Follow the Saint (30 page)

It was
Verdean that he had meant to reach. His instinct
had mapped the
campaign with a speed and sureness that
deliberate logic
still had to catch up with. But all the steps
were there. The
atmosphere of the moment showed no
probability of simmering down into
that mellow tranquillity in which heart-to-heart talks are exchanged. The Saint
very much wanted a heart-to-heart talk with somebody, if only to
satisfy a
perfectly normal inquisitiveness concerning what all the commotion was about.
But since Messrs Dolf and Kaskin
had been asking the questions when he arrived,
it appeared
that Mr Verdean might know more of the answers than they
did. Therefore Mr Verdean
looked like the prize catch of the
evening.
Therefore Mr Verdean had to be transported to an
atmosphere where heart-to-heart talking might take place.
It was
as simple as that.

The Saint
gripped Verdean by the arm, and said: “Let’s go
somewhere else,
brother. Your friends are getting rough.”

Verdean
took one step the way the Saint steered him, and then he turned into a
convincing impersonation of a hysteri
cal eel. He squirmed against the
Saint’s grasp with the strength
of panic, and his free arm whirled frantically
in the air. His knuckles hit the Saint’s cheekbone near the eye, sending a
shower of
sparks across Simon’s vision.

Simon
might have stopped to reason with him, to persuasively point out the manifest
arguments in favour of
adjourning to a less hectic neighbourhood; but
he had no
time. No
more shots had been fired, doubtless because it had
been borne in upon the ungodly that they stood a two to one chance of
doing more damage to each other than to him, but
he could hear them blundering in search of him. The Saint
raised
his gun and brought the barrel down vigorously where
he thought Verdean’s head ought to be. Mr Verdean’s head
proved to be in the desired spot; and Simon ducked
a
shoulder under him and lifted him
up as he collapsed.

The actual
delay amounted to less than three seconds. The
ungodly were still
blinded by the dark, but Simon launched
himself at the window with the accuracy of
a homing pigeon.

He wasted
no time fumbling with catches. He hit the
centre of it with his
shoulder—the shoulder over which
Verdean was draped. Verdean, in turn, hit it
with his hams;
and the fastening was not equal to the combined load. It
splintered
away with a sharp crack, and the twin casements
flew open crashingly.
Verdean passed through them into the
night, landing in soft earth with a
soggy thud; and the Saint
went on after him as if he were plunging into
a pool. He
struck ground with his hands, and rolled over in a fairly
graceful somersault as a fourth shot banged out of the room he had just
left.

A gorilla
paw caught him under the arm and helped him
up, and Mr Uniatz’s
voice croaked anxiously in his ear.

“Ya
ain’t stopped anyt’ing, boss ?”

“No.”
Simon grinned in the dark. “They aren’t that good.
Grab hold
of this bird and see if the car’ll start. They probably left the keys in
it.”

He had
located Mr Verdean lying where he had fallen.
Simon raised him by
the slack of his coat and slung him into
Hoppy’s bearlike
clutch, and turned back towards the
window just as the lights of the
living-room went on again
behind the disordered curtains.

He crouched
in the shadow of a bush with his gun raised,
and said in a much
more carrying voice: “I bet I can shoot
my initials on the
face of the first guy who sticks his nose
outside.”

The lights
went out a second time; and there was a con
siderable silence.
The house might have been empty of life.
Behind him, Simon
heard an engine whine into life, drop
back to a subdued purr as the starter disconnected. He
backed
towards the car, his eyes raking the
house frontage relent
lessly, until he
could step on to the running-board.

“Okay,
Hoppy,” he said.

The black
sedan slid forward. Another shot whacked out
behind as he opened
the door and tumbled into the front
seat, but it was yards wide of
usefulness. The headlights sprang into brilliance as they lurched through an
opening
ahead and skidded round in the lane beyond. For the first
time in
several overcrowded minutes, the Saint had leisure
to get out his
cigarette case. The flame of his lighter painted
jubilantly
mephistophelian highlights on his face.

“Let’s
pick up our own car,” he said. “Then we’ll take our prize home and
find out what we’ve won.”

He found
out sooner than that. He only had to fish out
Mr Verdean’s wallet
to find a half-dozen engraved cards that
answered a whole
tumult of questions with staggering
simplicity. They said:

_v

P
ATRICIA
H
OLM
put two lumps of
sugar in her coffee and
stirred it.

“Well,
that’s your story,” she said coldly. “So I suppose
you’re
sticking to it. But what were you doing there in the
first place?”

“I
told you,” said the Saint. “We were looking for Hogsbotham
.”

“Why
should you be looking for him ?”

“Because
he annoyed me. You remember. And we had to
do something to pass
the evening.”

“You
could have gone to a movie.”

“What,
and seen a picture about gangsters? You know
what a demoralizing
influence these pictures have. It might
have put ideas into my
head.”

“Of
course,” she said. “You didn’t have any ideas about
Hogsbotham.”

