Free Saint Intervenes by Leslie Charteris Page B

and at the
other end of the arrow was written in
neat copperplate the single word: “Thursday.”
    “If
the Saint says he’s coming on Thursday, he’s coming on Thursday,” Teal
stated definitely, in a private conference to which he was
summoned when the card arrived.
    Prince
Schamyl elevated his shoulders and spread out his hands.
    “I do
not attempt to understand your customs, Inspector. In my country, if we
require evidence, we beat the criminal with rods until he
provides it.”
    “You
can’t do that in this country,” said Teal, as if he wished you
could. “That postcard wouldn’t be worth tuppence in a court of law—not
with the sort of lawyers the Saint could afford to engage. We couldn’t
prove that he sent it. We know it’s his trade-mark, but the very fact
that everybody in England knows the same thing would be the weakest point in
our case. The prosecutor could never make the jury believe that a crook
as clever as the Saint is supposed to be would sent out a
warning that could be traced back to him so easily. The Saint
knows it, and he’s been trading on it for years—it’s the strongest card in
his hand. If we arrested him on evidence like that, he’d only have to
swear that the card was a fake—that some other crook had sent it out as
a blind—and he could make a fool of anyone who tried to prove it
wasn’t. Our only chance is to catch him more or less red-handed. One of
these days he’ll go too far, and I’m only hoping it’ll be on
Thursday.”
    Teal
thumbed the pages of a cheap pocket diary, although he had no need to
remind himself of dates.
    “This
is Wednesday,” he said. “You can say that Thursday begins any
time after midnight. I’ll be here at twelve o’clock myself, and I’ll stay
here till midnight tomorrow.”
    Mr. Teal
was worried more than he would have cared to admit. The idea that
even such a satanic ingenuity as he knew the Saint to possess could contrive
a way of stealing anything from under the eyes of a police guard who had
been forewarned that he was coming for it was obviously fantastic. It belonged
to sensational fiction, to the improbable world of Ars è ne Lupin. Ars è ne
Lupin would have disguised himself as Chief Inspector Teal or the Chief
Commissioner, and walked out with the crown under his arm; but Teal knew that such
miracles of impersonation only happened in the romances of
unscrupulous and reader-cheating authors. Yet he knew the Saint too
well, he had crossed swords too often with that amazing brigand of the
twentieth century, to derive any solid consolation from that thought.
    When he
came back to the hotel that night, he checked over his defences as
seriously as if he had been guarding the emperor of a great
European power from threatened assassination . There were men
posted at the entrances of the hotel, and one at a strategic point in the
lobby which covered the stairs and elevators. A Flying Squad car
stood outside. Every member of the hotel staff who would be
serving the Prince during the next twenty-four hours had been investigated. A burly detective paced the corridor outside the Prince’s suite, and two
more equally efficient men were posted inside. Teal added himself to the
last number. The £100,000 crown of Cherkessia reposed in a velvet-lined box on
a table in the sitting-room of the suite—Teal had unsuccessfully
attempted more than once to induce Prince Schamyl to authorise its removal to
a safe-deposit or even to Scotland Yard itself.
    “Where
is the necessity?” inquired the Prince blankly. “You have your
detectives everywhere. Are you afraid that they will be unable to
cope with this absurd criminal?”
    Teal had
no answer. He was afraid—there was a gloomy premonition creeping
around his brain that the Saint could not have helped foreseeing all his precautions, and
therefore must have discovered a loophole
long in advance. That was the reason
why he had studiously withheld even a rumour of the Saint’s threat from the