Free The Saint Goes On by Leslie Charteris Page A

the Saint’s own. “Haven’t you finished with Simon yet? We’re waiting for him to join us for dinner, and I’m getting hungry and Hoppy is getting away with all the sherry.”
    “I don’t know what you mean,” he answered suspiciously.
    “You ought to know, Claud.”
    He didn’t seem to know. She explained. He was silent for so long that she thought she had been cut off; and then his suspicious perplexity came through again in the same lethargic monotone.
    “I’ll ring you again in a few minutes,” he said.
    She sat on at the table, smoking her cigarette without enjoyment, playing a noiseless tattoo with her fingertips on the smooth green bakelite of the instrument. Over on the other side of the room, Hoppy Uniatz discovered the untouched glass which had been reserved for the Saint, and drew it cautiously towards him.
    In five minutes the telephone bell rang.
    “They don’t know anything about it at Scotland Yard or Market Street,” Teal informed her. “And it’s the first I’ve heard of it myself. Is this another of your family jokes, or what?”
    “I’m not joking,” said Patricia, and there was a sudden chill in her eyes which would have made the statement superfluous if Teal could have seen her. “Pryke took him away about half-past five. It was a perfectly ridiculous charge, but he wouldn’t listen to reason. It couldn’t possibly have kept the Saint as long as this.”
    The wire was silent again for a second or two. She could visualise the detective sucking his chewing gum more plainly than television could have shown him.
    “I’ll come round and see you,” he said.
    He was there inside the quarter-hour, with his round harvest-moon face stodgy and disinterested under his shabby pot hat, chewing the same tasteless cud of chicle and listening to the story again. The repetition added nothing to the sum of his knowledge, except that there was no joke involved. When he had heard it through and asked his questions, he called Scotland Yard and Market Street police station again, only to have his inquiries answered by the same blank negatives. Junior Inspector Pryke, apparently, had left Market Street at about a quarter to four, without saying where he was going; and nothing had been heard of him since. Certainly he had not reported in with an arrest anywhere in the Metropolitan area.
    Only one thing required no explanation; and he knew that Patricia Holm knew it, by this time, as well as he knew it himself-although her recital had carefully told him nothing more than Simon Templar himself would have done.
    “The Saint was after the High Fence,” he said bluntly. “He robbed Enderby this afternoon. I know it, and you know it, even if it is quite true that Enderby got on to us shortly after the alarm and swore it was all a mistake. Therefore it’s obvious that Enderby is something to do with the High Fence. Maybe we can’t prove it; but the High Fence knows his own men. It doesn’t take much more to work out what happened.”
    “I think you’re jumping to a lot of conclusions,” said Patricia, with Saintly sweetness, and did not deceive him for an instant.
    “Perhaps I am,” he said stolidly. “But I know what I’d have done if I’d been the High Fence. I’d have heard what had happened as soon as Scotland Yard did; and I’d have watched this place. I’d have seen Pryke come in; and even that mightn’t have stopped me… . They left here in a taxi, did they? Well, you ought to be able to work it out as well as I can.”
    “You mean de High Fence puts de arm on him?” asked Mr. Uniatz, translating innuendo into an idiom that he could understand.
    Teal looked round at him with heavy-lidded eyes in which the perpetual boredom was as flimsy a sham as anyone was likely to see it.
    “If you know the answers, I expect you’ll go to work on them,” he said, with a stony significance of which he would have been the first to disclaim all knowledge. “I’ve got my own job to do. If one