The Saint Meets His Match (19 page)

The Saint stood
deferentially aside; and the constable
stood
in his tracks and gaped along the line indicated by
Mr.
Teal’s forefinger. The Saint had not interfered with
the
improvised dummy in the chair. He had felt that it
would
have been unkind to deprive the constable of the
food for thought with
which that mysteriously motionless
silhouette
must have been able to divert his vigil.
“And while you were making a fool of yourself up
here,” said Teal bitterly, “Jill
Trelawney was walking out of the front door and getting clean away. And you
call
yourself a policeman!”

Simon coughed gently.

“I think,” he
said diffidently, “that the constable meant
well.”

Teal turned on him. The detective’s
heavy-lidded eyes
glittered on the dangerous
verge of fury.

The Saint smiled.

Slowly, deliberately,
Teal’s mouth closed upon the
word it had been about to release. Slowly
Teal’s heavy eyelids dropped down.

“Saint,” said
Teal, “I told you you were a bright boy.”

“So did Auntie Ethel,” said the
Saint.

2

Simon Templar, refreshed by a good night’s
sleep, set
out for the Ritz at 9.30 next
morning.

He had not been kept up
late the night before. Teal,
gathering himself back
into the old pose of mountainous
sleepiness out of which he had so nearly
allowed himself
to be disturbed, had gone
very quietly. In fact, Simon had
been sound asleep three quarters of an
hour after the detective’s return visit.

Teal hadn’t a leg to stand
on. True, the Saint had be
haved very curiously; but
there is no law against men be
having curiously. The Saint had lied; but lying
is not in
itself a criminal offense. It is
not even a misdemeanour for
a man to
arrange a dummy in a chair in such a way that a
realistic silhouette is thrown upon a blind. And there is
no statute to prevent a man claiming a Lithuanian
princess for an aunt, provided he does not do it
with
intent to defraud.
…
So
Teal had gone home.

Suspicion is not
evidence—that is a fundamental prin
ciple of English
law. The law deals in fact; and a thou
sand suspicious
circumstances do not make a fact.

No one had seen the
Princess Selina von Rupprecht.
No one could even prove that her real name was
Jill Trelawney. Therefore no charge could ever be substantiated against Simon
Templar for that night’s work. And
Teal was
wise enough to know when he was wasting his
time. There was a twinkle in the Saint’s eye that dis
couraged bluff.

“And yet, boys and
girls,” murmured Simon to himself,
the
next morning, as he went down the stairs, “Claud
Eustace
Teal is reputed to have a long memory. And last
night’s entertainment
ought to make that memory stretch from here to the next blue moon. No, I don’t
think we’re
going to find life quite so
easy as it was once.”

The house was watched, of
course. As he turned out
into the street, he
observed, without appearing to observe, the two men who stood immersed in
conversation on the
opposite pavement; and as he walked on
he knew, without
looking round, that one of the men followed him.

There was nothing much in
that, except as an omen.

It made no difference to the Saint’s intention
of break
fasting at the Ritz as Mr. Joseph
M. Halliday, of Boston,
Mass. In fact,
it was to allow for exactly that event that
he had left his flat earlier than he need have done.It was
nothing
new in Simon Templar’s young life to be shad
owed
by large men in very plain clothes, and such minor persecutions had long since
ceased to bother him.

He left the sleuth near
Marble Arch, and took a taxi
to the Ritz with the
comfortable certainty of being temporarily lost to the ken of the police; and
the pair of horn
rimmed glasses which he donned in the
cab effectively
completed his simplest disguise.

He arrived on the stroke of ten, entering
behind the
breakfast tray. Taking advantage
of the presence of the waiter, he kissed Jill like a dutiful husband, and sat
down
feeling that the day was well begun.

As soon as they were
alone—

“The self-control of
the police,” said the Saint hur
riedly, “is
really remarkable.”

The girl maintained her
gravity with an effort.

“Did he go
quietly?” she asked.

“To say that he went like a lamb,”
answered the Saint, “means nothing at all. He would have made a lamb look
like a hungry tiger outside a butcher’s shop on
early-
closing day.”
          

He retailed the part of
his ruse at which she had not
been audience, and had
his reward in the way she sat back
and looked at him.

“You’re a marvel,” she said, and
meant it.

“All this
flattery,” said the Saint, “is bad for my heart.”

He picked up one of the newspapers that had
come in with the tray, and read through the agony column care-
fully, without finding what he sought. He had no
more
luck with any of the others.

“He hasn’t had
time,” said Jill.

Simon nodded.

“To-morrow,” he
said, “for a fiver. Care to bet?”

They spent the day inside
the Ritz, very lazily; but neither of them was inclined to take a risk at that
mo
ment.
Meanwhile, Scotland Yard, lashed by the biting comments of Chief Inspector
Teal, tore its hair and ran
sacked London,
The Ritz, naturally, was never thought
of; and Mr. and Mrs. Joseph M.
Halliday never once set
foot outside the
hotel.

