He emerged into the hall just as Chief Inspector Teal's official boots stomped wrathfully over the threshold. The detective saw him as soon as he appeared, and the heightened colour in his chubby face flared up with the perilous surge of his blood pressure. He took a lurching step forward with one quivering forefinger thrust out ahead of him like a spear.
"You Saint!" he bellowed. "I want you!"
The Saint smiled at him, carefree and incredibly debonair.
"Why, hullo, Claud, old gumboil," he murmured genially. "You seem to be excited about something. Come in and tell me all about it."
VI
SIMON TEMPLAR had never actually been followed into his living-room by an irate mastodon; but if that remarkable experience was ever to befall him in the future, he would have had an excellent standard with which to compare it.
The imitation, as rendered by Chief Inspector Claud Eustace Teal, was an impressive performance, but it seemed to leave the Saint singularly unconcerned. He waved towards one armchair and deposited himself in another, reaching for cigarette box and ashtray.
"Make yourself at home," he invited affably. "Things have been pretty dull lately, as I said last night. What can I do to help you ?"
Mr Teal gritted his teeth over a lump of chewing gum with a barbarity which suggested that he found it an inferior substitute for the Saint's jugular vein. Why he should have followed the Saint at all in the first place was a belated question that was doing nothing to improve his temper. He could find no more satisfactory explanation than that the Saint had simply turned and calmly led the way, and he could hardly be expect to go on talking to an empty hall. But in the act of following, he felt that he had already lost a subtle point. It was one of those smoothly infuriating tricks of the Saint to put him at a disadvantage which never failed to lash Mr Teal's unstable temper to the point where he felt as if he were being garrotted with his own collar.
And on this occasion, out of all others, he must control himself. He had no need to get angry. He held all the aces. He had everything that he had prayed for in the long sections of his career that had been consecrated to the heartbreaking task of trying to lay the Saint by the heels. He must not make any mistakes. He must not let himself be baited into any more of those unbelievable indiscretions that had wrecked such opportunities in the past, and that made him sweat all over as soon as he had escaped from the Saint's maddening presence. He told, himself so, over and over again, clinging to all the tatters of his self restraint with the doggedness of a drowning man. He glared at the Saint with an effort of impassivity that made the muscles of his face ache.
"You can help me by taking a trip to the police station with me," he said. "Before you go any further, it's my duty to warn you that you're under arrest. And I've got all the evidence I need to keep you there!"
"Of course you have, Claud," said the Saint soothingly. "Haven't you had it every time you've arrested me ? But now that you've got that off your chest, would it be frightfully tactless if I asked you what I'm supposed to have done ?"
"Last night," Teal said, grinding his words out under fearful compression, "a Mr Robert Verdean, the manager of the City and Continental Bank's branch at Staines, was visited at his home in Chertsey by two men. They tied up his servant in the kitchen, and went on to find him in the living-room. The maid's description of them makes them sound like the two men who held up the same bank that morning. They went into the living-room and turned on the radio."
"How very odd," said the Saint. "I suppose they were trying to console Comrade Verdean for having his bank robbed. But what has that got to do with me? Or do you think I was one of them ?"
"Shortly afterwards," Teal went on, ignoring the interruption, "two other men entered the kitchen with handkerchiefs tied over their faces. One of them was about your height and build. The maid heard this one address the other one as 'Hoppy'."
Simon nodded perfunctorily.
"Yes," he said; and then his eyebrows rose. "My God, Claud, that's funny! Of course, you're thinking—"
"That American gangster who follows you around is called Hoppy, isn't he ?"
"If you're referring to Mr Uniatz," said the Saint stiffly, "he is sometimes called that. But he hasn't got any copyright in the name."
The detective took a fresh nutcracker purchase on his gum.
"Perhaps he hasn't. But the tall one went into the living-room. The radio was switched off and on and off again, and then it stayed off. So the maid heard quite a bit of the conversation. She heard people talking about the Saint."
