Leslie Charteris - Follow the Saint

And on this occasion, out of all others, he must control himself. He had no need to get angry. He held all the aces. He had everything that he had prayed for in the long sections of his career that had been consecrated to the heartbreaking task of trying to lay the Saint by the heels. He must not make any mistakes. He must not let himself be baited into any more of those unbelievable indiscretions that had wrecked such opportunities in the past, and that made him sweat all over as soon as he had escaped from the Saint's maddening presence. He told, himself so, over and over again, clinging to all the tatters of his self restraint with the doggedness of a drowning man. He glared at the Saint with an effort of impassivity that made the muscles of his face ache.

"You can help me by taking a trip to the police station with me," he said. "Before you go any further, it's my duty to warn you that you're under arrest. And I've got all the evidence I need to keep you there!"

"Of course you have, Claud," said the Saint soothingly. "Haven't you had it every time you've arrested me? But now that you've got that off your chest, would it be frightfully tactless if I asked you what I'm supposed to have done?"

"Last night," Teal said, grinding his words out under fearful compression, "a Mr Robert Verdean, the manager of the City and Continental Bank's branch at Staines, was visited at his home in Chertsey by two men. They tied up his servant in the kitchen, and went on to find him in the living-room. The maid's description of them makes them sound like the two men who held up the same bank that morning. They went into the living-room and turned on the radio."

"How very odd," said the Saint. "I suppose they were trying to console Comrade Verdean for having his bank robbed. But what has that got to do with me? Or do you think I was one of them?"

"Shortly afterwards," Teal went on, ignoring the interruption, "two other men entered the kitchen with handkerchiefs tied over their faces. One of them was about your height and build. The maid heard this one address the other one as 'Hoppy'."

Simon nodded perfunctorily.

"Yes," he said; and then his eyebrows rose. "My God, Claud, that's funny! Of course, you're thinking—"

"That American gangster who follows you around is called Hoppy, isn't he?"

"If you're referring to Mr Uniatz," said the Saint stiffly, "he is sometimes called that. But he hasn't got any copyright in the name."

The detective took a fresh nutcracker purchase on his gum.

"Perhaps he hasn't. But the tall one went into the living-room. The radio was switched off and on and off again, and then it stayed off. So the maid heard quite a bit of the conversation. She heard people talking about the Saint."

"That's one of the penalties of fame," said the Saint sadly. "People are always talking about me, in the weirdest places. It's quite embarrassing sometimes. But do go on telling me about it."

Mr Teal's larynx suffered a spasm which interfered momentarily with his power of speech.

"That's all I have to tell you!" he yelped, when he had partially cleared the obstruction. "I mean that you and that Uniatz creature of yours were the second two men who arrived. After that, according to the maid, there was a lot of shooting, and presently some neighbours arrived and untied her. All the four men who had been there disappeared, and so did Mr Verdean. I want you on suspicion of kidnapping him; and if we don't find him soon there'll probably be a charge of murder as well!"

Simon Templar frowned. His manner was sympathetic rather than disturbed.

"I know how you feel, Claud," he said commiseratingly. "Naturally you want to do something about it; and I know you're quite a miracle worker when you get going. But I wish I could figure out how you're going to tie me up with it, when I wasn't anywhere near the place."

The detective's glare reddened.

"You weren't anywhere near Chertsey, eh? So we've got to break down another of your famous alibis. All right, then. Where were you?"

"I was at home."

"Whose home?"

"My own. This one."

"Yeah? And who else knows about it?"

"Not a lot of people," Simon confessed. "We were being quiet. You know. One of these restful, old-fashioned, fire-side evenings. If it comes to that, I suppose there isn't an army of witnesses. You can't have a quiet restful evening with an army of witnesses cluttering up the place. It's a contradiction in terms. There was just Pat, and Hoppy, and of course good old Orace—"

"Pat and Hoppy and Orace," jeered the detective. "Just a quiet restful evening. And that's your alibi—"

"I wouldn't say it was entirely my alibi," Simon mentioned diffidently. "After all, there are several other houses in England. And I wouldn't mind betting that in at least half of them, various people were having quiet restful evenings last night. Why don't you go and ask some of them whether they can prove it? Because you know that being a lot less tolerant and forbearing than I am, they'd only tell you to go back to Scotland Yard and sit on a radiator until you'd thawed some of the clotted suet out of your brains. How the hell would you expect anyone to prove he'd spent a quiet evening at home? By bringing in a convocation of bishops for witnesses? In a case like this, it isn't the suspect's job to prove he was home. It's your job to prove he wasn't."

Chief Inspector Teal should have been warned. The ghosts of so many other episodes like this should have risen up to give him caution. But they didn't. Instead, they egged him on. He leaned forward in a glow of vindictive exultation.

"That's just what I'm going to do," he said, and his voice grew rich with the lusciousness of his own triumph. "We aren't always so stupid as you think we are. We found fresh tyre tracks in the drive, and they didn't belong to Verdean's car. We searched every scrap of ground for half a mile to see if we could pick them up again. We found them turning into a field quite close to the end of Greenleaf Road. The car that made 'em was still in the field — it was reported stolen in Windsor early yesterday morning. But there were the tracks of another car in the field, overlapping and under-lapping the tracks of the stolen car, so that we know the kidnappers changed to another car for their getaway. I've got casts of those tracks, and I'm going to show that they match the tyres on your car!"

The Saint blinked.

"It would certainly be rather awkward if they did," he said uneasily. "I didn't give anybody permission to borrow my car last night, but of course—"

"But of course somebody might have taken it away and brought it back without your knowing it," Teal said with guttural sarcasm. "Oh, yes." His voice suddenly went into a squeak. "Well, I'm going to be in court and watch the jury laugh themselves sick when you try to tell that story! I'm going to examine your car now, in front of police witnesses, and I'd like them to see your face when I do it!"

It was the detective's turn to march away and leave the Saint to follow. He had a moment of palpitation while he pondered whether the Saint would do it. But as he flung open the front door and crunched into the drive, he heard the Saint's footsteps behind him. The glow of triumph that was in him warmed like a Yule log on a Christmas hearth. The Saint's expression had reverted to blandness quickly enough, but not so quickly that Teal had missed the guilty start which had broken through its smooth surface. He knew, with a blind ecstasy, that at long last the Saint had tripped…

He waved imperiously to the two officers in the prowl car outside, and marched on towards the garage. The Saint's Hirondel stood there in its glory, an engineering symphony in cream and red trimmed with chromium, with the more sedate black Daimler in which Patricia had driven down standing beside it; but Teal had no aesthetic admiration for the sight. He stood by like a pink-faced figure of doom while his assistants reverently unwrapped the moulage impressions; and then, like a master chef taking charge at the vital moment in the preparation of a dish for which his underlings had laid the routine foundations, he took the casts in bis own hands and proceeded to compare them with the tyres on the Hirondel.