The Saint and Mr Teal (Once More the Saint)

Simon looked round the room. There was no trace of the man who had called himself Jones-nothing but an ashtray that had been freshly emptied. Obviously the killer had stayed long enough to obliterate all evi­dence of his visit; obviously, too, his victim had been temporarily paralyzed, so that the murderer had be­lieved that he was already dead.

There was a telephone by the door, and for a moment Simon Templar gazed at it and wondered if it was his duty to ring for assistance. The last thing on earth that he wanted was an interview even with the most un­suspecting police officer, but that consideration would not have weighed with him for an instant if he had not known that all the doctors in France could have done nothing for the man who was dying in his arms and did not know it.

"Why did Jones try to shoot you?" he asked, and Brian Quell grinned at him vacuously.

"Becaush he said Binksh could --"

The repetition choked off in the man's throat. His eyes wavered over Simon's face stupidly; then they dilated with the first and last stunned realization of the truth, only for one horrible dumb second before the end.. . .

Simon read the dead man's name from the tailor's tab inside the breast pocket of his coat and went softly back to his room. The other windows on the courtyard remained shrouded in darkness. If anyone else had heard the shot it must have been attributed to a passing taxi; but there is a difference between the cough of an engine and the crack of an automatic about which the trained ear can never be mistaken. If it had not been for Simon Templar's familiarity with that subtle dis­tinction, a coup might have been inscribed in the annals of crime which would have shaken Europe from end to end-but Simon could not see so far ahead that night.

He left Paris early the following morning. It was unlikely that the murder would be discovered before the afternoon; for it is an axiom of the Quarter that early rising is a purely bourgeois conceit, and one of the few failings of the French hotel keepers is that they feel none of that divine impulse to dictate the manner of life of their clientele which has from time immemorial made Great Britain the Mecca of holiday makers from every corner of the globe. Simon Templar had rarely witnessed a violent death about which he had so clear a conscience, and yet he knew that it would have been foolish to stay. It was one of the penalties of his fame that he had no more chance of convincing any well-informed policeman that he was a law-abiding citizen than he had of being elected President of the United States. So he went back to England, where he was more unpopular than anywhere else in Europe.

If it is true that there is some occult urge which draws a murderer back to the scene of his crime, it must have been an infinitely more potent force which brought Simon Templar back across the Channel to the scene of more light-hearted misdemeanours than Scotland Yard had ever before endured from the disproportionate sense of humour of any one outlaw. It was not so many years since he had first formulated the idea of making it his life work to register himself in the popular eye as something akin to a public institution; and yet in that short space of time his dossier in the Records Office had swollen to a saga of debonair lawlessness that made Chief Inspector Claud Eustace Teal speechless to contemplate. The absurd little sketch of a skeleton figure graced with a symbolic halo, that impudent signature with which Simon Templar endorsed all his crimes, had spread the terror of the Saint into every outpost of the underworld and crashed rudely into the placid meanderings of all those illustrious members of the Criminal Investigation Department who had hitherto been content to justify their employment as guardians of the law by perfecting themselves in the time-honoured sport of persuading deluded shop assistants to sell them a bar of chocolate one minute later than the lawful hours for such transactions. The Robin Hood of Modern Crime they called him in the headlines, and extolled his virtues in the same paragraph as they reviled the C.I.D. for failing to lay him by the heels; which only shows you what newspapers can do for democracy. He had become an accepted incident in current affairs, like Wheat Quotas and the League of Nations, only much more interesting. He stood for a vengeance that struck swiftly and without mercy, for a gay defiance of all dreary and mechanical things.

"It's not my fault, sir," Chief Inspector Teal stated gloomily, in an interview which he had with the assist­ant commissioner. "We aren't in the Saint's class, and some day I suppose we shall have to admit it. If this was a republic we should make him dictator and get some sleep."