The
Saint’s face showed no hint of his disappointment.
He sat for a few
seconds longer, tilting himself gently back and forth; and then he stood up.
“It’s
a pity you don’t keep more money on the premises, Henry,” he remarked.
“You could have saved yourself a
stamp.”
He picked
up a paperknife from the desk and tested the blade with his thumb. It was sharp
enough. The eyes of the
bound men dilated as they watched him.
The Saint smiled.
“From
the way you were talking when I first came in, it looks as if you know my
business,” he said. “And I hope
you’ve realized by
this time that I know yours. It isn’t a very
nice business; but
that’s something for you to worry about.
All I’m concerned with
is to make sure that you pay the
proper luxury tax to the right person, which
happens to be me. So will you attend to it as soon as possible, Henry? I should
think about ten thousand pounds will do for a first
instalment. I shall
expect it in one-pound notes, delivered by messenger before two-thirty pm
tomorrow. And it had better not be late.” The Saint’s blue eyes were as
friendly as frozen vitriol. “Because if it is, Chief Inspector Teal will
be calling
here again—and next time it won’t be an accident…. Mean
while”—the
knife spun from his hands like a whirling white flame, and the three men
flinched wildly as the point buried
itself with a thud in the small space
of carpet centrally
between them—“if one of you gets to work with that,
you ought to be up and about again in a few minutes. Goodbye, girls; and help
yourself to some sal volatile when you get
down stairs.”
It was
nearing one o’clock by his watch when he reached
the street; and Patricia was ordering
herself a second Martini
when he strolled
into the cocktail room at Quaglino’s.
She leaned back and closed her
eyes.
“I
know,” she said. “Teal and the Flying Squad are about
two blocks
behind you. I can tell by the smug look on your
face.”
“For
once in your life you’re wrong,” he said as he lowered
himself into a chair.
“They’re so far behind that if Einstein is
right they ought to have been here an hour ago.”
Over lunch
he gave her an account of his morning.
“But what
is
it all
about ?” she said.
He frowned.
“I
just wish I knew, darling. But it’s something bigger
than burglary-—you can take bets on that.
If Henry Osbett is
the Miracle Teapot in
person, the plot is getting so thick you could float rocks on it. If I haven’t
got mixed on what Claud Eustace told me last night, they run a radio programme,
and
that costs plenty of dough and trouble.
No gang of burglars would bother to go as far as that, even to keep up appear
ances. Therefore this is some racket in which the
dough
flows like water; and I wish I could think what that could be.
And it’s run by experts. In the whole of that shop
there wasn’t a single clue. I’ll swear that Claud Eustace himself could put it
through a sieve and not find anything.
…
I was just
bluffing Henry, of course, but I think I made a good job of it.”
“You
don’t think he’ll pay, do you?”
“Stranger
things have happened,” said the Saint hope
fully. “But if
you put it like that—no. That was just bait. There wasn’t anything else useful
that I could do. If I’d had
them somewhere else I might have beaten it
out of them, but
I couldn’t do it there, and I couldn’t put them in a bag
and
bring them home with me. Anyhow, this may be a better
way. It
means that the next move is up to the ungodly, and
they’ve got to make it
fast. And that may give us our
break.”
“Of
course it may,” she agreed politely. “By the way, where did you tell
me once you wanted to be buried?”
He
chuckled.
“Under
the foundation stone of a brewery,” he said. ”But
don’t
worry. I’m going to take a lot of care of myself.”
His idea of taking care of
himself for that afternoon was to
drive the
Hirondel down to the factory at an average speed
of about sixty miles an hour to discuss the installation of a
new type of supercharger designed to make the
engine
several degrees more lethal
than it was already, and after
wards
to drive back to London at a slightly higher speed in
order to be
punctual for his appointment with Mr Teal. Con
sidering that ride in retrospect, he sometimes wondered
whether he would have any chance of claiming that
the
astounding quality of care which it showed could be credited
entirely to his own inspired forethought.
It was on
the stroke of four when he sailed into the May Fair and espied the plump and
unromantic shape of Chief Inspector Teal dumped into a pink brocade armchair
and
looking rather like a bailiff in a boudoir.
Teal got
up as the Saint breezed towards him; and some
thing in the way he
straightened and stood there almost
checked Simon in the middle of a
stride. Simon forced himself to keep coming without a flaw in the smooth
surface of his outward tranquillity; but a sixth sense was rocketing red
danger
signals through his brain even before he heard the
detective’s
unnaturally hard gritty voice.
“I’ve
been waiting for you, Saint!”
“Then
you must have been early, Claud,” said the Saint. His smile was amiable
and unruffled, but there was an out
law’s watchfulness at the back of his bantering eyes.
“Is that any excuse for the basilisk leer ? Anyone would think you’d
eaten something——
”
“I
don’t want to hear any more of that,” Teal said
crunchily. “You
know damned well why I’m waiting for
you. Do you know what this is ?”
He
flourished a piece of paper in Simon’s face.
The Saint
raised his eyebrows.
“Not
another of those jolly old warrants ?” he murmured.
