Leslie Charteris - The Saint Closes the Case

"Whatever the opinions which may be expressed concern­ing the arrogance of this gentleman who presumes to take the law into his own lawless hands, it cannot be denied that in this case his intervention undoubtedly saved the life of our royal guest; and few will be found to deny that justice was done—though perhaps it was justice of too poetic a character to be generally accepted as a precedent. . . ."

With this sensational climax, which put the name of the Saint on the lips of every man and woman in the civilised world, came the end of a clearly defined chapter in his history.

The sensation died down, as the most amazing sensations will die down for lack of re‑stimulation. In an open letter which was published in every newspaper throughout Europe, the Crown Prince offered his thanks to the unknown, and promised that the debt should not be forgotten if at any time the Saint should stand in need of help from high places. The British Government followed almost immediately with the offer of a free pardon for all past offences on condition that the Saint revealed himself and took an oath to turn his energy and ingenuity into more legitimate channels. The only answer was a considered letter of acknowledgment and regretful re­fusal, posted simultaneously to all the leading news-agencies.

"Unfortunately," wrote the Saint, "I am convinced, and my friends with me, that for us to disband at the very moment when our campaign is beginning to justify itself in the crime statistics of London—and (which is even more important) in those more subtle offences against the moral code about which there can be no statistics—would be an act of indefensible cowardice on my part. We cannot be tempted by the mere promise of safety for ourselves to betray the motive which brought us together. The game is more than the player of the game. . . . Also, speaking for myself, I should find a respect­able life intolerably dull. It isn't easy to get out of the rut these days: you have to be a rebel, and you're more likely to end up in Wormwood Scrubs than Westminster Abbey. But I believe, as I have never believed anything before, that I am on the right road. The things of value are the common, primitive things. Justice is good—when it's done fanatically. Fighting is good—when the thing you fight for is simple and sane and you love it. And danger is good—it wakes you up, and makes you live ten times more keenly. And vulgar swash­buckling may easily be the best of all—because it stands for a magnificent belief in all those things, a superb faith in the glamour that civilisation is trying to sneer at as a delusion and a snare. ... As long as the ludicrous laws of this country refuse me these, I shall continue to set those laws at defiance. The pleasure of applying my own treatment to the human sores whose persistent festering offends me is one which I will not be denied. . . ."

And yet, strangely enough, an eagerly expectant public waited in vain for the Saint to follow up this astonishing man­ifesto. But day after day went by, and still he held his hand; so that those who had walked softly, wondering when the un­canny omniscience of the Unknown would find them out, began to lift up their heads again and boast themselves with increasing assurance, saying that the Saint was afraid.

A fortnight grew into a month, and the Saint was rapidly passing into something like a dim legend of bygone ages.

And then, one afternoon in June, yelling newsboys spread a special edition of the Evening Record through the streets of London, and men and women stood in impatient arid excited groups on the pavements and read the most astounding story of the Saint that had ever been given to the Press.

It was the story that is told again here, as it has already been retold, by now, half a hundred times. But now it is taken from a different and more intimate angle, and some details are shown which have not been told before.

It is the story of how Simon Templar, known to many as the Saint (plausibly from his initials, but more probably from his saintly way of doing the most unsaintly things), came by chance upon a thread which led him to the most amazing ad­venture of his career. And it is also the story of Norman Kent, who was his friend, and how at one moment in that adventure he held the fate of two nations, if not of all Europe, in his hands; how he accounted for that stewardship; and how, one quiet summer evening, in a house by the Thames, with no melodrama and no heroics, he fought and died for an idea.

Simon Templar read newspapers rarely, and when he did read them he skimmed through the pages as quickly as possible and gleaned information with a hurried eye. Most of the matter offered in return for his penny was wasted on him. He was not in the least interested in politics; the announcement that the wife of a Walthamstow printer had given birth to quadruplets found him unmoved; articles such as "A Man's Place is in the Home" (by Anastasia Gowk, the brilliant authoress of Passion in Pimlico) left him completely cold. But a quarter-column, with photograph, in a paper he bought one evening for the racing results chanced to catch his roving gaze, and roused a very faint flicker of attention.

Two coincidences led him from that idly assimilated item of news to a red-hot scent, the fascination of which for him was anything but casual.

The first came the next day, when, finding himself at Lud­gate Circus towards one o'clock, it occurred to him to call in at the Press Club in the hope of finding someone he knew. He found Barney Malone, of the Clarion, and was promptly invited to lunch, which was exactly what he had been looking for. The Saint had an ingrained prejudice against lunching alone.

Conversation remained general throughout the meal, except for one bright interlude.

"I suppose there's nothing new about the Saint?" asked Simon innocently, and Barney Malone shook his head.

"He seems to have gone out of business."

"I'm only taking a rest," Simon assured him. "After the calm, the storm. You wait for the next scoop."

Simon Templar always insisted on speaking of the Saint as "I"—as if he himself was that disreputable outlaw. Barney Malone, for all his familiarity with Simon's eccentric sense of humour, was inclined to regard this affectation as a particu­larly aimless pleasantry.

It was half an hour later, over coffee, that the Saint recalled the quarter-column which had attracted his attention, and asked a question about it.

"You may be quite frank with your Uncle Simon," he said. "He knows all the tricks of the trade, and you won't disappoint him a bit if you tell him that the chief sub-editor made it up himself to fill the space at the last moment." Malone grinned.

"Funnily enough, you're wrong. These scientific discoveries you read about under scare headlines are usually stunt stuff; but if you weren't so uneducated you'd have heard of K. B. Vargan. He's quite mad, but as a scientist his class is A 1 at the Royal Society."

"So there may be something in it?" suggested the Saint. "There may, or there may not. These inventions have a trick of springing a leak as soon as you take them out of the labora­tory and try using them on a large scale. For instance, they had a death-ray years ago that would kill mice at twenty yards, but I never heard of them testing it on an ox at five hundred."

Barney Malone was able to give some supplementary de­tails of Vargan's invention which the sub-editor's blue pencil had cut out as unintelligible to the lay public. They were hardly less unintelligible to Simon Templar, whose scientific knowledge stopped a long way short of Einstein, but he lis­tened attentively.

"It's curious that you should refer to it," Malone said, a little later, "because I was only interviewing the man this morning. He burst into the office about eleven o'clock, storming and raving like a lunatic because he hadn't been given the front page."