Leslie Charteris - Follow the Saint

"Gor-blimy!" he said.

The Saint filled his lungs with a breath of inexorable peace. Such moments of immortal bliss, so ripe, so full, so perfect, so superb, so flawless and unalloyed and exquisite, were beyond the range of any feeble words. They flooded every corner of the soul and every fibre of the body, so that the heart was filled to overflowing with a nectar of cosmic content. The very tone in which that one word had been spoken was a benediction. It gave indubitable promise that within a few hours the eyewitness evidence of Ebenezer Hogsbotham's depravity would have spread all over Chertsey, within a few hours more it would have reached London, before the next sunset it would have circulated over all England; and all the denials and protestations that Hogsbotham might make would never restore his self-made pedestal again.

Simon Templar braked the Hirondel to a stop in the pool of blackness under an overhanging tree less than a hundred yards beyond the end of Greenleaf Road. He blinked bis lights three times, and lighted a cigarette while he waited. Patricia Holm held his arm tightly. From the back of the car came gurgling sucking sounds of Hoppy Uniatz renewing his acquaintance with the bottle of Vat 69 which he had been forced by circumstances to neglect for what Mr Uniatz regarded as an indecent length of time.

A shadow loomed out of the darkness beside the road, whistling very softly. The shadow carried a shabby valise in one hand. It climbed into the back seat beside Hoppy.

Simon Templar moved the gear lever, let in the clutch; and the Hirondel rolled decorously and almost noiselessly on its way.

At close quarters, the shadow which had been added to the passenger list could have been observed to be wearing a policeman's uniform with a sergeant's stripes on the sleeve, and a solid black moustache which obscured the shape of its mouth as much as the brim of its police helmet obscured the exact appearance of its eyes. As the car got under way, it was hastily stripping off these deceptive scenic effects and changing into a suit of ordinary clothes piled on the seat.

Simon spoke over his shoulder as the Hirondel gathered speed through the village of Chertsey.

"You really ought to have been a policeman, Peter," he murmured. "You look the part better than anyone I ever saw."

Peter Quentin snorted.

"Why don't you try somebody else in the part?" he inquired acidly. "My nerves won't stand it many more times. I still don't know how I got away with it this time."

The Saint grinned in the dark, his eyes following the road.

"That was just your imagination," he said complacently. "There wasn't really much danger. I knew that Claud wouldn't have been allowed to bring his own team down from Scotland Yard. He was just assigned to take charge of the case. He might have brought an assistant of his own, but he had to use the local cops for the mob work. In the excitement, nobody was going to pay much attention to you. The local men just thought you came down from Scotland Yard with Teal, and Teal just took it for granted that you were one of the local men. It was in the bag — literally and figuratively."

"Of course it was," Peter said sceptically. "And just what do you think is going to happen when Teal discovers that he hasn't got the bag?"

"Why, what on earth could happen?" Simon retorted blandly. "We did our stuff. We produced the criminals, and Hoppy blew them off, and Teal got the boodle. He opened the bag and looked it over right here in the house. And Pat and Hoppy and I were in more or less full view all the time. If he goes and loses it again after we've done all that for him, can he blame us?"

Peter Quentin shrugged himself into a tweed sports jacket, and sighed helplessly. He felt sure that there was a flaw in the Saint's logic somewhere, but he knew that it was no use to argue. The Saint's conspiracies always seemed to work out, in defiance of reasonable argument. And this episode had not yet shown any signs of turning into an exception. It would probably work out just like all the rest. And there was unarguably a suitcase containing about fifteen thousand pounds in small change lying on the floor of the car at his feet to lend weight to the probability. The thought made Peter Quentin reach out for Mr Uniatz's bottle with a reckless feeling that he might as well make the best of the crazy life into which his association with the Saint had led him.

Patricia told him what had happened at the house after he faded away unnoticed with the bag.

"And you left her there?" he said, with a trace of wistfulness.

"One of the local cops offered to take her back to town," Simon explained. "I let him do it, because it'll give her a chance to build up the story… I don't think we shall hear a lot more about Hogsbotham from now on."

"So while I was sweating blood and risking about five hundred years in penal servitude," Peter said bitterly, "you were having a grand time helping her take her clothes off."

"You have an unusually evil mind," said the Saint, and drove on, one part of his brain working efficiently over the alibi that Peter was still going to need before morning, and all the rest of him singing.