The Saint Meets His Match (5 page)

“Maaaye fairest
chiiild-da, I have no gift to giiive

theeee;
No
lark-ka could pipe-pa to skies sow dull and

gra-a-ay;

Yet-ta, ere I gow, one
lesson I can leeeave theeee
For every da-a-ay.
…”

“I saw Templar speak
to him——
”

“Shut up, you fool!”

“Be gooood-da, sweet
maaid, and-da let who can-na

be cle-evah;

Do nowble things, not-ta
dream them, awl daaay
lawng
…”

The telephone bell
screamed.

“See who it is,
Weald. No, give it to me.”

She took the instrument out
of his hands. There was
no need to ask who was the
owner of the silkily endearing
voice that came over the
wire.

“Hullo!”

“Yes, Mr.
Templar?”

“Please don’t let the
Angels pester the innocent gentle
man with the
criminal voice. He doesn’t know me from
Adam,
and probably never will. I warned you I had mo
ments
of extreme cunning, didn’t I?”

She hung up the receiver
thoughtfully, ignoring
Weald’s splutter of
questions.

The musician below, a man
inspired, was repeating the
last verse with increased fervour—perhaps as a
consolation
to himself for having been
deprived of the middle one.

“Bee
goooooda-da, sweet maaid-da,

and-da
let whoo
caan-na be cle-e-e-ev-ah… .”

The girl stood by the
window, and something like a
smile touched her lips.
“A humorist!” she said. Then the smile was gone altogether.
“Second round to Simon Templar,” she said softly.
“And now, I think, we start!”

Chapter II

HOW SIMON TEMPLAR
 
WAS DISTURBED,

AND THERE WAS FURTHER BADINAGE IN

BELGRAVE STREET

I
F IT
had been possible to prepare a place-time chart of
the activities of the Angels of Doom, it would have shown,
during the eighteen hours following Simon Templar’s
departure from the house in Belgrave Street, a distinct
concentration of interest in the region of Upper Berkeley
Mews, where the Saint had converted a couple of garages,
with the rooms above, into the most ingeniously com
fortable fortress in London. Also, like other concentra
tions of the Angels of Doom, it appeared to be conducted
with considerable labour and expense for no prospect of immediate
profit.

It may be suggested that
the district of Mayfair was an
eccentric situation for
the home of a policeman; but
Simon Templar thanked God
he wasn’t a real policeman.
In fact, he must have been
the weirdest kind of policeman
that ever claimed to be attached
to Scotland Yard. But attached he indisputably was, and could claim his
official
salutes from some of the men who would
once have given
their ears to arrest him. “Thus
are the mighty fallen,
and the weapons of
walloping perished,” he said to Teal
at
another lunch, with a kind of wicked wistfulness; and the detective sighed, and
kept his misgivings to himself. For the Saint, in his new disguise of a
respectable citizen,
seemed much too good to be
true—much too good… .
Teal had an uneasy feeling
that no bad man who had suddenly reformed would have been quite so
overpoweringly
sanctimonious about it. All that he had
ever seen of the
Saint, all that he had ever known of
him, made Chief Inspector Teal feel like a performing elephant dancing a
hornpipe over a thin glass dome in the presence of this
inexplicable virtue. And in his mountainously bovine way Chief
Inspector Teal watched the Saint enforcing
the
law by strictly legal methods, and wondered… .

Not that anyone’s
mystification would have worried
Simon Templar in the
least. If he had thought about it
at all, he would
have been impishly amused, in his serene
ly
contented fashion. As it was, he went on with his life,
and the job he had taken on, with a sublime disregard
for the feelings and opinions of the world at large, seem
ing to be distressed only by the lack of an adequate sup
ply of victims for his exaggerated sense of humour.

One thing, however, could
disturb his tranquillity, and
that was to have business
troubles intruded upon the
hours which he had
allotted to himself for rest or recrea
tion.
At midnight of the day after his visit to Belgrave
Street,
for instance, when he was sitting up in bed, hap
pily
engaged in polishing the opening lines of a new
song
dealing with the shortcomings of the latest Honours
List,
and a bullet smacked through the window behind
him
and chipped a lump out of a perfectly good ceiling,
he was distinctly
bored.

With a sigh he climbed
out and pulled on his dressing
gown. One glance at the
line between the star-shaped split
in the window and
the scar in the plaster was enough to
show that the shot
had come in at a wide angle. The
Saint sighed again. Perhaps his estimate of
himself had
been wrong, It seemed that there
was something else
which annoyed him
even more than to be interrupted
after business hours—and that was to be
taken for a fool.

He glanced round the room and selected a
battered
pickelhaube—
relic of a grimmer warfare than that. Then
he switched off the light. Returning to the window,
he
knelt down so, that he was below
the level of the sill, and
raised the
lower sash. On one side of this opening he dis
played the
pickelhaube,
looped over the back of a chair which he
edged into position with his foot, and awaited
developments with a
kindly interest.

