The Saint vs Scotland Yard (30 page)

Patricia was waiting for him there.

“Teal’s on his way,” she said.

“Alone?”

“He was talking to his sleuth-hound when I gave you the
signal.
There wasn’t anyone else with him.”

“Splendid.”

His coat off, the Saint was over at the dressing-table, putting
a
lightning polish on his hair with brush and comb. Under
Patricia’s
eyes, the traces of his recent rough-and-tumble in the
car disappeared
miraculously. In a matter of seconds he was
his old spruce self,
lean and immaculate and alert, a laughing
storm-centre of
hell-for-leather mischief, flipping into a blue velvet smoking-gown… .

“Darling—”

She stopped him, with a hand on his arm. She was quite
serious.

“Listen, boy. I’ve never questioned you before, but this time
there’s no Duke of Fortezza to frame you out.”

“Maybe not.”

“Are you sure there isn’t going to be real trouble?”

“I’m sure there is. For one thing, our beautiful little bolt-
hole has
done its stuff. Never again will it make that sleuth-
hound outside my
perfect alibi. After tonight, Claud Eustace
will know that I’ve
got a spare exit, and he’ll come back with
a search warrant and a
gang of navvies to find it. But we’ll
have had our money’s worth out of it.
Sure, there’s going to be trouble. I asked for it—by special delivery!”

“And what then?”

Simon clapped his hands on her shoulders, smiling the old
Saintly
smile.

“Have you ever known any trouble that I couldn’t get out
of?”
he demanded. “Have you ever seen me beaten?”

She thrilled to his madcap buoyancy—she did not know why.

“Never!”
she cried.

Downstairs, the front door bell rang. The Saint took no
notice. He
held her with his eyes, near to laughing, vibrant
with impetuous audacity,
magnificently mad.

“Is there anything that can put me down?”

“I can’t imagine it.”

He swept her to him and kissed her red lips.

The bell rang again. Simon pointed, with one of his wide
gestures.

“Down there,” he said, “there’s an out-size detective whose
one aim in life is to spike the holiday that’s coming to us. Our own Claud
Eustace Teal, with his mouth full of gum and his
wattles crimsoning, paying us his last
professional call. Let’s go
and swipe him on
the jaw.”

Chapter VII

In the sitting-room, Patricia closed her book and looked
up as Chief Inspector Teal
waddled in. Simon followed the
visitor. It
was inevitable that he should dramatise himself—that
he should extract the last molecule of diversion
from the scene
by playing his part as
strenuously as if life and death de
pended
on it. He was an artist. And that night the zest of his self-appointed task
tingled electrically in all his fibres. Teal,
chewing stolidly through a few seconds’ portentous pause, thought that
he had never seen the Saint so debonair and
dangerous.

“I hope I don’t intrude,” he said at last, heavily.

“Not at all,” murmured the Saint. “You see before you a
scene of
domestic repose. Have some beer?”

Teal took a tight hold on himself. He knew that there was a
toe-to-toe
scrap in front of him, and he wasn’t going to put
himself at a
disadvantage sooner than he could help. The
searing vials of
righteous indignation within him had sim
mered down still
further during the drive from Regent’s Park,
and out of the travail
caution had been born. His purpose
hadn’t weakened in the least, but he
wasn’t going to trip over
his own feet in the attempt to achieve it.
The lights of battle
glittering about in the Saint’s blue eyes
augured a heap of
snags along the route that was to be paddled, and for
once
Chief Inspector Teal was trying to take the hint.

“Coming quietly?” he asked.

The feeler went out, gruffly noncommital; and Simon
smiled.

“You’re expecting me to ask why,” he drawled, “but I
refuse
to do anything that’s expected of me. Besides, I know.”

“How do you know?”

“My spies are everywhere. Sit down, Claud. That’s a collapsi
ble chair
we bought specially for you, and the cigars in that
box explode when you light them. Oh, and
would you mind
taking off your hat?—it
doesn’t go with the wallpaper.”

Teal removed his bowler with savage tenderness. He realised
that he
was going to have an uphill fight to keep the promise he had made to himself.
There was the faintest thickening in
his lethargic voice as he repeated his
question.

“How do you know what I want you for?”

“My dear soul, how else could I have known except by
being with
you when you first conceived the idea of wanting
me?” answered
the Saint blandly.

“So you’re going to admit it really was you I was talking to
at Regent’s
Park?”

“Between ourselves—it was.”

“Got some underground way out of here, haven’t you?”

“The place is a rabbit-warren.”

“And
where’s Perrigo?”

“He’s playing bunny.”

Teal twiddled a button, and his eyelids lowered. The lead
ing tentacles of a nasty cold
sensation were starting to weave
clammily up
his spine. It was something akin to the sensation
experienced by a man who, in the prelude to a
nightmare, has been cavorting happily about in the middle of a bridge over a
fathomless abyss, and who suddenly discovers that
the bridge
has turned into a thin slab
of toffee and the temperature is
rising.

Something was springing a leak. He hadn’t the ghost of a
presentiment
of what the leak was going to be, but the symp
toms of its approach
were bristling all over the situation like
the quills on a
porcupine.

“You helped Perrigo to escape at Regent’s Park, didn’t
you?”
He tried to make his voice sleepier and more bored than it had ever been
before, but the strain clipped minute snippets off the ends of the syllables.
“You’re admitting that you caused
a wilful breach of the
peace by discharging firearms in a
public thoroughfare, and you obstructed
and assaulted the
police in the execution of their duty, and that you became
an
accessory to wilful murder?”

