Leslie Charteris - The Saint and Mr. Teal

Laura Berwick thought that her reason would break. The last of the swarthy seamen had released her and gone out with Toby — there was no one in the saloon but herself and Abdul Osman, and that ghastly relic of a man cowering in a corner and watching Osman's movements with blubbering hate-filled eyes. Osman did not even seem to be aware of his existence — perhaps he had grown so used to having that thing of his own creation with him that he took no more notice of him than if he had been a dog; or perhaps in the foul depths of his mind there was some spawning idea of heaping humiliation on humiliation both for the girl and his beaten slave. He edged towards her unsteadily, his glittering eyes leering with unutterable things, and she retreated from him as she would have done before a snake, until her back was to the wall and she could retreat no further.

"Come to me, beautiful white rose!"

His arms reached out for her. She tried to slip sideways away from their clawing grasp, keeping her eyes out of sheer terror from looking full into that puffed lecherous face; but he caught her arm and held it with a strength greater than her own. She was drawn irresistibly into his hot embrace — she felt the horrible softness of his paunch against her firm young flesh, and shuddered until mists swam before her eyes. She could not possibly endure it much longer. Her senses reeled, and she seemed to have lost all her strength…

And then, as his greedy lips found her face, her brain went out at last into merciful blackness; and she heard the shot that struck him down only as a dim part of her dream.

SIMON TEMPLAR slammed the door of the glory hole forward, twisted the key, and snapped it off short in the lock. He heard a babel of shouts and jabbering in heathen tongues break out behind it, and grinned gently. So far as he had been able to discover in a lightning reconnaissance, practically the whole of Osman's crew was congregated up there in the fo'c'sle: he had already battened down the hatch over their heads, and it would take them nothing less than an hour to break out.

It was the moment for a speed of action that could be outdistanced by nothing less nimble than a Morality Squad discovering new vices to suppress — that speed of decision and performance in which the Saint had no equal. With the stillness of the ship still freshly bruised by the sharp thud of that single shot, it was a time when committee meetings and general philosophy had to take second place.

He raced down the alleyway towards the second door under which he had seen a strip of light; it was thrown open as he reached it, and an olive-skinned man in uniform, with his shirt unbuttoned, stared into his face from a range of twelve inches. In the cabin behind him, two others, apparently fellow officers, were frozen statuesquely around a table littered with cards. Just for the sharp-etched half of a second there was an utter immobility; and then Simon's fist crashed into the man's face and sent him staggering. In another second that door also was locked and the key broken.

Simon had located only one other danger point, and that was a few steps farther down the passage. As he opened the door he saw that it was the galley, and the explanation of the light he had seen was provided by a coal-black Kano boy who was placidly peeling potatoes and humming one of his own weird melodies. The song died away in an abrupt minor as the Kano boy looked up at him with rolling eyes: Simon saluted him cheerily and turned the third key on the safe side of the door.

Then he went aft to the saloon; and as he went he saw another door hanging drunkenly open on its mutilated hinges.

Toby Halidom was pillowing Laura's head on one arm, babbling silly incoherent things to her. His other hand covered the doorway with the automatic that had killed Osman, and for one second Simon felt nearer death than he cared to stand at any time.

"Put that down, you ass," he said; and then Toby recognized him and lowered the gun slowly.

"What are you doing here?"

"Getting you out of trouble," said the Saint briskly. "You needn't worry — the crew won't be interfering yet. I've just locked them up to keep them out of mischief."

His gaze swept comprehensively round the room — over the body of Abdul Osman, who lay stretched out on his back, half underneath a table that he had clutched at and brought down with him in his fall, with a slowly widening red stain on his white shirt front; over the unconscious figure of Galbraith Stride; over the enslaved secretary, Clements, who sat without movement on one of the couches, his face hidden in his hands, with an empty hypodermic syringe lying where it had fallen on the dark tapestry beside him… He reached out and took the automatic from Halidom's unresisting fingers.

"I don't care if I hang for it!" said the young man hysterically. "He deserved everything he got."

Simon's eyebrows went up through one slow half-centimetre.

"If you hang for it?" he repeated.

"Yes. They can do what they like. I killed him — the swine. I shot him—"

The Saint's smile, that quirk of the lips which could be so gay, so reckless, so mocking, so debonair, so icily insolent, so maddeningly seraphic, as his mood willed it, touched his mouth and eyes with a rare gentleness that transformed him. A strange look, almost of tenderness, touched the chiselled lines of that mad buccaneering face.

"Hang you, Toby?" he said softly. "I don't think they'll do that."

The young man scarcely heard him. For at that moment Laura's eyes opened, full of the horror of her last moment of consciousness, and saw the face of the young man bending over her with a queer little choking sob.

"Toby!"

She clung to him, raising herself against his shoulder, still wild-eyed with lingering nightmares; and then she shrank back as she saw Abdul Osman.

"Toby! Did you "

"It's all right, darling," said Halidom huskily. "He won't trouble us again."

Then the Saint's hands touched each of their shoulders.

"I don't think you need to stay here," he said quietly.

He led them out onto the deck, out into the night air that was cool and fresh with the enduring sweetness of the sea. The motorboat in which they had come was still moored at the bottom of the gangway; but now the Puffin was made fast behind it, with its spread sails stirring like the wings of a grey ghost against the dark water. Between them they helped the girl down to the motorboat; and Simon sat on the half-deck and gazed aft to the seats where the other two had settled themselves. A match flared at the end of his cigarette.

"Will you try and listen to me?" he said, in the same quiet tone. "I know what you've been through tonight, because I was listening most of the time. There were some things I had to know before I moved — and then, when the time came for me to interfere, there wasn't much for me to do. I did what I could, and no one will stop you going back to the Claudette ."

The hand with the cigarette moved towards the Luxor's side in a faint gesture.

"A man was killed there tonight. I've never seen any good reason for buttering up a bad name just because it's a dead one. As Toby said, he deserved everything he got — maybe more. He was a man whose money had been wrung farthing by farthing out of the ruin and degradation of more human lives than either of you can imagine. He was a man who'll leave the world a little cleaner for being dead.

"But in the eyes of the law he was murdered. In the eyes of the law he was a citizen who had every right to live, who could have called for policemen paid for by other citizens to protect him if he'd ever been threatened, who would have been guiltless for ever in the eyes of the law until his crimes could have been proved according to the niggling rules of evidence to twelve bamboozled half-wits by a parade of blathering lawyers. And the man who killed him will be sentenced to death according to the law.