The Saint
shrugged. There seemed to be only one thing
to do, so he did it. With a certain amount
of effort, he picked
up Mr Teal’s weighty
person and heaved it into the car,
dumped
Teal’s macintosh and hat on top of him, picked up
an oblong yellow
package which had fallen out of his pocket
and
slung that in as well, got into the driving seat himself, and drove away.
That
Simon’s diagnosis had been accurate was proved by
the fact that Teal
was beginning to groan and blink his eyes
when the Hirondel
pulled up at his front door. The Saint
lighted a cigarette
and looked at him reproachfully.
“I’m
ashamed of you,” he said. “An old man of your age, letting yourself
be picked up in the gutter like that. And not
even during licensing
hours, either. Where did you get the
embalming fluid ?”
“So
it was you, was it ?” Teal muttered thickly.
“I
beg your pardon ?”
“What
the hell was the idea?” demanded Teal, with a
growing indignation
which left no doubt of his recovery.
“The
idea of what?”
“Creeping
up behind me and knocking me on the
head! If you think I’m going to let
you get away with
that——
”
“Claud,”
said the Saint, “do I understand that you’re accusing me again?”
“Oh,
no!” Teal had his eyes wide open now, and they
were red with wrath.
The edge of his sarcasm was as silky
and delicate as the blade of a crosscut saw. “It was
two other
people. They fell out of the sky
with parachutes——
”
The Saint
sighed.
“I
don’t want to interrupt you. But can this great brain of
yours see
any particular reason why I should cosh you today ? We haven’t seen each other
for ages, and so far as I know you
haven’t been doing anything to make me
angry. And even if
you had, and I thought it would be good for you to be
bopped over
the bean, do you think I’d take the trouble to
bring you home
afterwards? And even if I brought you
home afterwards, do you think I’d let
you wake up while I
was still around, instead of bopping you again and leaving
you to wake up without knowing I’d been anywhere near
you? I am
a very modest man, Claud,” said the Saint un
truthfully, “but
there are some aspersions on my intelligence
which cut me to the
quick, and you always seem to be the guy who thinks of them.”
Mr Teal
rubbed his head.
“Well,
what did happen ?” he demanded grudgingly.
“I
don’t really know. When I shot over the horizon, there was some guy in the act
of belting you over the lid with a
handy piece of lead pipe. I thought of asking him to stop
and
talk it over, but he ran too fast. So I
just loaded you into the old jalopy and brought you home. Of course, if you
really
wanted to go on dozing in the
gutter I can take you back.”
The detective
looked about him. His aching skull was
clearing a little,
enough at least for him to be able to see that this latest misfortune was
something which, for once, might not be chargeable to the Saint’s account. The
realization did
not actually improve his temper.
“Have
you any idea who it was ?”
“That’s
a large order, isn’t it ? If you’re as charming to all
your other clients as
you usually are to me, I should say that
London must be crawling with birds who’d
pay large sums of
money for the fun of
whacking you on the roof with a lump
of
iron.”
“Well,
what did this one look like?” snarled Teal im
patiently.
“I’m
blowed if I could draw his picture, Claud. The light
was pretty bad, and
he didn’t stay very long. Medium height,
ordinary build, thin
face—nothing definite enough to help
you much, I’m afraid.”
Teal
grunted.
Presently
he said: “Thanks, anyway.”
He said
it as if he hated to say it, which he did. Being under
any obligation to the
Saint hurt him almost as much as his
indigestion. Promptly he wished that he
hadn’t thought of
that comparison. His stomach, reviving from a too
fleeting
anaesthesia, reminded him that it was still his most
constant
companion. And now he had a sore and splitting head as
well.
He realized
that he felt about as unhappy as a man can feel.
He opened
the door of the car, and took hold of his rain
coat and bowler hat.
“G’night,”
he said.
“Goodnight,”
said the Saint cheerfully. “You know where
I live, any time you
decide you want a bodyguard.”
Mr Teal did
not deign to reply. He crossed the sidewalk
rather unsteadily,
mounted the steps of the house, and let
himself in without
looking back. The door closed again
behind him.
Simon
chuckled as he let in the clutch and drove on to
wards the appointment to which he had been
on his way. The
episode which had just taken
place would make a mildly
amusing
story to tell: aside from that obvious face value, he didn’t give it a second
thought. There was no reason why he
should.
There must have been enough hoodlums in the
metropolis with long-cherished dreams of vengeance against Mr Teal,
aside from ordinary casual footpads, to account for
the sprinting
beater-up who had made such an agile getaway: the only entertaining angle was
that Coincidence should have
chosen the
Saint himself, of all possible people, to be the
rescuer.
That was as
much as the Saint’s powers of clairvoyance
were worth on that
occasion.
Two hours
later, when he had parked the Hirondel in the
garage at Cornwall
House, his foot kicked something out of
the door as he got
out. It was the yellow packet that had
slipped out of Teal’s
pocket, which had fallen on to the
floor and been left there forgotten by
both men.
