis’s third shot went up into
the ceiling. Then he himself also had hold of the wrist,
and he twisted at it savagely. The gun went to the floor,
and the Saint kicked it away.

He did not see Cullis
snatch up the bronze statuette
from the table behind him, but if he had not
turned his
head—more by intuition than by
calculation—it would
certainly have
cracked his skull. As it was, the glancing
blow half stunned him and sent him reeling, with his
hold on Cullis’s wrist broken. Jill had let the
man go as
soon as the Saint grappled with him.

As he climbed dizzily to
his feet, with his head singing, and wiped the blood out of his eyes, he saw
the chief commissioner groping blasphemously for one of the fallen
guns with his sound left hand—saw the open French win
dows, and Jill Trelawney vanishing through them.