“Could I speak to you alone for a minute, Claud?”
Teal followed him out to the driveway where they could speak without being overheard. Simon filled the detective in on what had taken place since they had met in the Mister Snowball van.
“Now listen, Claud,” he said firmly. “I know you’d like to devote yourself exclusively to proving me wrong, but there’s more at stake than your reputation and my self-interest.”
He lowered his voice. “You won’t find any footprints outside the window except mine, and the guard on the gate himself can testify that I was outside these grounds when the shot was fired.”
“So it was a suicide attempt?”
“No. It was attempted murder. By somebody in the building.”
“Who?” Teal retorted.
“I may be brilliant, but I’m not totally omniscient. It was undoubtedly somebody in on the plot with Jeff Peterson. I’m sure the scheme was something like this: use the letters to give Liskard a motive for suicide, and then commit the suicide for him since he wouldn’t do it himself — leaving the window open as a false clue to murder if the suicide setup wasn’t convincing enough. His death was to be the cue for a revolution of some sort in Nagawiland, probably in the name of equality and democracy, but in fact a power grab. Peterson and his father, who’s back in Nagawiland, were in on it, but Peterson’s father would never be accepted as head of state. He’s a notorious alcoholic down there. The top man still hasn’t blown his horn.”
“So you have it all figured out,” Teal said slowly. “Except the small matter of who did it.”
The Saint shrugged.
“I can’t do all your work for you, Claud — I’m only trying to do most of your thinking. Now if you’ll try to control your natural envy of superior intellects, I’ll let you in on a brilliant plan I’ve come up with for catching the leader of this conspiracy.”
Teal managed a rather theatrical sneer.
“What plan would that be?” he grumbled. “Torture the ones we’ve caught until they tell who the boss is?”
“No, Claud, I’m suggesting we not use standard police methods this time.” Simon looked warily around. “If you want to catch your man before breakfast, don’t waste any more of my time here — and don’t try to keep me out of that hospital. Whatever other ideas you have about me, you know me well enough by now to know that murdering a man like Liskard isn’t my kind of fun. But if you’ll cooperate with me this time, you can have all the glory.”
His tone was no longer mocking, and the detective had jousted with him for long years enough to recognize his sincerity.
Teal peered at him torpidly, chomping his gum like a shrewd and very thoughtful cow. A cartoonist depicting the scene might have drawn a small and almost wattless bulb glowing feebly above his head.
“You’re thinking of a trap,” he stated expressionlessly.
“Good for you, Claud, old tortoise,” Simon congratulated him. “And it needs you to help rig the cheese.”
12
Nearly three hours later, on the third floor of the Edgington Hospital, a doctor appeared at one end of a corridor as two other doctors came out of a room and walked away along the corridor in the other direction. Another door on the same corridor was flanked by a uniformed policeman and a plain-clothes detective. A student nurse carrying a covered metal tray came out of that room and followed the two doctors.
No one paid any particular attention to the doctor who then walked alone down the corridor. He wore a white smock which covered his body from his shoulders to his knees. Over his mouth and nose was a white mask, and a white cap closely covered the top of his head and his forehead. At the guarded door he merely nodded to the detective, opened the door, and stepped in. Beyond a small alcove was the patient’s bed. The patient lay still, his own head thoroughly bandaged. Only his eyes were not covered by gauze, and they were closed.
A nurse who was sitting near the bed stood up and looked at the doctor in surprise.
“I thought he was supposed to sleep,” she said.
“He is,” the doctor whispered. “But his reaction in the next hour may be critical. Please get everything prepared for a transfusion if necessary. And while you’re at it, you’d better also ask for an oxygen tent.”
The nurse peered at his eyes.
“I’m sorry, doctor, but I don’t recognize...”
“Bronson,” he said impatiently. “I’m on the Prime Minister’s personal staff — from Nagawiland. Now, if you please...”
The nurse, accustomed to obeying doctors without question, thinned her lips, nodded, and left the room.
Instantly the doctor hurried to the bed. The patient lay still, his breathing slow and shallow, only his closed eyes showing through the bands of gauze and adhesive that swathed his head. With a swift glance over his shoulder at the door, the doctor pulled something that looked like a thin pointed stick from beneath his white smock. He bent over the bed, bringing the long slender shaft down toward the throat of the man in the bed.
The patient suddenly came to life. He rolled violently toward the doctor, catching him low in the stomach with a foot that shot out from between the sheets and sent him tumbling back across the room. The doctor’s eyes were wide with surprise and panic. The patient flung back the covers and sprang out on his feet. The doctor reeled back toward the door, wildly swinging the stick to cover his retreat; but the patient now had an automatic in his hand, pointing accurately at the center of the doctor’s chest
“If I were in the movies,” came Simon Templar’s voice from behind the patient’s mask, “I’d say, Sorry to interrupt your operation, doctor, but this time I’m afraid you’re the one who gets stuck.”
The doctor froze, his back to the alcove which led into the main corridor.
“Now drop that Magic wand — which looks to me like a souvenir Nagawi arrow, probably dipped in some jolly native poison,” Simon said, pulling off his own bandages.
The other man seemed about to obey, but then he drew back his arm and flicked his wrist, and the arrow flashed through the air toward the Saint. Simon ducked aside, and the sharp stained point whipped past his ear and clattered against the wall beyond the bed in which he had been lying.
He could easily have shot his opponent dead in that single second, even while he was dodging the arrow, which might actually have been what the other was hoping for, if his last desperate throw failed to inflict a scratch which could likely have been lethal. But the Saint wanted him alive. So when the man followed the arrow with a wild suicidal lunge at him, Simon once more held his fire, but sidestepped and deflected the blow with a numbing karate cut into the forearm. His own right hand jabbed the gun muzzle cruelly into the “doctor’s” belly. His left caught him flat on the side of his head, and then snatched away the white mask.
“Foreign Minister Todd,” Simon said pleasantly. “I suppose this is a sample of how your followers would have gone back to nature if your little revolution had come off?”
Todd tried another futile swing even though he was dazed and against the wall. He succeeded only in knocking over a table lamp. Simon swung him around and locked him in a comparatively painless if undignified judo hold.
“One thing you’re not,” the Saint said regretfully, “and that’s a fighter. I suppose those diplomatic cocktail parties aren’t the best exercise in the world. All right, everybody — the show’s over.”
The door of the communicating lavatory burst open, and half a dozen people came through it in fairly rapid succession. Among them were two police officers and Chief Inspector Claud Eustace Teal.
Simon released Todd with a motion that swung him directly into Teal’s arms.