Leslie Charteris - The Saint In England

"I know whom I want," answered Teal stonily.

"Yeah?" The Saint's voice was one vicious upward swoop of derision. "Then did you know you were standing inside his house right now?"

Mr. Teal blinked. His eyes began a fractional widening; his mouth began an infinitesimal opening.

"Renway?" he said. And then the baleful skepticism came back into his face with a tinge of colour. "Is that your new alibi?" he jeered.

"That's my new alibi," said the Saint, rather quickly and quietly; "and you'd better listen to it. Did you know that Renway was the man who stole that aeroplane from Hawker's?"

"I didn't. And I don't know it yet."

"He brought it here and landed it here, and I watched him. Go down to that field out there and have a look at the scars in the grass where he had his flares, if you're too dumb to believe me. Did you know that he had a submarine in a cave in the cliffs, with live torpedoes on board?"

"Did I know—"

"Did you know that the crew of the submarine have been sleeping in a secret room under this house for months? Did you know they were the toughest bunch of hoodlums I've seen in England for years?"

"Did I—"

"Did you know," asked the Saint, in a final rasp, "that three million pounds in gold is on its way flying from Croydon to Paris right now while you're getting in my hair with your blathering imitation of a bum detective — and Renway has got everything set to shoot it down and set up a crime record that'll make Scotland Yard look more halfwitted than it's ever looked since I started taking it apart?"

The detective swallowed. There was an edge of savage sincerity in the Saint's voice which bit into the leathery hide of his incredulity. He suffered a wild fantastic temptation to begin to listen, to take in the preposterous story that the Saint was putting up, to consider the items of it soberly and seriously. And he was sure he was making a fool of himself. He gulped down the ridiculous impulse and plunged into defensive sarcasm.

"Of course I didn't know all that," he almost purred. "Is Einstein going to prove it for you, or will Renway admit it himself?"

"Renway will admit it himself," said the Saint grimly. "But even that won't be necessary. Did you know that these ten tons of gold were being shipped on aeroplane G-EZQX, which took off from Croydon at seven?" He ripped the top sheet off the memorandum block on the desk and thrust it out. "Do you know that that's his handwriting, or will you want his bank manager to tell you?"

Teal looked at the sheet.

"It doesn't matter much whether it's his writing or your version of it," he said, with an almost imperceptible break in the smoothness of his studied purr. "As a Treasury official, Renway has a perfect right to know anything like that."

"Yeah?" Simon's voice was suddenly so soft that it made Teal's laboured suaveness sound like the screech of a circular saw. "And I suppose he had a perfect right to know Manuel Enrique, and not say anything about it when he brought him into the police station at Horley?"

"Who says he knew Enrique?"

The Saint smiled.

"Not me, Claud. If I tell you he did, it'll just make you quite sure he didn't. This is what says so."

He put his hand in his pocket and took out the letter which he had found in the safe. "Or maybe I faked this, too?" he suggested mildly.

"You may have done," said Teal dispassionately; but his baby-blue eyes rested with a rather queer intensity on Simon's face.

"Come for a walk, Claud," said the Saint gently, "and tell me I faked this."

He turned aside quite calmly under the muzzle of Teal's gun and walked to the door. For no earthly reason that he could have given in logical terms, Mr. Teal followed him. And all the time he had a hot gnawing fear that he was making a fool of himself.

Sergeant Barrow followed Mr. Teal because that was his job. He was a fool anyway, and he knew it. Mr. Teal had often told him so.

In the billiard room, Simon pointed to the panel sagging loose on its hinges as he had torn it off — the hole he had chipped through the wall, the wooden stairway going steeply down into the chalk.

"That's where those six men have been living, so that the ordinary servants never knew there was anything going on. You'll find their beds and everything. That's where I was shut up when they got wise to who I was; and that's where I've just got out of."

Teal said nothing for several seconds. And then the most significant thing was, not what he said, but what he did.

He put his gun back in his pocket and looked at the Saint almost helplessly. No one will ever know what it cost him to be as natural as that. But whatever his other failings may have been, Chief Inspector Teal was a kind of sportsman. He could take it, even when it hurt.

"What else do you know?" he asked.

"That the submarine is out in the Channel now, waiting for the aeroplane to come down. That Renway's up over here in that Hawker ship, with loaded machine guns to shoot down the gold transport, and a packet of bombs to drop on any boat that tries to go to the rescue. That all the telephone lines to Croydon Aerodrome, and between the coast and London, have been cut. That there's a radio transmitter somewhere in this place — I haven't found it yet — which is just waiting to carry on signalling when the transport plane stops. That there isn't a hope in hell of getting a warning through to anywhere in time to stop the raid."

Teal's pink face had gone curiously pale.

"Isn't there anything we can do?" he said.

"There's only one thing," answered the Saint. "Down on the landing field you probably saw a Tiger Moth warming up. It's mine. It's the ship I came here in — but that's another story. With your permission, I can go up in it and try to keep Renway off. Don't tell me it's suicide, because I know all that. But it's murder for the crew of that transport plane if I don't try."

The detective did not answer for a moment. He stared at the floor, avoiding the Saint's straight blue gaze.

"I can't stop you," he said at last; and Simon smiled.

"You can forget about Hoppy hitting that policeman, if you're satisfied with the other evidence," he said. He had a sudden absurd thought of what would shortly be happening to a certain George Wynnis, and a shaft of the old mockery touched his smile like sunlight. "And next time I tell you that some low criminal is putting his stuff onto me, Claud," he said, "you mayn't be so nasty and disbelieving."

His forefinger prodded Mr. Teal's stomach in the old maddening way; but his smile was only reminiscent. And without another word he went out of the billiard room, down the long dark corridor to the open air.

As he climbed into the cockpit of his ship he looked back towards the house and saw Mr. Teal standing on the terrace, watching him. He waved a gay arm, while the mechanic dragged away the chocks from under the wheels; and then he settled down and opened the throttle. The stick slid forward between his knees, the tail lifted, and he went roaring down the field to curve upwards in a steep climbing turn over the trees.

He had left it late enough; and if the wind had been in the north instead of in the south he might have been too late. Winding up the sky in smoothly controlled spirals, he saw the single wide span of a big monoplane coming up from the northern horizon, and knew that it must be the transport plane for which Renway was waiting — no other ship of that build would have been flying south at that hour. He looked for Renway and saw a shape like a big square-tipped seagull swinging round in a wide circle over the Channel, six thousand feet up in the cloudless blue…

Renway! The Saint's steady fingers moved on the stick, steepening the angle of climb by a fraction; and his lips settled in a grim reckless line at the remainder that those fingers had no Bowden trips under them, as Renway's had. He looked ahead through the propeller between a double rank of dancing valve springs instead of between the foreshortened blued jackets of a pair of guns. He was taking on a duel in which nothing but his own skill of hand and eye could be matched against the spitting muzzles of Renway's guns — and whatever skill Renway could bring to the handling of them. And suddenly the Saint laughed — a devilish buccaneering laugh that bared his teeth and edged the chilled steel in his eyes, and was drowned to soundlessness in the smashing howl of his engine and whipped away in the tearing sting of the wind.