Count on the Saint (49) by Leslie Charteris

Author:Leslie Charteris
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2015-12-15T16:00:00+00:00

4

What the Chronicle’s front-page headline lacked in syntax it made up for in dramatic effect.

SANTA KILLER STRIKES AGAIN!

Simon Templar propped the paper against the coffeepot and read the story during breakfast.

The killing of Sir Basil Lazentree had happened too late for the following morning’s papers, but the murder of Stanton Wakeforth could not have been better timed if the editor had committed it himself.

Two murders within twenty-four hours and half a mile of each other, both of important people, both killed by a man disguised as Father Christmas, and both with Simon Templar in the vicinity: the story had everything any news-hungry editor ever dreamt of.

There was an account of each murder plus potted biographies of both victims. Everyone but the cat appeared to have been interviewed, and there was a spread of pictures of every person and place in any way involved.

The Saint reviewed his own notices critically. For once the quotes were accurate, but he thought it was time the press took a new portrait for their files. The picture of Nutkin, however, was an accurate likeness, the photographer having managed to catch him looking both arrogant and angry as he shouldered his way through the throng of reporters outside the department store.

There are certain moments which transcend description, when words become not only superfluous but positively obstructive to a clear understanding of the emotions they seek to describe. The look on Superintendent Nutkin’s face when he marched importantly into the manager’s office and found himself confronted by the Saint had been one such moment. It was like the expression of a monarch who, after walking grandly up the aisle to be crowned, finds someone already sitting on his throne.

“What are you doing here?” he almost shouted.

“Waiting for you, like everybody else, Mr. Nuthatch—”

“Nutkin!”

“—and before you go out on a limb and I have to saw it off,” Simon continued kindly, “we were all here together while Brother Wakeforth was being promoted to the Great Board Room in the sky. So let me warn you that anything you say may be taken down and used in evidence of probable paranoia.”

Once he had recovered from the shock and reluctantly accepted that the Saint’s alibi was not merely cast iron but made of titanium alloy, Nutkin had instituted the ritual known as Standard Procedure. The store had been cleared of customers and searched, the staff had been questioned and their statements taken, the stock room had been dusted for fingerprints and the body examined, photographed, and finally despatched to the morgue.

The net result of so much activity had been to establish that the murder of the store boss was in some way connected with the killing of the master of St. Enoch’s—a fact that had been fairly obvious from the moment the porter had given his description of the murder.

A clue that confirmed a probable link between the killings had been spotted by the Saint. Left to his own devices after being clearly exonerated of Wakeforth’s murder, he had ignored Nutkin’s instruction to leave the store and instead wandered up to the tycoon’s office.

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