Mr Teal
held on to his stomach as the anguishing parody
proceeded to rend the
air.
“Miracle
Tea!” he rasped savagely. “What’ll they think of
next? As
if tea could cure indigestion! Pah!”
The way he
said
“Pah!”
almost blew his front teeth out; and Kennedy glanced
at him discerningly.
“Oh,
so that’s the trouble, is it ? The mystery is solved.”
“I
didn’t say——
”
Kennedy
grinned at him.
The door
of the tea shoppe opened again, to admit
Inspector Peters,
Kennedy’s chief assistant.
“Sorry
I was so long, sir,” he apologized, taking the vacant
chair at
their table. “The man was out——
”
“Never
mind that,” said Kennedy. “Teal’s got indiges
tion.”
“You
can fix that with a bit of bicarb,” said Peters
helpfully.
“So
long as it isn’t something more serious,” said Kennedy,
reaching
for the freshly-arrived plate of hot buttered
crumpets with a hand
like a leg of mutton and the air of
massive confidence which can only be achieved by a man of
herculean physique who knows that his interior
would never
dare to give him any
backchat. “I’ve been noticing his face
lately. I must say I’ve been worried about it, but I didn’t like
to mention it before he brought it up.”
“You
mean the twitching ?” asked Peters.
“Not
so much the twitching as the jaundiced colour. It
looks bad to me.”
“Damn
it,” began Teal explosively.
“Acid,”
pronounced Kennedy, engulfing crumpets.
“That’s generally
the beginning of the trouble. Too much
acid swilling around
the lining of your stomach, and where are you ? In next to no time you’re a
walking mass of gastric
ulcers. You know what happens when a gastric
ulcer eats into
a blood vessel ?”
“You
bleed to death ?” asked Peters interestedly.
“Like
a shot,” said Kennedy, apparently unaware of the
fact that Teal was
starting to simmer and splutter like a pan full of hot grease. “It’s even
worse when the ulcer makes a
whacking great hole in the wall of the
stomach and your
dinner falls through into the abdominal cavity….”
Mr Teal
clung to his chair and wished that he had been
born deaf.
It was no
consolation at all to him to recall that it had
actually been the
Saint himself who had started the fashion of
making familiar and
even disgusting comments on the shape
and dimensions of the stomach under
discussion, a fashion
which Mr Teal’s own colleagues, to their
eternal disgrace, had been surprisingly quick to adopt. And now that it had
been
revealed that his recent irritability had been caused by
acute
indigestion, the joke would take a new lease of life. It
is a
curious but undeniable fact that a man may have a head
ache or a toothache
or an earache and receive nothing but
sympathy from those about him; but let
his stomach ache
and
all he can expect is facetiousness of the most callous and offensive kind. Mr
Teal’s stomach was a magnificently well-
developed
organ, measuring more inches from east to west
than he cared to calculate and he was perhaps excessively
sensitive about it; but in its present condition
the most faintly
flippant reference
to it was exquisite torment.
He stood
up.
“Will
you excuse me, sir?” he said, with as much dignity
as he
could muster. “I’ve got a job to do this evening.”
“Don’t
forget to buy some Miracle Tea on your way
home,” was
Kennedy’s farewell.
Mr Teal
walked up Victoria Street in the direction of his
modest lodgings. He
had no job to do at all; but it would
have been physically impossible for him to have stomached
another minute of the conversation he had left
behind him. He walked, because he had not far to go, and the exercise
helped to distract his thoughts from the feeling
that his intestines were being gnawed by a colony of hungry rats.
Not that the distraction was by any means
complete: the rats
continued their
remorseless depredations. But he was able
to give them only half his attention instead of the whole of it.
In the circumstances it was perhaps natural that
the broad
cast which had been added
to his current griefs should remain
vaguely
present in the background of his mind. The address given had been in Victoria
Street. And therefore it was perhaps not such a wild coincidence after all
that he should
presently have found
himself gazing at a large showcard in
the
window of a chemist’s shop which he must have been
passing practically every day for the last two
months.
INDIGESTION?
Try
MIRACLE TEA 2
/6 a
packet
Mr Teal
was not even averagely gullible; but a man in his
state of mind is not
fully responsible for his actions. The
tribulations of the
last few weeks had reduced him to a state
of desperation in
which he would have tried a dose of prussic
acid if it had been
recommended with sufficient promises of
alleviating his distress.
With a
furtive glance around him, as if he was afraid of
being caught in a
disreputable act, he entered the shop and
approached the
counter, behind which stood a shifty-eyed
young man in a soiled
white coat.
“A
packet of Miracle Tea,” said Mr Teal, lowering his
voice to a
mumble, although the shop was empty, as though
he had been asking for
some unmentionable merchandise.
He planked
down a half-crown with unconvincing defiance.
The assistant
hesitated for a moment, turned, and took an
oblong yellow packet
from a shelf behind him. He hesitated
again, still holding it as if he was
reluctant to part with it.
“Yes,
sir?” he said suggestively.
