The Saint and Mr. Teal: Formerly Called "Once More the Saint" (5 page)

Simon sat and watched the girl hail the taxi and climb in. The cab picked up speed rapidly; and Simon touched his self-starter and hurled the great silver Hirondel smoothly after it.

The taxi swung away to the north and plunged into the streaming traffic of the Marylebone Road. It had a surprising turn of speed for a vehicle of its type; and the Saint was glad that his car could claim to have the legs of almost anything on the road. More than once it was only the explosive acceleration of its silent hundred horsepower that saved him from being jammed in a tangle of slow-moving traffic which would have wrecked his scheme irretrievably. He clung to the taxi’s rear number plate like a hungry leech, snaking after it past buses, drays, lorries, private cars of every size and shape under the sun, westwards along the main road and then to the right around the Baker Street crossing, following every twist of his unconscious quarry as faithfully as if he had been merely steering a trailer linked to it by an invisible steel coupling. It was the only possible method of making certain that no minor accident of the route could leave him sandwiched behind while the taxi slipped round a corner and vanished forever; and the Saint concentrated on it with an ice-cold singleness of purpose that shut every other thought out of! his head, driving with every trick of the road that he knew and an inexorable determination to keep his radiator nailed to a point in space precisely nine inches aft of the taxi’s hind quarters.

There was always the risk that his limpet-like attachment would attract the attention of the driver of the taxi, but it was a risk that had to be ignored. Fortunately it was growing dark rapidly after a dull and rainy afternoon; they raced up the Finchley Road in a swiftly deepening dusk, and as they passed Swiss Cottage Underground the Saint took the first chance of the chase-fell far behind the taxi, switched on his lights, tore after it again, and picked up the red glowworm eye of its tail light after thirty breathless seconds. That device might have done something to allay any possible suspicions; and the lights of one car look very much like the lights of any other when the distinctive features of its coachwork are hidden behind the diffused rays of a few statutory candlepower.

So far the procession had led him through familiar highways; but a little while after switching on his lights he was practically lost. His bump of locality told him that they were somewhere to the east of the Finchley Road and heading roughly north; but the taxi in front of him whizzed round one corner after another until his bearings were boxed all round the compass, and the names of streets which occasionally flashed past the tail of his eye were unknown to him.

Presently they were running down a broad avenue of large houses set well back from the road, and the taxi ahead was slowing up. In a moment of intuitive understanding, the Saint held his own speed and shot past it: keeping the cab in his driving mirror, he saw it turning in through a pair of gates set in a high garden wall twenty yards behind him.

Simon locked his wheels round the next corner and pulled up dead. In a second he was out of the car and walking quickly back towards the driveway into which the taxi had disappeared.

He strolled quietly past the gates and took in as much of the lie of the land as he could in one searching survey under the slanted brim of his hat. The house was a massively gloomy three-storied edifice in the most pompous Georgian style, reminiscent of a fat archdeacon suffering an attack of liver with rhinocerine fortitude; and the only light visible on that side of it was a pale pink bulb that hung in the drab portico like a forlorn plum in an orchard that the pickers have finished with. The neglected front garden was dappled with the shadows of a few laurel bushes and unkempt flower beds. Of the taxi there was no sign; but a dim nimbus of light was discernible beyond the shrubbery on the right.

The Saint’s leisured step eased up gradually and reached a standstill. After all, Mr. Jones was the man he wanted to meet: this appeared to be Mr. Jones’s headquarters: and there were no counter-attractions in the way of night life to be seen in that part of Hampstead. The main idea suffered no competition; and a shrewd glance up and down the road revealed no other evening prowlers to notice what happened.

Simon dropped his hands into his pockets and grinned gently at the stars.

“Here goes,” he murmured.

The dense shadows inside the garden swallowed him up like a ghost. A faint scraping of gears came to him as he skirted a clump of laurels and padded warily along the grass border of a part of the drive which circled round towards the regions where he had seen the light; and he rounded the corner of the house in time to see the taxi’s stern gliding through the doors of a garage that was built onto the side of Mr. Jones’s manor. Simon halted again, and stood like a statue while he watched a vague figure scrunch out of the darkness and pull the doors shut behind the cab- from the inside. He surmised that there was a direct communication from the garage through into the house, but he heard a heavy bolt grating into its socket as he drew nearer to investigate.

