The Saint in Action (21 page)

Nothing was obvious to Mr Teal except that he had got Simon Templar where he wanted him at last. But there was a mocking, buccaneering challenge in the Saint’s voice that could not go unanswered.

“What obvious step?” he asked scorchingly. “I’ve got all the evidence I need–-“

“I’m sorry; I forgot for the moment that you’re only a detective,” Simon apologized. “Let me put it into simple words. My answer to you is that Miss Avery gave me the ten thousand quid by mistake, and I rectified the mistake by immediately sending the money back to her. She’s bound to have received it by now—and I know she’s on the telephone. Since she seems to be the only important witness against me wouldn’t it be rather a good idea to make quite certain that all this beautiful evidence of yours is really in the bag?”

He indicated his own instrument and his meaning was clear enough. But Chief Inspector Teal merely grunted and opened the handcuffs.

“That’s an old one, isn’t it?” he said contemptuously. “While I’m fooling about with the telephone you make your getaway. I’m surprised that you should suggest such a whiskery–-“

He was interrupted by the shrill ringing of the twin bells of the telephone, and the Saint automatically reached for the instrument.

“No, you don’t!” barked Mr Teal. “I’ll take it.”

Simon couldn’t help smiling, for the detective was doing the very thing he had just been sneering at. But the Saint had no desire to make a getaway. He had a hunch that he knew where that call was coming from.

“Hullo!” said Mr Teal in a carefully controlled, Saintly voice.

“Is that Mr Simon Templar?”

“Yes,” replied Mr Teal untruthfully; and he experienced a sudden awful feeling as though somebody had removed his stomach in one piece, leaving a wide open space; for the voice at the other end of the wire belonged unmistakably to Beatrice Avery. Mr Teal went to the movies often enough to know that.

“I owe you a humble apology, Mr Templar, for making such a stupid mistake,” said Beatrice Avery, and Mr Teal heard the words through a kind of infernal tantara, in which the assistant commissioner’s eloquent sniff was the most easily recognizable sound. “Thank you a thousand times for sending the money back so promptly. It was all a silly joke. Please forgive me.”

III

If THERE WAS ANY joke in sight it was beyond the range of Mr Teal’s sense of humour. He stood clinging to the telephone like a drowning man attached to a waterlogged straw. However it had been managed, somehow it had been done again: the Saint had been right in his hands and had slipped through them like a trickle of water. It was impossible, incredible, inhuman, unfair, unjust—but it had happened. Teal’s head buzzed with the petrifying impact of the blow. He swallowed voicelessly, trying to think of something to say or do, but his brain seemed to be taking a temporary siesta. All he could think of was that he wanted to find some peaceful place in which to die. And at the same time he was bitterly aware that the Saint would probably still be capable of making him turn in his grave.

The Saint had enough confirmation of his hunch in the expression on Mr Teal’s stricken face. He took the receiver gently out of the detective’s hand and placed it to his own ear.

“I was half expecting you to ring, fair lady,” he said easily. “If ever we meet again I hope you will make full compensation for that look you gave me–-“

“I just told you, Mr Templar, that it was only a silly joke,” interrupted the girl’s breathless voice. “Please forget all about it.”

“That’s not so easy. If there’s anything I could do to help–-“

“Help?” The girl forced a laugh, and to the Saint it sounded almost hysterical. “Why should I want any help? It was just an idiotic practical joke, and it went wrong. That’s all, Mr Templar. I’m afraid I made a dreadful little fool of myself, and I shall be eternally grateful if you’ll forget the whole thing.”

“Is it as bad as that, darling?” Simon asked softly. “Because–-“

“Thank you so much, Mr Templar. Good-bye.”

Simon slid a cigarette into his mouth as he turned away from the instrument. In the fuliginous silence that followed, as the Saint lighted his smoke, Chief Inspector Teal’s pudgy fingers slowly and laboriously unwrapped a fresh wafer of spearmint. Mr Teal was making a game effort to recover his composure, and it was brutally hard going. He was tied in a knot, and he knew it. It was an old, old knot, and he was familiar with every twist of it. Once again he had believed that triumph was within his grasp, and once again that debonair outlaw had cheated him. And it would happen again and again and again and forever. The knowledge percolated into Mr Teal’s interior like a liquid cannon ball, solidifying into its original shape in the lower region of his stomach. He thrust the wafer of gum into his mouth and glared murderously at the unemotional Sergeant Barrow.

