The Saint Goes On Read Free

from you is what address you put on the parcel.”
    Sunny Jim put his cigar back in his mouth till the end glowed red.
    “I did send off a parcel not long ago,” he confessed reminiscently. “It was addressed to”
    He never said who it was addressed to.
    Mr. Teal heard the shot behind him, and saw Sunny Jim’s hand jerk to his chest and his body jar with the shock of the bullet. The slam of the door followed, as Teal turned round to it in a blank stupor of incredulity. Pryke, who was nearest, had it open again when his superior reached it; and Teal barged after him in a kind of incandescent daze, out on to the landing. The sheer fantastic unexpectedness of what had happened had knocked his brain momentarily out of the rhythm of conscious functioning, but he clattered down the stairs on Pryke’s heels, and actually overtook him at the door which let them out on to the street.
    And having got there, he stopped, with his brain starting work again, overwhelmed by the utter futility of what he was doing.
    There was nothing sensational to be seen outside. The road presented the ordinary aspect of a minor thoroughfare in the Shepherd Market area at that time of day. There was an empty car parked on the other side of the road, a man walking by with a brief-bag, two women laden down with parcels puttering in the opposite direction, an errand-boy delivering goods from a tricycle. The commonplace affairs of the district were proceeding uninterrupted, the peace of the neighbourhood was unbroken by so much as a glimpse of any sinister figure with a smoking gun scooting off on the conventional getaway. Teal’s dizzy gaze turned back to his subordinate. “Did you see him?” he rasped.
    “Only his back,” said Pryke helplessly. “But I haven’t the faintest idea which way he went.” Teal strode across to the errand-boy.
    “Did you see a man come rushing out of that building just now?” he barked: and the lad looked at him blankly. “Wot sort of man, mister?”
    “I don’t know,” said Teal, with a feeling that he was introducing himself as the most majestic lunatic in creation. “He’d have been running hell for leather-you must have noticed
him”
    The boy shook his head.
    “I ain’t seen nobody running abaht, not till you come aht yerself, mister. Wot’s the matter-‘as ‘e pinched something?”
    Mr. Teal did not enlighten him. Breathing heavily, he rejoined Junior Inspector Pryke.
    “We’d better get back upstairs and see what’s happened,” he said shortly.
    But he knew only too well what had happened. The murder of Johnny Anworth had been repeated, in a different guise, under his very nose-and that after he had pleaded so energetically for a chance to guard against it. He did not like to think what ecstatic sarabands of derision must have been dancing themselves silly under the smug exterior of Desmond Pryke. He clumped up the stairs and across the landing again in a dumb paroxysm of futile wrath, and went back into the flat.
    And there he halted again, one step inside the room, with his eyes bulging out of their sockets and the last tattered remnants of his traditional pose of sleepiness falling off him like autumn leaves from a tree, staring at what he saw as if he felt that the final vestiges of sanity were reeling away from his overheated mind.
    II
the body of Sunny Jim Fasson was no longer there. That was the brain-staggering fact which Chief Inspector Teal had to assimilate. It had simply ceased to exist. For all the immediate evidence which Teal’s reddening gaze could pick up to the contrary, Sunny Jim Fasson might never have lived there, might never have been interviewed there, and might never have been shot there. The ultimate abysses of interplanetary space could not have been more innocent of any part of Sunny Jim Fasson than that shabby one-room flatlet as Teal saw it then. There could hardly have been much less trace of Sunny Jim if he had never been born.
    And instead of that, there was