The Saint sidled on past the garage to the back of the house and waited. After a time he saw two parallel slits of subdued radiance blink out around the edges of a drawn blind in a first-floor window: they were no more than hairlines of almost imperceptible luminance etched in the blackness of the wall, but they were enough to give him the information he needed.

Down on the ground level, almost opposite, where he stood, he made out another door-obviously a kitchen entrance for the convenience of servants, tradesmen, and policemen with ten minutes to spare and a sheik-like style with cooks. He moved forward and ran his fingers over it cautiously. A gentle pressure here and there told him that it was not bolted, and he felt in his pocket for a slim pack of skeleton keys. At the third attempt the heavy wards turned solidly over; and Simon replaced the keys in his pocket and pushed the door inwards by fractions of an inch, with the blade of his penknife pressing against the point where it would first be able to slip through. He checked the movement of the door at the instant when his knife slid into the gap, and ran the blade delicately up and down the minute opening. At the very base of the door it encountered an obstruction; and the Saint flicked the burglar alarm aside with a neat twist and an inaudible sigh of satisfaction, and stepped in.

Standing on the mat, with his back to the closed door, he put away the knife and snapped a tiny electric flashlight from its clip in his breast pocket. It was no longer than a fountain pen, and a scrap of tinfoil with a two-millimetre puncture in it was gummed over the bulb so that the beam it sent out was as fine as a needle. A three-inch ellipse of concentrated light whisked along the wall beside him and rounded itself off into a perfect circle as it came to rest on another door facing the one by which he had entered.

Simon Templar’s experience as a burglar was strictly limited. On the rare occasions when he had unlawfully introduced himself into the houses of his victims, it had nearly always been in quest of information rather than booty. And he set out to explore the abode of the man called Jones with the untainted zest of a man to whom the crime was still an adventure.

With one hand still resting lightly in the side pocket of his coat, he opened the opposite door soundlessly and admitted himself to a large, dimly illuminated central hall. A broad marble staircase wound up and around the sides of the hall, climbing from gallery to gallery up the three floors of the house until it was indistinguishable against the great shrouded emptiness of what was probably an ornate stained-glass skylight in the roof. Everything around was wrapped in the silence of death, and the atmosphere had the damply naked feel of air that has not been breathed for many months. A thin smear of dust came off on his fingers from everything he touched; and when he flashed his torch over the interior of one of the ground-floor rooms he found it bare and dilapidated, with the paint peeling off the walls and cobwebs festooning an enormous dingy gilt chandelier.

“Rented for the job,” he diagnosed. “They wouldn’t bother about the ground floor at all-not with kid-napped prisoners.”

He flitted up the staircase without so much as a tap from his feather-weight crepe-soled shoes. A strip of cheap carpet had been roughly laid around the gallery which admitted to the first-floor rooms; and the Saint walked softly over it, listening at door after door.

Then he heard, with startling clarity, a voice that he recognized.

“You have nothing to be afraid of, Miss Holm, so long as you behave yourself. I’m sorry to have had to take the liberty of abducting you, but you doubtless know one or two reasons why I must discourage your friend’s curiosity.”

He heard the girl’s calm reply:
“I think you could have invented a less roundabout way of committing suicide.”

The man’s bass chuckle answered her. Perhaps only the Saint’s ears could have detected the iron core of ruthless menace that hardened the overtones of its full-throated heartiness.

“I’m glad you’re not hysterical.” A brief pause. “If there’s anything within reason that you want, I hope you’ll ask for it. Are you feeling hungry?”

“Thanks,” said the girl coolly. “I should like a couple of sausages, some potatoes, and a cup of coffee.”

Simon darted along the gallery and whipped open the nearest door. Through the gap which he left open he saw a heavily built, grey-haired man emerge from the next room, lock the door after him, and go down the stairs. As the man bent to the key, the Saint had a photographic impression of a dark, large-featured, smooth-shaven face; then he could only see the broad, well-tailored back passing downwards out of view.