"That's one of the penalties of fame," said the Saint sadly. "People are always talking about me, in the weirdest places. It's quite embarrassing sometimes. But do go on telling me about it."
Mr Teal's larynx suffered a spasm which interfered momentarily with his power of speech.
"That's all I have to tell you!" he yelped, when he had partially cleared the obstruction. "I mean that you and that Uniatz creature of yours were the second two men who arrived. After that, according to the maid, there was a lot of shooting, and presently some neighbours arrived and untied her. All the four men who had been there disappeared, and so did Mr Verdean. I want you on suspicion of kidnapping him; and if we don't find him soon there'll probably be a charge of murder as well!"
Simon Templar frowned. His manner was sympathetic rather than disturbed.
"I know how you feel, Claud," he said commiseratingly. "Naturally you want to do something about it; and I know you're quite a miracle worker when you get going. But I wish I could figure out how you're going to tie me up with it, when I wasn't anywhere near the place."
The detective's glare reddened.
"You weren't anywhere near Chertsey, eh? So we've got to break down another of your famous alibis. All right, then. Where were you ?"
"I was at home."
"Whose home?"
"My own. This one."
"Yeah ? And who else knows about it ?"
"Not a lot of people," Simon confessed. "We were being quiet. You know. One of these restful, old-fashioned, fire-side evenings. If it comes to that, I suppose there isn't an army of witnesses. You can't have a quiet restful evening with an army of witnesses cluttering up the place. It's a contradiction in terms. There was just Pat, and Hoppy, and of course good old Orace——"
"Pat and Hoppy and Orace," jeered the detective. "Just a quiet restful evening. And that's your alibi——"
"I wouldn't say it was entirely my alibi," Simon mentioned diffidently. "After all, there are several other houses in England. And I wouldn't mind betting that in at least half of them, various people were having quiet restful evenings last night. Why don't you go and ask some of them whether they can prove it ? Because you know that being a lot less tolerant and forbearing than I am, they'd only tell you to go back to Scotland Yard and sit on a radiator until you'd thawed some of the clotted suet out of your brains. How the hell would you expect anyone to prove he'd spent a quiet evening at home ? By bringing in a convocation of bishops for witnesses ? In a case like this, it isn't the suspect's job to prove he was home. It's your job to prove he wasn't."
Chief Inspector Teal should have been warned. The ghosts of so many other episodes like this should have risen up to give him caution. But they didn't. Instead, they egged him on. He leaned forward in a glow of vindictive exultation.
"That's just what I'm going to do," he said, and his voice grew rich with the lusciousness of his own triumph. "We aren't always so stupid as you think we are. We found fresh tyre tracks in the drive, and they didn't belong to Verdean's car. We searched every scrap of ground for half a mile to see if we could pick them up again. We found them turning into a field quite close to the end of Greenleaf Road. The car that made 'em was still in the field—it was reported stolen in Windsor early yesterday morning. But there were the tracks of another car in the field, overlapping and under-lapping the tracks of the stolen car, so that we know the kidnappers changed to another car for their getawa
y. I've got casts of those tracks, and I'm going to show that they match the tyres on your car!"
The Saint blinked.
"It would certainly be rather awkward if they did," he said uneasily. "I didn't give anybody permission to borrow my car last night, but of course——"
"But of course somebody might have taken it away and brought it back without your knowing it," Teal said with guttural sarcasm. "Oh, yes." His voice suddenly went into a squeak. "Well, I'm going to be in court and watch the jury laugh themselves sick when you try to tell that story! I'm going to examine your car now, in front of police witnesses, and I'd like them to see your face when I do it!"
It was the detective's turn to march away and leave the Saint to follow. He had a moment of palpitation while he pondered whether the Saint would do it. But as he flung open the front door and crunched into the drive, he heard the Saint's footsteps behind him. The glow of triumph that was in him warmed like a Yule log on a Christmas hearth. The Saint's expression had reverted to blandness quickly enough, but not so quickly that Teal had missed the guilty start which had broken through its smooth surface. He knew, with a blind ecstasy, that at long last the Saint had tripped....
