Leslie Charteris - The Saint Goes On

"What is your objection to having him arrested and questioned in the ordinary way?" asked the Commissioner.

"He'd have to be taken to Market Street, wouldn't he?" meditated Teal aloud. His baby blue eyes hid themselves under studiously sleepy lids. "Well," he said dryly, "because I don't want him murdered."

Junior Inspector Desmond Pryke flushed. He was one of the first graduates of Lord Trenchard's famous Police College, and he usually gave the impression of being very well satisfied with his degree. He was dark, slim, and well-manicured; and the inventor of that classic experiment for turning gentlemen into detectives could certainly have pointed to him as a product who looked nothing like the traditional idea of a policeman. Mr. Teal had been heard to thank God that there was no possibility of confusing them, but there were obvious reasons why Mr. Teal was irrevocably prejudiced in favour of the old order.

"It's in your manor, Pryke," said the Assistant Commissioner. "What do you think?"

"I don't see what there is to be gained by it," said the other. "If Fasson hasn't been too frightened by the murder of Anworth to talk anyhow—"

"What does Fasson know about the murder of Anworth?" demanded Teal quickly, for the official statements to the Press had contained certain deliberate gaps.

Pryke looked at him.

"I don't suppose he definitely knows any more than any other outsider, but it's common gossip in the underworld that Anworth was murdered because he was going to turn informer."

"You look as if you spent a lot of your time picking up gossip from the underworld," retorted Teal sarcastically. He caught the Assistant Commissioner's chilly eye on him, and went on more politely: "In any case, sir, that's only another reason why I don't want to take him to a police station. I want to try and prevent him thinking that any squeal could be traced back to him."

There was some further discussion, through which Teal sat stolidly chewing a worn-out lump of spearmint, with his round pink face set in its habitual mask of weary patience, and eventually gained his point.

"Perhaps you had better take Inspector Pryke with you," suggested the Commissioner, when he gave his permission.

"I should like to, sir," said Mr. Teal, with great geniality, "but I don't know whether this can wait long enough for him to go home and change."

Pryke adjusted the set of his coat delicately as he rose. It was undoubtedly part of a resplendent suit, being of a light fawn colour with a mauve over-check; a very different proposition from Teal's shiny blue serge.

"I didn't know that Police Regulations required you to look like an out-of-work rag and bone man," he said; and Chief Inspector Teal's complexion was tinged with purple all the way to Hyde Park Corner.

He resented having Inspector Pryke thrust upon him, partly because he resented Inspector Pryke, and partly because the High Fence had been his own individual assignment ever since Johnny Anworth put his knife and fork into that fatal plate of roast beef six weeks ago. For a lieutenant, when necessity called for one, Mr. Teal preferred the morose and angular Sergeant Barrow, who had never been known to speak unless he was spoken to, and who then spoke only to utter some cow-like comment to which nobody with anything better to do need have listened. Chief Inspector Teal had none of the theoretical scientific training in criminology with which the new graduates of the Police College were pumped to offensive overflowing, but he had a background of thirty years' hard-won experience which took the intrusion of manicured theorists uneasily; and at the entrance of the small apartment building in which Sunny Jim Fasson had been located he said so.

"I want you to keep quiet and let me do the talking," was his instruction. "I know how I'm going to tackle Fasson, and I know how to get what I want out of him."

Pryke fingered his M.C.C. tie.

"Like you've always known how to get what you want out of the Saint?" he drawled.

Mr. Teal's lips were tightly compressed as he stumped up the narrow stairway. His seemingly interminable failure to get anything that he really wanted out of that cool smiling devil who passed so incongruously under the name of the Saint was a thorn in his side which Inspector Pryke had twisted dextrously before. Whenever Chief Inspector Teal attempted to impress the rising generation of detectives with his superior craftsmanship, that gibe could always be brought up against him, openly or surreptitiously; and Mr. Teal was getting so tired of it that it hurt. He wished, viciously, that some of the smart infants who were being pushed up under him could have as much to cope with as he had had in his time.

But Sunny Jim Fasson was quite a different problem from the blue-eyed bantering outlaw who had occupied so much of Mr. Teal's time in other days; and he felt a renewal of confidence when he saw Sunny Jim's startled face through the slit of the opening door and wedged his foot expertly in the aperture.

"Don't make a fuss, and nobody's going to hurt you, Sunny," he said.

Sunny Jim, like Johnny Anworth, was also a philosopher, in his way. He retreated into the tiny bed-sitting-room without dropping the ash from his cigar.

"What's it about this time, Mr. Teal?" he inquired, with the sang-froid of old experience.

He did not even bother to put on his cultivated American accent; which saved him considerable trouble, for he had been born in the Old Kent Road and had learnt all that he knew of America from the movies.

"It needn't be about some diamond bracelets that were stolen from Peabody's — unless you want it to be," said Teal, with equal cold-bloodedness.

Sunny Jim raised his eyebrows. The gesture was mechanical.

"I don't know what you mean, Mr. Teal."

"Would you know what I meant," replied the detective, with impregnable drowsiness, "if I told you that Peabody has identified your photograph and is quite sure he can identify you; and half the Magnificent Hotel staff are ready to back him up?"

Sunny Jim had no answer to that.

"Mind you," said Teal, carefully unwrapping a fresh slice of chewing gum, "I said that we needn't go into that unless you want to. If you had a little talk with me now, for instance — why, we could settle it all here in this room, and you needn't even come with us to the station. It'd be all over and forgotten — just between ourselves."

When Sunny Jim Fasson was not wearing the well-trained smile from which he had earned his nickname, his face fell into a system of hard-bitten lines which drew an illuminating picture of shrewd and sharp intelligence. Those lines be came visible now. So far as Sunny Jim was concerned, Teal's speech needed no amplification; and Sunny Jim was a man who believed in the comfort and security of Mr. James Fasson first, last, and in the middle. If Teal had arrived half an hour later he would have been on his way to Ostend, but as things were he recognised his best alternative health resort.

"I'm not too particular what I talk about with an old friend, Mr. Teal," he said at length.

"Do you sell your stuff to the High Fence, Sunny?"

Fasson held his cigar under his nose and sniffed the aroma.

"I believe I did hear of him once," he admitted cautiously.

The appearance of bored sleepiness in Chief Inspector Teal's eyes was always deceptive. In the last few seconds they had made a detailed inventory of the contents of the room, and had observed a torn strip of brown paper beside the waste-basket and a three-inch end of string on the carpet under the table.

"You've already got rid of Peabody's diamond bracelets, haven't you?" he said persuasively; and his somnolent eyes went back to Sunny Jim's face and did not shift from it. "All I want to know from you is what address you put on the parcel."