Perhaps after all, as Mr Teal had so often been driven to believe in his more despondent moments, there was some fateful interdiction against his ever being permitted to complete that favourite sentence. At any rate, this was not the historic occasion on which completion was destined to be achieved. The sound of a bell cut him off in mid-flight, like a gong freezing a prizefighter poised for a knockout punch.
This time it was not the telephone, but a subdued and decorous trill that belonged unmistakably to the front door.
Teal looked over his shoulder at the sound. And as the Saint started to move he moved faster.
"You stay here," he flung out roughly. "I'll see who it is."
Simon sat down again philosophically and lighted another cigarette. His first smoke ring from that new source was still on its way to the ceiling when Mr Teal came back.
After him came Mr Algernon Sidney Fairweather.
2
Mr Fairweather wore a dark suit with a gold watch chain looped across the place where in his youth he might once have kept his waist. He carried a light gray Homburg and a tightly rolled umbrella with a gold handle. He looked exactly as if a Rolls Royce had just brought him away from an important board meeting.
The Saint inspected him with sober admiration mingled with cordial surprise; and neither of those expressions conveyed one per cent of what was really going on in his mind.
"Algy," he said softly, "what have I done to deserve the honour of seeing you darken my proletarian doors?"
"I… er — Um!" said Mr Fairweather, as if he had not made up his mind what else to say. Teal interposed himself between them. "I was just about to take Mr Templar under arrest," he explained grimly.
"You were — Um! Were you? May I ask what the charge was, Inspector?"
"I suspect him of being concerned in kidnapping Lady Valerie Woodchester."
Fairweather started.
"Lady—" He swallowed. "Kidnapped? But—"
"Lady Valerie Woodchester has disappeared, and her apartment has been ransacked," Teal said solidly. "I'm glad you came here, sir. You may be able to give me some information. You knew her well, I believe?"
"Er — yes, I suppose I knew her quite well."
"Did she ever say anything to make you think that she was afraid of anyone — that she considered herself in any sort of danger?"
Fairweather hesitated. He glanced nervously at the Saint.
"She did mention once that she was frightened of Mr Templar," he affirmed reluctantly. "But I'm afraid I didn't pay much attention to it at the time. The idea seemed so— But you surely don't think that anything serious has really happened to her?"
"I know damn well that something has happened to her — I don't know how serious it is." Teal turned on the Saint like a congealed cyclone. "That's what you'd better tell me! I might have known you couldn't be trusted to tell the truth for two minutes together. But you've told me too much already. You told me that Lady Valerie had something you wanted. Now she's disappeared, and her place has been ransacked. Ralph Windlay was murdered, and his flat was ransaked. In both places someone was looking for something, and from what you've told me the most likely person is you!"
The Saint signed.
"Of course," he said patiently. "That's what they call Deduction. That's what they teach you at the Police College. I'm looking for something, and therefore everyone who is looking for something is me."
Teal set his teeth. The suspicions which had been held in check at the beginning of the interview were flooding back on him with the overwhelming turbulence of a typhoon. In all fairness to Mr Teal it must be admitted that there was some justification for his biassed viewpoint. Mr Teal could make allowances for coincidence up to a point; but the swift succession of places and people where and to whom violent things had happened in close proximity to Simon Templar's presence on the scene was a little too much for him. And there was the curdling memory of many other similar coincidences to accelerate the acid fermentation of Mr Teal's misanthropic conclusions. The congenital runaway tendencies of his spleen were aggravated by the recollection of his own recent guilelessness.
"Lady Valerie didn't stay with you very long last night," he rapped. "Why did she leave you so early?"
"She was tired," said the Saint.
"Had you quarrelled with her?"
"Bitterly. I may be old fashioned, Claud, but one thing I will not allow anybody to do is to be rude about my friends. They may have figures like sacks of dough and faces like giant tomatoes, but beauty is only skin deep and kind hearts are more than coronets and all that sort of thing, and just because a bloke is a policeman is no reason why any girl should make fun of him. That's what I told her. I said: 'Look here, Lady Valerie, just because poor old Claud Eustace has fallen arches and a bay window like the blunt end of the Normandie—"
"Will you shut up?" roared the detective.
Simon shut up.
Mr Teal took a fresh grip on his gum.
"Why was Lady Valerie frightened of you?" he barked.
The Saint did not answer.
"Had you been threatening her?"
Simon remained mute. He made helpless clownish motions with his hands.
The detective's complexion was like that of an overripe prune.
"What the hell's the matter with you?" he bayed. "Can't you even talk any more?"
"Of course not," said the Saint. "You told me to shut up. I am an oyster. Will you have me on the half shell, or creamed in white wine?"
Chief Inspector Teal looked as if he had swallowed a large live eel. His stomach appeared to be trying to reject this refractory diet, and he seemed to be having difficulty in keeping it down. His neck swelled with the fury of the struggle.
"Tell me why Lady Valerie was frightened of you," he said in a garroted gargle.
"I've no idea why she should have been," said the Saint. "I'd no idea she was. Why don't you ask Algy? He seems to know all about it. And while you're on the job, what about asking him why he came here and what he thought he was going to do?"
Fairweather sniffed into a white silk handkerchief, tucked it back into his breast pocket and planted himself like a minister in Parliament preparing to answer a question from the Opposition.
"I have not visited Mr Templar before," he said, "and I should not expect to do so again. The reason for my call this morning is quite simple. I had a tentative engagement to lunch with Lady Valerie today, and I rang her up not long ago to confirm it. She was not in, and her maid informed me in some agitation that she had apparently not slept at her apartment last night and had left no message to give a clue to her whereabouts. Knowing that this was an extraordinary departure from her normal habits, I puzzled over it with some seriousness and recalled her mentioning that she was in some fear of Mr Templar, as I have told you. I telephoned again later, and could still hear no news of her; and on my way from the club to the Savoy, where we were to have met, I recollected that she had told me that she was dining with Mr Templar last night. My anxieties at once became graver, and since I was at that moment close to this building, on an impulse — which was perhaps rash in conception but which I now feel to have been very sensibly founded — I instructed my chauffeur to stop, and came up with the intention of—"
"Algy," said the Saint, with profound respect, "I don't wonder you got into the Cabinet. With your gift for making a collection of plain goddam lies sound like an archbishop's sermon, the only thing I can't understand is why they didn't make you prime minister."
Conviction hardened on Mr Teal like the new carapace on a moulted lobster. His eyes held on the Saint with dourly triumphant tenacity.