The Saint vs Scotland Yard (27 page)

“Hold everything, Beautiful,” said the Saint. “The police
are in, and you and I are pulling our freight together.”

He locked the door and strode coolly past the dumbfounded
hoodlum.
Flinging the window wide, he looked down into the
private gardens that
adjoined Gloucester Terrace and the park
beyond. He saw shadows
that moved, and knew that the house
was surrounded. Simon waved a cheery
hand to the cordon
and closed the window again.

He turned back to Perrigo.

“Is there a way over the roof, or a back staircase?” he asked.

The man looked him his underlip jutting.

“What’s the idea, Templar?”

“The idea is to get to hell out of here,” said the Saint
crisply.
“Tell me what you know—and tell it quick!”

Perrigo glowered at him uncertainly, and in the silence they
heard
Teal’s invading contingent arriving profanely on the
landing.

And Perrigo made up his mind.

“There’s no way out,” he said.

He spoke the truth as far as he knew it; but the Saint
laughed.

“Then we’ll go out that way.”

The door-handle rattled, and the woodwork creaked under
an
impacting weight; and Elberman suddenly roused out of
his long retirement.
——

“And vot happens to me?” he squeaked, with his labouriously
cultivated accent scattering to the four winds. “Vot
do I say ven dey com’ in?”

Simon walked to the mantelpiece and picked up a large
globular vase, from which he
removed the artificial flowers.

“You stay here and sing,” he said, and forced the pot down
firmly
over the receiver’s ears.

Outside, Chief Inspector Teal settled his hat and stepped
back a
pace. The casket that had delayed him was at the
bottom of the stairs
then, but if Teal could have had his way
with it would have
been at the bottom of the nethermost
basement in Gehenna.

“All together,” he snapped.

Three brawny shoulders moved as one, and the door splin
tered inwards.

Except for Isadore Elberman, struggling like a maniac to
shake the
porcelain cowl off his head, the room was empty of
humanity.

Teal’s glance scorched round it. There was plenty of furni
ture, but
not a thing that would have given cover to a full-grown man. Then he saw a
communicating door in another
wall, and swore.

He dashed through, leaving his men to deal with the easy prisoner.
Curtains flapping before an open window caught his
eye, and
instinctively he went over and stuck his head out. A
man standing by a
bush below looked up.

“Seen anyone?” Teal shouted.

“No, sir.”

Teal withdrew his head and noticed a second door standing
ajar. He
went through it and found himself back on the
landing he had just
left, and his language became lurid.

Simon Templar and Perrigo stopped for a moment in the
hall.
Perrigo was a tough guy from the Uskides upwards, but
Simon felt personally
responsible for his safety and he took
the responsibility
seriously. There were irrefutable financial
reasons for his solicitude—one
hundred thousand of them. And
for the duration of the fast-travelling
episode he had got
Perrigo’s confidence. He tapped the gangster’s bosom
impres
sively.

“In
case we should get separated, 7, Upper Berkeley Mews is
the address,” he stated. “See you remember it.”

Perrigo gloomed sidelong at him, still fuddled with suspi
cious perplexity.

“I don’t want to see you again,” he growled.

“You will,” said the Saint, and pushed him onwards.

Chief Inspector Teal floundered to the top of the stairs, and
two of his
men pressed close behind him. They looked down
and saw Simon Templar
alone in the hall, hands on hips, with
his back to the door
and an angelic smile on his upturned
face.

“About that rhyme,” said the Saint. “I’ve just thought of
something. Suppose the old colonel ‘went up in smoke for his
gluttony?
Would the Poet Laureate pass it? Would Wilhelmina
Stitch
approve?”

“Get him!” snapped Teal.

The detectives swept down in a bunch.

They saw the Saint open the door, and heard outside the
sharp
pipping of a motor-horn. Patricia Holm was cruising
round. But this they
did not know. The door slammed shut
again, and as a kind of multiple echo
to the slam came the
splattering cackle of an automatic. It fired
four times, and
then Teal got the door open.

He faced a considerable volume of pitchy darkness, out of
which
spoke the voice of one of the men he had posted to
guard the courtyard.

“I’m
sorry, sir—they got away.”

“What happened?”

“Shot out the lights and slipped us in the dark, sir.” Way
down the
road, a horn tooted seven times, derisively.

Chapter IV

A tinge of old beetroot suffused Mr. Teal’s rubicund
complexion.

To say that his goat was completely and omnipotently got
conveys
nothing at all. In the last ten minutes his goat had
been utterly
annihilated, and the remains spirited away to the exact point in space where
(so Einstein says) eternity changes
its socks and starts back on the
return journey. He was as
comprehensively de-goated as a man can be.

With a foaming cauldron of fury bubbling just below his
collar, he
stood and watched his two outposts come up the
steps towards him.

“Did you see Perrigo?” he rasped.

“Yes, sir. He came out first, and waited. I didn’t recognise
him at
once—thought it was one of our own men. Then another bloke came out
          
“

Teal turned on the men behind him.

