Mr Teal
said nothing. He sat champing soporifically,
staring steadfastly
at the polished toes of his regulation boots,
until Sergeant Barrow
returned.
Teal got up and spoke to him at
a little distance; and when
he rejoined the
Saint the drowsiness was turgid and treacle-
thick on his pink full-moon
face.
“All
right,” he bit out in a cracked voice, through lips
that were
stiff and clumsy with the bitterness of defeat. “Now
suppose you
tell me how you did it.”
“But
I didn’t do it, Claud,” said the Saint, with a serious
ness that
edged through his veneer of nonchalance. “I’m as
keen as you are to
get a line on this low criminal who takes
my trademark in vain.
Who was the bloke they picked up
this afternoon ?”
For some
reason which was beyond his understanding,
the detective stopped
short on the brink of a sarcastic come
back.
“He
was an Admiralty draughtsman by the name of Nancock,” he said; and the
gauzy derision in the Saint’s
glance faded out abruptly as he realized that
in that simple answer he had been given the secret of Mr Osbett’s remark
able
chemistry.
XI
I
T WAS
as if a distorting mirror had been suddenly flattened
out, so that it reflected a complete picture with
brilliant
and lifelike accuracy. The
figures in it moved like marion
ettes.
Simon even
knew why Nancock had died. He himself,
ironically for Teal’s disappointment, had
sealed the fat man’s
death-warrant without
knowing it. Nancock was the man
for
whom the fifteen-hundred-pound packet of Miracle Tea
had been intended; Nancock had been making a fuss
at the
shop when the Saint arrived.
The fuss was due to nothing but Nancock’s fright and greed, but to suspicious
eyes it
might just as well have looked like the overdone attempt of a
guilty conscience to establish its own innocence.
Nancock’s
money had passed into the
Saint’s hands, the Saint had got
into
the shop on the pretext of bringing the same package
back, and the Saint had said: “I know all
about your busi
ness.” Simon
could hear his own voice saying it. Osbett has
made from that the one obvious deduction. Nancock had
been a dead man when the Saint left the shop.
And to
dump the body out of a Hirondel, with a Saint
drawing pinned to it,
was a no less obvious reply. Probably
they had used one of his own authentic
drawings, which had
still been lying on the desk when he left them. He might
have
been doing any one of a dozen things that afternoon which
would have
left him without an alibi.
He had
told Patricia that the next move was up to the
ungodly, and it had
come faster than he had expected. But it
had also fulfilled all
his other hopes.
“Claud,”
he said softly, “how would you like to make the
haul of a lifetime
?”
Teal sat
and looked at him.
“I’ll
trade it,” said the Saint, “for something that’ll hardly
give you
any trouble at all. I was thinking of asking you to do
it for me anyhow, in
return for saving your life last night.
There are certain
reasons why I want to know the address
where they have a
telephone number Berkeley 3100. I can’t get the information from the telephone
company myself, but you can. I’ll write it down for you.” He scribbled the
figures on a piece of paper. “Let me know where that number lives,
and I’ll
give you your murderer and a lot more.”
Teal
blinked suspiciously at the memorandum.
“What’s
this got to do with it?” he demanded,
“Nothing
at all,” said the Saint untruthfully. “So don’t
waste your
time sleuthing around the place and trying to
pick up clues. It’s just some private
business of my own. Is it
a sale?”
The
detective’s eyes hardened.
“Then
you do know something about all this!”
“Maybe
I’m just guessing. I’ll be able to tell you later. For
once in your life, will you let me do you
a good turn without
trying to argue me out of
it?”
Mr Teal
fought with himself. And for no reason that he
could afterwards
justify to himself, he said grudgingly: “All
right. Where shall I
find you ?”
“I’ll
stay home till I hear from you.” Simon stood up,
and suddenly
remembered for the first time why he was there
at all. He pulled a
yellow package out of his pocket and
dropped it in the detective’s lap.
“Oh yes. And don’t forget
to take some of this belly balm as soon as
you get the chance.
It may help you to get back that sweet disposition you
used
to have, and stop you being so ready to think unkind thoughts
about
me.”
On the way
home he had a few qualms about the ultimate
wisdom of that parting
gesture, but his brain was too busy
to dwell on them. The final patterns
of the adventure were
swinging into place with the regimented
precision that
always
seemed to come to his episodes after the most chaotic
beginnings, and the rhythm of it was like wine in his blood.
He had
made Teal drive slowly past Cornwall House with him in a police car, in case
there were any watchers waiting
to see whether the attempt to saddle him with
Nancock’s
murder would be successful. From Cannon Row police
station,
which is also a rear exit from Scotland Yard, he took
a taxi back to his
apartment, and stopped at a newsagent’s
on the way to buy a
copy of a certain periodical in which he
had hitherto taken
little interest. By the time he got home it had given him the information he
wanted.
Sam
Outrell, the janitor, came out from behind the desk
as he entered the
lobby.
“Those
men was here, sir, about two hours ago, like you said they would be,” he
reported. “Said you’d sent ‘em to
measure the winders
for some new curtains. I
let ‘em in like
you told me, an’ they
went through all the rooms.”
