The Saint Goes On Read Free Page B

Was he shot?”
    Teal hesitated for a moment, studying him with that deceptively bovine gaze.
    “Yes, he was shot.”
    “When?”
    “Just now.”
    The bantering blue eyes had an impish twinkle.
    “You must have been doing some fast detecting,” said the Saint. “Or did somebody tell you?”
    Mr. Teal frowned at him, shifting his gum from tooth to tooth till he got it lodged behind his wisdoms. His sluggish glance travelled once again over that keen sunburned face, handsome as Lucifer and lighted with an indescribable glimmer of devil-may-care mockery; and he wondered if there would ever be any peace for him so long as he was in the employment of the Law and that amazing buccaneer was on the other side.
    For Simon Templar was the incalculable outlaw for whom the routines of criminal investigation had no precedents. He belonged to no water-tight classification, followed no rules but his own, fitted into no definite category in the official scheme of things. He was the Saint: a creation of his own, comparable to nothing but himself. From time to time, desperate creatures of that nebulously frontiered stratosphere commonly called “the Underworld” had gone forth vowing unprintable revenge, and had come back empty-handed-when they came back at all. Many times, Chief Inspector Claud Eustace Teal had thought that all his ambitions would be fulfilled if he could see the Saint safely locked away behind the bars of Larkstone Prison-and yet some of his most spectacular coups could never have been made without the Saint’s assistance. And in spite of all the wrath that had been directed on him from these diametrically antagonistic quarters, the Saint had still gone on, a terror to the underworld and a thorn in the side of Scotland Yard, a gay crusader in modern dress who returned from his lawless raids with more booty than any adventurer had ever found before him.
    And with all these memories freshened in his mind during that slothful survey, almost against his will, Chief Inspector Teal found himself impotent to believe that the High Fence could be merely another alias of the man before him. It was not psychologically possible. Whatever else could be said about him, the Saint was not a man who sat spinning webs and weaving complex but static mysteries. Everything that he did was active: he would go out to break up the web and take his illicit plunder from the man who wove it, but he wouldn’t spin… . And yet there was the evidence of Teal’s own flabbergasted senses, there in that room, to be explained away; and Mr. Teal had suffered too much at the Saint’s hands to feel that there could ever be any comfortable certainty in the wide world when that incorrigible free-booter was around.
    He clasped his pudgy hands behind his back and said: “Sunny Jim was shot in this room less than five minutes ago. Somebody opened the door and shot him while I was talking to him. He was shot just in time to stop him telling me something I very much wanted to hear. And I want to know what you were doing at that time.”
    The Saint smiled rather mildly.
    “Is that an invitation or a threat?” he inquired.
    “It’s whichever you like to make it,” Teal answered grimly. “Sunny Jim didn’t shoot himself, and I’m going to find out who did it.”
    “I’m sure you are, Claud,” said the Saint cordially. “You always do find out these things, with that marvellous brain of yours… . Have you thought of the High Fence?”
    Teal nodded.
    “I have.”
    “What do you know about the High Fence?” demanded Pryke suspiciously.
    Simon took out a cigarette-case and looked at him equably.
    “This and that. I’ve been looking for him for some time, you know.”
    “What do you want with the High Fence, Saint?” asked Mr. Teal.
    Simon Templar glanced with unwontedly passionless eyes at the chair where Sunny Jim had stopped talking, and smiled with his lips. He lighted a cigarette.
    “The High Fence has killed two men,” he said.