“Nothing
very definite,” he admitted. “We might have
just wedged his mouth
open and poured him full of gin, and
then pushed him in the stage door of a
leg show, or some
thing like that. Anyway, it didn’t come to anything. We
got
into the wrong house, as you may have gathered. The bloke
who told
us the way said ‘the fourth house’, but it was too
dark to see houses. I
was counting entrances; but I didn’t discover until afterwards that Verdean’s
place has one of
those U-shaped drives, with an in and out gate, so I
counted him twice. Hogsbotham’s sty must have been the next house
on.
Verdean’s house is called ‘The Shutters’, but the paint
was so bad
that I easily took it for “The Snuggery’. After I’d
made the mistake and got in
there, I was more or less a pawn
on the
chessboard of chance. There was obviously some
thing about Verdean that wanted investigating, and the way
things panned out it didn’t look healthy to
investigate him
on the spot. So we
just had to bring him away with us.”

“You
didn’t have to hit him so hard that he’d get con
cussion and lose his
memory.”

Simon
rubbed his chin.

“There’s
certainly something in that, darling. But it was
all very difficult.
It was too dark for me to see just what I was
doing, and I was in
rather a rush. However, it does turn out
to be a bit of a
snag.”

He had
discovered the calamity the night before, after he had unloaded Verdean at his
country house at Weybridge—
he had chosen that secluded lair as a
destination partly
because it was only about five .miles from Chertsey,
partly because it had more elaborate facilities for concealing cap
tives than
his London apartment. The bank manager had
taken an alarmingly long time to recover
consciousness; and
when he eventually came
back to life it was only to vomit and
moan unintelligibly. In between
retchings his eyes wandered
over his
surroundings with a vacant stare into which even
the use of his own name and the reminders of the plight from
which he had been extracted could not bring a
single flicker of response. Simon had dosed him with calomel and seda
tives and put him to bed, hoping that he would be
back to normal in the morning; but he had awakened in very little
better condition, clutching his head painfully and
mumbling
nothing but listless uncomprehending replies to any question he
was asked.

He was
still in bed, giving no trouble but serving abso
lutely no useful
purpose as a source of information; and the Saint gazed out of the window at
the morning sunlight lanc
ing through the birch and pine glade outside
and frowned
ruefully over the consummate irony of the impasse.

“I
might have known there’d be something like this
waiting for me when
you phoned me to come down for
breakfast,” said Patricia stoically. “How soon are you
expect
ing Teal?”
.The Saint chuckled.

“He’ll
probably be sizzling in much sooner than we want
him—a tangle like this
wouldn’t be complete without good
old Claud Eustace. But we’ll worry
about that when it
happens. Meanwhile, we’ve got one consolation. Comrade
Verdean seems to be one of
those birds who stuff everything
in their
pockets until the stitches begin to burst. I’ve been
going over his collection of junk again, and it
tells quite a
story when you put it
together.”

Half of the
breakfast table was taken up with the pot
pourri of relics
which he had extracted from various parts of
the bank manager’s
clothing, now sorted out into neat piles.
Simon waved a spoon
at them.

“Look
them over for yourself, Pat. Nearest to you, you’ve
got a couple of
interesting souvenirs. Hotel bills. One of
‘em is where Mr
Robert Verdean stayed in a modest semiboardinghouse at Eastbourne for the
first ten days of July.
The other one follows straight on for the next five days; only
it’s from a swank sin-palace at Brighton, and
covers the
sojourn of a Mr and Mrs
Jones who seem to have consumed
a
large amount of champagne during their stay. If you had a
low mind like mine, you might begin to jump to a
few con
clusions about Comrade
Verdean’s last vocation.”

“I
could get ideas.”

“Then
the feminine handkerchief—a pretty little senti
mental souvenir, but
rather compromising.”

Patricia
picked it up and sniffed it.

“Night
of Sin,” she said with a slight grimace.

“Is
that what it’s called? I wouldn’t know. But I do know
that it’s the same
smell that the blonde floozie brought in
with her last night.
Her name is Angela Lindsay; and she
has quite a reputation in the trade for
having made suckers
out of a lot of guys who should have been smarter than
Comrade Verdean.”

She nodded.

“What
about the big stack of letters. Are they love-
letters?”

“Not
exactly. They’re bookmaker’s accounts. And the
little book on top of
them isn’t a heart-throb diary—it’s a
betting diary. The name on all of ‘em
is Joseph Mackintyre.
And you’ll remember from an old adventure of
ours that
Comrade
Mackintyre has what you might call an elastic conscience about his bookmaking.
The story is all there,, figured
down to
pennies. Verdean seems to have started on the sixth of July, and he went off
with a bang. By the middle of the
month
he must have wondered why he ever bothered to
work in a bank. I’m not surprised he had champagne every
night at Brighton—it was all free. But the luck
started to
change after that. He had
fewer and fewer winners, and he
went
on plunging more and more heavily. The last entry in
the diary, a fortnight ago, left him nearly five
thousand
pounds in the red. Your first
name doesn’t have to be Sher
lock to
put all those notes together and make a tune.”