Simon
picked it up; and when he saw the label he sighed,
and then grinned again. So that was a new
depth to which Mr Teal had sunk; and the revelation of the detective’s
dyspepsia would provide a little extra piquancy to
their next
encounter in badinage…
.
He went on
reading the exaggerated claims made for
Miracle Tea on the
wrapper as he rode up in the elevator to
his apartment. And as
he read on, a new idea came to him, an
idea which could
only have found a welcome in such a scape
grace sense of
mischief as the Saint’s. The product was called Miracle Tea, and there seemed
to be no reason why it should
not be endowed with miraculous properties
before being
returned to its owner. Chief Inspector Teal would surely
be disappointed if it failed to perform miracles. And that could
so easily
be arranged. The admixture of a quantity of crushed
senna pods, together
with a certain amount of powdered
calomel—the indicated specific in all
cases of concussion….
In his
own living-room, the Saint proceeded to open the
packet with great
care, in such a way that it could be sealed
again and bear no trace of having been
tampered with.
Inside,
there seemed to be a second paper wrapping. He
took hold of one
corner of it and pulled experimentally. A complete crumpled piece of paper came
out in his fingers.
Below that, there was another crumpled white pad. And
after
that, another. It went on until the whole package was empty,
and the
table on which he was working was covered with
those creased white scraps. But no tea
came to light. He
picked up one of the
pieces of paper and cautiously unfolded
it, in case it should be the container of an individual dose.
And then suddenly he sat quite still, while his
blue eyes froze
into narrowed pools
of electrified ice as he realized what he
was looking at.
It was a
Bank of England note for fifty pounds.
III
“
M
IRACLE TEA
,”
said the Saint reverently, “is a good
name for it.”
There
were thirty of those notes—a total of fifteen hundred pounds in unquestionably
genuine cash, legal tender and
ripe for immediate circulation.
There was
a light step behind him, and Patricia Holm’s
hand fell on his
shoulder.
“I
didn’t know you’d come in, boy,” she said; and then
she didn’t
go on. He felt her standing unnaturally still. After
some seconds she
said: “What have you been doing—
breaking into the baby’s moneybox
?”
“Getting
ready to write some letters,” he said. “How do
you like
the new notepaper ?”
She pulled
him round to face her.
“Come
on,” she said. “I like to know when you’re going
to be
arrested. What’s the charge going to be this time—
burgling a bank
?”
He smiled
at her.
She was
easy to smile at. Hair like ripe corn in the sun, a
skin like rose
petals, blue eyes that could be as wicked as his
own, the figure of a
young nymph, and something else that
could not have been captured in any
picture, something in her that laughed with him in all his misdeeds.
“Tea-drinking
is the charge,” he said. “I’ve signed the
pledge, and henceforward
this will be my only beverage.”
She raised her fist.
“I’ll
push your face in.”
“But
it’s true.”
He handed
her the packet from which the money had
come. She sat on the
table and studied every side of it. And after that she was only more helplessly
perplexed.
“Go
on,” she said.
He told
her the story exactly as it had happened.
“And
now you know just as much as I do,” he concluded. “I haven’t even had
time to do any thinking on it. Maybe we
needn’t bother. We
shall wake up soon, and everything will
be quite all
right.”
She put
the box down again and looked at one of the notes.
“Are
they real?”
“There
isn’t a doubt of it.”
“Maybe
you’ve got away with Teal’s life savings.”
“Maybe.
But he has got a bank account. And can you
really see Claud
Eustace hoarding his worldly wealth in packets of patent tea ?”
“Then
it must be evidence in some case he’s working on.”
“It
could be. But again, why keep it in this box ?” Simon
turned the
yellow packet over in his supple hands. “It was
perfectly sealed
before I opened it. It looked as if it had never
been touched. Why
should he go to all that trouble? And suppose it was evidence just as it stood,
how did he know
what the evidence was without opening it ? If he didn’t
know,
he’d surely have opened it on the spot, in front of witnesses.
And if he
did know, he had no business to take it home. Besides, if he did know that he
was carrying dangerous evidence, he wouldn’t have had to think twice about what
motive there might be for slugging him on his way home;
but he
didn’t seem to have the slightest idea what it was all
about.”
Patricia
frowned.
“Could
he be taking graft ? This might be a way of slipping
him the money.”
Simon
thought that over for a while; but in the end he
shook his head.
“We’ve
said a lot of rude things about Claud Eustace in
our time, but I don’t
think even we could ever have said that
seriously. He may be
a nuisance, but he’s so honest that it runs out of his ears. And still again,
he’d have known what
he was carrying, and known what anybody who
slugged him
might have been after, and the first thing he did when he
woke up
would have been to see if he’s still got the dough. But he didn’t. He didn’t
even feel in his pockets.”
“But
wasn’t he knocked silly ?”