The Saint vs Scotland Yard (The Holy Terror)

'You weren't followed?'

'Not far.'

'Everything else all right?'

Perrigo grunted a curt affirmative. He clapped his hat on a peg and thrust out his jaw.

'What you're talking about's O.K.,' he said. 'It's the follow-up that's not jake. When Henderson hears about Frankie, he'll remember the way I ran—and there's a warrant for me over that Hammersmith job already.'

'You killed Frankie?'

All Elberman's questions were phrased in the same way: they were flat statements, with the slightest of perfunctory interrogation marks tacked on to the last syllable.

'Had to,' Perrigo said briefly. 'Let's get on—I want a drink.'

He was as barren of emotion as Elberman, but for a different reason. Habit had a hand in Perrigo's callousness. In the course of his chequered career he had been one of Chi­cago's star torpedoes, until a spot of trouble that could not be squared had forced him to jump the Canadian border and thence remove himself from the American continent. There were fourteen notches on his gun—but he was not by nature a boastful man.

Elberman led the way up the stairs, and Perrigo followed at his shoulder.

'Did you get that ticket?'

'Yes, I got you a berth. It's on the Berengaria. She sails tomorrow afternoon. You're in a hurry to leave?'

'I'll say I am. I guess it's safe for me to go back now, and I know a dealer in Detroit who'll give me a good price for my share. I'll get enough to give me a big start, and I'll make it grow. There's no money in this durned country.'

Elberman shrugged, and opened a door.

He took two paces into the room, and Perrigo took one. And then and there the pair of them halted in their tracks like a Punch and Judy show whose operator has heard the lunch-hour siren, the muscles of their jaws going limp with sheer incredulous astonishment.

Chapter II

 

'Come right in, boys,' said the Saint breezily.

He reclined gracefully in Isadore Elberman's own sacrosanct armchair. Between the fingers of one hand was a freshly lighted cigarette; the fingers of the other hand curved round the butt of a .38 lead-pump that looked as if it could do everything the makers claimed for it and then some. It was as unsociable-looking a piece of armament as Perrigo had ever seen—and he knew what he was talking about. The sight of it kept his hands straight down and flaccid at his sides, as in­nocuous as the fists of something out of a waxwork exhibition.

If further pictorial detail is required, it may be provided by mentioning that the Saint was wearing a light grey suit and a silk shirt, both of which showed no traces of ever having been worn before; and an unwary angel might have been pardoned for turning round and hurriedly overhauling its own con­science after getting one glimpse of the radiant innocence of his face.

But most of these interesting points were wasted on the single-track minds of the two men in the doorway. Their retinas, certainly, registered a photographic impression of the general homoscape; but the spotlight of their attention merely oscillated momentarily over the broader features of the picture, and settled back in focus on the salient factor of the whole scenery—the starkly-fashioned chunk of blued steel that stared unwinkingly into the exact centre of the six-inch space between them, only too plainly ready and eager to concentrate its entire affection upon whichever of them first put in a bid for the monopoly.

'Make yourselves at home, boys,' murmured the Saint. 'Per­rigo, you may close the door—how did you leave Frankie, by the way?'

Perrigo, with one hand dumbly obedient on the knob, started as if he had received an electric shock. The casual question needled with such an uncanny precision slick into the very core of things that he stared back at the Saint in the dim beginnings of a kind of vengeful terror.

'What do you know about Frankie?' he croaked.

'This and that,' said the Saint, nonchalantly unhelpful. 'Carry on shutting the door, brother, and afterwards you may keep on talking.'