Patricia’s
sweet face was solemn with thought.
“Those
two men,” she said. “Dolf and Kaskin. You knew
them.
What’s their racket?”
“Morrie was one of Snake
Canning’s sparetime boys once.
He’s
dangerous. Quite a sadist, in his nasty little way. You could hire him for
anything up to murder, at a price; but he
really enjoys his work. Kaskin
has more brains, though. He’s
more
versatile. Confidence work, the old badger game, living off women, protection
rackets—he’s had a dab at all of them.
He’s
worked around racetracks quite a bit, too, doping
horses and intimidating jockeys and bookmakers and so
forth, which makes him an easy link
with Mackintyre. His last stretch was for manslaughter. But bank robbery is
quite
a fancy flight even for him. He
must have been getting
ideas.”
Patricia’s
eyes turned slowly towards the morning paper
in which the holdup
at Staines still had a place in the head
lines.
“You
mean you think——
”
“I
think our guardian angel is still trying to take care of
us,”
said the Saint; and all the old impenitent mischief that
she knew too well was
shimmering at the edges of his smile.
“If
only we knew a cure for amnesia, I think we could be
fifteen thousand pounds richer before bedtime. Add
it up
for yourself while I take
another look at the patient.”
He got up
from the table and went through to the study
which adjoined the
dining-room. It was a rather small, com
fortably untidy room,
and the greater part of its walls were
lined with built-in bookshelves. When he
went in, one tier of shelving about two feet wide stood open like a door;
beyond
it, there appeared to be a narrow
passage. The passage was actually a tiny cell, artificially lighted and
windowless, but
perfectly ventilated
through a grating that connected with the
air-conditioning system which served the rest of the house.
The cell was no more than a broad gap between the
solid
walls of the room on either
side of it, so ingeniously squeezed
into
the architecture of the house that it would have taken a
clever surveyor many hours of work with a footrule
to
discover its existence. It had very
little more than enough room for the cot, in which Verdean lay, and the table
and chair at which Hoppy Uniatz was dawdling over his break
fast—if any
meal which ended after noon, and was washed
down
with a bottle of Scotch whisky, could get by with that
name.
Simon
stood just inside the opening and glanced over the
scene.
“Any
luck yet?” he asked.
Mr Uniatz
shook his head.
“De
guy is cuckoo, boss. I even try to give him a drink, an’
he don’t
want it. He t’rows it up like it might be perzon.”
He
mentioned this with the weighty reluctance of a
psychiatrist adducing
the ultimate evidence of dementia
praecox.
Simon
squeezed his way through and slipped a thermo
meter into the
patient’s mouth. He held Verdean’s wrist with
sensitive fingers.
“Don’t
you want to get up, Mr Verdean ?”
The bank
manager gazed at him expressionlessly.
“You
don’t want to be late at the bank, do you ?” said the
Saint.
“You might lose your job.”
“What
bank ?” Verdean asked.
“You
know. The one that was robbed.”
“I
don’t know. Where am I ?”
“You’re
safe now. Kaskin is looking for you, but he won’t
find you.”
“Kaskin,”
Verdean repeated. His face was blank, idiotic.
“Is he someone I
know?”
“You remember Angela,
don’t you ?” said the Saint. “She
wants
to see you.”
Verdean
rolled his head on the pillows.
“I
don’t know. Who are all these people ? I don’t want to
see anyone. My head’s
splitting. I want to go to sleep.”
His eyes
closed under painfully wrinkled brows.
Simon let
his wrist fall. He took out the thermometer,
read it, and sidled
back to the door. Patricia was standing
there.
“No
change?” she said; and the Saint shrugged.
“His
temperature’s practically normal, but his pulse is
high. God alone knows
how long it may take him to get his
memory back. He could stay like this
for a week; or it might
even be years. You never can tell… I’m
beginning to think I may have been a bit too hasty with my rescuing-hero act. I
ought to have let Kaskin and Dolf work him over a bit
longer, and heard
what he had to tell them before I butted
in.”
Patricia
shook her head.
“You
know you couldn’t have done that.”
“I
know.” The Saint made a wryly philosophic face.
“That’s the worst
of trying to be a buccaneer with a better
nature. But it would
have saved the hell of a lot of trouble,
just the same. As it
is, even if he does recover his memory,
we’re going to have to
do something exciting ourselves to
make him open up. Now, if we could only
swat him on the
head in the opposite direction and knock his memory back
again——
”
He broke
off abruptly, his eyes fixed intently on a corner of
the room; but
Patricia knew that he was not seeing it. She looked at him with an involuntary
tightening in her chest.
Her ears had not been quick enough to catch
the first swish
of tyres on the gravel drive which had cut off what he
was
saying, but she was able to hear the car outside coming to a
stop.
The Saint
did not move. He seemed to be waiting, like a
watchdog holding its
bark while it tried to identify a stray
sound that had pricked its ears. In
another moment she knew
what he had been
waiting for.
