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."
"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.
Verdean showed no improvement in the afternoon. Towards five o'clock the Saint had a flash of inspiration, and put in a long-distance call to a friend in Wolverhampton.
"Dr Turner won't be back till tomorrow morning, and I'm afraid I don't know how to reach him," said the voice at the other end of the wire; and the flash flickered and died out at the sound. "But I can give you Dr Young's number—"
"I am not having a baby," said the Saint coldly, and hung up.
He leaned back in his chair and said, quietly and intensely: "God damn."
"You should complain," said Patricia. "You Mormon."
She had entered the study from the hall, and closed the door again behind her. The Saint looked up from under mildly interrogative brows.
"I knew you adored me," he said, "but you have an original line of endearing epithets. What's the origin of this one?"
"Blonde," she said, "and voluptuous in a careful way. Mushy lips and the-old-baloney eyes. I'll bet she wears black lace undies and cuddles like a kitten. She hasn't brought the baby with her, but she's probably got a picture of it."
The Saint straightened.
"Not Angela?" he ventured breathlessly.
"I'm not so intimate with her," said Patricia primly. "But she gave the name of Miss Lindsay. You ought to recognize your own past when it catches up with you."
Simon stood up slowly. He glanced at the closed section of the bookcase, beyond which was the secret room where Hoppy Uniatz was still keeping watch over Mr Verdean and a case of Vat 69; and his eyes were suddenly filled with an unholy peace.
"I do not recognize her, darling, now I think about it," he said. "This is the one who had the twins." He gripped her arm, and his smile wavered over her in a flicker of ghostly excitement. "I ought to have known that she'd catch up with me. And I think this is the break I've been waiting for all day…"