Read Online Brighter Buccaneer by Leslie Charteris - Free Book Online

had succumbed to a not unreasonable thirst, and spent half an hour in the restaurant car in earnest collaboration with a bottle of Worthington. But there was no sign of his bag having been tampered with when he came back, and he had seen no familiar face on the train.
    It was one of the most mystifying things that had ever happened to him, and the fact that the police case against him had been considerably weakened by his bereavement was a somewhat dubious compensation.
    Chief Inspector Teal reached London with a theory of his own. He expounded it to the Assistant Commissioner without enthusiasm.
    “I’m afraid there’s no doubt that Larry’s telling the truth,” he said. “He’s no idea what happened to the swag, but I have. Nobody double-crossed him, because he always works alone, and he hasn’t any enemies that I know of. There’s just one man who might have done it-you know who I mean.”
    The Assistant Commissioner sniffed. He had an irritating and eloquent sniff.
    “It would be very tiresome if anything happened to the Saint,” he remarked pointedly. “The C.I.D. would have a job to find another stock excuse that would sound quite as convincing.”
    When Mr. Teal had cooled off in his own room, he had to admit that there was an element of truth in the Assistant Commissioner’s acidulated comment. It did not mellow his tolerance of the most unpopular Police Chief of his day; he had had similar thoughts himself, without feeling as if he had discovered the elixir of life.
    The trouble was that the Saint refused to conform to any of the traditions which make the capture of the average criminal a mere matter of routine. There was nothing stereotyped about his methods which made it easy to include him in the list of suspects for any particular felony. He was little more than a name in criminal circles; he had no jealous associates to give him away, he confided his plans to no one, he never boasted of his success in anyone’s hearing-he did nothing which gave the police a chance to catch him red-handed. His name and address were known to every constable in the force; but for all any of them could prove in a court of law he was an unassailably respectable citizen who had long since left a rather doubtful past behind him, an amiable young man about town blessed with plentiful private means, who had the misfortune to be seen in geographically close proximity to various lawless events for which the police could find no suitable scapegoat. And no one protested their ignorance of everything to do with him more vigorously that his alleged or prospective victims. It made things very difficult for Mr. Teal, who was a clever detective but a third-rate magician.
    The taciturnity of Max Kemmler was a more recent thorn in Mr. Teal’s side.
    Max Kemmler was a Dane by birth and an American by naturalization. The phase of his career in which the United States Federal Authorities were interested started in St. Louis, when he drifted into Egan’s Rats and carved the first notches in his gun. Prudently, he left St. Louis during an election clean-up and reappeared in Philadelphia as a strong-arm man in a newsstand racket. That lasted him six months, and he left in a hurry; the tabs caught up with him in New York, where he went over big for a couple of years as typewriter expert in an East Side liquor mob. He shot up the wrong speakie one night after a celebration and was lucky to be able to make a passage to Cherbourg on a French liner that sailed at dawn the next morning. How he got past the passport barriers into England was something of a mystery. He was down on the deportation list, but Scotland Yard was holding up in the hope of an extradition warrant.
    He was a thick-shouldered man of middle height, with a taste for camel-hair coats and very light grey Homburgs. Those who had been able to keep on the right side of him in the States called him a good guy-certainly he could put forth a rugged geniality, when it suited him,