The Saint Meets His Match (34 page)

“I wasn’t even trying
to,” she said mildly. “I probably shall one day, but that’ll keep.
Did you see much?”

“Only the
exteriors.”

“Then you must have
seen the police,” she said. “But
you
didn’t offer to lend a hand.”

He smiled.

“I was minding my own
business,” he said. “Your way
out
was easy enough, and I’d never heard you wanted
chaperoning
on these parties. If I’d thought you were
likely
to get in a jam, I’d have horned in; but since I
saw
the policeman waddling along a hundred yards astern
with his suspenders
bursting under the strain, and you skipping away like a young gazelle, I didn’t
see anything to get excited about. I’ve run too many races against the
police myself, in my younger days, to get
seriously wor
ried about any policeman
who’s less than three miles in
the
lead when he starts chasing me. But it does them
good to run, Jill—it shakes up their livers and stops their kidneys
congealing.”

“Did you mean to do
the same thing as I did?”

“Something like.
I’ve been over that room with a small-
toothed comb myself
more than once, and plenty more of the house likewise; but it was only to-night
I got your
inspiration about the desk, and I was
meaning to try
your very own experiment on it.”

“But I thought you said you didn’t see anything
inside
the room?”

“Did I really?”

She looked at him with
something like a grimace.

“Are you still being
difficult?”

“Oh, no… . But let’s revert for a
moment to the absorbing subject of supralapsarianists. Do you really be
lieve they wear barbed-wire underwear and take off
their
socks when they pass an
infralapsarianist in the street?”

She pouted.

“If you don’t mean to
talk turkey,” she said, “you don’t have to give me applesauce. I’m
not a fish.”

“O.K., baby. But how
much of that cache did you get
through before Cullis
butted in?”

She was lighting a
cigarette from the case he handed
her, and she shook
her head ruefully over the match.

“I didn’t get through
any of it,” she said. “It was just
a
waste of time finding it. The door behind me and the
false
top in the desk must have opened just about simul
taneously.
There was a despatch box, and I think there
were one or two odd
papers underneath; that’s all I saw
before
the fun started. It was hearing you outside that
beat me. If that hadn’t made me decide that the tall tim
ber was the best next stop for Little Girl, I’d
probably
have lifted anything I could
see and hoped I’d get something good.”

“It wouldn’t have
helped you much,” said the Saint. “There can’t be many documents in
existence that would
incriminate Cullis, and it
would have been a thousand
to one against your
collecting the right ones in your
-handful.”

“And now,” said
the girl bitterly, “if there ever were any incriminating papers in that
cache, he’ll have them
out and burn them before
he goes to bed tonight. He
won’t take a second chance
with me.”

Simon shrugged.

“Why should he ever
have taken a chance at all?”

“It’s the way of a man
like that,” said Jill. “He may have wanted to gloat over them in
private. Or he may
have just kept them for
“curiosities.”

Simon was steering the
two-seater round the big one
way triangle at Hyde Park
Corners, and he did not answer
at once.

Then he said: “I
wonder what incriminating papers
there might, have
been.”

“So do I.
…
But to-night’s work may put the wind
up him a bit
more, which is something.”

The Saint drove on in silence for a while, and
his next
remark came as a bolt from the
blue.

“Would you object to
being arrested?” he asked.

She looked at him.

“I think I should be
inclined to object,” she said.
“Why?”

“Just part of that
idea I mentioned recently,” said the
Saint.
“I’ll think it out more elaborately overnight, and
tell you the whole scheme to-morrow if I think there’s
anything in it.”

She had to be content with
that. The air of mystery
which had been exasperating her so much of late
had
somehow grown deeper than ever that
night, and he was
very taciturn all
the rest of the way to Chelsea.

He left her at the studio,
and would not even come in
for a last drink and
cigarette before he went home.

“I want to sleep on
it,” he said. “It is now after half-past three. I shall be asleep at
half-past four, and I shall
sleep until half-past four
this afternoon. When I wake up
I shall have something to
come round and tell you.”

For his own convenience
he had decided to spend the
night at the apartment in
Sloane Street instead of going bark to Upper Berkeley Mews. He parked the car
in a
garage close by and walked round to his flat, and, as
he
crossed the road, he happened to glance up at the win
dows. Something that he saw there made him halt in
his stride,
slip his hands in his pockets, and stand there
gazing up thoughtfully at the windows for quite a long
time. Then he went back to the garage and returned
with a couple of spanners from his toolbox.

Standing on the pavement
below, he sent one span
ner hurtling upwards with an accurate aim. It
smashed through one window with a clatter and tinkle of broken
glass, and in a moment the second spanner had
followed
it through another window.

Then Simon stood back and watched two thick
green
ish clouds rolling down towards the
street like a couple
of ghostly
slow-motion waterfalls.

As he stood there, a heavy
hand tapped him on the
shoulder.

” ‘Ere,” said a
voice behind him, “what’s this?”

“Chlorine,” said
the Saint coolly. “A poisonous gas.
I
shouldn’t go any nearer: it would be unhealthy for
you
to get under that stream.”

