The Saint Closes the Case (3 page)

“The true details of the case,”
wrote the
Daily Record,
some days later, “are likely to remain a
mystery for ever, un
less the Saint should one day elect to come
out into the open
and elucidate them. Until then the curiosity of the public
must
be satisfied with the findings of the committee of Scotland
Yard
experts who have been investigating the affair—‘that in
some way
the Saint succeeded in so tampering with the fuses
of the Mills Bombs
with which Golter intended to attempt
the life of the Crown Prince, that
they exploded the moment
he released the spring handle, thereby
blowing him to
pieces… .’

“Whatever the opinions which may be
expressed concern
ing the arrogance of this gentleman who presumes to take
the
law into his own lawless hands, it cannot be denied that in
this case
his intervention undoubtedly saved the life of our royal guest; and few will be
found to deny that justice was
done—though perhaps it was justice of too
poetic a character
to be generally accepted as a precedent… .”

With this sensational climax, which put the
name of the
Saint on the lips of every man and woman in the civilised
world, came
the end of a clearly defined chapter in his history.

The sensation died down, as the most amazing
sensations
will die down for lack of re-stimulation. In an
open letter
which was published in every newspaper throughout Europe,
the Crown
Prince offered his thanks to the unknown, and promised that the debt should not
be forgotten if at any time
the Saint should stand in need of help from
high places. The
British Government followed almost immediately with the
offer of a free pardon for all past offences on condition that
the Saint
revealed himself and took an oath to turn his energy
and ingenuity into
more legitimate channels. The only answer was a considered letter of
acknowledgment and regretful refusal, posted simultaneously to all the leading
news-agencies.

“Unfortunately,” wrote the Saint,
“I am convinced, and my
friends with me, that for us to disband at the
very moment
when our campaign is beginning to justify itself in the
crime
statistics of London—and (which is even more important) in
those more subtle offences
against the moral code about which
there can
be no statistics—would be an act of indefensible
cowardice on my part. We cannot be tempted by the mere
promise of safety for ourselves to betray the
motive which
brought us together. The
game is more than the player of the
game.
… Also, speaking for myself, I should find a respect
able life intolerably dull. It isn’t easy to get
out of the rut
these days: you have to
be a rebel, and you’re more likely to
end
up in Wormwood Scrubs than Westminster Abbey. But I
believe, as I have never believed anything before,
that I am
on the right road. The
things of value are the common,
primitive
things. Justice is good—when it’s done fanatically.
Fighting is good—when the thing you fight for is simple
and
sane and you love it. And danger
is good—it wakes you up,
and makes you live ten times more keenly. And
vulgar swashbuckling may easily be the best of all—because it stands for a
magnificent belief in all those things, a superb
faith in the
glamour that civilisation
is trying to sneer at as a delusion
and
a snare.
…
As long as the ludicrous laws of this country
refuse me these, I shall continue to set those laws at defiance.
The pleasure of applying my own treatment to the
human
sores whose persistent
festering offends me is one which I will
not be denied… .”

And yet, strangely enough, an eagerly
expectant public
waited in vain for the Saint to follow up this astonishing
man
ifesto. But day after day went by, and still he held his hand;
so that
those who had walked softly, wondering when the un
canny omniscience of
the Unknown would find them out,
began to lift up their heads again and boast
themselves with
increasing assurance, saying that the Saint was afraid.

A fortnight grew into a month, and the Saint
was rapidly
passing into something like a dim legend of bygone ages.

And then, one afternoon in June, yelling
newsboys spread a
special edition of the
Evening Record
through the
streets of
London, and men and women stood in impatient arid excited
groups on the pavements and read the most astounding story
of the
Saint that had ever been given to the Press.

It was the story that is told again here, as
it has already been
retold, by now, half a hundred times. But now it is taken
from
a different and more intimate angle, and some details are
shown
which have not been told before.

It is the story of how Simon Templar, known
to many as
the Saint (plausibly from his initials, but more probably
from
his saintly way of doing the most unsaintly things), came by chance upon
a thread which led him to the most amazing ad
venture of his
career. And it is also the story of Norman Kent,
who was his friend,
and how at one moment in that adventure
he held the fate of
two nations, if not of all Europe, in his
hands; how he
accounted for that stewardship; and how, one
quiet summer evening,
in a house by the Thames, with no melodrama and no heroics, he fought and died
for an idea.

1. How Simon Templar went for a drive,

and saw a strange sight

Simon Templar read newspapers rarely, and when
he did read
them he skimmed through the pages as quickly as possible
and
gleaned information with a hurried eye. Most of the matter
offered in
return for his penny was wasted on him. He was not
in the least interested
in politics; the announcement that the
wife of a Walthamstow
printer had given birth to quadruplets
found him unmoved;
articles such as “A Man’s Place is in the
Home” (by
Anastasia Gowk, the brilliant authoress of
Passion in Pimlico)
left him
completely cold. But a quarter-
column, with photograph, in a paper he bought
one evening
for the racing results chanced to catch his roving gaze,
and
roused a very faint flicker of attention.