“Thanks
a lot, Sam,” said the Saint, and rode up in the lift
with
another piece of his mosaic settled neatly into place,
He came
into the living-room like a ray of sunshine and
spun his hat over
Patricia’s head into a corner.
“Miracle
Tea is on the air in about ten minutes,” he said,
“with a program
of chamber music. Could anything be more appropriate ?”
Patricia
looked up from her book.
“I
suppose you’ve heard about our curtain measurers.”
“Sam
Outrell told me. Do I get my diploma in advanced
prophetics? After the
party I had this morning, I knew it
wouldn’t be long before someone wanted
to know what had
happened to Comrade McGuire. Did you get him to Weybridge
in good
condition?”
“He
didn’t seem to like being locked in the trunk of the
Daimler very
much.”
The Saint
grinned, and sat down at the desk to dismantle
his automatic. He
opened a drawer and fished out brushes
and rags and cleaning
oil.
“Well,
I’m sure he preferred it to being nailed up in a
coffin,” he said
callously. “And he’s safe enough there with O
race on guard. They
won’t find him in the secret room,
even if they do think of looking down
there…. Be a darling
and start tuning in Radio Calvados, will you
?”
For a short while she was busy
with the dials of the radio
gram; and then
she came back and watched him in silence
while he went over his gun with the loving care of a man who
knew how much might hang on the light touch of a
trigger.
“Something
else has happened,” she said at last. “And
you’re holding out on
me.”
Simon
squinted complacently up a barrel like burnished
silver, and snapped the sliding jacket
back into place. There
was a dynamic
exuberance in his repose that no artist could
have captured, an aura of resilient swiftness poised on a
knife-edge of balance that sent queer little
feathery ripples up
her spine.
“A
lot more is going to happen,” he said. “And then I’ll tell you what a
genius I am.”
She would
have made some reply; but suddenly he fell
into utter stillness
with a quick lift of his hand.
Out of the radio, which had
been briefly silent, floated the
opening
bars of the
Spring Song.
And his watch told him that
it was the start of the Miracle Tea Company’s
contribution
to the load that the
twentieth-century ether has to bear.
Shortly
the music faded to form a background for a deli
cate Oxford accent
informing the world that this melody
fairly portrayed the sensations of a sufferer from
indigestion after drinking a nice big cup of Miracle Tea. There followed
an unusually nauseating dissertation on the
manifold virtues of the product, and then a screeching slaughter of the Grand
March from
Tannh
ä
user
played by the same string quartet.
Patricia got up pallidly and poured herself out a
drink.
“I
suppose we do have to listen to this ?” she said.
“Wait,”
said the Saint.
The
rendition came to its awful end, and the voice of
Miracle Tea polluted
the air once again.
“Before
we continue our melody programme, we should
like to read you a
few extracts from our file of unsolicited
letters from
sufferers who have tried Miracle Tea. Tonight
we are choosing
letters one thousand and six, one thousand
and fourteen, and one
thousand and twenty-seven….”
The
unsolicited letters were read with frightful enthusi
asm, and the Saint
listened with such intentness that he was
obviously paying no
attention to the transparently bogus
effusions. He sat with the gun turning
gently in his hands
and a blindingly beatific smile creeping by hesitant
degrees into the lines of his chiselled fighting mouth, so that the girl
looked at
him in uncomprehending wonderment.
“…
And there, ladies and gentlemen, you have the
opinions of the
writers whose letters are numbered one
thousand and six, one
thousand and fourteen, and one
thousand and twenty-seven in our files,”
said the voice of
the announcer, speaking with tedious deliberation.
“These
good people cured themselves by drinking Miracle Tea. Let
me urge you to buy Miracle Tea—tonight. Buy Miracle
Teal …
And now the string quartet will play
Drink to Me
Only——
”
There were
two more short numbers and the broadcast
was over. Simon switched off the radio as
the next advertiser
plunged into his act.
“Well,”
said Patricia mutinously, “are you going to talk ?”
“You
heard as much as I did.”
“I
didn’t hear anything worth listening to.”
“Nor
did I. That’s the whole point. There wasn’t anything worth listening to. I was
looking for an elaborate code mes
sage. An expert like me can smell a
code message as far off as
a venerable gorgonzola—there’s always a certain clumsiness
in the phrasing. This was so simple that I nearly
missed it.”
Patricia
gazed into the depths of her glass.
She said:
“Those numbers——
”
He nodded.
“The
‘thousand’ part is just coverage. Six, fourteen, and
twenty-seven are the
operative words. They have to buy
Miracle Tea—tonight. Nothing else in the programme means
a thing. But according to that paper I brought in,
Miracle
Tea broadcasts every night of
the week; and that means that
any night the Big Shot wants to he can
send out a call for the
men he wants to come
and get their orders or anything else
that’s waiting for them. It’s the
last perfect touch of organiza
tion. There’s
no connecting link that any detective on earth
could trace between a broadcast and any particular person
who listens to it. It means that even if one of his
operatives should be under suspicion, the Big Shot can contact him without the
shadow of a chance of transferring suspicion to himself. You could think of
hundreds of ways of working a few numbers into an advertising spiel, and I’ll
bet they have a new one every time.”