“Yes,
of course,” she said enthusiastically, and went
towards the telephone
in the study.
Something
awful, something terrifying, something freezing and paralysing, damp, chilly,
appalling, descended over
Chief Inspector Teal like a glacial cascade.
With the very
edge
of the precipice crumbling under his toes, his eyes were
opened. The delirium of fury that had swept him
along so
far coagulated sickeningly
within him. Cold, pitiless, ines
capable
facts hammered their bitter way through into the
turmoil of his brain.
He was too shocked at the moment even
to
feel the anguish of despair. His mind shuddered under the
impact of a
new kind of panic. He took a frantic step forward
—a step that was, in its own way, the crossing of a harrowing
Rubicon.
“Wait
a minute,” he stammered hoarsely.
VII
F
IFTEEN MINUTES
later,
Simon Templar stood on the front
steps and watched the police car crawl out of
the drive
with its cargo of incarnate woe. He felt Patricia’s
fingers slide
into his hand, and turned to smile at her.
“So
far, so good,” he said thoughtfully. “But only so
far.”
“I
thought you were joking, at breakfast,” she said. “How
did he get here
so soon ?”
He
shrugged.
“That wasn’t difficult. I
suppose he stayed down at Staines
last night;
and the Chertsey police would have phoned over
about the Verdean
business first thing this morning, knowing
that
he was the manager of the bank that had been held up.
Claud must have shot off on the scent like a
prize greyhound,
and I’m afraid I can
sympathize with the way he must have felt when he arrived here.”
“Well,
we’re still alive,” she said hopefully. “You got rid
of him
again.”
“Only
because his nerves are getting a bit shaky from all
the times I’ve
slipped through his fingers, and he’s so scared
of being made a fool
of again that he daren’t move now
without a cast-iron case, and I was
able to pick a few awk
ward holes in this one. But don’t begin
thinking we’ve got
rid of him for keeps. He’s just gone away now to see if
he can stop up the holes again and put some more iron in the evidence, and he’s
sore enough to work overtime at it. He’s
going to be three times
as dangerous from now on. Worse
than that, he’s not so dumb that he isn’t
going to put two and
two together about all this commotion around
Verdean
coming right on top of the robbery. You can bet the Crown
Jewels to a
showgirl’s virtue that he’s already figured out
that Verdean was mixed
up in it in some way. While we’re
stuck with Verdean, and Verdean is
stuck with amnesia.”
The Saint closed the front door with sombre finality. “Which
is the hell of a layout from any angle,” he
said. “Tell Orace
to bring me a
large mug of beer, darling, because I think I am going to have a
headache.”
His
headache lasted through a lunch which Orace indig
nantly served even
later than he had served breakfast, but it
brought forth very
little to justify itself. He had gone over
the facts at his
disposal until he was sick of them, and they
fitted together with a
complete and sharply focused deductive picture that Sherlock Holmes himself
could not have
improved on, without a hiatus or a loose end anywhere—
only the
picture merely showed a plump rabbit-faced man
slinking off with
fifteen thousand pounds in a bag, and neg
lected to show where
he went with it. Which was the one
detail in which Simon Templar was most urgently interested.
He was always on the side of the angels, he told himself, but
he had to remember that sanctity had its own
overhead to
meet.
Verdean
showed no improvement in the afternoon. Towards five o’clock the Saint had a
flash of inspiration, and put in a long-distance call to a friend in
Wolverhampton.
“Dr
Turner won’t be back till tomorrow morning, and
I’m afraid I don’t
know how to reach him,” said the voice at
the other end of the
wire; and the flash flickered and died
out at the sound.
“But I can give you Dr Young’s number——”
“I am
not having a baby,” said the Saint coldly, and hung
up.
He leaned
back in his chair and said, quietly and intensely:
“God damn.”
“You
should complain,” said Patricia. “You Mormon.”
She had
entered the study from the hall, and closed the
door again behind
her. The Saint looked up from under
mildly interrogative brows.
“I
knew you adored me,” he said, “but you have an
original
line of endearing epithets. What’s the origin of this
one?”
“Blonde,”
she said, “and voluptuous in a careful way.
Mushy lips and the-old-baloney eyes. I’ll
bet she wears black
lace undies and cuddles
like a kitten. She hasn’t brought the
baby
with her, but she’s probably got a picture of it.”
The Saint
straightened.
“Not
Angela?” he ventured breathlessly.
“I’m
not so intimate with her,” said Patricia primly. “But she gave the
name of Miss Lindsay. You ought to recognize
your own past when it
catches up with you.”
Simon stood
up slowly. He glanced at the closed section of the bookcase, beyond which was
the secret room where
Hoppy Uniatz was still keeping watch over Mr
Verdean and
a case
of Vat 69; and his eyes were suddenly filled with an
unholy peace.
“I do
not recognize her, darling, now I think about it,” he
said.
“This is the one who had the twins.” He gripped her
arm, and
his smile wavered over her in a flicker of ghostly
excitement. “I
ought to have known that she’d catch up with
me. And I think this
is the break I’ve been waiting for all
day….”
