Leslie Charteris - The Saint and Mr. Teal

"Thanks for the fight," said the Saint shortly. "I never cared for cold-blooded killings."

For answer the big man came forward off his toes like a charging bull; but he had not moved six inches before the Saint's swift dash reached him. Again those pile-driving fists jarred on the weak spot just below the other's breastbone. Jones grabbed for a stranglehold, but the drumming of iron knuckles on his solar plexus made him stagger backwards and cover up with his elbows. His mouth opened against the protest of his paralyzed lungs, and his face went white and puffy. Simon drove him to the door and held off warily. He knew that the big man was badly hurt, but perhaps his helplessness looked a little too realistic… The Saint feinted with a left to the head, and in a second the big man was bear-hugging him in a wild rush that almost carried him off his feet.

They went back towards the gleaming dome in a fighting tangle. Simon looked over his shoulder and saw it a yard away, with its brilliant surface shining like silver around the charred blackness of the professor's hand. The strip of wire that he had seen melted on it had left streaky trails of smeared metal down the curved sides, like the slime of a fantastic snail. The Saint saw them in an instant of photographically vivid vision in which the minutest details of that diabolical apparatus were printed forever on his memory. There must have been tens of thousands of volts pulsing invisibly through that section of the secret process, hundreds of amperes of burning annihilation waiting to scorch through the first thing that tapped them with that crackle of blue flame and hiss of intolerable heat which he had seen once and heard again. His shoes slipped over the floor as he wrestled superhumanly against the momentum that was pressing him back towards certain death: the big man's face was cracked in a fiendish grin, and he heard Patricia cry out… Then one of his heels tripped over the professor's outstretched legs, and he was thrown off his balance. He put all his strength into a frantic twist of his body as he fell, and saw the dome leap up beside him, a foot away. The fall knocked half the wind out of his body, and he fought blindly away to one side. Suddenly his hands grasped empty air, and he heard Patricia cry out again.

The splitting detonation of a shot racketed in his ears as he rolled up on one elbow. Patricia had missed, somehow, and the big man was grappling for the gun. Simon crawled up and flung himself forward. As he did so, the big man saw his own gun lying in the corner where the Saint had kicked it, and dived for it. Simon caught him from behind in a circling sweep, locking the big man's arms to his sides at the elbows; but the big man had the gun. The Saint saw it curling round for a backward shot that could not help scoring somewhere: he made a wild grab at the curving wrist and caught it, jerking it up as the trigger tightened, and the shot smashed through the floor. Simon flung his left leg forward, across the big man's stance. The steel dome was a yard away on his left. He heaved sideways, across the leverage of his thigh, and sprang back… The man's scream rang in his ears as he staggered away. Once again that spurt of eye-aching blue flame seared across his eye's and turned suddenly orange. The big man had hit the dome with his shoulder, and his coat was burning; the smell of singeing cloth stung the Saint's nostrils, and the crack of cordite sang through his head as the galvanic current clamped a dead finger convulsively on the trigger and held it there rigidly in one last aimless shot…

"And we still don't know his real name," murmured the Saint.

He pushed a handkerchief across his brow and looked at Patricia with a crooked grin. Patricia was fingering her wrist tenderly, where the big man's crushing grip had fastened on it. She looked back at the Saint with a pale face that was still hopelessly puzzled.

"That's your fault," she said.

"I know." The Saint's eyes had a mocking twist in their inscrutable blue that she couldn't understand. "You see, when you've made up your mind about a thing like Brother Jones's demise, the only way is to get it over quickly. And Claud Eustace will be along soon. But I promise you, Pat, I've never hated killing anyone so much — and there was never anyone who'd 've been so dangerous to my peace of mind if he'd stayed alive. If you want any excuses for it, he'd got two deliberate murders on his own hands and one more for which he was deliberately responsible, so he only got what was coming to him."

She waited alone in the room of death while the Saint vanished along the landing towards one of the bedrooms. It took the Saint a few minutes to repair the damage which the fight had done to his immaculate elegance, but when he had finished there was hardly a trace of it — nothing but a slight disorder that could have been caused by a brief scuffle. He used the dead man's hair-brushes and clothesbrush, and wrapped a handkerchief round his hand before he touched anything. Everything went back on the dressing table exactly as he had found it; and he returned to the girl with a ready smile.

"Let's finish the clean-up, Pat — I don't know that we've a lot of time."

He went over the floor with keen, restless eyes. Two cartridge cases he picked up from odd corners where they had rolled away after the snap action of the recoil had spewed them out of a pistol breech. He identified them as the products of his own gun, for he had marked each of them with a nick in the base. They went into his pocket: the others, which testified to the shots which Jones had fired, he left where they lay, and added to them the souvenir which he had preserved in a match-box from his breakfast table that morning. He searched the room once more for any other clues which he might have overlooked, and was satisfied.

His hand fell on Patricia's shoulder. "Let's go," he said.

They went down to the hall. Simon left her again while he went out into the garden. His automatic, and the shells he had picked up, went deep under the earth of a neglected flower bed; and he uprooted a clump of weeds and pressed them into a new berth where they would hide the marks of freshly turned earth.

"Don't you ever want me to know what you're up to?" asked Patricia, when he came back; and the Saint took her by the arm and led her to a chair.

"Lass, don't you realize I've just committed murder?

And times is not what they was. I've known much bigger things than this that were easy enough to get away with before Claud Eustace had quite such a life-and-death ambition to hang my scalp in his belt; but this is not once upon a time. We might have run away and left the mystery to uncover itself, but I didn't think that was such a hot idea. I'd rather know how we stand from the start. Now sit down and let me write some more about Wilberforce Gupp — this is a great evening for brainwork."

He propelled her gently into the chair and sat himself down in another. An envelope and a pencil came out of his pocket; and with perfect calm and detachment, as if he were sitting in his own room at home with a few minutes to spare, the amazing Saint proceeded to scribble down and read aloud to her the epilogue of his epic.

He had just finished when they both heard a car swing into the drive. Feet crunched over the gravel, and heavy boots grounded on the stone outside the front door. The resonant clatter of a brass knocker curtly applied echoed through the house.