Leslie Charteris - The Saint Goes On

"From a man I found on the theory I was working on. You told me I could—"

"What was his name?"

"That's a long story," said Pryke hoarsely. "I met him…"

Probably he knew that the game was over — that the bluff was hopeless except as a play for time. The attack was too overwhelming. Watching him with smiling lips and bleak blue eyes, the Saint knew that there wasn't a man living who could have warded it off — whose brain, under the shock, could yet have moved fast enough to concoct a story, instantaneously and without reflection, that would have stood the light of remorseless investigation which must have been directed into it.

"I met him last night," said Pryke. "I suppose you have some reason—"

Simon nodded.

"We have," he said gently. "We came here to play the grand old parliamentary game of Sitting on the Fence; and it looks as if you are what might be called the sittee."

"You're crazy," said Pryke harshly.

His hand was sliding towards his hip, in a casual movement that should have been merely the conventional search for a cigarette-case; and Simon saw it a fraction of a second late.

He saw the flash of the nickel-plated gun, and the shot blasted his eardrums as he flung himself aside. Pryke swerved frantically, hesitated an instant, and turned his automatic on the broad target of Chief Inspector Teal; but before he could touch the trigger again the Saint's legs had swung round in a flailing scissor-sweep that found its marks faultlessly on knee-joint and ankle-bone. Pryke cursed and went down, clean and flat as a dead fish, with a smack that squeezed half the breath out of his body; and the Saint rolled over and held him in an ankle lock while the local men who had been posted outside poured in through the doors.

And that was approximately that.

The Saint continued to lie prostrate on the floor after Pryke had been handcuffed and taken away, letting the profound contentment of the day sink into his soul and make itself gorgeously at home. Misunderstanding his stillness, Mr. Teal bent over him with a shadow of alarm on his pink face.

"Are you hurt?" he asked gruffly; and the Saint chuckled.

"Only in my pride." He reached out and retrieved his cigarette, which had parted company with him during the scuffle, and blew the dust off it before replacing it in his mouth. "I'm getting a worm's-eye view of life — you might call it an act of penance. If I'd had to make a list of all the people whom I didn't think would ever turn out to be the High Fence, your Queen of the May would have been first on the roll. Well, I suppose Life has these surprises… But it all fits in. Being on duty at Market Street, he wouldn't have had any trouble in poisoning Johnny Anworth's horse-radish; but I'm not quite sure how he got Sunny Jim."

"I am," said Teal grimly. "He was standing a little behind me when I was talking to Fasson — between me and the door. He could have shot Fasson from his pocket and slammed the door before I could look round, without taking a tremendous risk. After all, there was no reason for anyone to suspect him. He put it over on all of us." Teal fingered a slip of chewing gum out of his pocket and unwrapped it sourly, for he also had his pride. "I suppose it was you who took Sunny Jim away," he said suddenly.

Simon grinned.

"Teal! Will you always think these unkind thoughts about me?"

The detective sighed. He picked up the evidential package from the counter, opened it, glanced at the gleaming layers of gems, and stuffed it firmly into his pocket. No one knew better than himself what unkind thoughts he would always have to think. But in this case at least the Saint had done him a service, and the accounts seemed to be all square — which was an almost epoch-making denouement. "What are you getting out of this?" he inquired suspiciously.

The Saint rose to his feet with a smile, and brushed his clothes.

"Virtue," he said piously, "is its own reward. Shall we go and look for some breakfast, or must you get on with your job?"

Mr. Teal shook his head.

"I must get back to London — there are one or two things to clear up. Pryke's flat will have to be searched. There's still a lot of stolen property to be recovered, and I shouldn't be surprised to find it there — he must have felt so confident of never being suspected that he wouldn't bother about a secret headquarters. Then we shall have to pull in Quincey and Enderby, but I don't expect they'll give us much trouble now." The detective buttoned his coat, and his drowsy eyes went over the Saint's smiling face with the perpetual haze of unassuageable doubt still lingering in them. "I suppose I shall be seeing you again," he said.

"I suppose you will," said the Saint, and watched Teal's stolid portly figure lumbering out into the street before he turned into the nearest telephone booth. He agreed with Mr. Teal that Pryke had probably been confident enough to use his own apartment as his headquarters. But Patricia Holm and Hoppy Uniatz were already in London, whereas Mr. Teal had to get there; and Simon Templar had his own unorthodox interpretation of the rewards of Virtue.

The visitors who came to see the Saint uninvited were not only members of the C.I.D. In several years of spectacular outlawry, Simon Templar had acquired a reputation which was known wherever newspapers were read.

"There must be something about me that excites the storytelling instinct in people," he complained once to Patricia Holm, who should have known better than anyone how seriously to take his complaint. "Four out of every five have it, and their best friends won't tell 'em."

Most of the legends that circulated about him were fabulously garbled, but the fundamental principles were fairly accurate. As a result, he had an ever-growing public which seemed to regard him as something between a benevolent if slightly weak-minded uncle and a miracle-working odd-job man. They ranged from burglars who thought that his skill might be enlisted in their enterprises for a percentage of the proceeds, to majestic dowagers who thought that he might be instrumental in tracing a long-lost Pekinese; from shop girls in search of romance to confidence men in search of a likely buyer of a gold brick. Sometimes they were interesting, sometimes they were pathetic; mostly they were merely tiresome. But on rare occasions they brought the Saint in touch with those queer happenings and dark corners in other people's lives from which many of his adventures began, and for that reason there were very few of them whom he refused to see.

There was one lady in particular whom he always forced himself to remember whenever he was tempted to dodge one of these callers, for she was quite definitely the least probable herald of adventure who ever crossed his path. He was, as a matter of fact, just ready to go out one morning when Sam Outrell telephoned up to announce her.

"Your Jersey 'as come back from the cleaners, sir," was his cryptic postscript to the information.

Sam Outrell had been raised on a farm, many years before he came to be head porter in the apartment building on Piccadilly where the Saint lived, and incidentally one of Simon's loyalest watch-dogs; and the subterfuges by which he managed to convey a rough description of visitors who were standing at his elbow were often most abstrusely bucolic. Simon could still remember the occasion, when he had been suffering tireless persecution from a stout Society dame who was trying to manufacture divorce evidence against her doddering spouse, on which Sam had told him that "Your silk purse has turned up, sir," and had explained later that he meant to convey that "The old sow's 'ere."

"I'll have a look at it," said the Saint, after a brief hesitation.