Leslie Charteris - The Saint vs Scotland Yard

And suddenly the meaning of it flashed upon the Saint — so suddenly and lucidly that he threw back his head and bowed before a gust of helpless mirth.

He spun round to the door beside him. He had made sure that it was locked, but he must have been mistaken. He heaved his shoulder at it, and it burst open — it had been temporarily secured with a gimlet, as he discovered later. But at that moment he was not curious about that. He hadn't a doubt in his head that his latest and most sudden inspiration was right, and he knew exactly what he was going to do about it.

Five minutes later, after a brief interlude for wash and brush-up purposes, he was careering blissfully back along the corridor on one of the most supremely joyous journeys of his life.

At the compartment at which Perrigo had been, he stopped, and opened the door.

"Miss Lovedew," he said pensively, and again the impetiginous female looked up and acknowledged the charge, "Is your luggage insured?"

"Of course," said the woman. "Why?"

"You should begin making out your claim immediately," said the Saint.

The woman stared.

"I don't understand you. What's happened? Are you one of the company's servants?"

"I am the head cook and bottle-washer," said the Saint gravely, "and I did not like your red flannel nighties."

He closed the door again and passed on, carolling hilariously to himself, and leaving the lady to suffer from astounded fury as well as acne.

In the Pullman he found Patricia gazing disconsolately in front of her. Her face lighted up as he arrived.

"Did you find him?"

Simon sat down.

"What luck did you have?"

"Just sweet damn-all," said the girl wryly. "I've been over my part of the train four times, and I wouldn't have missed Perrigo if he'd disguised himself as a mosquito."

"I am inspired," said the Saint.

He took the wine list and his pencil, and wrote rapidly. Then he held up the sheet and read:

Patricia smiled.

"Will you always be mad?" she asked.

"Until the day I die, please God," said the Saint.

"But if you didn't find Perrigo—"

"But I did find him!"

The girl gasped.

"You found him?"

Simon nodded; and she saw then that his eyes were laughing.

"I did. He was in the luggage van at the end, heaving mentionables and unmentionables out of a wardrobe trunk. And just for the glory of it, Pat, the trunk was labelled with the immortal name of Lovedew — I found that out afterwards and tried to break the news to her, but I don't think she believed me. Anyway, I whaled into him, and there was a breezy exchange of pleasantries. And the long and the short of

"That Perrigo is locked up in that trunk, just where he wanted to be; but there's an entirely new set of labels on it that are going to cause no small stir on board the Berengaria if Claud Eustace arrives in time. Which I expect he will — Isadore is almost certain to have squealed. And all we've got to do is wait for the orchestra to tune up." Simon looked at his watch. "There's half an hour to go yet, old Pat, and I think we might stand ourselves a bottle!"

A clock was booming the half-hour after twelve when Chief Inspector Teal climbed stiffly out of his special police car at the gates of the Ocean Dock. It had been half-past ten when he left Albany Street Police Station, and that single chime indicated that the Flying Squad driver had made a very creditable run of it from London to Southampton.

For Isadore Elberman had duly squealed, as the Saint had expected, and it had been no mean squeal. Considerably stewed down after a sleepless night in the cells, he had reiterated to the Divisional Inspector the story with which he had failed to gain Teal's ear the evening before; and the tale had come through with a wealth of embellishments in the way of circumstantial detail that had made the Inspector reach hastily for the telephone and call for Mr. Teal to lend his personal patronage to the squeak.

Isadora Elberman was not the only member of the cast who had spent a sleepless night. Teal had been waiting on the doorstep of his bank when it opened in the morning. He asked casually for his balance, and in a few minutes the cashier passed a slip of paper across the counter. It showed exactly one thousand eight hundred pounds more to his credit than it should have done, and he had no need to make further inquiries. He took a taxi from the bank to Upper Berkeley Mews; but a prolonged assault on the front door elicited no response, and the relief watcher told him that Templar and the girl had gone out at nine-thirty and had not returned. Teal went back to New Scotland Yard, and it was there that the call from Albany Street found him.

And on the way down to Southampton the different fragments of the jigsaw in which he had involved himself had fitted themselves together in his head, dovetailing neatly into one another without a gap or a protuberance anywhere, and producing a shape with one coherent outline and a sickeningly simple picture lithographed upon it in three colours. So far as the raw stark facts of the case were concerned, there wasn't a leak or a loose end in the whole copper-bottomed consolidation of them. It was as puerile and patent as the most elementary exercise in kindergarten arithmetic. It sat up on its hind legs and leered at him.

Slowly and stolidly, with clenched fists buried deep in the pockets of his overcoat, Chief Inspector Teal went up the gangway of the Berengaria to see the story through.

And down in the well-deck aft, Simon Templar was sitting on a wardrobe trunk discoursing genially to two stewards, a porter, an irate lady with pimples, and a small group of fascinated passengers.

"I agree," the Saint was saying. "It is an outrage. But you must blame Bertie for that. I can only conclude that he doesn't like red flannel nighties either. So far as can be deduced from the circumstances, the sight of your eminently respectable robes filled him with such an uncontrollable frenzy that he began to empty the whole contents of your trunk out of the window. But am I to blame? Am I Bertie's keeper? At a moment when my back was turned—"

"I don't believe you!" stormed the irate lady. "You're a common thief, that's what you are! I should know that trunk anywhere. I can describe everything that's in it—"

"I'll bet you can't," said the Saint.

The lady appealed to the assembled spectators.

"This is unbearable!" she raved. "It's the most barefaced imposture I ever heard of! This man has stolen my clothes and put his own labels on the trunk—"

"Madam," said the Saint, "I've never disputed that the trunk, as a trunk, was yours. The labels refer to the destination of the contents. As a strictly law-abiding citizen—"

"Where," demanded the pimply female hysterically, "is the Captain?"

And at that point Teal shouldered himself into the front rank of the crowd.

Just for a second he stood looking at the Saint, and Simon saw that there were shadows under his eyes and the faintest trace of flabbiness about his cheeks. But the eyes themselves were hard and expressionless, and the lips below them were pressed up into a dour line.