The Saint vs Scotland Yard (The Holy Terror)

Or floated companies that sank,

Or, with a piece of sharp bamboo,

Bashfully bumped off Mrs. Glue;

They might have understood his whim

And, in the end, forgiven him:

Such things, though odd, have now and then

Been done by perfect gentlemen;

But Daniel's foul iniquity

Could hardly have been worse if he

Had bought (or so it seemed to them)

A chocolate after 9 p.m.'

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!'

Chapter X

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——'