Leslie Charteris - The Saint Goes On

Teal hesitated for a moment, studying him with that deceptively bovine gaze.

"Yes, he was shot."

"When?"

"Just now."

The bantering blue eyes had an impish twinkle.

"You must have been doing some fast detecting," said the Saint. "Or did somebody tell you?"

Mr. Teal frowned at him, shifting his gum from tooth to tooth till he got it lodged behind his wisdoms. His sluggish glance travelled once again over that keen sunburned face, handsome as Lucifer and lighted with an indescribable glimmer of devil-may-care mockery; and he wondered if there would ever be any peace for him so long as he was in the employment of the Law and that amazing buccaneer was on the other side.

For Simon Templar was the incalculable outlaw for whom the routines of criminal investigation had no precedents. He belonged to no water-tight classification, followed no rules but his own, fitted into no definite category in the official scheme of things. He was the Saint: a creation of his own, comparable to nothing but himself. From time to time, desperate creatures of that nebulously frontiered stratosphere commonly called "the Underworld" had gone forth vowing unprintable revenge, and had come back empty-handed — when they came back at all. Many times, Chief Inspector Claud Eustace Teal had thought that all his ambitions would be fulfilled if he could see the Saint safely locked away behind the bars of Larkstone Prison — and yet some of his most spectacular coups could never have been made without the Saint's assistance. And in spite of all the wrath that had been directed on him from these diametrically antagonistic quarters, the Saint had still gone on, a terror to the underworld and a thorn in the side of Scotland Yard, a gay crusader in modern dress who returned from his lawless raids with more booty than any adventurer had ever found before him.

And with all these memories freshened in his mind during that slothful survey, almost against his will, Chief Inspector Teal found himself impotent to believe that the High Fence could be merely another alias of the man before him. It was not psychologically possible. Whatever else could be said about him, the Saint was not a man who sat spinning webs and weaving complex but static mysteries. Everything that he did was active: he would go out to break up the web and take his illicit plunder from the man who wove it, but he wouldn't spin… And yet there was the evidence of Teal's own flabbergasted senses, there in that room, to be explained away; and Mr. Teal had suffered too much at the Saint's hands to feel that there could ever be any comfortable certainty in the wide world when that incorrigible free-booter was around.

He clasped his pudgy hands behind his back and said: "Sunny Jim was shot in this room less than five minutes ago. Somebody opened the door and shot him while I was talking to him. He was shot just in time to stop him telling me something I very much wanted to hear. And I want to know what you were doing at that time."

The Saint smiled rather mildly.

"Is that an invitation or a threat?" he inquired.

"It's whichever you like to make it," Teal answered grimly. "Sunny Jim didn't shoot himself, and I'm going to find out who did it."

"I'm sure you are, Claud," said the Saint cordially. "You always do find out these things, with that marvellous brain of yours… Have you thought of the High Fence?"

Teal nodded.

"I have."

"What do you know about the High Fence?" demanded Pryke suspiciously.

Simon took out a cigarette-case and looked at him equably.

"This and that. I've been looking for him for some time, you know."

"What do you want with the High Fence, Saint?" asked Mr. Teal.

Simon Templar glanced with unwontedly passionless eyes at the chair where Sunny Jim had stopped talking, and smiled with his lips. He lighted a cigarette.

"The High Fence has killed two men," he said. "Wouldn't you like a chance to see him in the dock at the Old Bailey?"

"That isn't all of it," answered the detective stubbornly. "You know as well as I do that the High Fence is supposed to keep a lot of the stuff he buys together, and ship it out of the country in big loads. And they say he keeps a lot of cash in hand as well — for buying,"

The glimmer of mockery in the Saint's eyes crisped up into an instant of undiluted wickedness.

"Teal, this is all news to me!"

"You're a liar," said the detective flatly.

He stared at the Saint with all the necessary symptoms of a return of his unfriendly glower, and added: "I know what your game is. You know the High Fence; but you don't know what he does with the stuff he's bought, or where he keeps his money. That's all you want to find out before you do anything about putting him in the dock at the Old Bailey on a charge of murder. And when that time comes, you'll buy a new car and pay some more cash into your bank balance. That's all the interest you have in these two men who've been killed."

"I can't get around to feeling that either of them is an irreparable loss," Simon admitted candidly. "But what's all this dramatic lecture leading to?"

"It's leading to this," said Teal relentlessly. "There's a law about what you're doing, and it's called being an accessory after the fact."

Simon aligned both eyebrows. The sheer unblushing impudence of his ingenuousness brought a premonitory tinge of violet into the detective's complexion even before he spoke.

"I suppose you know what you're talking about, Claud," he drawled. "But I don't. And if you want to make that speech again in a court of law, they'll want you to produce a certain amount of proof. It's an old legal custom." Only for the second time in that interview, Simon looked straight at him instead of smiling right through him. "There's a lot of laws about what you're doing; and they're called slander, and defamation of character, and—"

"I don't care what they're called!"

"But you've got to care," said the Saint reasonably. "After all, you're telling me that a bloke's been shot, and that I did it, or I know something about it. Well, let's begin at the beginning. Let's be sure the bloke's dead. Where's his body?"

In spite of certain superficial resemblances, it can be fairly positively stated that Chief Inspector Teal had never, even in some distant incarnation, been a balloon. But if he had been, and the point of a pin had been strategically applied to the most delicate part of his rotundity, it would have had practically the same effect as the Saint's innocently mooted question. Something that had been holding out his chest seemed to deflate, leaving behind it an expanding and exasperating void. He felt as if someone had unscrewed his navel and his stomach had fallen out.

The cigar which had slipped stupidly out of Sunny Jim's mouth when the bullet hit him was lying on the carpet in front of him, tainting the room with an acrid smell of singeing wool. Teal put his foot on it. It was his only concrete assurance that the whole fantastic affair hadn't been a grotesque hallucination — that the overworked brain which had struggled through so many of the Saint's shattering surprises hadn't finally weighed its anchor and gone wallowing off into senile monsoons of delirious delusion. His lips thinned out in an effort of self-control which touched the borders of homicidal fever.

"That's what I want to know," he said. "The body was here when I went out. When I came in again it had disappeared — and you were here instead. And I think you know something about it."

"My dear Claud," Simon protested, "what d'you think I am — a sort of amateur body-snatcher?"

"I think you're a—"

Simon raised his hand.

"Hush," he said, with a nervous glance at Inspector Pryke. "Not before the lady."

Teal gulped.

"I think—"

"The trouble is," said the Saint, "that you don't. Here you are shooting off your mouth about a body, and nobody knows whether it exists. You wonder whether I could have shot Sunny Jim, when you don't even know whether he's dead. You hint at pinching me for being an accessory after the fact, and you can't produce the fact that I'm supposed to be an accessory to."