The man’s footsteps died away; and Simon returned to the landing. He stood at the door of Patricia’s room and tapped softly on the wood with his fingernails.

“Hullo, Pat!”

Her dress rustled inside the room.

“Quick work, boy. How did you do it?”

“Easy. Are you all right?”

“Sure.”

“How’s the window in there?”

“There’s a sort of cage over it-I couldn’t reach the glass. The taxi was the same. There’s a divan bed and a couple of wicker armchairs. The table’s very low-the legs wouldn’t reach through the bars. He’s thought of everything. Washbasin and jug of water on the floor-some towels-cigarettes —”

“What happened to the taxi driver?”

“That was Mr. Jones.”

The Saint drew a thoughtful breath.

“Phew! And what a solo worker! … Can you hold on for a bit? I’d like to explore the rest of the establishment before I start any trouble.”

“Go ahead, old chap. I’m fine.”

“Still got your gun?”

“Sure.”

“So long, lass.”

The Saint tiptoed along the landing and prowled up the second flight of stairs.

CHAPTER VI
THERE were no lights burning on the tipper gallery, but a dull glimmer of twilight filtered up from the lamps below and relieved the darkness sufficiently for him to be able to move as quickly as he wanted to. With his slim electric flash in his hand he went around the story from room to room, turning the door handles with infinite care and probing the apartments with the dancing beam of his torch. The first one he opened was plainly but comfortably furnished as a bedroom: it was evidently occupied, for the bed had not been made since it was last slept in, and a shaving brush crested with a mound of dried lather stood on the mantelpiece. The second room was another bedroom, tidier than the first, but showing the ends of a suit of silk pyjamas under the pillow as proof that it also was used. The door of the third room was locked; and Simon delved in his pocket again for a skeleton key. The lock was of the same type as that on the back door by which he had entered the house-one of those ponderously useless contraptions which any cracksman can open with a bent pin-and in a second or two it gave way.

Simon pushed the door ajar and saw that the room was in darkness. He stepped boldly in, quartering the room with his weaving pencil of light. The flying disk of luminance danced along the walls and suddenly stopped, splashing itself in an irregular pool over the motionless form of a man who lay quietly on the floor as if asleep. But the Saint knew that he was dead.

He knelt down and made a rapid examination. The man had been dead about forty-eight hours-there was no trace of a wound, but with his face close to the dead man’s mouth he detected the unmistakable scent of prussic acid. It was as he was rising to go that he accidentally turned over the lapel of the dead man’s coat, and saw the thin silver badge underneath-the silver greyhound of a King’s Messenger.

The Saint came to his feet again rather slowly. The waters were running deeper than he had ever expected, and he felt an odd sense of shock. That slight silver badge had transformed the adventure at one glance from a more or less ordinary if still mysterious criminal problem to an intrigue that might lead anywhere.

As he left the room he heard the man called Jones coming up the stairs again. Peeping over the wooden balustrade, he saw that the man carried a tray-the catering arrangements in that house appeared to be highly commendable, even if nothing else was.

Simon slipped along the gallery without a sound. He opened two more rooms and found them both empty; then he paused outside another and saw a narrow line of light under the door.

He stood still for a few seconds, listening. He heard an occasional faint chink of glass or metal, and the shuffling of slippered feet over the carpet; but there were no voices. Almost mechanically he tried the door, and had one of the biggest surprises of his life when he felt it opening.

The Saint froze up motionless, with a dry electric tingle glissading over the surface of his skin. The way the door gave back under his light touch disintegrated the very ground from under his nebulous theory about the occupant of that room. In the space of four seconds his brain set up, surveyed, and bowled over a series of possible explanations that were chiefly notable for their complete uselessness. In the fifth second that ultimate fact impressed itself unanswerably on his consciousness, and he acknowledged it with a wry shrug and the decimal point of a smile. Theories were all very well in their place; but he had come to the house of Mr. Jones on a quest for irrefutable knowledge, and an item of irrefutable knowledge was awaiting his attention inside that room. It remained for him to go in and get introduced-and that was what he had given up a peaceful evening in his own home to do.