The Saint and Mr Teal (Once More the Saint)

"We've tried all the regulars," he said. "The Green Cross boys are the nucleus of it, we know, but so far they've been able to work a system of alibis that have left us flat. Most of them have come into a lot of money that they can't account for since this trouble started, but that isn't a crime. We had one of their best men in the other day-a fellow named Orping. He was playing the American gangster to the life. Between ourselves, we knocked him about a bit-you know what can be done-but we couldn't shake a thing out of him. I don't like that American line that Orping's got hold of. It looks ugly."

"Any idea where the stuff's being fenced?"

"I'm afraid not. I don't think it's being fenced in this country at all."

Simon Templar smiled inwardly, but he forbore to point a moral.

"Who's the Big Noise?" he asked; and the detective shrugged grimly.

"If we knew that, the trouble would be practically over. There are rumours that it's some sort of Yank, and all the registered aliens have come under obser­vation, but we haven't learned much. Whoever he is, he's got his men right under his thumb. I've never met so many oysters before. The story is that Corrigan was one of the bunch who threatened to squeal, and what happened to him has put the fear of God into everyone else who might have talked."

The Saint pushed his hands into his pockets and gazed at the detective with a faint suggestion of mockery.

" It must have made you wish I was on the road again, Claud. It's something to think that you may have admitted that my reign of terror wasn't so bad after all."

Mr. Teal finished his coffee and unwrapped a wafer of chewing gum. His baby-blue eyes looked the Saint over with a certain seriousness.

"If you only had the sense to keep out of the news­papers and save the assistant commissioner from prac­tising sarcastic remarks on me," he said, "I shouldn't be sorry if you were on the road for a while. You can do things that we can't do officially. We're trying to get special powers, but you know what that's likely to mean. It may take us months-and men will be killed every day while we're helpless. There's only one way to deal with this sort of thing. You've got to fight guns with guns, killing with killing, fear with fear."

They separated on an arrangement to lunch together in three days' time, which was the friendliest parting they had had for many months. It rather tickled Simon to think how the advent of a common enemy might make a branded outlaw almost persona grata with the Law, merely because his killings were more discrimi­nate.

Patricia and the Saint drove boldly back to Manson Place in a taxi. There was a man tinkering with a motorcycle at the open end of the cul-de-sac: Simon saw him look up as the taxi passed, and reckoned that Tex Goldman would shortly be receiving some interest­ing news.

Curiously enough, it did not occur to him that a sharp pair of eyes in the car that had carried the hold-up men away from the Baytree Club might have noticed him where he stood in the street a few doors from the scene of the crime.

He paid off the taxi and mounted the short flight of steps to the front door of his temporary home circumspectly. The man at the corner still tinkered with his motorcycle. Simon slid aside the pivoted metal plate under the knocker and studied the indicator bulb which it concealed to make sure that no one had entered the house in his absence before he called Patricia to join him. He kept his right hand in his pocket while he unlocked the door and let her through, and his eyes never ceased their watchful survey of the street; but his precautions were a matter of routine. He was not expecting trouble immediately.

"It's rather a pity I let those Green Cross boys know who I was," he said.

There were several letters waiting for him, and he sat on the table in the sitting room and read them while Patricia Holm went to the kitchen to find him a bottle of beer.

She came back with a tray. He heard her put it down, and then he heard a crash.

"Never mind the glass," he said, without looking round. "We can always burgle Woolworth's for some more. Break the lot if you feel like it."

"Simon-I didn't --"

The Saint took his eyes off the letter he was reading. A motorcycle was roaring away with an open exhaust. He saw the broken window, and the shining metal cylinder that lay on the floor; and he moved like a streak of lightning.

The force of his rush hurled the girl, bruised and shaken, onto the settee, and the next instant the Saint's weight was flung on the back of it. The heavy piece of leather-upholstered furniture was toppled over by the impact, so that they lay sheltered behind it.

In another split second the thunder of the explosion deafened them, and the air was full of the whine of flying metal.

CHAPTER IV PATRICIA HOLM looked up from her crossword puzzle.

"Give me a word for 'sack' in three letters, boy. M, A, something."

" 'Bag,' " suggested the Saint.

The girl eyed him sinisterly.

"What d'you mean-'bag'? I said --"