“Well?” he demanded sulphurously. “What are we waiting for?”

“Don’t take it so much to heart, Claud, old dear,” said the Saint, his voice surprisingly innocent of raillery. “Don’t be in a hurry to dash off either. You’re not bursting with anxiety to have that chat with the assistant commissioner, are you ? I’m not going to prod you in the waistcoat–-“

“You’d better not try!” said Mr Teal hoarsely as he shifted his ample paunch well out of range of the Saint’s questing forefinger.

“Have a drink, and let’s get together,” pleaded the Saint. “The mistake you made was natural enough— and if the worst comes to the worst you can always shove the blame onto Sergeant Barrow. You probably will anyhow. Hut that doesn’t make it up to me. The thing which pains me is that you should have mistaken me for this bird of prey who calls himself the Z-Man. A bloke who can cause a girl full of charm and glamour and a hard-boiled detective to frizzle me with a couple of looks like the interior of a sewage incinerator must be pretty epizootic. Tell me, Claud, who is this descendant of Dracula?”

But something else had settled upon Mr Teal’s tortured presence—something oddly stubborn and impenetrable that didn’t fit in with his earlier demonstrations any more than it belonged to the stunned paralysis which had since overcome him. It was as if he had drawn back inside himself and locked a door.

“Forget it,” he said stonily.

“I can’t forget something 1 don’t know. Be reasonable, dear old nitwit. It’s only fair to me–-“

“I don’t know anything about the Z-Man, and nobody else knows anything about the Z-Man,” Teal said deliberately. “I was just trying to be funny. Understand?”

He nodded sleepily, jerked his head towards Sergeant Barrow, and they both left. As the front door gave a vicious slam Hoppy Uniatz reached for the whisky decanter and thrust the neck of it into his capacious mouth.

“Boss,” he said, coming to the surface, “I don’t get nut’n.”

“Except the whisky,” murmured the Saint, rescuing the decanter. “For once, Hoppy, I’m right in your street. I don’t get nut’n either.”

“Why ja let dem bums get away wit’ it?” asked Mr Uniatz discontentedly. “Dey got a noive, bustin’ in like dat. Say, if we knew some politicians we could have dose mugs walkin’ a beat again so fast–-“

Simon was not listening. He was pacing up and down like a tiger, inhaling deeply from his cigarette; and as Mr Uniatz watched him a slow smile of appreciation illuminated his homely face. He could see that his boss was thinking, and, knowing from his own experience what a painful ordeal this was, he relapsed into a sympathetic and respectful silence.

It was clear enough to the Saint that Mr Teal had been disturbed by certain dimensions of his blunder which hadn’t been apparent at first sight. The very existence of the Z-Man, it seemed, had been a closely guarded secret—until Teal had let the cat peep out of the bag and wink at Simon Templar, of all people. Unable to undo the damage which he had done in his first excess of confidence, the detective had taken the only remedy he had left and had escaped from the Saint’s magnetic presence before he could be lured into any more mistakes. But as far as the Saint was concerned he had still left plenty of interesting ideas behind him.

A key turned in the front door, and a moment later Patricia Holm walked into the living room. She looked at the Saint accusingly.

“I met Teal downstairs,” she said. “What are we going to be arrested for now?”

“Nothing,” answered the Saint peacefully. “Claud Eustace thought I was, though, until 1 showed him the error of his ways. Sit down, lass, and listen to the tale of how a perfectly respectable buccaneer was mistaken for the ungodliest of the ungodly.”

Patricia sat down with the patience that she had learned through years of testing it. She had known the Saint too long to be surprised by any story he had to tell; and she knew him too well to be deceived by the transparency of his present calm. There was the unmistakable hell-for-leather lilt in his voice, hinting at battle, murder and sudden death; and when that lilt was there it was as useless to oppose him as it would have been useless to argue with a cyclone.

“We’re going after the Z-Man,” he said dreamily.

“Who’s the Z-Man?”

“I don’t know.”

“That ought to give us a flying start then,” said Patricia kindly. “Do you know what it’s all about, Hoppy?”

“I don’t know nut’n,” answered Mr Uniatz as though he were a phonograph record with a crack in it.

It didn’t take the Saint long to give a full and Tivid recital of what he knew. He was always fond of his own voice, but this time there wasn’t much for him to tell. The girl listened with growing interest; but at the finish, when he asked for her opinion, she had none to offer.

