Leslie Charteris - Follow the Saint

Patricia's eyes turned slowly towards the morning paper in which the holdup at Staines still had a place in the headlines.

"You mean you think—"

"I think our guardian angel is still trying to take care of us," said the Saint; and all the old impenitent mischief that she knew too well was shimmering at the edges of his smile. "If only we knew a cure for amnesia, I think we could be fifteen thousand pounds richer before bedtime. Add it up for yourself while I take another look at the patient."

He got up from the table and went through to the study which adjoined the dining-room. It was a rather small, comfortably untidy room, and the greater part of its walls were lined with built-in bookshelves. When he went in, one tier of shelving about two feet wide stood open like a door; beyond it, there appeared to be a narrow passage. The passage was actually a tiny cell, artificially lighted and windowless, but perfectly ventilated through a grating that connected with the air-conditioning system which served the rest of the house. The cell was no more than a broad gap between the solid walls of the room on either side of it, so ingeniously squeezed into the architecture of the house that it would have taken a clever surveyor many hours of work with a footrule to discover its existence. It had very little more than enough room for the cot, in which Verdean lay, and the table and chair at which Hoppy Uniatz was dawdling over his breakfast — if any meal which ended after noon, and was washed down with a bottle of Scotch whisky, could get by with that name.

Simon stood just inside the opening and glanced over the scene.

"Any luck yet?" he asked.

Mr Uniatz shook his head.

"De guy is cuckoo, boss. I even try to give him a drink, an' he don't want it. He t'rows it up like it might be perzon."

He mentioned this with the weighty reluctance of a psychiatrist adducing the ultimate evidence of dementia praecox.

Simon squeezed his way through and slipped a thermometer into the patient's mouth. He held Verdean's wrist with sensitive fingers.

"Don't you want to get up, Mr Verdean?"

The bank manager gazed at him expressionlessly.

"You don't want to be late at the bank, do you?" said the Saint. "You might lose your job."

"What bank?" Verdean asked.

"You know. The one that was robbed."

"I don't know. Where am I?"

"You're safe now. Kaskin is looking for you, but he won't find you."

"Kaskin," Verdean repeated. His face was blank, idiotic. "Is he someone I know?"

"You remember Angela, don't you?" said the Saint. "She wants to see you."

Verdean rolled his head on the pillows.

"I don't know. Who are all these people? I don't want to see anyone. My head's splitting. I want to go to sleep."

His eyes closed under painfully wrinkled brows.

Simon let his wrist fall. He took out the thermometer, read it, and sidled back to the door. Patricia was standing there.

"No change?" she said; and the Saint shrugged.

"His temperature's practically normal, but his pulse is high. God alone knows how long it may take him to get his memory back. He could stay like this for a week; or it might even be years. You never can tell… I'm beginning to think I may have been a bit too hasty with my rescuing-hero act. I ought to have let Kaskin and Dolf work him over a bit longer, and heard what he had to tell them before I butted in."

Patricia shook her head.

"You know you couldn't have done that."

"I know." The Saint made a wryly philosophic face. "That's the worst of trying to be a buccaneer with a better nature. But it would have saved the hell of a lot of trouble, just the same. As it is, even if he does recover his memory, we're going to have to do something exciting ourselves to make him open up. Now, if we could only swat him on the head in the opposite direction and knock his memory back again—"

He broke off abruptly, his eyes fixed intently on a corner of the room; but Patricia knew that he was not seeing it. She looked at him with an involuntary tightening in her chest. Her ears had not been quick enough to catch the first swish of tyres on the gravel drive which had cut off what he was saying, but she was able to hear the car outside coming to a stop.

The Saint did not move. He seemed to be waiting, like a watchdog holding its bark while it tried to identify a stray sound that had pricked its ears. In another moment she knew what he had been waiting for.

The unmistakable limping steps of Orace, Simon Templar's oldest and most devoted retainer, came through the hall from the direction of the kitchen and paused outside the study.

"It's that there detective agyne, sir," he said in a fierce whisper. "I seen 'im fru the winder. Shall I chuck 'im aht?"

"No, let him in," said the Saint quietly. "But give me a couple of seconds first."

He drew Patricia quickly out of the secret cell, and closed the study door. His lips were flirting with the wraith of a Saintly smile, and only Patricia would have seen the steel in his blue eyes.

"What a prophet you are, darling," he said.

He swung the open strip of bookcase back into place. It closed silently, on delicately balanced hinges, filling the aperture in the wall without a visible crack. He moved one of the shelves to lock it. Then he closed a drawer of his desk which had been left open, and there was the faint click of another lock taking hold. Only then did he open the door to the hall — and left it open. And with that, a master lock, electrically operated, took control. Even with the knowledge of the other two operations, nothing short of pickaxes and dynamite could open the secret room when the study door was open; and one of the Saint's best bets was that no one who was searching the house would be likely to make a point of shutting it.

He emerged into the hall just as Chief Inspector Teal's official boots stomped wrathfully over the threshold. The detective saw him as soon as he appeared, and the heightened colour in his chubby face flared up with the perilous surge of his blood pressure. He took a lurching step forward with one quivering forefinger thrust out ahead of him like a spear.

"You Saint!" he bellowed. "I want you!"

The Saint smiled at him, carefree and incredibly debonair.

"Why, hullo, Claud, old gumboil," he murmured genially. "You seem to be excited about something. Come in and tell me all about it."

Simon Templar had never actually been followed into his living-room by an irate mastodon; but if that remarkable experience was ever to befall him in the future, he would have had an excellent standard with which to compare it.

The imitation, as rendered by Chief Inspector Claud Eustace Teal, was an impressive performance, but it seemed to leave the Saint singularly unconcerned. He waved towards one armchair and deposited himself in another, reaching for cigarette box and ashtray.

"Make yourself at home," he invited affably. "Things have been pretty dull lately, as I said last night. What can I do to help you?"

Mr Teal gritted his teeth over a lump of chewing gum with a barbarity which suggested that he found it an inferior substitute for the Saint's jugular vein. Why he should have followed the Saint at all in the first place was a belated question that was doing nothing to improve his temper. He could find no more satisfactory explanation than that the Saint had simply turned and calmly led the way, and he could hardly be expect to go on talking to an empty hall. But in the act of following, he felt that he had already lost a subtle point. It was one of those smoothly infuriating tricks of the Saint to put him at a disadvantage which never failed to lash Mr Teal's unstable temper to the point where he felt as if he were being garrotted with his own collar.