X
Simon 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 accommodatingly, 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 pensively, "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 suddenly 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 commonplace detective, adequately doing a job in which miracles did not happen and the natural laws of the universe were respected and cast-iron cases were not being perennially disintegrated under his noise by a bland and tantalizing buccaneer 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 unprecedented 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."
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 seriousness 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 comeback.
"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 remarkable chemistry.
XI
It 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 marionettes.
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 business." 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.