Leslie Charteris - The Saint vs Scotland Yard

"I'll see you in hell first," grated Perrigo.

"You won't see me in hell at all," said the Saint. "I like warm climates, but I'm very musical, and I think the harps have it. Forward march!"

He propelled Perrigo down the hall to a door which opened on to a flight of stone steps. At the bottom of these steps there was a small square cellar furnished with a chair and a camp bed. The door, Perrigo noticed, was of three-inch oak, and a broad iron bar slid in grooves across it. Simon pointed, and Perrigo went in and sat on the bed.

"When you know me better," said the Saint, "you'll discover that I have a cellar complex. So many people have taken me into cellars in order to do me grievous bodily harm that the infection has got into my system. There's something very sinister and thrilling about a cellar, don't you think?"

Perrigo hazarded no opinion.

"How long do I stay here?" he asked.

"Until tomorrow," Simon told him. "You'll find the place rather damp and stuffy, but there's enough ventilation to save you from suffocating. If you decide to strangle yourself with your braces, you might do it under that loose flagstone in the corner, which conceals a deep grave all ready dug for any corpses I might have on my hands. And in the morning I'll be along with some breakfast and a pair of thumbscrews, and we'll have a little chat. Night-night, old dear."

He left Perrigo with those cheering thoughts to chew over, and went out, bolting the iron bar into place and securing it with a steel staple.

A silver-noted buzzer was purring somewhere above him as he ran up the stairs, and he knew that the next development was already on its way. He was not surprised-he had been expecting it — but the promptitude with which his expectations had been realised argued a tenacious implacability on the part of Chief Inspector Teal that would have unsettled the serenity of anyone but a Simon Templar. But the Saint was lining up to the starting-gate of an odyssey quite different from that of Mr. Teal. He let himself through the linen cupboard of the first-floor bathroom into No. 1, Upper Berkeley Mews, and went quickly down the runway to No. 7; and he was smiling as he stepped out of it into his own bedroom and slid the mirror panel shut behind him.

Patricia was waiting for him there.

"Teal's on his way," she said.

"Alone?"

"He was talking to his sleuth-hound when I gave you the signal. There wasn't anyone else with him."

"Splendid."

His coat off, the Saint was over at the dressing-table, putting a lightning polish on his hair with brush and comb. Under Patricia's eyes, the traces of his recent rough-and-tumble in the car disappeared miraculously. In a matter of seconds he was his old spruce self, lean and immaculate and alert, a laughing storm-centre of hell-for-leather mischief, flipping into a blue velvet smoking-gown…

"Darling—"

She stopped him, with a hand on his arm. She was quite serious.

"Listen, boy. I've never questioned you before, but this time there's no Duke of Fortezza to frame you out."

"Maybe not."

"Are you sure there isn't going to be real trouble?"

"I'm sure there is. For one thing, our beautiful little bolt-hole has done its stuff. Never again will it make that sleuth-hound outside my perfect alibi. After tonight, Claud Eustace will know that I've got a spare exit, and he'll come back with a search warrant and a gang of navvies to find it. But we'll have had our money's worth out of it. Sure, there's going to be trouble. I asked for it — by special delivery!"

"And what then?"

Simon clapped his hands on her shoulders, smiling the old Saintly smile.

"Have you ever known any trouble that I couldn't get out of?" he demanded. "Have you ever seen me beaten?"

She thrilled to his madcap buoyancy — she did not know why.

"Never!" she cried.

Downstairs, the front door bell rang. The Saint took no notice. He held her with his eyes, near to laughing, vibrant with impetuous audacity, magnificently mad.

"Is there anything that can put me down?"

"I can't imagine it."

He swept her to him and kissed her red lips.

The bell rang again. Simon pointed, with one of his wide gestures.

"Down there," he said, "there's an out-size detective whose one aim in life is to spike the holiday that's coming to us. Our own Claud Eustace Teal, with his mouth full of gum and his wattles crimsoning, paying us his last professional call. Let's go and swipe him on the jaw."

In the sitting-room, Patricia closed her book and looked up as Chief Inspector Teal waddled in. Simon followed the visitor. It was inevitable that he should dramatise himself — that he should extract the last molecule of diversion from the scene by playing his part as strenuously as if life and death depended on it. He was an artist. And that night the zest of his self-appointed task tingled electrically in all his fibres. Teal, chewing stolidly through a few seconds' portentous pause, thought that he had never seen the Saint so debonair and dangerous.

"I hope I don't intrude," he said at last, heavily.

"Not at all," murmured the Saint. "You see before you a scene of domestic repose. Have some beer?"

Teal took a tight hold on himself. He knew that there was a toe-to-toe scrap in front of him, and he wasn't going to put himself at a disadvantage sooner than he could help. The searing vials of righteous indignation within him had simmered down still further during the drive from Regent's Park, and out of the travail caution had been born. His purpose hadn't weakened in the least, but he wasn't going to trip over his own feet in the attempt to achieve it. The lights of battle glittering about in the Saint's blue eyes augured a heap of snags along the route that was to be paddled, and for once Chief Inspector Teal was trying to take the hint.

"Coming quietly?" he asked.

The feeler went out, gruffly noncommital; and Simon smiled.

"You're expecting me to ask why," he drawled, "but I refuse to do anything that's expected of me. Besides, I know."

"How do you know?"

"My spies are everywhere. Sit down, Claud. That's a collapsible chair we bought specially for you, and the cigars in that box explode when you light them. Oh, and would you mind taking off your hat? — it doesn't go with the wallpaper."

Teal removed his bowler with savage tenderness. He realised that he was going to have an uphill fight to keep the promise he had made to himself. There was the faintest thickening in his lethargic voice as he repeated his question.

"How do you know what I want you for?"

"My dear soul, how else could I have known except by being with you when you first conceived the idea of wanting me?" answered the Saint blandly.

"So you're going to admit it really was you I was talking to at Regent's Park?"

"Between ourselves — it was."

"Got some underground way out of here, haven't you?"

"The place is a rabbit-warren."

"And where's Perrigo?"

"He's playing bunny."

Teal twiddled a button, and his eyelids lowered. The leading tentacles of a nasty cold sensation were starting to weave clammily up his spine. It was something akin to the sensation experienced by a man who, in the prelude to a nightmare, has been cavorting happily about in the middle of a bridge over a fathomless abyss, and who suddenly discovers that the bridge has turned into a thin slab of toffee and the temperature is rising.

Something was springing a leak. He hadn't the ghost of a presentiment of what the leak was going to be, but the symptoms of its approach were bristling all over the situation like the quills on a porcupine.

"You helped Perrigo to escape at Regent's Park, didn't you?" He tried to make his voice sleepier and more bored than it had ever been before, but the strain clipped minute snippets off the ends of the syllables. "You're admitting that you caused a wilful breach of the peace by discharging firearms in a public thoroughfare, and you obstructed and assaulted the police in the execution of their duty, and that you became an accessory to wilful murder?"