The Saint vs Scotland Yard (3 page)

Simon was alone. The continued political activities of a
certain
newspaper proprietor had driven him to verse, and he
was covering a sheet
of foolscap with the beginning of a minor
epic expressing his own views on the
subject:

Charles Charleston Charlemagne St. Charles

Was wont to utter fearful snarls

When by
professors he was pressed

To note how England had progressed

Since
the galumptious, gory days

Immortalised
in Shakespeare’s plays.

For him, no Transatlantic flights,

Ford motor-cars, electric lights,

Or radios at less than cost

Could compensate for what he lost

By
chancing to coagulate

About five hundred years too late.

Born in the only days for him

He would have swung a sword with vim,

Grown
ginger whiskers on his face,

And mastered, with a knobbly mace,

Men who wore hauberks on their chests

Instead of little woolen vests,

And drank strong wine among his peers

Instead of pale synthetic beers.

At this point, the trend of his inspiration led the Saint on a
brief
excursion to the barrel in one corner of the room. He
replenished his
tankard, drank deeply, and continued:

Had he not reason to be glum
When born
in nineteen umpty-um?

And there, for the moment, he stuck; and he was cogitating
the
possible developments of the next stanza when he was
interrupted by the
zing!
of the front door bell.

As he stepped out into the hall, he glanced up through the
fanlight
above the door at the mirror that was cunningly fixed
to the underneath of
the hanging lantern outside. He recog
nised the caller at once, and opened
the door without hesita
tion.

“Come in, Harry,” invited the Saint cordially, and led the
way back to
the sitting-room. “I was busy with a work of art
that is going to make
Milton look like a distant relative of the gargle, but I can spare you a few
minutes.”

Long Harry glanced at the sheet half-covered with the
Saint’s
neat handwriting.

“Poetry, Mr. Templar? We used to learn poetry at school,”
he said
reminiscently.

Simon looked at him thoughtfully for two or three seconds, and then he
beamed.

“Harry, you hit the nail on the head. For that suggestion, I
pray that
your shadow may always be jointed at the elbows.
Excuse me one
moment.”

He plumped himself back in his chair and wrote at speed. Then he cleared
his throat, and read aloud:

“Eton and Oxford failed to floor

The spirit of the warrior;

Though ragged and bullied, teased and hissed,

Charles stayed a Medievalist;

And even when his worldly Pa

(Regarding him with nausea)

Condemned him to the dismal cares

Of
sordid trade in stocks and shares,

Charles, in top-hat and Jaeger drawers,

Clung like a limpet to his Cause,

Believing, in a kind of trance,

That one day he would have his Chance.”

He laid the sheet down reverently.

“A mere pastime for me, but I believe Milton used to sweat
blood over
it,” he remarked complacently. “Soda or water,
Harry?”

“Neat, please, Mr. Templar.”

Simon brought over the glass of Highland cream, and Long
Harry
sipped it, and crossed and uncrossed his legs awkwardly.

“I hope you don’t mind my coming to see you, sir,” he
ventured at
last.

“Not at all,” responded the Saint heartily. “Always glad
to
see any Eton boys here. What’s the trouble?”

Long Harry fidgeted, twiddling his fingers and corrugating his brow. He
was the typical “old lag,” or habitual criminal,
which is
to say that outside of business hours he was a per
fectly ordinary man of
slightly less than average intelligence
and rather more than
average cunning. On this occasion he
was plainly and ordinarily ill at ease,
and the Saint surmised
that he had only begun to solve his worries
when he mustered up the courage to give that single, brief, and symptomatic
ring
at the front door bell.

Simon lighted a cigarette and waited impassively, and presently his
patience reaped its harvest.

“I wondered—I thought maybe I could tell you something
that might
interest you, Mr. Templar.”

“Sure.” The Saint allowed a thin jet of smoke to trickle
through
his lips, and continued to wait.

“It’s about … it’s about the Scorpion, Mr. Templar.”

Instantaneously the Saint’s eyes narrowed, the merest frac
tion of a
millimetre, and the inhalation that he drew from his
cigarette was long and
deep and slow. And then the stare that
he swivelled round in
the direction of Long Harry was wide
blue innocence itself.——’

“What Scorpion?” he inquired blandly.

Long Harry frowned.

“I thought you’d ‘ve known about the Scorpion, of course,
Mr.
Templar, you being——
”

“Yeah?”

Simon drawled out the prompting diphthong in a honeyed
slither up
a gently persuasive G-string; and Long Harry
shuffled his feet uncomfortably.

“Well, you remember what you used to be, Mr. Templar.
There
wasn’t much you didn’t know in those days.”

“Oh, yes—once upon a time. But now—”

“Last
time we met, sir——”

The Saint’s features relaxed, and he smiled.

“Forget it, Harold,” he advised quietly. “I’m now a
respect
able citizen. I was a respectable citizen the last time we met,
and I
haven’t changed. You may tell me anything you like,
Harry—as one
respectable citizen to another—but I’d recom
mend you to forget the
interview as you step over the front
door mat. I shall do the same—it’s
safer.”