Two coincidences led him from that idly
assimilated item
of news to a red-hot scent, the fascination of which for
him
was anything but casual.

The first came the next day, when, finding
himself at Ludgate
Circus towards one o’clock, it occurred to him to call
in
at the Press Club in the hope of finding someone he knew. He
found Barney Malone, of the
Clarion,
and was promptly invited
to lunch, which
was exactly what he had been looking for. The
Saint had an ingrained prejudice against lunching alone.

Conversation remained general throughout the
meal, except
for one bright interlude.

“I suppose there’s nothing new about the
Saint?” asked
Simon innocently, and Barney Malone shook his head.

“He seems to have gone out of business.”

“I’m only taking a rest,” Simon
assured him. “After the
calm, the storm. You wait for the next scoop.”

Simon Templar always insisted on speaking of
the Saint as “I”—as if he himself was that disreputable outlaw.
Barney
Malone, for
all his familiarity with Simon’s eccentric sense of
humour, was inclined to regard this affectation as a particu
larly aimless pleasantry.

It was half an hour later, over coffee, that
the Saint recalled
the quarter-column which had attracted his attention, and
asked a question about it.

“You may be quite frank with your Uncle
Simon,” he said.
“He knows all the tricks of the trade,
and you won’t disap
point him a bit if you tell him that the chief sub-editor
made
it up himself to fill the space at the last moment.” Malone grinned.

“Funnily enough, you’re wrong. These
scientific discoveries
you read about under scare headlines are
usually stunt stuff;
but if you weren’t so uneducated you’d have
heard of K. B.
Vargan. He’s quite mad, but as a scientist his class is A
1 at
the Royal Society.”

“So there may be something in it?”
suggested the Saint.
“There may, or there may not. These
inventions have a trick
of springing a leak as soon as you take them
out of the labora
tory and try using them on a large scale. For instance,
they
had a death-ray years ago that would kill mice at twenty yards,
but I never
heard of them testing it on an ox at five hundred.”

Barney Malone was able to give some
supplementary de
tails of Vargan’s invention which the sub-editor’s blue
pencil
had cut out as unintelligible to the lay public. They were
hardly
less unintelligible to Simon Templar, whose scientific
knowledge stopped a
long way short of Einstein, but he lis
tened attentively.

“It’s curious that you should refer to
it,” Malone said, a
little later, “because I was only
interviewing the man this
morning. He burst into the office about
eleven o’clock,
storming and raving like a lunatic because he hadn’t been
given the front page.”

He gave a graphic description of the
encounter.

“But what’s the use?” asked the
Saint. “There won’t be an
other war for hundreds of years.”

“You think so?”

“I’m told so.”

Malone’s eyebrows lifted in that tolerantly
supercilious way
in
which a journalist’s eyebrows will sometimes lift when an
ignorant outsider ventures an opinion on world
affairs.

“If you live for another six
months,” he said, “I shall ex
pect to see you in
uniform. Or will you conscientiously ob
ject?”

Simon tapped a cigarette deliberately on his
thumbnail.

“You mean that?”

“I’m desperately serious. We’re nearer to
these things than
the rest of the public, and we see them coming first. In
an
other few months the rest of England will see it coming. A lot
of funny
things have been happening lately.”

Simon waited, suddenly keyed up to interest;
and Barney
Malone sucked thoughtfully at his pipe, and presently
went
on:

“In the last month, three foreigners
have been arrested,
tried, and imprisoned for offences against the Official
Secrets
Act. In other words, espionage. During the same period,
four
Englishmen have been similarly dealt with in different
parts of Europe. The
foreign governments concerned have dis
owned the men we’ve
pinched; but since a government always
disowns its spies as
soon as they get into trouble, on principle,
no one ever believes
it. Similarly, we have disclaimed the four
Englishmen, and,
naturally, nobody believes us, either—and
yet I happen to know
that it’s true. If you appreciate really subtle jokes, you might think that one
over, and laugh next
time I see you.”

The Saint went home in a thoughtful mood.

He had a genius that was all his own—an
imaginative gen
ius that would take a number of ordinary facts, all of
which
seemed to be totally unconnected, and none of which, to the
eye of
anyone but himself, would have seemed very remark
able, and read them
into a sign-post pointing to a mystery.
Adventure came to him
not so much because he sought it as because he brazenly expected it. He
believed that life was full
of adventure, and he went forward in the full
blaze and surge
of that belief. It has been said of a man very much like
Simon
Templar that he was “a man born with the sound of trumpets
in his
ears”; that saying might almost equally well have been
said of the
Saint, for he also, like Michael Paladin, had heard
the sound of the
trumpet, and had moved ever afterwards
in the echoes of the
sound of the trumpet, in such a mighty clamour of romance that at least one of
his friends had been
moved to call him the last hero, in
desperately earnest jest.