The Saint vs Scotland Yard (14 page)

A matter of seconds later the big car was in Berkeley Street, and he was
pushing through the revolving doors of the hotel.

“Friend of mine had a bit of a car smash,” he rapped at a
sleepy
reception clerk. “I wanna room for him now, and a
doctor at eleven.
Will you send a coupla men out to carry him
in? Car at the
door.”

“One four eight,” said the clerk, without batting an eyelid.

Simon saw the unconscious man carried upstairs, shot half-
crowns into
the hands of the men who performed the trans
portation, and closed
the door on them.

Then he whipped from his pocket a thin nickelled case
which he
had brought from a pocket in the car. He snapped
the neck of a small
glass phial and drew up the colourless fluid
it contained into the
barrel of a hypodermic syringe. His latest
prot
é
g
é
was
still sleeping the sleep of sheer exhaustion, but
Simon had no
guarantee of how long that sleep would last. He
proceeded to provide
that guarantee himself, stabbing the needle into a limp arm and pressing home
the plunger until the
complete dose had been administered.

Then he closed and locked the door behind him and went
quickly down the stairs.

Below, the
reception clerk stopped him.
“What name
shall I register, sir?”

“Teal,” said the Saint, with a wry flick of humour. “Mr.
C. E.
Teal. He’ll sign your book later.”

“Yes, sir… . Er—has Mr. Teal no luggage, sir?”
“Nope.”
A new ten-pound note drifted down to the desk.
“On
account,” said the Saint. “And see that the doctor’s wait
ing here
for me at eleven, or I’ll take the roof off your hotel
and crown you with
it.”

He pulled his cap sideways and went back to his car. As he
turned into
Upper Berkeley Mews for the second time, he saw
that his first
homecoming had only just been soon enough. But
that did not surprise
him, for he had figured out his chances
on that schedule
almost to a second. A warning blink of white
from an upper window
caught his expectant eye at once, and
he locked the wheel hard over and
pulled up broadside on
across the mews. In a flash he was out of his
seat unlocking a
pair
of garage doors right at the street end of the mews, and in
another second or two the car was hissing back
into that
garage with the cut-out firmly closed.

The Saint, without advertising the fact, had recently become
the owner
of one complete side of Upper Berkeley Mews, and
he was in process of
making some interesting structural alterations to that block of real estate of
which the London County
Council had not been informed and about which
the District
Surveyor had not even been consulted. The great work was
not yet by
any means completed, but even now it was capable
of serving part of
its purposes.

Simon went up a ladder into the bare empty room above. In
one corner
a hole had been roughly knocked through the wall;
he went through it
into another similar room, and on the far
side of this was
another hole in a wall; thus he passed in quick succession through numbers 1,
3, and 5, until the last plunge
through the last hole and a curtain beyond it
brought him
into No. 7 and his own bedroom.

His tie was already off and his shirt unbuttoned by that
time, and
he tore off the rest of his clothes in little more than
the time
it took him to stroll through to the bathroom. And
the bath was already
full—filled long ago by Patricia.

“Thinks of everything!’ sighed the Saint, with a wide grin
of pure
delight.

He slid into the bath like an otter, head and all, and came
out of it
almost in the same movement with a mighty splash,
tweaking the plug out
of the waste pipe as he did so. In
another couple of seconds he was
hauling himself into an
enormously woolly blue bath-robe and grabbing
a towel …
and he went paddling down the stairs with his feet kicking
about in a pair of gorgeously dilapidated moccasins, humming
the hum of
a man with a copper-plated liver and not one
solitary little baby
sin upon his conscience.

And thus he rolled into the sitting-room.

“Sorry to have kept you waiting, old dear,” he murmured;
and Chief
Inspector Claud Eustace Teal rose from an arm
chair and surveyed him heavily.

“Good morning,” said Mr. Teal.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” agreed the Saint affably.

Patricia was smoking a cigarette in another chair. She
should,
according to the book of etiquette, have been beguiling the visitor’s wait
with some vivacious topical chatter; but the Saint, who was sensitive to
atmosphere, had perceived
nothing but a glutinously expanding silence
as he entered the
room. The perception failed to disturb him. He lifted the
silver cover from a plate of bacon and eggs, and sniffed appre
ciatively.
“You don’t mind if I eat, do you, Claud?” he mur
mured.

The detective swallowed. If he had never been required to
interview the Saint on
business, he could have enjoyed a tolera
bly
placid life. He was not by nature an excitable man, but
these interviews
never seemed to take the course which he in
tended
them to take.

“Where were you last night?” he blurted.

“In Cornwall,” said the Saint. “Charming county—full of
area.
Know it?”

“What time did you leave?”

“Nine-fifty-two
pip.”

“Did anybody see you go?”

“Everyone who had stayed the course observed my
departure,”
said the Saint carefully. “A few of the male popula
tion had
retired hurt a little earlier, and others were still
enthusiastic but
already blind. Apart from seven who had been
ruled out earlier in
the week by an epidemic of measles—”

“And where were you between ten and five minutes to five
this morning?”