The mews was deserted, and
there were no pedestrians visible at the entrance in Berkeley Square at that
moment,
but he could pick out the shadowy bulk of a big saloon
car parked in the cul-de-sac of the mews itself, and
the second shot from it impinged accurately upon the
pickel
haube
with a noise like that of a dull gong.

Neither of the shots from
outside had been accom
panied by a report, but
Simon Templar, since acquiring
the right to be as noisy
as he pleased, had ceased to be of
such a retiring
disposition. He emptied his automatic
without stealth, and crammed in a fresh
magazine as he raced down the stairs.

His servant met him in the
hall.

“Count ten, and then
open the front door—but lie flat
on the ground when you do it!” snapped the
Saint, and
vanished into the sitting room
without explaining how
this feat of
contortion was to be performed.

He was edging back the
window curtains when the door
began to open.

He had no fear for the man
who was opening it, for
there were so few flies
on Orace that even a short-sighted
man would have had
no excuse for mistaking him for a
Chilean mule. Neither had he any fear of
the agile gun
man who was upsetting his
evening. Either the car was
an
ordinary car, in which case the gunman was winged if
Simon Templar had ever learnt anything about the
art
of shooting up automobiles; or
the car was an extraordinary car, lined throughout with half-inch nickel
steel, in which case the gunman was probably not winged. And,
either way, if it came to a fight …

“Joke!” murmured
the Saint, and lowered his head
again quickly.

Ordinary guns he was
prepared for, and ready to take
on any time. Not that he
particularly fancied himself
with guns, but he reckoned he could just about
pull his
weight in most kinds of rough
stuff. But there was another
kind of
gun before tackling which Simon Templar al
ways paused to take a deep breath and recite rapidly the verse from the
hymn which contains a line about shelters
from the stormy blast; and it was undoubtedly a specimen
of that kind of gun which was spluttering a
horizontal
hailstorm of lead
sufficiently close to his direction to be
appreciably unpleasant.

Taking the breath, and
postponing the recitation to a
later date, Simon put up
his head again; and as he did so
the fire ceased, and the car picked up speed
with a rush
and swooped into the emptiness
of Berkeley Square.

The Saint, standing at the
corner of the mews and
trying to draw a bead on one of the departing
tires as the car turned into Mount Street, was briskly arrested.

“Don’t be a bigger
fool than you can help,” he snarled;
and the constable,
recognizing him, released him with a
stammered
apology.

“It was a car, sir——
”

“You amaze me,”
said the Saint, in awe. “I thought
it
was a team of racing camels. Get the number down in
your
book.”

The policeman obeyed; and
Simon, with a shrug,t
urned and shouldered his way back to the house
through the nucleus of a gaping crowd.

He found Orace dabbing an
ear with a stained hand
kerchief.

“Hurt?”

“Nossir—just a
splinter er wood. They were firin’ low.”

“It’s more painful
through the stomach,” said the Saint
enigmatically,
and went on upstairs.

The pursuit of the car from
which the machine gun
had been fired wasn’t
Simon Templar’s business. It could
be carried on just
as effectively by the regulars—or just
as
ineffectively, for the number plates were certain to
have
been changed. But it made the Saint think.

When the assistant
commissioner called in later for
the story, however, Simon
showed no signs of perturba
tion.

“It was Budd’s idea, of course. He’s seen
service in
Chicago. But machine guns in the
streets of London are
nothing new on
me—I’ve had it happen before. There’s
no
blamed originality in this racket, that’s the trouble.”

“They seem to think
you’re important.”

“There’s certainly
some personal bias against me,” ad
mitted the Saint
innocently. “I was expecting a demon
stration—I
had further words with Jill Trelawney yester
day. Cigarette?”

“Thanks.”

The commissioner helped
himself. He was a grizzled,
hard-featured man who had
worked his way up from the
bottom of the ladder, and
he had all the taciturn abruptness common to men who have risen in the world
by ‘
nothing but a relentless devotion to the ambition of
rising in the world.

“How did she strike
you?”

“She didn’t,”
said the Saint perversely.“I think she
would have, though, but
for the low cunning with which
I made my
escape. She’s a sweet child.”

“Charming,”
agreed the commissioner ironically. “So
gentle!
Such endearing ways!”

“Ever meet
her?”

“No. I knew her father, of course.”

Simon grinned.

“He never made any
friendly advance towards me,” he
murmured. “But
of course there was some prejudice
against me at the
time. Tell me that story again—from
the inside.”

Cullis settled himself.

“The inside is that
Trelawney swore all along that
he’d been framed,” he
said. “It’s not such an inside, any
way,
because he told exactly the same tale at the inquiry. After all, that was the
only defense open to him: he was
caught so red-handed that
no one could have thought
out any other explanation
except that he was guilty.”