Leslie Charteris - Catch the Saint

“Thank God you’ve come!” he cried, pointing a shaking finger at the Saint. “This man broke in here and—”

“Spare us,” said the Saint. “The law, for once, is with me.” He spoke to Lieutenant Stacey, who was leading the task force. “This fine-looking gent is the Supremo. He was obliging enough to hand over the evidence from the wall safe, and to plug his assistant there for trying to stop him. Brother Hamlin seems to be alive; he should make a very willing witness.”

“You’re working for the police?” Angelworth grated. “Then where’s Carole? What have you done with Carole?”

“She’s downtown, at Police Headquarters, protected by a charming detective lieutenant. She was picked up on a phoney charge to make certain she wouldn’t be in touch with you after lunch.”

“Did she know?” Angelworth asked almost piteously.

“No, she didn’t,” Simon answered.

With incredible swiftness Angelworth spun round and dashed back into the study. As the policemen raced after him, Simon shouted: “Watch out — he’s got a gun in there!”

But there was no sound of shots. A moment later, after scuffling noises, the police emerged into the living-room again with a handcuffed and crestfallen ex-Supremo in their charge.

“He was trying to kill himself,” one of them said. “We got the gun just when he was putting it to his head.”

“I’ll give him one thing,” Simon said thoughtfully. “He did love one person in the world more than himself.”

The atmosphere at the airport the next noon was clear, kerosene-perfumed, and — to the Saint — supercharged with his own eagerness to get away from Philadelphia. Brad Ryner sat in the police car with the door open, and Lieutenant Stacey stood beside the Saint as a porter carried Simon’s bag into the terminal.

“I want you to know how much we appreciate what you did,” Stacey said earnestly.

Simon shook his head, nodding, and turned to Ryner.

“Look,” Ryner said, “I feel mighty bad about this. When I used those pictures to get you to help out, I didn’t realise what it was gonna cost you. I mean about the girl. I didn’t know what a crummy mess it would put you in, not until she told you off at headquarters last night.”

The Saint’s mind was forced to leap back and relive that scene again. Carole had been released, with explanations, when her father was brought in, and had then had to cope alone with the shock of his arrest and the revelations that went with it, while Simon was indulging the authorities in their mania for paperwork. It had not been necessary for him to see her even after she had helped with summoning lawyers and fending off vulturine reporters. In fact, Stacey, who was well aware of her feelings by that time, had tried to avert the unpleasantries.

Sitting in his office that evening, he had said to Simon, while Brad Ryner listened: “She’s very upset, naturally. She’s not being rational. She’s got to blame somebody, and it’s easier for her to blame you than her father. I’d suggest that you don’t see her. At least not for some time, till she’s cooled down.”

“Yeah,” Ryner had joined in. “Just blow. What good can it do to let her chew you out?”

“If she wants to see me, I at least owe her that,” Simon had said. “Let her in.”

It had been worse than he had anticipated. When Carole entered Stacey’s office she had looked so haggard, her eyes so swollen and reddened with crying, that Simon could scarcely recognise her as the lively happy girl he had known so briefly. It was understandable. Before this she had not been able to imagine to herself that there was even a one per cent clay content in her paternal idol’s feet, and now he turned out to be ninety-nine per cent pure mud. And the man she had loved was the one who had shattered her world, doomed her father to prison, and condemned her at the very least to humiliation and a terrible time of readjustment.

“You pig!” she said, and for as long as he lived he would remember the corrosive bitterness of every syllable. “I can’t think of anything low enough to call you.”

“Now wait a minute,” Ryner had put in. “Don’t blame Simon for what your father did. He was only...”

Simon silenced the detective with a glance, but did not try to reply to Carole himself.

“You could have told me,” she said. “You knew I... I loved you. And all the time you were using me to get at my father!”

That was all she could say. A racking sob choked her so that no more words could get through. Simon had taken one step towards her, and then she had turned and run from the office.

Now, at the airport, Ryner was saying: “But since you did face her like that, why didn’t you at least explain why you had to do it? You didn’t have to let her think you’re a heel. You weren’t using her, the way she said.”

“No, I wasn’t,” Simon said. “But do you think she’d believe me? It would only have sounded as if I were trying to make her father look even worse. When you’ve just wrecked a girl’s life, all the logic in the world won’t convince her that you had to do it. And in the long run, it’ll be much better for her to go on hating me.”

With a final good-bye he strode from the police car to the door of the terminal.

“Well,” Stacey said, “maybe only a saint could have played it that way...”

And they watched him walk away into the lobby.

Catch the Saint is a collection of two mystery novellas by Fleming Lee, based upon stories by Norman Worker continuing the adventures of the sleuth Simon Templar a.k.a. “The Saint”, created by Leslie Charteris.