“I was on my way.”

“Were you anywhere near Wintney?”

“That would be about it.”

“Notice anything peculiar around there?”

Simon
wrinkled his brow.

“I recall the scene distinctly. It was the hour before the
dawn. The
sleeping earth, still spell-bound by the magic of
night, lay quiet
beneath the paling skies. Over the peaceful
scene brooded the
expectant hush of all the mornings since the
beginning of these
days. The whole world, like a bride listen
ing for the footfall
of her lover, or a breakfast sausage hoping
against hope——”

The movement with which Teal clamped a battered piece of
spearmint between his molars
was one of sheer ferocity.

“Now listen,” he snarled. “Near Wintney, between ten and
five
minutes to five this morning, a Hirondel with your num
ber-plates on it was
called on to stop by a police officer—-and it
drove straight past
him!”

Simon
nodded.

“Sure, that was me,” he said innocently. “I was in a
hurry.
D’you mean I’m going to be summoned?”

“I mean more than that. Shortly before you came past, the
constable
heard a scream——
”

Simon nodded again.

“Sure, I heard it too. Weird noises owls make sometimes.
Did he want
me to hold his hand?”

“That
was no owl screaming
—”

“Yeah? You were there as well, were you?”

“I’ve got the constable’s telephoned report—”

“You can find a use for it.” The Saint opened his mouth,
inserted
egg, bacon, and buttered toast in suitable proportions,
and stood
up. “And now
you
listen, Claud Eustace.” He
tapped the
detective’s stomach with his forefinger. “Have you
got a
warrant to come round and cross-examine me at this ungodly hour of the
morning-—or any other hour, for that
matter?”

“It’s part of my duty
           
“

“It’s part of the blunt end of the pig of the aunt of the
gardener.
Let that pass for a minute. Is there one single crime
that even your
pop-eyed imagination can think of to charge
me with? There is not.
But we understand the functioning of
your so-called brain. Some loutish cop
thought he heard some
one scream in Hampshire this morning, and
because I hap
pened to be passing through the same county you think I
must have had something to do with it. If somebody tells you that a
dud
shilling has been found in a slot machine in Blackpool,
the first
thing you want to know is whether I was within a
hundred miles of the
spot within six months of the event. A
drowned man is fished
out of the ocean at Boston, and if you
hear a rumour that I
was staying beside the same ocean at
Biarritz two years before——
”

“I never—”

“You invariably. And now get another earful. You haven’t a
search-warrant,
but we’ll excuse that. Would you like to go upstairs and run through my
wardrobe and see if you can find
any bloodstains on my clothes? Because you’re
welcome.
Would you like to push into the garage and take a look at
my
car and see if you can find a body under the back seat? Shove on. Make
yourself absolutely at home. But digest this first.”
Again that
dictatorial forefinger impressed its point on the
preliminary concavity
of the detective’s waistcoat. “Make that
search—accept my invitation—and if you
can’t find anything to justify it, you’re going to wish your father had died a
bachelor,
which he may have done for all I
know. You’re becoming a
nuisance,
Claud, and I’m telling you that this is where you get
off. Give me the small half of less than a quarter
of a break, and I’m going to roast the hell out of you. I’m going to send
you up to the sky on one big balloon; and when you
come
down you’re not going to
bounce—you’re going to spread your
self
out so flat that a shortsighted man will not be able to see
you sideways. Got it?”

Teal gulped.

His cherubic countenance took on a slightly redder tinge,
and he
shuffled his feet like a truant schoolboy. But that, to
do him
justice, was the only childish thing about his attitude, and it was beyond
Teal’s power to control. For he gazed deep
into the dancing,
mocking, challenging blue eyes of the Saint
standing there before
him, lean and reckless and debonair
even in that preposterous bath-robe
outfit; and he understood
the issue exactly.

And Chief Inspector Claud Eustace Teal nodded.

“Of course,” he grunted, “if that’s the way you take it,
there’s
nothing more to be said.”

“There isn’t,” agreed the Saint concisely. “And if there
was,
I’d say it.”

He picked up the detective’s bowler hat, dusted it with his towel, and
handed it over. Teal accepted it, looked at it, and
sighed. And he was
still sighing when the Saint took him by
the arm and ushered
him politely but firmly to the door.

Chapter III

“And if that,” remarked the Saint, blithely returning to
his
interrupted breakfast, “doesn’t shake up Claud Eustace
from the
Anzora downwards, nothing short of an earthquake
will.”

Patricia lighted another cigarette.

“So long as you didn’t overdo it,” she said.
“Quis
s’excuse,
s’accuse ——
”

“And
honi soil qui mal y pense,”
said the Saint
cheerfully. “No, old sweetheart—that outburst had been on its way for a
long
while. We’ve been seeing a great deal too much of Claud
Eustace
lately, and I have a feeling that the Teal-baiting sea
son is just getting
into full swing.”