Leslie Charteris - The Saint vs Scotland Yard

An official came down the train, checking up visas and issuing embarkation vouchers. Simon obtained a couple of passes, and smoked thoughtfully for some minutes. And then he laughed and stood up.

"Why worry?" he wanted to know. "I've thought of a much better thing to do. One of my really wonderful inspirations."

"What's that?"

Simon tapped her on the shoulder.

"I'm going to beguile the time by baiting Bertie," he said, with immense solemnity. "C'mon!"

He hurtled off in his volcanic way, with a long-striding swing of impetuous limbs, as if a gale of wind swept him on.

And Patricia Holm was smiling as she ran to catch him up — the unfathomable and infinitely tender smile of all the women who have been doomed to love romantic men. For she knew the Saint better than he knew himself. He could not grow old. Oh, yes, he would grow in years, would feel more deeply, would think more deeply, would endeavour with spasmodic soberness to fall in line with the common facts of life; but the mainsprings of his character could not change. He would deceive himself, but he would never deceive her. Even now, she knew what was in his mind. He was trying to brace himself to march down the road that all his friends had taken. He was daring himself to take up the glove that the High Gods had thrown at his feet, and to take it up as he would have taken up any other challenge — with a laugh and a flourish, and the sound of trumpets in his ears. And already she knew how she would answer him.

She came up behind him and caught his elbow.

"But is this going to help you, lad?"

"It will amuse me," said the Saint. "And it's an act of piety. It's our sacred duty to see that Bertie has a journey he'll never forget. I shall open the ball by trying to touch him for a subscription to the funds of the Society for Distributing Woollen Vests to the Patriarchs of the Upper Dogsboddi. Speaking emotionally and in a loud voice I shall wax eloquent on the work that has already been done among his black brothers, and invite him to make a contribution. If he does, we'll go and drink it and think up something else. If he doesn't, you'll barge in and ask him for his autograph. Address him as Al Jolson, and ask him to sing something. After that—"

"After that," said Patricia firmly, "he'll pull the communication cord, and we shall both be thrown off the train. Lead on, boy!"

Simon nodded, and went to the door of the compartment he had marked down.

And there he stopped, statuesquely, while the skyward-slanting cigarette between his lips sank slowly through the arc of a circle and ended up at a comically contrasting droop.

After a few seconds, Patricia stepped to his side and also looked into the compartment. And the Saint took the cigarette from his mouth and exhaled smoke in a long expiring whistle.

Perrigo was gone.

There wasn't a doubt about that. The corner seat that he had occupied was as innocent of human habitation as any corner seat has ever been since George Stephenson hitched up his wagons and went rioting down to Stockton-upon-Tees. If not more so. As for the other seats, they were occupied respectively by a portly matron with a wart on her chin, a small boy in a sailor suit, and a thin-flanked female with pimples and a camouflaged copy of The Well of Loneliness, into none of whom could Gunner Perrigo by any conceivable miracle of make-up have transformed himself… Those were the irrefutable facts about the scene, pithily and systematically recorded; and the longer one looked at them, the more gratuitously grisly they became.

Simon singed the inoffensive air with a line of oratory that would have scorched the hide of a salamander. He did it as if his heart was in the job, which it was. Carefully and comprehensively, he covered every aspect and detail of the situation with a calorific lavishness of imagery that would have warmed the cockles of a sergeant-major's heart. Nobody and nothing, however remotely connected with the incident, was left outside the wide embrace of his oration. He started with the paleolithic progenitors of the said George Stephenson, and worked steadily down to the back teeth of Isadore Elberman's grandchildren. At which point Patricia interrupted him.

"He might be having a wash or something," she said.

"Yeah!" The Saint was scathing. "Sure, he might be having a wash. And he took his bag with him in case the flies laid eggs on it. Did you notice that bag? I did. It was brand-new — hadn't a scratch on it. He'd been doing some early morning shopping before he caught the train, hustling up some kit for the voyage. All his own stuff was at Isadore's, and he wouldn't risk going back there. And his bag's gone!"

The embarkation officer passed them, and opened the door of the compartment.

"Miss Lovedew?" The pimply female acknowledged it."Your papers are quite in order —"

Simon took Patricia's arm and steered her gently away.

"Her name is Lovedew," he said sepulchrally. "Let us go and find somewhere to die."

They tottered a few steps down the corridor; and then Patricia said: "He must be still on the train! We haven't slowed up once since we started, and he couldn't have jumped off without breaking his neck—"

The Saint gripped her hands.

"You're right!" he whooped. "Pat, you're damn right! I said you wanted a brain for this sort of thing. Bertie must be on the train still, and if he's on the train we'll find him — if we have to take the whole outfit to pieces. Now, you go that way and I'll go this way, and you keep your eyes peeled. And if you see a man with a huge tufted beard, you take hold of it and give it a good pull!"

"Right-o, Saint!"

"Then let's go!"

He went flying down the alley, lurching from side to side from the rocking of the train, and contriving to light another cigarette as he went.

He did his share thoroughly. In the space of ten minutes he reviewed a selection of passengers so variegated that his brain began to reel. Before his eyes passed an array of physiognomies that would have made Cesare Lombroso chirrup ecstatically and reach for his tape-measure. Americans of all shapes and sizes, Englishmen in plus fours, flannel bags, and natty suitings, male children, female children, ambiguous children, large women, small women, three cosmopolitan millionaires — one fat, one thin, one sozzled — three cosmopolitan millionaires' wives — ditto, but shuffled — a novelist, an actor, a politician, four Parsees, three Hindus, two Chinese, and a wild man from Borneo. Simon Templar inspected every one of them who could by any stretch of imagination have come within the frame of the picture, and acquired sufficient data to write three books or six hundred and eighty-seven modern novels. But he did not find Gunner Perrigo.

He came to the end of the last coach, and stood gazing moodily out of the window before starting back on the return journey.

And it was while he was there that he saw a strange sight.

The first manifestation of it did not impress him immediately. It was simply a scrap of white that went drifting past the window. His eyes followed it abstractedly, and then reverted to their gloomy concentration on the scenery. Then two more scraps of white flittered past his nose, and a second later he saw a spread of red stuff fluttering feebly on the wire fence beside the line.

The Saint frowned, and watched more attentively. And a perfect cataract of whatnots began to aviate past his eyes and distribute themselves about the route. Big whatnots and little whatnots, in divers formations and half the colours of the rainbow, went wafting by the window and scattered over the fields and hedges. A mass of green taffeta flapped past, looking like a bilious vulture after an argument with a steam hammer, and was closely followed by a jaundiced cotton seagull that seemed to have suffered a similar experience. A covey of miscellaneous bits and pieces drove by in hot pursuit. No less than eight palpitating banners of assorted hues curvetted down the breeze and perched on railings and telegraph poles by the wayside. It went on until the entire landscape seemed to be littered with the loot of all the emporia of Knightsbridge and the Brompton Road.