“I saw you smash
those windows.”

“That must have been
amusing for you,” murmured
the Saint, still gazing thoughtfully upwards.
“But since
they’re my own windows, I
suppose I’m allowed to smash
them.”

The policeman stood beside
him and followed his gaze
upwards.

” ‘Ow did that gas
get there?”

“It was left there,” said the Saint
gently, “by an assis
tant commissioner
of Scotland Yard who has a grudge
against
me. I might have walked right into it, only I
happened to look up at the
windows, and I remembered
leaving them open
last time I went out. They were
closed
before I opened them again with those spanners,
and that made me look hard at them. You could See a
sort of mistiness on the panes, even in this
light.”

The constable turned, and suddenly a gleam of
recog
nition came into his eyes. He peered
at the Saint more closely, and then he released a blasphemous ejaculation.

“I know you!”

“You’re
honoured,” said the Saint affably.

“You’re the gentleman who told me that
funny story
about that very flat the week
before last, and got me the
worst
dressing down I ever ‘ad from the divisional inspec
tor!”

He did not call Simon a
gentleman.

“Am I?” said the
Saint.

“You’ll come along
with me to the station right now.”

Simon turned to him with a
bland smile.

“Why?”

“I shall take you
into custody——
”

“On what
charge?”

“Suspicious loitering, an’ committing a
breach of the
peace.”

“Oh, for the love of
Pete!” said the Saint. “Why not
throw in arson and
bigamy as well?”

But he had to submit to the arrest, because a
humble
constable—especially one with good
reason to remember him—could not be expected to appreciate the same argu
ments as Chief Inspector Teal had followed only
too
clearly.

It took Simon another hour
to obtain his liberty, and
more than another hour
after that to get the last traces
of the gas out of his apartment.

It did not take him
anything like so long to discover
the means by which it had been
introduced. There were
pieces of glass on the
floor which had not come from
either
of the broken windows. He was able to piece a few of them together into the
curved shape which they had
originally had. And in the frame of his
front door, level
with the keyhole of the
Yale lock, had been bored a neat
hole
no thicker than a knitting needle—almost invisible
to the casual glance, but as obvious as the neck on
a
giraffe to the Saint’s practised
eye.

“Another of the old gags that never
fail—sometimes,”
he murmured. “And
glass bulbs of the stuff in an attache
case
ready to heave in. He’d probably just got back from
this job when Jill met him… . Our Mr. Cullis
is wak
ing up. If he hadn’t had to shut
the windows, or I hadn’t
remembered
how I’d left them, I might have been cold
mutton draped on the umbrella stand by this time. Oh,
it’s a great life!”

The first pallor of dawn
was lightening the sky when
he eventually pulled the sheets up to his chin
and closed
his eyes; but even then it
seemed that he was not to have
the
undisturbed rest he so badly needed. He seemed to
have slept hardly ten minutes before he was
roused by the
ring of his front-door
bell; but when he opened protesting
eyes,
his watch told him that it was eleven o’clock.

He tumbled sulphurously out of bed pulled on a
dress
ing gown, and went to the door.

The cherubic visage of Chief Inspector Teal
confront
ed him on the threshold.

“You again?”
sighed the Saint, and turned on his heel
without
another word, leaving the door open behind him.

Teal followed him into the
sitting room.

“Had a thick
night?” inquired Teal sympathetically.
“Sorry
I had to disturb you.”

“You didn’t have
to,” said the Saint. “If you’d looked
twice,
you’d have seen that you only had to push your
tie pin into that hole
beside the lock, and the door would
have
opened as wide as a whale’s yawn. Or are you going to tell me you hadn’t heard,
that one before?”

Teal began to unwrap a piece of chewing gum.

“I hear you’ve had
some trouble.”

“Nice of you to come
round and see if I was all right,”
said
the Saint pleasantly. “As it happens, I’m still in the
best of health. Now do you mind if I go back to bed?”

“You’re not the only man who had trouble
last night,”
said Teal sleepily.

“Been eating too much again?” said
the Saint solici
tously.

“Some men,”
said Teal, “bite off more than they can
chew.”

The Saint sank into a
chair with a sigh.

“Have you been sitting
up reading a detective story,
and then come round to
work off some of the jokes on
me?” he demanded.

“Up late last night,
weren’t you?”

“No,” said the
Saint. “Up early this morning.”

“Enjoy yourself in
Hampstead?”

Simon wrinkled his brow.

“I believe I’ve heard
of that place before,” he said.
“Doesn’t one of the buses go there,
or something?”

Teal chewed stolidly.

“I know roughly what
time you got back here,” he said,
“because
I was able to find that out at Rochester Row.
I
also know what time somebody not quite unknown was
busting
Mr. Cullis’s desk. There were fresh footprints
in
one flower bed and the same footprints over that patch
of
building land at the back. It’s rather a distinctive kind
of mud on that bit of building land. Funny I should
have seen the same kind of mud on the floor boards of
your car. I went to the garage this morning before I
called in here, just to have a look.”