The advertisement appeared
in
The Times
next morn
ing. During the previous
day they had amused themselves
with speculating about the
form it would take; and, as it happened, neither of them had come very near the
mark.

I
NJUSTICE
.—
A great wrong may be put right if the
Lady of Paris will meet one who is anxious to
make
restitution in exchange for forgiveness—
T
HE
L
ORD
OF
P
ARIS.

“It brings tears to
my eyes,” said the Saint.

“Do you believe it?” asked Jill.

Simon shrugged.

“It isn’t
impossible,” he said. “You say you’re certain
he had a hand in the framing of your father. Well, we
now know a
few things about
him.
He’s got some reason to respect us. And, as a
cautious man, he may think it a
wise move to
make a treaty.”

Jill Trelawney nodded,
buttering a slice of toast.

“And yet,” she
said, “it’s a trap.”

“Not for the police.
Essenden wouldn’t dare—not in
the face of what we know.
For trafficking in illicit drugs,
five years’ penal
servitude.”

“No, not the police.
Just himself.”

Simon lighted a cigarette.

“Do you want to buy?”

“We buy.” She looked at him. “Or
I buy. I shall see Essenden to-night.”

“Where?”

“At his house. I’ve
been there before. Shall I forget it?”
She
smiled at him, and he laughed. “That’s where he’ll be expecting me, from
to-day onwards. He wouldn’t
expect me to write—he
knows me too well.”

“And if he knows you
so well,” said the Saint, “he’ll be
expecting
trouble.”

“Of course.”

“And he’s going to get
it?”

With a cup of coffee in her
hand, the girl answered,
quite calmly: “A
year ago I swore to kill every man who
had
a hand in ruining my father. Waldstein is dead. I
suspect
Essenden. If I find proof against him—”

“That was my way, once,” said the
Saint quietly. “But
doesn’t it ever
occur to you that you might be doing much better work if you looked for the
evidence to clear your
father’s name, instead of merely looking for
revenge?”

Jill Trelawney said:
“My father died.”

Simon had nothing to say.

They spent another inactive
day, reading and talking
desultorily. To Simon
Templar, those long conversations were fascinating and yet maddening. She never
spoke of
the Angels of Doom, or the charge that
lay against her,
or the unchanged inflexibility of her
purpose. These
things remained as a dark background
to her presence:
they were never allowed to steal out of the background,
and yet they could not be escaped. Against that
back
ground Simon Templar felt
himself a stranger. Not once yet, in that bizarre alliance of theirs, had he
been allowed to enter into the secret places of her mind. But he played
up to her. Because she had that air of
unawareness, he left
her unaware. He
tried no cross-examinations. She was the
soloist: he was the accompaniment, heard, valuable, per
fectly attuned, but subordinate and half ignored.
It was
one of the most salutary
experiences of the Saint’s violent
life.
But what else could he do? The mind of a woman
with an Idea is like a one-way street: you have to run with
the
traffic, or get into trouble.

She obliterated their
forthcoming adventure until the
evening. Until after
dinner; when she smiled at him
across the table and his
cigarette case, and said: “Saint,
it’s very nice of you
to be coming with me.”

“Very nice of you to
be come with,” said the Saint
politely.

He offered her a match; but for a moment she
looked past it.

“Does the idea of
being an accessory to another murder
attract you?”
she asked.

“Tremendously,”
said the Saint.

“It will probably
come to that, you know.”

“I’ve always enjoyed
a good murder.”

She touched her waist. He
knew what she carried there,
under her coat. Since the
night before, he had inspected
the weapon again, with a professional eye.

“Have you got a gun?” she asked him.

“Don’t care for
‘em,” he said. “Nasty, noisy things.
Dangerous,
too. Might go off.”

She laughed suddenly.

“And yet,” she
said, “you’ve proved you aren’t a fool.
If
you hadn’t, I’d have taken a lot of convincing… .
Are
you ready?”

He glanced at his watch.

“The car should be
here now,” he said.

They went out to the car
five minutes later—a luxurious
limousine, with liveried
chauffeur, ordered by telephone
for the occasion.

Simon handed the girl in,
and paused to give directions
to the chauffeur.

It was a pure coincidence
that Chief Inspector Teal should have been passing down Piccadilly at that mo
ment. The
car was not in Piccadilly, but at the side entrance of the hotel, in Arlington
Street, which Teal was
crossing. He observed
the car, as he invariably observed
everything else around him, with
drowsy eyes that ap
peared to notice nothing
and in fact missed nothing.

He saw a man speaking to a chauffeur. The man
wore
an overcoat turned up around his chin,
a soft hat worn
low over his eyes, and a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles.
It is surprising how much of a man’s face
those three
things can hide between
them—especially at night. Teal
thought there was something familiar
about the man, but he could not connect up the association immediately.

He stood at the corner of
the Ritz and watched the man
enter the car. He was not
looking for Simon Templar at
that moment. He was not,
as a matter of fact, even think
ing of Simon Templar. He
had thought and talked of
little else but Simon
Templar for the last forty-eight
hours, and his brain had
wearied of the subject.