Leslie Charteris - The Saint Goes On

For the first time since he had come into the room, Irelock met his eyes. He even smiled slightly.

"That's hardly necessary, Inspector," he said. "You seem to have plenty of evidence already. I think I can flatter myself that it took a clever man to catch me." His gaze wandered significantly over to the Saint. "When did you first — suspect me?"

"When you saw a face at the window," Simon told him, "and the party broke up at a very psychological moment. I hadn't anything definite even then; but I began to wonder."

Irelock nodded.

"That was bad luck, of course," he said matter-of-factly. "But I had to do something to stop Kenneth finding out that Ellshaw had been seen alive. Then, after I'd started a scare, I thought I might as well go on with it. If I'd been lucky, I might have got you and Ripwell in the garden — as it was, you nearly got me." He touched his forearm, where the bullet had grazed him. "But it made my story more circumstantial. It was only afterwards that I realised that Kenneth might be suspected, and I had to try and manufacture some evidence in his favour."

"Why did you drink your own poison?"

"Partly because Teal wouldn't drink, and by that time I knew I'd got to get rid of both of you together. Partly because you'd just been saying things which showed me that you were fairly hot on my trail — I didn't know what you might have said to Teal already. It was the only time I lost my nerve. I tried to turn the idea into a way of throwing you off the scent again."

"Do you realise the meaning of all you're saying?" asked Teal grimly.

Irelock sighed.

"Oh, yes. Quite well. But there doesn't seem to be much point in giving you any more trouble. After all, you've got other witnesses. You ought not to have Ellshaw; but that's another piece of bad luck. I told him that if he saw a red light in my window he was to keep away, but apparently he didn't keep away far enough."

"One more question," said the Saint. "Why didn't you kill me in Duchess Place?"

"Because I hadn't got a gun," answered Irelock simply. "I never set out to go in for that sort of crime — not till it was thrust on me. I notice that murderers in books always have guns, but they aren't really easy for the amateur to get hold of. I should have got rid of you like I got rid of Mrs. Ellshaw — knocked you out and sunk you in the river while you were unconscious. It was only when things began to happen down here that I got hold of Ripwell's old revolver. And of course he did have some ammunition; but he'd forgotten it."

"Have you still got this gun?" Teal asked quickly.

Irelock's lips moved in a wan smile, and he put his right hand into the breast of his dressing-gown. Three of them at least caught the sudden cunning shift of his eyes, and realised too late what was coming — it was queer, Simon reflected afterwards, how completely they had been taken in by his implied surrender, when every one of them should have known that the murderers who make a full and calm confession at the moment when they are unmasked are as rare as fresh pineapples in Lapland.

What Ellshaw knew, or what he guessed, none of them ever discovered. It is only on record that he was the first of them to move, the only one to get up and go straight for Irelock. Twice the room rocked to the crash of the heavy gun, and Ellshaw staggered at the impact of each shot; but he held on his course. He must have been dead on his feet; but in some uncanny way he caught Irelock at the door and fell on his arm dragging the revolver down so that it could only aim at the floor. It took two men to unlock the clutch of his fingers on Irelock's wrist; and the bruises of that dying grip were still stamped on the other's flesh a fortnight later, when he stepped down from the dock to wait for the answer to the greatest mystery of all.

"Business" took Simon Templar to Penzance, though nobody ever knew exactly what he had to do there. He took Hoppy Uniatz with him for company. But Hoppy never saw him do it. Simon parked him in the bar of a convenient pub for an hour, and that was that. For all that this story can record, he may have spent the hour in another pub across the street, talking to nobody and watching nothing. The Saint's business was as irregular as himself, and directed by the same incalculable twists of motive: he was liable to do a great many important things with apparent aimlessness, and a great many unimportant things with the most specious and circumstantial parade of reasons.

It is about two hundred and eighty miles from London to Penzance, which the Saint drove in five hours, including one break for a cigarette and a drink in Taunton; and after that one hour for which Hoppy Uniatz was alone, he climbed back into his car as if he was cheerfully prepared to drive the same two hundred and eighty miles home without further delay.

The chronicler, whose one object it is to conceal no fact which by its unfair suppression might deceive any one of the two hundred and fifty thousand earnest readers of this epic, is able to reveal that this performance had never entered Simon Templar's head; although the Saint would have done it without turning a hair if it had happened to be necessary. But he did not say so; and Mr. Uniatz, citizen of a country whose inhabitants regard a thousand-mile jaunt in much the same light as the average Londoner regards a trip to Brighton, would have been quite unperturbed whatever the Saint had announced for his programme. Hardly anything was capable of perturbing Mr. Uniatz except a call for mental effort lasting more than five consecutive seconds, and that was an ordeal to which he had never been known to submit himself voluntarily.

He sat placidly at the Saint's side while the huge snarling Hirondel droned eastwards along the coast, chewing the butt of an incredibly rank cigar in a paradise of utter intellectual vacancy which allowed his battered features to relax in a calm that had its own rugged beauty, being very much like something that Epstein might have conceived in a sportive mood. They left the rocks of Cornwall behind them and entered the rolling pastures and red earth of Devon, diving sometimes through the cool shadows of a wood, sometimes catching sight of a wedge of sea sparkling in the sunlight between a fold of the hills. Simon Templar, who was constitutionally unable to regard the highways of England as anything but a gigantic road-face circuit laid out for his personal use, did nothing to encourage a placid relaxation in anybody who rode with him; but Hoppy had sat in that car often enough to learn that any other atittude could lead only to a nervous breakdown. Only once was he jarred out of his phlegmatic fatalism, when the Saint sounded his horn and pulled out to pass a big speeding saloon on a straight stretch beyond Sid-mouth. As they swept up alongside, the saloon swerved out spitefully: the Saint's face hardened under a sheath of bronze, and he held grimly on, with his offside wheels on the very edge of the road. They got through, with a shrill scraping of wings; and then Simon swung the Hirondel sharply in, and heard Hoppy's breath hiss through his teeth.

"Geez, boss," said Mr. Uniatz uncertainly, "I fought we was finished, den." He felt around at his hip. "Say, why don't ya stop de wagon an' lemme go back an' shoot up dat goddamn son of a witch?"

Simon glanced at the driving mirror, and smiled rather gently.

"He has been shot up, Hoppy," he said; and Mr. Uniatz looked back and saw that the saloon had stopped far behind, tilting over at a perilous angle with its nearside wheels buried in a deep ditch.

They roared over four more hills, whipped around half a dozen more corners in hair-raising skids, and thundered past a gaunt grey building in a barren hollow, close to the road. Simon took the cigarette from between his lips and pointed to it.