“You
must be getting quite a collection of them.”
“I’m
not going to need to collect any more,” Teal said
grimly. “You went
too far when you left your mark on the dead man you threw out of your car in
Richmond Park this
afternoon. I’m taking you into custody on a charge of
wilful
murder!”
X
S
IMON TOOK
Mr Teal
by the arm and led him back to a seat.
He was probably the
only man in the world who could have got away with such a thing, but he did it
without the
faintest sign of effort. He switched on about fifty
thousand
watts of his personality, and Mr Teal was sitting down
beside
him before he recovered from it.
“Damn
it, Templar, what the hell do you think you’re
doing?” he
exploded wrathfully. “You’re under arrest!”
“All
right, I’m under arrest,” said the Saint accommodat
ingly, as
he stretched out his long legs. “So what ?”
“I’m
taking you into custody——
”
“You
said that before. But why the hurry ? It isn’t early
closing day at Vine Street, is it ? Let’s
have our tea first, and
you can tell me all
about this bird I’m supposed to have
moidered. You say he was thrown out
of a car——”
“Your
Hirondel!”
“But
why mine? After all, there are others. I don’t use enough of them to keep the
factory going by myself.”
The detective’s
jaws clamped on his chewing gum.
“You
can say all that to the magistrate in the morning,” he retorted dourly.
“It isn’t my job to listen to you. It’s my
job to take you to the
nearest police station and leave you
there, and that’s what I’m going to do.
I’ve got a car and a couple of men at each of the entrances, so you’d better
not
give any trouble. I had an idea you’d be here at four o’clock ——
”
“So I
spent the afternoon moidering people and chucking
them out of cars,
and then rush off to meet you so you needn’t
even have the trouble
of looking for me. I even use my own famous Hirondel so that any cop can
identify it, and put my
trademark on the deceased to make everything
easy for
the prosecution. You know, Claud,” said the Saint
pen
sively, “there are times when I wonder whether I’m quite
sane.”
Teal’s baby
blue eyes clung to him balefully.
“Go
on,” he grated. “Let’s hear the new alibi. It’ll give
me plenty of time to get it
torn down before you come up for trial!”
“Give
me a chance,” Simon protested. “I don’t even know
what time I’m supposed to have
been doing all these exciting
things.”
“You
know perfectly well——
“Never
mind. You tell me, and let’s see if we agree. What
time did I sling this
stiff out of my car?”
“A few minutes after
three—and he was only killed a few
minutes
before that.”
The Saint
opened his cigarette case.
“That
rather tears it,” he said slowly; and Teal’s eye
kindled with triumph.
“So
you weren’t quite so smart——
”
“Oh,
no,” said the Saint diffidently. “I was just thinking of
it from
your point of view. You see, just at that time I was
at the Hirondel
factory at Staines, talking about a new blower
that I’m thinking of
having glued on to the old buzz-wagon.
We had quite a
conference over it. There was the works manager, and the service manager, and
the shop foreman,
and a couple of mechanics thrown in, so far as I remember.
Of course, everybody knows that the whole staff down there
is in my pay, but the only
thing I’m worried about is whether you’ll be able to make a jury believe
it.”
A queerly
childish contraction warped itself across Mr
Teal’s rubicund
features. He looked as if he had been sud
denly seized with an
acute pain below the belt, and was about
to burst into tears.
Both of
these diagnoses contained a fundament of truth.
But they were far from
telling the whole story.
The whole
story went too far to be compressed into a
space less than
volumes. It went far back into the days when
Mr Teal had been a
competent and contented and common
place detective, adequately doing a
job in which miracles did
not happen and the natural laws of the
universe were re
spected and cast-iron cases were not being perennially
dis
integrated under his noise by a bland and tantalizing buc
caneer
whose elusiveness had almost started to convince
him of the reality of
black magic. It coiled through an
infinite history of incredible
disasters and hair breadth
frustrations that would have wrung the
withers of anything
softer
than a marble statue. It belonged to the hysterical saga
of his whole hopeless duel with the Saint.
Mr Teal
did not burst into tears. Nor, on this one unpre
cedented occasion,
did he choke over his gum while a flush
of apoplectic fury
boiled into his round face. Perhaps there were no more such reactions left in
him; or perhaps on this
one occasion an inescapable foreboding of the uselessness of
it all strangled the spasm before it could mature
and gave
him the supernatural strength to stifle his emotions under the
pose of stolid somnolence that he could so rarely
preserve
against the Saint’s
fiendishly shrewd attack. But however he
achieved the feat, he managed to sit quite still while his hot resentful
eyes bored into the Saint’s smiling face for a time
before he struggled slothfully to his feet.
“Wait
a minute,” he said thickly.
He went
over and spoke to a tall cadaverous man who was
hovering in the
background. Then he came back and sat
down again.
Simon
trickled an impudent streamer of smoke towards
him.
“If I were a sensitive man
I should be offended, Claud. Do
you have to
be quite so obvious about it when you send
Sergeant Barrow to find out whether I’m telling you the
truth? It isn’t good manners, comrade. It savours
of
distrust.”