He went
into the living-room with a new quickness in his
step and a new
exhilaration sliding along his nerves. Now
that this new angle
had developed, he was amazed that he
had not been expecting it from the
beginning. He had con
sidered every other likely eventuality, but
not this one; and yet this was the most obvious one of all. Kaskin and Dolf
knew who
he was, and some of his addresses were to be
found in various
directories that were at the disposal of any
one who could read: it
was not seriously plausible that after the night before they would decide to
give up their loot and
go away and forget about it, and once they had
made up
their minds to attempt a comeback it could only have been a
matter of time before they
looked for him in Weybridge. The
only thing
he might not have anticipated was that they
would send Angela Lindsay in to open the interview. That
was a twist which showed a degree of circumspection
that
made Simon Templar greet her
with more than ordinary
watchfulness.
“Angela,
darling!” he murmured with an air of pleased
surprise. “I
never thought I should see you in these rural
parts. When did you
decide to study bird life in the suburbs ?”
“It
came over me suddenly, last night,” she said. “I began
to realize
that I’d missed something.”
His eyes
were quizzically sympathetic.
“You
shouldn’t be too discouraged. I don’t think you missed it by more than a couple
of inches.”
“Perhaps
not. But a miss is——
”
“I
know. As good as in the bush.”
“Exactly.”
He smiled
at her, and offered the cigarette box. She took
one, and he gave her
a light. His movements and his tone of
voice were almost
glisteningly smooth with exaggerated
elegance. He was enjoying his act
immensely.
“A
drink?” he suggested; but she shook her head.
“It
mightn’t be very good for me, so I won’t risk it.
Besides, I want to try
and make a good impression.”
He was
studying her more critically than he had been able
to the night before,
and it seemed to him that Patricia’s
description of her was a little less
than absolutely fair. She
had one of those modern streamlined figures
that look boyish
until
they are examined closely, when they prove to have the
same fundamental curves that grandma used to have. Her
mouth and eyes were effective enough, even if the
effect was
deplorable from a moral
standpoint. And although it was
true
that even a comparatively unworldly observer would
scarcely have
hesitated for a moment over placing her in her
correct category, it was also very definitely true that if all the
other members of that category had looked like
her, Mr
Ebenezer Hogsbotham would have
found himself burning a
very solitary
candle in a jubilantly naughty world.
The Saint went on looking at
her with amiable amusement
at the imaginative
vistas opened up by the train of thought.
He said: “You must have made quite an impression on
Comrade Verdean. And you drank champagne with him
at
Brighton.”
She put
her cigarette to her lips and drew lightly at it while she gazed at him for a
second or two in silence. Her face was perfectly composed, but her eyes were
fractionally narrowed.
“I’ll
give you that one,” she said at length. “We’ve been
wondering
just how much you really knew. Would you care
to tell me the rest,
or would that be asking too much?”
“Why,
of course,” said the Saint obligingly. “If you’re interested. It
isn’t as if I’d be telling you anything you don’t
know already.”
He sat
down and stretched out his long legs. He looked
at the ceiling. He was bluffing, but he
felt sure enough of his
ground.
“Kaskin
and Dolf picked up Verdean on his holiday at
Eastbourne,” he
said. “Kaskin can make himself easy to like when he wants to—it’s his
stock in trade. They threw you in
for an added attraction. Verdean fell for it all. He was
having
a swell time with a bunch of good
fellows. And you were
fairly swooning into his manly arms. It made him
feel grand,
and a little bit dizzy. He had to
live up to it. Kaskin was a
sporty
gent, and Verdean was ready to show that he was a
sporty gent too. They got him to backing horses,
and he
always backed winners. Money
poured into his lap. He felt
even
grander. It went to his head—where it was meant to go.
He left his boardinghouse, and pranced off to
Brighton with
you on a wild and
gorgeous jag.”
Simon reached for a cigarette.
“Then,
the setback,” he went on. “You had expensive
tastes, and you
expected him to go on being a good fellow
and a sporty gent.
But that looked easy. There was always
money in the geegees, with Kaskin’s expert
assistance. So he
thought. Only something
went haywire. The certainties
didn’t
win. But the next one would always get it back.
Verdean began to plunge. He got wilder and wilder as he
lost more
and more. And he couldn’t stop. He was infatuated
with you, scared stiff of losing you. He lost more money than
he had of his own. He started embezzling a little,
maybe.
Anyway, he was in the cart. He
owed more money than he
could hope to
pay. Then Kaskin and Dolf started to get
tough. They told him how he could pay off his debt, and
make a profit as well. There was plenty of money
in the bank
every week, and it would be very easy to stage a holdup and
get away with it if he was co-operating. Kaskin and
Dolf would do the job and take all the risk, and all he had to do was to give
them the layout and make everything easy for them. He’d never be suspected
himself, and he’d get his cut
afterwards.
But if he didn’t string along—well, someone
might have to tell the head office about him. Verdean knew
well enough what happens to bank managers who get
into debt, particularly over gambling. He could either play ball
or go down the drain. So he said he’d play ball.
Am I right ?”