“What
d’you mean—‘yes, sir?’ ” blared Mr Teal with the belligerence of
increasing embarrassment.
“Isn’t
there something else, sir ?”
“No,
there isn’t anything else!” retorted the detective,
whose sole remaining ambition
was to get out of the place as
quickly as
possible with his guilty purchase. “Give me that
stuff and take your money.”
He reached over and fairly
snatched the yellow packet out
of the young
man’s hand, stuffed it into his pocket, and
lumbered out as if he were trying to catch a train. He was in
such a hurry that he almost bowled over another
customer
who was just entering the
shop—and this customer, for
some
reason, quickly averted his face.
Mr Teal was
too flustered even to notice him. He went
plodding more rapidly
than usual on his homeward way,
feeling as if his face was a bright crimson
which would
announce his shame to any passerby, and never dreaming
that Destiny had already
grasped him firmly by the scruff of
the
neck.
Five
minutes later he was trudging through a narrow side
street within a couple
of blocks of his apartment. The coma
tose dusk of Sunday evening lay over it
like a shroud: not a
single other human creature was in sight, and the only sound
apart from the solid tread of his own regulation
boots was a
patter of hurried footsteps coming up behind him. There was
nothing in that to make him turn his head…. The
footsteps
caught up until they were
almost on his heels; and then
something hit him a terrific blow on the
side of the head and
everything dissolved
into black darkness.
II
S
IMON
T
EMPLAR’S
views on
the subject of Chief Inspector
Teal, unlike Chief Inspector Teal’s views on
the subject
of the Saint, were apt to fluctuate between very
contradictory
extremes.
There were times when he felt that life would lose
half its savour if he were deprived of the perpetual joy of
dodging Teal’s constant frantic efforts to put him
behind
bars; but there were other
times when he felt that his life
would
be a lot less strenuous if Teal’s cardinal ambition had
been a little less tenacious. There had been times
when he had
felt sincere remorse for
the more bitter humiliations which
he
had sometimes been compelled to inflict on Mr Teal, even
though these
times had been the only alternatives to his own
defeat in their endless duel; there had been other times when
he could have derived much satisfaction from
beating Teal
over the head with a
heavy bar of iron with large knobs on
the
end.
One thing
which the Saint was certain about, however,
was that his own
occasional urges to assault the detective’s
cranium with a blunt
instrument did not mean that he was at
any time prepared to
permit any common or garden thug to
take the same liberties with that
long-suffering dome.
This was
the last of the coincidences of which due warning
has already been
given—that Simon Templar’s long sleek
Hirondel chanced to be taking a short
cut through the back
streets of the district at that fateful hour, and whirled round a
corner into the one street where it was most needed
at the
precise moment when Teal’s ample body was spreading itself
over the pavement as flat as a body of that
architecture can
conveniently be
spread without the aid of a steam roller.
The Saint’s foot on the
accelerator gave the great car a last
burst
in the direction of the spot where these exciting things
were happening, and then he stood on the brakes.
The thug
who had committed the assault
was already bending over
Teal’s
prostrate form when the screech of skidding tyres
made him stop and look
up in startled fear. For a split second
he
hesitated, as if considering whether to stand his ground and give battle; but
something about the sinewy breadth of the Saint’s shoulders and the athletic
and purposeful speed
with which the
Saint’s tall frame catapulted itself out of the still sliding car must have
discouraged him. A profound antipathy to the whole scene and everyone in it
appeared to
overwhelm him; and he
turned and began to depart from it
like
a stone out of a sling.
The Saint
started after him. At that moment the Saint had
no idea that the object of his timely
rescue was Chief Inspec
tor Teal in person:
it was simply that the sight of one bloke
hitting another bloke with a length of gaspipe was a spectacle
which inevitably impelled him to join in the
festivities with
the least possible delay. But as he started in pursuit
he caught
his first glimpse of the fallen
victim’s face, and the surprise checked his stride as if he had run into a
wall. He paused
involuntarily to
confirm the identification; and that brief
delay lost him any chance he might have had of making a
capture. The thug was already covering the ground
with
quite remarkable velocity, and
the extra start he had gained from the Saint’s hesitation had given him a lead
which even
Simon Templar’s long legs
doubted their ability to make up. Simon gave up the idea with a regretful sigh,
and stooped to
find out how much
damage had been sustained by his
favourite enemy.
It only
took him a moment to assure himself that his
existence was
unlikely to be rendered permanently unevent
ful by the premature
removal of its most pungent spice; but nevertheless there was also no doubt
that Teal was tempor
arily in the land of dreams, and that it
would do the Saint
himself
no good to be found standing over his sleeping body.
On the other hand, to leave Mr Teal to finish his sleep in
peace
on the sidewalk was something which no self-respect
ing buccaneer could do. The actual commotion from which
the
situation had evolved had been practically negligible. Not
a window had been flung up; not a door had been
opened. The street remained sunken in its twilight torpor, and once again there
was no other living soul in sight.