He waved imperiously to the two officers in the prowl car outside, and marched on towards the garage. The Saint's Hirondel stood there in its glory, an engineering symphony in cream and red trimmed with chromium, with the more sedate black Daimler in which Patricia had driven down standing beside it; but Teal had no aesthetic admiration for the sight. He stood by like a pink-faced figure of doom while his assistants reverently unwrapped the moulage impressions ; and then, like a master chef taking charge at the vital moment in the preparation of a dish for which his underlings had laid the routine foundations, he took the casts in bis own hands and proceeded to compare them with the tyres on the Hirondel.
He went all round the Hirondel twice.
He was breathing a trifle laboriously, and his face was redder than before—probably from stooping—when he turned his attention to the Daimler.
He went all round the Daimler twice, too.
Then he straightened up and came slowly back to the Saint. He came back until his face was only a few inches from the Saint's. His capillaries were congested to the point where his complexion had a dark purple hue. He seemed to be having more trouble with his larynx.
"What have you done to those tyres?" he got out in a hysterical blare.
The Saint's eyebrows drew perplexedly together.
"What have I done to them ? I don't get you, Claud. Do you mean to say they don't match?"
"You know damn well they don't match! You knew it all the time." Realization of the way the Saint had deliberately lured him up to greater heights of optimism only to make his downfall more hideous when it came, brought something like a sob into the detective's gullet. "You've changed the tyres!"
Simon looked aggrieved.
"How could I, Claud ? You can see for yourself that these tyres are a long way from being new——"
"What have you done with the tyres you had on the car last night?" Teal almost screamed.
"But these are the only tyres I've had on the car for weeks," Simon protested innocently. "Why do you always suspect me of such horrible deceits ? If my tyres don't match the tracks you found in that field, it just looks to me as if you may have made a mistake about my being there."
Chief Inspector Teal did a terrible thing. He raised the casts in his hands and hurled them down on the concrete floor so that they shattered into a thousand fragments. He did not actually dance on them, but he looked as if only an effort of self-control that brought him to the brink of an apoplectic stroke stopped him from doing so.
"What have you done with Verdean ?" he yelled.
"I haven't done anything with him. Why should I have ? I've never even set eyes on the man."
"I've got a search warrant——"
"Then why don't you search?" demanded the Saint snappily, as though his patience was coming to an end. "You don't believe anything I tell you, anyhow, so why don't you look for yourself? Go ahead and use your warrant. Tear the house apart. I don't mind. I'll be waiting for you in the living-room when you're ready to eat some of your words."
He turned on his heel and strolled back to the house.
He sat down in the living-room, lighted a cigarette, and calmly picked up a magazine. He heard the tramp of Teal and his minions entering the front door, without looking up. For an hour he listened to them moving about in various parts of the house, tapping walls and shifting furniture; but he seemed to have no interest beyond the story he was reading, Even when they invaded the living-room itself, he didn't even glance at them. He went on turning the pages as if they made no more difference to his idleness than a trio of inquisitive puppies.
Teal came to the living-room last. Simon knew from the pregnant stillness that presently supervened that the search had come to a stultifying end, but he continued serenely to finish his page before he looked up.
"Well," he said at length, "have you found him?"
"Where is he?" shouted Teal, with dreadful savagery.
Simon put down the magazine.'
"Look here," he said wearily. "I've made a lot of allowances for you, but I give up. What's the use ? I tell you I was at home last night, and you can't prove I wasn't; but just because you want me to have been out, I must be faking an alibi. You've got casts of the tyre tracks of a car that was mixed up in some dirty business last night, and they don't match the tracks of either of my cars; but just because you think they ought to match, I must have changed my tyres. I tell you I haven't kidnapped this fellow Verdean, and you can't find him anywhere in my house; but just because you think I ought to have kidnapped him, I must have hidden him somewhere else. Every shred of evidence is against you, and therefore all the evidence must be wrong. You couldn't possibly be wrong yourself, because you're the great Chief Inspector Claud Eustace Teal, who knows everything and always gets his man. All right. Every bit of proof there is shows that I'm innocent, but I must be guilty because your theories would be all wet if I wasn't. So why do we have to waste our time on silly little details like this ? Let's just take me down to the police station and lock me up."
