Leslie Charteris - The Saint and Mr. Teal

"It's a pity you couldn't have saved Jones and done what you thought of all the same," said Teal; and the change in his manner was so marked that the Saint smiled. "It might have done the country some good."

Simon drew at his cigarette and hunched his shoulders.

"Why the hell should I bother? The country's got its salvation in its own hands. While a nation that's always boasting about its outstanding brilliance can put up with a collection of licensing laws, defense-of-the-realm acts, seaside councillors, Lambeth conventions, sweepstake laws, Sunday-observance acts, and one fatuity after another that's nailed on it by a bunch of blathering maiden aunts and pimply hypocrites, and can't make up its knock-kneed mind to get rid of 'em and let some fresh air and common sense into its life — when they can't do anything but dither over things that an infant in arms would know its own mind about — how the devil can they expect to solve bigger problems? And why the blazes should I take any trouble to save them from the necessity of thinking for themselves…? Now for heaven's sake make up your mind whether you want to arrest me or not, because if you don't I'd like to go home to bed."

"All right," said Teal. "You can go."

The Saint held out his hand.

"Thanks," he said. "I'm sorry about that gramophone record. Maybe we can get on better in the future — if we're both very good."

"I'll believe that of you when I see it," said Teal; but he smiled.

Simon pushed his way through the knot of waiting men to the door.

At the foot of the stairs the detective who had been left with Patricia barred his way. Teal looked over the gallery rail and spoke down.

"It's all right, Peters," he said. "Mr. Templar and Miss Holm can go."

Simon opened the front door and turned to wave the detective a debonair good-bye. They went out to where the Saint had left his car, and Simon lighted another cigarette and waited in silence for the engine to warm. Presently he let in the clutch and they slid away southwards for home.

"Was it all right?" asked Patricia.

"Just," said the Saint. "But I don't want such a narrow squeak again for many years. There was one vital piece of evidence I'd overlooked, and Teal thought of it. I had to think fast — and play for my life. But I collared the evidence as I went out, and they'll never be able to make a case without it. And do you know, Pat? — Claud Eustace ended up by really believing me."

"What did you tell him?"

"Very, very nearly the whole truth," said the Saint, and hummed softly to himself for a long while.

He drove home by a roundabout route that took them over Westminster Bridge. In the middle of the bridge he dipped into his pocket and flung something sideways, far out over the parapet.

It was a small box that weighed heavily and rattled.

Back at Scotland Yard, a puzzled detective sergeant turned his coat inside out for the second time.

"I could have sworn I put the matchbox with those bullets in my pocket, sir," he said. "I must have left it on the bench or something. Shall I go back and fetch it?"

"Never mind," said Mr. Teal. "We shan't be needing it."

A CERTAIN Mr. Peabody, known to his wife as Oojy-Woojy, was no fool. He used to say so himself, on every possible occasion; and he should have known. He was a small and rather scraggy man with watery eyes, a melancholy walrus moustache, and an unshakable faith in the efficiency of the police and the soundness of his insurance company — which latter qualities may provide a generous explanation of an idiosyncrasy of his which in anyone else would have been described as sheer and unadulterated foolishness.

Mr. Peabody, in fact, is herewith immortalized in print for the sole and sufficient reason that he was the proprietor of a jewellery shop in Regent Street which the Green Cross gang busted one night in August. Apart from this, the temperamentalities, destiny, and general Oojy-Woojiness of Mr. Peabody do not concern us at all; but that busting of his shop was the beginning of no small excitement.

Mr. Peabody's idiosyncrasy was that of displaying his choicest wares in his window — and leaving them there for the passing crowd to feast their eyes upon. Not for him the obscurity of safes and strong rooms: that was only the fate of the undistinguished bulk of his stock, the more commonplace articles of virtu. His prize pieces were invariably set out behind the glass on velvet-lined shelves lighted by chastely shielded bulbs. An act of deliberate criminal foolishness, from the point of view of almost anyone except Mr. Peabody. From the point of view of the Green Cross boys, an act of sublime charity.

It was a very good bust, from the point of view of a detached connoisseur — carried out with all the slick perfection of technique of which the Green Cross boys were justly proud. The coup was no haphazard smash-and-grab affair, but a small-scale masterpiece of which every detail had been planned and rehearsed until the first and only public presentation could be guaranteed to flutter through its allotted segment of history with the smooth precision of a ballet. Mr. Peabody's emporium had been selected for the setting out of a list of dozens of other candidates simply on account of that aforesaid idiosyncrasy of his, and every item to be taken had been priced and contracted for in advance.

Joe Corrigan was booked to drive the car; Clem Enright heaved the brick; and Ted Orping, a specialist in his own line, was ready with the bag. In the space of four seconds, as previously timed by Ted Orping's stop watch, a collection of assorted bijouterie for which any receiver would cheerfully have given two thousand pounds in hard cash vanished from Mr. Peabody's shattered window with the celerity of rabbits fading away from a field at the approach of a conjuror with an empty top hat. A gross remuneration, per head of the parties concerned, of five hundred pounds for the job — if you care to look at it that way. Fast money; for on the big night the performance went through well within scheduled limits.

It was precisely two o'clock in the morning when Clem Enright's brick went through Mr. Peabody's plate glass, and the smash of it startled a constable who was patrolling leisurely down his beat a matter of twenty yards away. Ted Orping's hands flew in and out of the window with lightning accuracy while the policeman was fumbling with his whistle and lumbering the first few yards towards them. Before the Law had covered half the distance the job was finished, and the two Green Cross experts were piling into the back of the car as it jolted away and gathered speed towards Oxford Circus. The stolen wagon whizzed over the deserted crossroads as the first shrill blasts of alarm wailed into the night far behind.

"Good work," said Ted Orping, speaking as much for his own share in the triumph as for anybody else's.

He settled back in his corner and pulled at the brim of his hat — a broad-shouldered, prematurely old young man of about twenty-eight, with a square jaw and two deep creases running down from his nose and past the corners of his thin mouth. He was one of the first examples of a type of crook that was still new and strange to England, a type that founded itself on the American hoodlum, educated in movie theatres and polished on the raw underworld fiction imported by F. W. Woolworth — a type that was breaking into the placid and gentlemanly paths of Old World crime as surely and ruthlessly as Fate. In a few years more Ted's type was no longer to seem strange and foreign; but in those days he was an innovation, respected and feared by his satellites. He had learned to imitate the transatlantic callousness and pugnacity so well that he was no longer conscious of playing a part. He had the bullying swagger, the taste for ostentatious clothes, the desire for power; and he said "Oh, yeah?" with exactly the right shade of contempt and belligerence.