Long Harry nodded.

“If you forget it, sir, it’ll be safer for me,” he said
seriously.

“I have a hopeless memory,” said the Saint carefully.
“I’ve
already forgotten your name. In another minute, I shan’t
be
sure that you’re here at all. Now shoot the dope, son.”

“You’ve got nothing against me, sir?”

“Nothing. You’re a professional burglar, housebreaker, and
petty
larcenist, but that’s no concern of mine. Teal can attend
to your
little mistakes.”

“And you’ll forget what I’m going to say—soon as ever I’ve
said
it?”

“You heard me.”

“Well,
 
Mr. Templar——
” Long
Harry cleared his throat,
took another pull at his drink, and blinked
nervously for some seconds. “I’ve worked for the Scorpion, Mr.
Templar,” he said
suddenly.

Simon Templar never moved a muscle.

“Yes?”

“Only once, sir—so far.” Once having left the diving-board,
Long Harry
floundered on recklessly. “And there won’t be a
second time—not if I
can help it. He’s dangerous. You ain’t
never safe with him. I
know. Sent me a message he did,
through the post. Knew where I was staying,
though I’d only
been there two days, an’ everything about me. There was
five
one-pound notes in the letter, and he said if I met a car that’d
be waiting
at the second milestone north of Hatfield at nine
o’clock last Thursday
night there’d be another fifty for me to
earn.”

“What
sort of car was it?”

“I never had a chance to notice it properly, Mr. Templar. It
was a big,
dark car, I think. It hadn’t any lights. I was going to
tell you—I
was a bit suspicious at first, I thought it must be a
plant, but it was that
talk of fifty quid that tempted me. The
car was waiting for
me when I got there. I went up and looked
in the window, and
there was a man there at the wheel. Don’t
ask me what he looked
like—he kept his head down, and I
never saw more than the top of his
hat. ‘Those are your
instructions,’ he says, pushing an envelope at
me, he says, ‘and there’s half your money. I’ll meet you here at the same time
tomorrow.’ And then he drove off. I struck a match, and found he’d given me the
top halves of fifty pound notes.”

“And then?”

“Then—I went an’ did the job, Mr. Templar.”

“What job?”

“I was to go to a house at St. Albans and get some papers.
There was a
map, an’ a plan, an’ all about the locks an’
everything. I had my
tools—I forgot to tell you the first letter said I was to bring them—and it was
as easy as the orders said
it would be. Friday night, I met the car as
arranged, and
handed over the papers, and he gave me the other halves
of
the notes.”

Simon extended a lean brown hand.

“The orders?” he inquired briefly.

He took the cheap yellow envelope, and glanced through
the
contents. There was, as Long Harry had said, a neatly-
drawn map and plan;
and the other information, in a stu
diously characterless copperplate
writing, covered two more
closely written sheets.

“You’ve
no idea whose house it was you entered?”

“None at all, sir.”

“Did you look at these papers?”

“Yes.” Long Harry raised his eyes and looked at the Saint
sombrely.
“That’s the one reason why I came to you, sir.”

“What were they?”

“They were love-letters, sir. There was an address—64 Half
Moon Street. And they were
signed —
‘Mark’.”

Simon passed a hand over his sleekly perfect hair.

“Oh yes?” he murmured.

“You
saw the Sunday papers, sir?”

“I did.”

Long Harry emptied his glass, and put it down with clumsy
fingers.

“Sir Mark Deverest shot ‘imself at 64 ‘Alf Moon Street, on Saturday
night,” he said huskily.

When he was agitated, he occasionally lost an aspirate, and
it was an
index of his perturbation that he actually dropped
two in that one
sentence.

“That’s the Scorpion’s graft, Mr. Templar—blackmail. I
never
touched black in my life, but I’d heard that was his
game. An’ when he sent
for me, I forgot it. Even when I was looking through those letters, it never
seemed to come into my
head why he wanted them. But I see it all
now. He wanted ‘em to put the black on Deverest, an’ Deverest shot himself
instead
of paying up. And—I ‘elped to murder ‘im, Mr. Templar.
Murder,
that’s what it was. Nothing less. An’ I ‘elped!” Long
Harry’s
voice fell to a throaty whisper, and his dull eyes
shifted over the
clear-etched contours of the Saint’s tanned face in a kind of panic of anxiety.
“I never knew what I was doing,
Mr. Templar, sir—strike me dead if I
did——
”

Simon reached forward and crushed out his cigarette in an
ashtray.

“Is that all you came to tell me?” he asked dispassionately;
and Long Harry gulped.

“I thought you’d be laying for the Scorpion, sir, knowing
you always
used to be ——
”

“Yeah?”

Again that mellifluous dissyllable, in a voice that you could
have
carved up with a wafer of butter.

“Well, sir, what I mean is, if you
were
the Saint, sir, and
if
you hadn’t forgotten that you might ever have been him, you
might——
”