"That's just what I'm going to do," Teal raved blindly.
The Saint looked at him for a moment, and stood up.
"Good enough," he said breezily. "I'm ready when you are."
He went to the door and called: "Pat!" She answered him, and came down the stairs. He said: "Darling, Claud Eustace has had an idea. He's going to lug me off and shove me in the cooler on a charge of being above suspicion. It's a new system they've introduced at Scotland Yard, and all the laws are being altered to suit it. So you'd better call one of our lawyers and see if he knows what to do about it. Oh, and you might ring up some of the newspapers while you're on the job—they'll probably want to interview Claud about his brainwave."
"Yes, of course," she said enthusiastically, and went towards the telephone in the study.
Something awful, something terrifying, something freezing and paralysing, damp, chilly, appalling, descended over Chief Inspector Teal like a glacial cascade. With the very edge of the precipice crumbling under his toes, his eyes were opened. The delirium of fury that had swept him along so far coagulated sickeningly within him. Cold, pitiless, inescapable facts hammered their bitter way through into the turmoil of his brain. He was too shocked at the moment even to feel the anguish of despair. His mind shuddered under the impact of a new kind of panic. He took a frantic step forward —a step that was, in its own way, the crossing of a harrowing Rubicon.
"Wait a minute," he stammered hoarsely.
VII
FIFTEEN MINUTES later, Simon Templar stood on the front steps and watched the police car crawl out of the drive with its cargo of incarnate woe. He felt Patricia's fingers slide into his hand, and turned to smile at her.
"So far, so good," he said thoughtfully. "But only so far."
&nbs
p; "I thought you were joking, at breakfast," she said. "How did he get here so soon ?"
He shrugged.
"That wasn't difficult. I suppose he stayed down at Staines last night; and the Chertsey police would have phoned over about the Verdean business first thing this morning, knowing that he was the manager of the bank that had been held up. Claud must have shot off on the scent like a prize greyhound, and I'm afraid I can sympathize with the way he must have felt when he arrived here."
"Well, we're still alive," she said hopefully. "You got rid of him again."
"Only because his nerves are getting a bit shaky from all the times I've slipped through his fingers, and he's so scared of being made a fool of again that he daren't move now without a cast-iron case, and I was able to pick a few awkward holes in this one. But don't begin thinking we've got rid of him for keeps. He's just gone away now to see if he can stop up the holes again and put some more iron in the evidence, and he's sore enough to work overtime at it. He's going to be three times as dangerous from now on. Worse than that, he's not so dumb that he isn't going to put two and two together about all this commotion around Verdean coming right on top of the robbery. You can bet the Crown Jewels to a showgirl's virtue that he's already figured out that Verdean was mixed up in it in some way. While we're stuck with Verdean, and Verdean is stuck with amnesia." The Saint closed the front door with sombre finality. "Which is the hell of a layout from any angle," he said. "Tell Orace to bring me a large mug of beer, darling, because I think I am going to have a headache."
His headache lasted through a lunch which Orace indignantly served even later than he had served breakfast, but it brought forth very little to justify itself. He had gone over the facts at his disposal until he was sick of them, and they fitted together with a complete and sharply focused deductive picture that Sherlock Holmes himself could not have improved on, without a hiatus or a loose end anywhere— only the picture merely showed a plump rabbit-faced man slinking off with fifteen thousand pounds in a bag, and neglected to show where he went with it. Which was the one detail in which Simon Templar was most urgently interested. He was always on the side of the angels, he told himself, but he had to remember that sanctity had its own overhead to meet.
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