“Between these four walls,” said the Saint, “and in these
trousers, I
cannot tell a lie.”

“Very well.” Teal’s knuckles whitened over the brim of his
hat.
“Templar, I arrest you——
”

“Oh, no,” said the Saint. “Oh, no, Claud, you
don’t.”

The detective tautened up as if he had received a blow. But Simon Templar
wasn’t even looking at him. He was selecting a
cigarette from a box
on the centre table. He flicked it into the
air and caught it
between his lips, with his hands complacently outspread. “My only parlour
trick,” he remarked, changing the
subject.

Teal spoke through his teeth.

“And why?” he flared.

“Only one I ever learnt,” explained the Saint naively.

“Why don’t I arrest you?”

Simon ranged himself side-saddle on the table. He stroked
the cog of
an automatic lighter and put his cigarette in the
flame.

“Because, Claud, what I say to you now, between these four
walls and
in these trousers, and what I’d say in the witness-box, are two things so
totally different you’d hardly believe
they came from the
same rosebud mouth.”

Teal snorted.

“Perjury, eh? I thought something cleverer than that was
coming
from you, Saint.”

“You needn’t be disappointed.”

“Got a speech that you think’ll let you out?”

“I have, Claud. I’ve got a peach of a speech. Put me in the
dock, and
I’ll lie like a newspaper proprietor. Any idea what
that means?”

The detective shrugged.

“That’s your affair,” he grunted. “If you want to be run
for
perjury as well as other things, I’m afraid I can’t stop you.”

Simon leaned forward, his left hand on his hip and his right
hand on his
knee. The deep-blue danger lights were glinting
more brightly than
ever in his eyes, and there was fight in
every line of him. A back-to-the-wall,
buccaneering fight, rol
licking out to damn
the odds.

“Claud, did you think you’d got me at last?”

“I did. And I still think so.”

“Thought that the great day had dawned when my name
was coming
out of the Unfinished Business ledger, and you
were going to sleep nights?”

“I did.”

“That’s too bad, Claud,” said the Saint.

Teal pursed his lips tolerantly, but there were pinpoints of
red
luminance darting about in his gaze.

“I’m still waiting to hear why,” he said flatly.

Simon stood
up.

“O.K.,” he said, and a new indefinable timbre of menace
was pulsing
into his easy drawl. “I’ll tell you why. You asked
for a
showdown. I’ll tell you what you’ve been thinking. There was a feather you
wanted for that hat of yours: you tried all
manner of ways to get
it, but it wasn’t having you. You were
too dumb. And then
you thought you’d got it. Tonight was
your big night. You were going to
collect the Saint on the
most footling break he ever made. I’ve got
away with every
thing from murder downwards under your bloodshot eyes,
but
you were going to run me for stealing fourpence out of the
Bank of
England.”

“That’s not what I said.”

“It goes for what you meant. You get what you asked for, Claud.
Thought I was the World’s Wet Smack, did you? Figured that I was so busy
crashing the mountains that I’d never
have time to put a tab on all the
molehills? Well, you asked
for something. Now would you like to know what
I’ve really
been doing tonight?”

“I’ll hear it.”

“I’ve been entertaining a dozen friends, and I’ll give you
from now
till Kingdom Come to prove it’s a lie!”

The detective glared.

“D’you think I was born yesterday?” he yelped.

“I don’t know,” said the Saint lazily. “Maybe you weren’t
born at all. Maybe you were just dug up. What’s that got to
do with
it?”

Teal choked. His restraint split into small pieces, and the
winds of
his wrath began to twitch the bits out of his grasp,
one by one.

“What’s the idea?” he demanded heatedly; and the Saint
smiled.

“Only the usual alibi, old corpuscle. Like it?”

“Alibi?” Teal rent the words with sadistic violence. “Oh,
yes,
you’ve got an alibi! Six men saw you at Regent’s Park alone,
but you’ve
got twelve men to give you an alibi. And where was
this alibi?”

“In the house that communicates with this one by the secret
passage
you wot of.”

“You aren’t going to change your mind about that passage?”

“Why should I? It may be eccentric, but there’s nothing in
the
Statute Book to say it’s illegal.”

“And that’s the alibi you’re going to try and put over on
me?”

“It’s more,” said the Saint comfortably. “It’s the alibi
that’s
going to
dish you.”

“Is
it?”

Simon dropped his cigarette into an ashtray and put his
hands in
his pockets. He stood in front of the detective, six
feet two inches of hair-trigger
disorder—with a smile.

“Claud,” he said, “you’re missing the opportunity of a
life
time. I’m letting you in on the ground floor. Out of the
kindness of
my heart I’m presenting you with a low-down on
the organisation of a
master criminal that hundreds would
give their ears to get. I’m not doing
it without expense to
myself, either. I’m giving away my labyrinth of secret passages,
which means that if I want to be troublesome again
I shall have to look for a new headquarters. I’m showing you the
works of my emergency alibi, guaranteed to rescue
anyone
from any predicament: there
are four lords, a knight and three
officers
of field rank in it—they’ve taken me years to collect, and now I shall have to
fossick around for a new bunch. But what are trifles like that between friends?
Now be sensible,
Claud. It becomes
increasingly evident that some one is imper
sonating me.”