The
unmistakable limping steps of Orace, Simon Temp
lar’s oldest and most
devoted retainer, came through the hall
from the direction of
the kitchen and paused outside the
study.
“It’s
that there detective agyne, sir,” he said in a fierce whisper. “I
seen ‘im fru the winder. Shall I chuck ‘im aht?”
“No,
let him in,” said the Saint quietly. “But give me a
couple of
seconds first.”
He drew Patricia quickly out of
the secret cell, and closed
the study door.
His lips were flirting with the wraith of a
Saintly smile, and only
Patricia would have seen the steel in
his
blue eyes.
“What
a prophet you are, darling,” he said.
He swung
the open strip of bookcase back into place. It
closed silently, on
delicately balanced hinges, filling the
aperture in the wall
without a visible crack. He moved one
of the shelves to lock it. Then he closed a drawer of his
desk
which had been left open, and there was
the faint click of another lock taking hold. Only then did he open the door to
the hall—and left it open. And with that, a master lock,
electrically
operated, took control. Even with the knowledge
of the other two operations, nothing short of pickaxes and dynamite
could open the secret room when the study door
was open; and one of the Saint’s best bets was that no one
who was searching the house would be likely to
make a
point of shutting it.
He emerged
into the hall just as Chief Inspector Teal’s
official boots stomped
wrathfully over the threshold. The
detective saw him as soon as he
appeared, and the heightened
colour in his chubby face flared up with the
perilous surge
of his blood pressure. He took a lurching step forward
with
one quivering forefinger thrust out ahead of him like a
spear.
“You
Saint!” he bellowed. “I want you!”
The Saint smiled at him,
carefree and incredibly debonair.
“Why,
hullo, Claud, old gumboil,” he murmured genially. “You seem to be
excited about something. Come in and tell
me all about
it.”
VI
S
IMON TEMPLAR
had never
actually been followed into his
living-room by an irate mastodon; but if that
remarkable
experience was ever to befall him in the future, he would
have had an excellent standard with which to compare it.
The
imitation, as rendered by Chief Inspector Claud Eustace
Teal, was an impressive
performance, but it seemed to leave
the Saint
singularly unconcerned. He waved towards one
armchair and deposited himself in another, reaching for
cigarette box and ashtray.
“Make yourself at
home,” he invited affably. “Things have
been pretty dull lately, as I said last night. What can I do to help you
?”
Mr Teal
gritted his teeth over a lump of chewing gum
with a barbarity
which suggested that he found it an inferior
substitute for the
Saint’s jugular vein. Why he should have
followed the Saint at all in the first
place was a belated ques
tion that was doing
nothing to improve his temper. He could find no more satisfactory explanation
than that the Saint had
simply turned
and calmly led the way, and he could hardly
be expect to go on talking to an empty hall. But in the act of
following, he felt that he had already lost a
subtle point. It was one of those smoothly infuriating tricks of the Saint to
put him at a disadvantage which never failed to
lash Mr
Teal’s unstable temper to
the point where he felt as if he were
being
garrotted with his own collar.
And on this
occasion, out of all others, he must control
himself. He had no
need to get angry. He held all the aces.
He had everything that he had prayed for
in the long sections
of his career that had
been consecrated to the heartbreaking
task of trying to lay the Saint by
the heels. He must not make
any mistakes. He
must not let himself be baited into any
more of those unbelievable indiscretions that had wrecked such
opportunities in the past, and that made him sweat all over as soon as he had
escaped from the Saint’s maddening presence. He told, himself so, over and over
again, clinging
to all the tatters of
his self restraint with the doggedness of a
drowning man. He glared at the Saint with an effort of
impassivity that made the muscles of his face ache.
“You
can help me by taking a trip to the police station
with me,” he
said. “Before you go any further, it’s my duty
to warn you that
you’re under arrest. And I’ve got all the
evidence I need to
keep you there!”
“Of
course you have, Claud,” said the Saint soothingly.
“Haven’t you had it every
time you’ve arrested me ? But now
that you’ve
got that off your chest, would it be frightfully
tactless if I asked you what I’m supposed to have done ?”
“Last
night,” Teal said, grinding his words out under fear
ful compression, “a Mr
Robert Verdean, the manager of the City and Continental Bank’s branch at
Staines, was visited at
his home in Chertsey
by two men. They tied up his servant
in
the kitchen, and went on to find him in the living-room. The maid’s description
of them makes them sound like the
two
men who held up the same bank that morning. They went into the living-room and
turned on the radio.”
“How
very odd,” said the Saint. “I suppose they were
trying to
console Comrade Verdean for having his bank
robbed. But what has
that got to do with me? Or do you
think I was one of them ?”
“Shortly
afterwards,” Teal went on, ignoring the interruption, “two other men
entered the kitchen with handkerchiefs tied over their faces. One of them was
about your
height and build. The maid heard this one address the
other
one as ‘Hoppy’.”
Simon
nodded perfunctorily.
“Yes,”
he said; and then his eyebrows rose. “My God,
Claud, that’s funny!
Of course, you’re thinking—
”