“And what are you loafing about here for?” he stormed.
“D’you
want your nannies to hold your hands when you go
out at night? Get
after them!”

He left the pursuit in their hands, and fumed back up the
stairs.
There he found a bedraggled Isadore Elberman, re
leased at last from
his eccentric headgear, in charge of a plain-
clothes constable.
The receiver was as loquacious as Teal al
lowed him to be.

“You can’t hold me for nothing, Mr. Teal. Those men
attacked
me and tied me up. You saw how I was fixed when
you came in.”

“I know all about you,” said Teal unpleasantly.

Elberman blinked rapidly.

“Now you listen and I tell you somethings, Mr. Teal. I don’t
like
Perrigo. He’s stole some tickets and never pay me for
them, nor nothing else
vot he owes me. You catch him and I’ll
tell you all about
him. I’m an innocent man vot’s been
robbed. Now I’ll tell you.”

“You can tell the magistrate in the morning,” said Teal.

He was in no mood to listen patiently to anyone. His
temper had
been jagged over with a cross-cut saw. Simon
Templar had tweaked
his nose for the umpteenth time, lit
erally and figuratively; and the
realisation of it was making
Teal’s palms sweat. It mattered nothing that
a warrant to
arrest the Saint could be obtained for the trouble of
asking for
it, and that the Saint could probably be located in
fifteen
minutes by the elementary process of going to No. 7, Upper
Berkeley
Mews and ringing the bell. Time after time Teal had thought his task was just
as easy, and time after time he had
found a flourishing colony of
bluebottles using his ointment
for a breeding-ground. It had gone on until
Teal was past
feeling the faintest tremor of optimism over anything
less than
a capture of the Saint red-handed, with stereoscopic
cameras,
trained on the scene and a board of bishops standing by
for
witnesses. And something dimly approaching that ideal had
offered
itself that night—only to slither through his fingers and
flip him in
the eye with its departing tail.

He had no real enthusiasm for the arrest of Elberman, and even his
interest in Perrigo had waned. The Saint filled his
horizon to the
exclusion of everything else. With a morose
detachment he watched
Elberman removed in a taxi, and
stayed on in the same spirit to receive the
reports of the men
who had been down the road. These were not helpful.

“We went as far as Euston Road in the squad car, sir, but it
wasn’t any
use. They had too long a start.”

Teal had expected no better. He gave his subordinates one
crowded
minute of the caustic edge of his tongue for not having got on the job more
promptly, and was mad with
himself for doing it. Then he dismissed them.

“And give my love to your Divisional Inspector,” he said.
“Tell
him I like his officers. And when I want some dumbbell
exercise, I’ll send
for you again.”

He made his exit on that line, and was sourly aware that
their
surprised and reproachful glances followed him out of
the house.

He realised that the Saint had got under his skin more
deeply than
he knew. Never in any ordinary circumstances
could the stoical and
even-tempered Mr. Teal have been
moved to pass the buck to his helpless
underlings in such a
fashion.

And Teal didn’t care. As he climbed into his car, the broiling crucibles
of fury within him were simmering down to a
steady white-hot
calidity of purpose. By the time he got to
grips with his man
again, the Saint would probably have an
other peck of dust
ready to throw in his eyes, some new
smooth piece of hokum laid out for him
to skate over. Teal
was prepared for it. It made no difference to him. His
whole
universe at that moment comprised but one ambition—to
hound Simon
Templar into a corner from which there could
be no escape, corral
him there, and proceed to baste into him
every form of discourtesy and dolour
permitted by the laws of
England. And he was
going to do it if it took him forty years
and travelled him four thousand miles.

Some of which it did-—-but this prophecy was hidden from
him.

The most inexorably wrathful detective in the British Isles, Chief
Inspector Claud Eustace Teal, stepped on the gas and
walloped into the second lap of his
odyssey, heading for Upper
Berkeley Mews.

Chapter V

Simon Templar garaged his gat in a side pocket and
leapt into
the darkness. The men outside were on their toes
for concerted action,
but the dousing of the lights beat them.
Simon swerved nimbly
round the noises of their blundering,
and sprinted for the square patch of
twilight that indicated
the way out of the courtyard.

His fingers hooked on the brickwork at the side of the
opening as
he reached it, and he fetched round into the road on a tight hair-pin turn that
brought him up with his back to
the wall outside. A yard or two to his left
he saw the parking
lights of a car gliding along the kerb.

Then Perrigo came plunging out. He skidded round the
same turn
and picked up his stride again without a pause.
Simon shot off the
wall and closed alongside him. He grabbed
Perrigo’s arm.

“The car—you won’t make it on foot!”

He sprang for the running-board as he spoke—Patricia was
keeping
level, with the Hirondel dawdling easily along in
second. Perrigo looked
round hesitantly, making the pace flat-footed. Then he also hauled himself
aboard.

“Right away, lass,” said the Saint.

The great car surged forward, sprawling Perrigo head over
heels on
to the cushions of the back seat. Patricia changed up
without a click, and
Simon swung himself lightly over into
place beside her.