“You still don’t really know anything,” she objected.

“Exactly,” agreed the Saint, unabashed. “It was only by chance that I heard anything about the Z-Man at all—and that was mostly because Claud dropped a brick. It’s just another proof, Pat, old cherub, that my guardian angel never falls down on the job. Something tells me that this game is Big, and I should be lacking in moral duty if I didn’t sit in on it. Observe the reactions of Beatrice Avery and Claud Eustace Teal— two people who have just about as much in common as a gazelle and a hippopotamus. Both of them closed up as enthusiastically as a couple of lively clams. Both of them refused to discuss the subject of the Z-Man. Both of them told me it was all a joke.”

The Saint rose to his feet and lighted another cigarette. His eyes were mere slits of steel.

“A joke!” he repeated. “If you’d seen the look in Beatrice Avery’s eyes, Pat, you’d know how much of a joke the Z-Man is! Teal, too. He was fool enough to think I was the Z-Man, and he didn’t want to put the bracelets on me because he’d have to touch me! By God, this bird must be something that ‘d make Jack the Ripper look like a Salvation Army drummer boy.”

“You still don’t know anything useful,” Patricia said practically. “What are you going to do—advertise for him?”

“I don’t know… . There’s a hell of a lot I don’t know,” answered the Saint, scowling. “I don’t even know what the Z-Man’s racket is—excepting that it must be damned profitable. It’s no good asking Teal for information; he’s in trouble enough already. I can’t go to Beatrice Avery—or at least, if I did she wouldn’t see me or tell me anything.”

“She might see me.”

“She won’t see anybody,” said the Saint. “After what has happened today she’ll be scared as stiff as a corpse. Don’t you get it, darling? She had an appointment with the Z-Man or one of his agents, and she knows she failed to keep it. The Z-Man won’t know that she actually did keep it, and he’ll start turning on the heat. This girl will have extra locks and bolts on her doors–-“

“Didn’t you say that she and I look a bit alike?”

“Only in height and build and fair-headedness and general beauty and all that sort of thing,” replied Simon. “You’re both the same type, that’s all.”

“Then leave it to me,” said Patricia calmly. “I’ll show you what a real detective can do.”

It was the conventional tea hour when she entered the handsome new apartment house in the neighbourhood of Marble Arch known as Parkside Court. Number 21 was on the sixth floor, and Patricia went up in the elevator in spite of the fact that the porter had warned her that Miss Avery had given instructions that she was not at home to anybody. The porter had put it more broadly than this; he had declared that Miss Avery had gone down to Cornwall for a holiday —or up into Aberdeenshire, he wasn’t sure which. But Patricia had looked at him with her sapphire-blue eyes, so remarkably like the Saint’s, and her bewitching smile, and the unfortunate man had dried completely up.

In the carpeted corridor, outside the door of number 21 a man was repairing a vacuum cleaner. Patricia was sorry for him. He had taken the vacuum cleaner apart into so many pieces that it was very doubtful whether it could ever be put together again. Notwithstanding his workmanlike overalls, Patricia had no difficulty in recognizing him as an employee of some private detective agency. He had “ex-policeman” stamped all over him in embossed lettering.

“No good you ringing that bell, miss,” he said gruffly as Patricia placed her finger on the button. “There’s nobody at home. Miss Avery’s gone into the country.”

He had looked at her very hard at first with a somewhat startled expression on his face. Patricia knew why. She went on smiling at him.

“Is there any special way of ringing?” she enquired sweetly. “I don’t think she’ll refuse to see her own sister.”

The man suddenly grinned.

“Well, of course that’s different, miss,” he said hastily. “I thought there was a likeness. Why, when you came round the corner I took you for Miss Avery herself.”

He gave three short rings, a long one and three more short. The door was almost immediately opened by a nervous-looking maid.

“Okay, Bessie, it’s Miss Avery’s sister.”

Patricia walked straight in, just as the Saint might have done, and her complete assurance gave the maid no chance to reply. A moment later, in the artistically lighted living room, she was face to face with Beatrice Avery.

“I’m quite harmless, and I hope you’ll forgive me for getting in by a trick, Miss Avery,” she said directly. She opened her bag and produced a card. “This will tell you who I am—and perhaps you’ll guess why I’m here.”