"What a man you are, Claud!" said the Saint with admiration. "Nothing is hidden from you. Your house must be full of little birds."
"It's my business to know what people like you are doing."
"You know," said the Saint in an injured tone, "I believe you must have been having me watched. I don't call that very friendly of you. Have you lost your old faith in me?"
"What were you doing between one-five and four-thirty this morning?" Teal repeated tigerishly.
The Saint stirred his coffee with an air of shy discomfort.
"I really didn't want you to know about that," he confessed. "You see, much as I love you, you're always the professional policeman, and you have to take such a morbidly legal view of things. The fact is, Peter and Hoppy and I decided that we didn't feel tired so we pushed off to a little club we wot of where they haven't any respect for the licensing laws, and we stayed there hardening our arteries and talking to loose women until nearly dawn."
"What's the name of this club?"
"That's just what I can't tell you, Claud. You see my point. If you knew where it was you'd feel you had to do something about closing it down, because any place in London where one might have a good time always has to be closed down. And that would be a pity, because it's quite a cheery little spot now, and these places always become so dismal when they get infested with disguised policemen snooping about for evidence and leaving the smell of Lifebuoy soap in their wake—"
"All right," Teal said with frightful restraint. "That's your story. And now suppose you tell me about those men you painted red, white and blue and left outside Luker's house."
The Saint put down his coffee cup. He wore the incredulous and appalled expression of a Presbyterian elder who has been accused of operating an illicit still.
"Painted?" he said hollowly.
"Yes."
"Red, white and blue?"
"Yes."
"Outside Luker's house?"
"Yes."
"Who were these men?"
"You know as well as I do. Their names are Bravache, Pietri and Dumaire."
The Saint shook his head with great concern.
"Somebody must have been pulling your leg, Claud," he said. "I simply can't imagine myself doing a thing like that, even after a night at the place where I was. Did anybody see me paint them and leave them outside Luker's house? Do they say I painted them?"
Mr Teal unwrapped a springboard of spearmint with wearily deliberate fingers, as if he were undressing himself for bed after a hard day. He had already spent a bad hour in dire anticipation of this interview and his forebodings had not been disappointed. But he had to go through with it. For an hour he had been preparing himself, wrestling with his soul, facing in prospect all the gibes and banter and infuriating mockery that he knew he would have to endure, drilling himself to the fulfilment of the vow that he would be calm, that he would be rocklike and masterful, that for this one lone historic occasion he would not let the Saint get under his skin and cut the suspenders of his self-control, as the Saint had done with fateful facility so often in the past; and the soul of Claud Eustace Teal had emerged tried and tempered from the annealing fires. Or nearly. He would triumph in the ordeal even though blood oozed from his pores.
"No," he said. "Nobody saw you do it. The men don't say it was you. They say they don't know who it was. But I know it was you!"
"Do you?" At that moment the Saint was as sleek as a seal. "What makes you think so?"
"I know it because Luker was one of the guests at that country-house fire that you were meddling in, where John Kennet was killed; and I should think of you in connection with anything that happened to Luker now. Besides that, two of these men are Frenchmen. When I saw you at that place where Ralph Windlay was murdered, you read me two cuttings from French newspapers and talked about something called the Sons of France. Red, white and blue are the French national colours. Painting those men like that and leaving them outside Luker's doorstep is just the sort of thing I'd expect of you. There's one connecting link all the way through, and you're it!"
Simon regarded him like a spot on the carpet.
"And that's your evidence, is it?"
Teal swallowed, but he nodded stubbornly.
"That's it."
"That's the collection of barefaced balderdash that's supposed to authorize you to take me into custody and lug me off to Vine Street. That's the immortal excretion of the best brains of Scotland Yard. Or have I misjudged you, Claud? Have you taken a pill and woken up to find you've got a genius for publicity? You'll certainly get a bale of it over this. Let's go on with it. What will the charge be? Wait a minute, I can see it all — 'That he did feloniously and with malice aforethought assault the complainants with an unlawful instrument, to wit, a paintbrush—' "
"Did I say that?" asked Mr Teal.
It was quite a moment for Mr Teal. For the first time that he could remember he stopped the Saint short.
The Saint looked at him in wary surmise. A hundred disjointed ideas rocketed through his head, but they all arrived by devious paths at the same mark. And that was something compared with which a seven-headed dragon pirouetting on its tail would have been a perfectly commonplace phenomenon.
"Do you mean," he said foggily, "that you didn't come here to arrest me?"
"You ought to know enough about the law to know that I can't do anything if these men won't make a complaint."
Simon felt a trifle lightheaded.
"You didn't come here to congratulate me by any chance?"
"No."
"And you didn't come here for breakfast."
"No."
"Well, what the devil did you come for?"
"I thought you might like to tell me something about it," Teal said woodenly. "What is all this about, and what has Luker got to do with it?"
The Saint reached for a cigarette.
"Quite apart from the fact that I don't see why I should be supposed to know, haven't you thought of asking him?"
"I have asked him. He said he'd never seen these men before; and they say they've never heard of him."
The Saint lighted his cigarette. He leaned back in his chair and stretched out his legs under the table.
"Then it certainly does look very mysterious," he said, but his blue eyes were quiet and searching.
Chief Inspector Teal turned his venerable bowler on his blue-serge knees. He had got his spearmint nicely into condition now — a plastic nugget, malleable and yet resistant, still flavorous, crisp without being crumbly, glutinous without adhesion, obedient to the capricious patterning of his mobile tongue working in conjunction with the clockwork reciprocation of his teeth, polymorphous, ductile. It was a great comfort to him. He would have been lost without it. What he had to do was not easy.
"I know," he said. "That's why I came to see you. I thought you might be able to give me a lead."
The Saint stared at him for several moments in a silence of gull-winged eyebrows and wide absorbent eyes, while that cataclysmic statement sank through the diverse layers of his comprehension.
"Well, I will be a cynocephalic mandrill scratching my blue bottom on the ramparts of Timbuctoo," he said finally. "Or am I one already? I thought I'd seen every kind and sample of human nerve in my time, but this is the last immortal syllable. You treat me as a suspicious character; you habitually accuse me of every crime that's committed in England that you're too thickheaded to solve; you threaten me three times a week with penal servitude and bodily violence; you persecute me at every conceivable opportunity; you disturb my slumbers and hound me at my own breakfast table; and then you have the unmitigated gall to sit there, with your great waistcoat full of stomach, and ask me to help you!"