Simon started to get up, spurred faster than thought by an irresistible premonition. But the agitation which had lent its penetrating pitch to Mr Uniatz' discordant voice was too quick for him. Hoppy's next utterance came through with the shattering clarity of a radio broadcast. "Listen, boss — de goil's got away!"
3
Teal put down the telephone with a sharp clunk of concentrated viciousness. Any reversal of emotion that he had suffered before was a childish tantrum compared with this. The Saint had not only been on the verge of making a monkey out of him for the second time in an hour — he had lured him on to the brink of affronting Fairweather in a way that might easily have cost him his job into the bargain. Whatever sentient faculties Mr Teal possessed at that moment were merely a curried hash of boiling vitriol. His face was congested to a deep shade of heliotrope, but his nostrils were livid with the whiteness of a berserk passion that would have been fuelled rather than assuaged by buckets of human blood.
He dug into his hip pocket and dragged out a pair of handcuffs as he lurched across towards the Saint.
"Come on," he said in a voice that could scarcely be recognized as his own. "You can write the rest of it down in Vine Street."
Simon watched him approach while he thought faster than he had ever done since this story began. Why and how Valerie Woodchester had escaped and what momentous consequences that escape might bring after it were questions that had to be crushed out of the activity of his mind. They could be dealt with afterwards; unless he forgot them now, there would be no useful afterwards in which to deal with them.
This was a time when his fluent tongue would be no more use to him — he might as well have tried to argue Niagara to a standstill. From where he stood he could have reached a gun, but that would have been almost as useless. It would certainly have cowed Fairweather; but the paroxysm of cold rage that was propelling Teal across the floor would have kept him walking straight on into it until it blasted him down. And the Saint knew that he would never be capable of using a gun on Claud Eustace Teal for anything more than a bluff. Equally beyond doubt, he knew that he would never be capable of letting himself be handcuffed and taken to Vine Street without knowing how he was going to get out again.
He said: "Wait a minute, Claud. You win. I'll give you Lady Valerie."
It was the only thing he could have said that the detective would even have heard. It stopped Teal a yard from him, with the handcuffs held out.
"Where is she?"
Simon gazed at him with a sad wistful smile.
"It's been a good long scrap and a lot of fun, hasn't it, Claud?" he said. "But I suppose you were bound to come out on top in the end… Oh well, let's make a clean sheet of it while we're at it. Hoppy was getting excited about nothing. Lady Valerie hasn't got away. I took her away myself, only I didn't have time to tell him. She's here in this apartment now, only about half-a-dozen yards away from you."
Teal gawped at him.
"Here?"
"Yes. You didn't think of that, did you? Well, you'll find her perfectly safe and sound, without even a speck of powder brushed off her nose."
"Where?"
"Come through the bedroom and I'll show you."
He turned away with an air of stoical resolution and sauntered steadily towards the door. Teal followed on his heels. Fairweather grasped his umbrella and followed Teal. As they entered the room, where the bed was still disordered from the Saint's recent rising, Simon said: "You've always suspected that I had a collection of secret passages and things here. You were pretty close to the mark, too. This ought to amuse you."
He indicated the door to one side of the bed.
Teal jerked it open. It revealed the interior of a big built-in cupboard in which an assortment of suits from the Saint's unlimited wardrobe hung on a long rail like a file of thin soldiers.
The Saint sat dejectedly on the side of the bed.
"Just push the wall at the end and it opens," he said listlessly.
Teal shoved himself grimly in, shouldering the rank of suits aside. Fairweather stepped up to the door and peered in after him.
What happened next was a succession of startling events of which Mr Fairweather's subsequent recollections were inclined to be confused. It seemed to him that without any warning the back of his collar and the seat of his pants were seized by the grappling mechanism of a kind of bimanual travelling crane. He rose from the ground and moved forward without any effort of his own into the interior of the cupboard, letting out a thin plaintive squeal as he did so. Then his advancing abdomen collided with breathtaking violence with the unyielding posterior of Chief Inspector Teal; the cupboard door slammed behind him; the light overhead went out; darkness descended; there was the sound of a key turning in the lock; and after that there was as much empty and unhelpful silence as Teal's sporadic sputtering of inspired profanity left room for…
Simon Templar moved swiftly out of the bedroom and locked that door also after him.
Now he was in it up to the neck, but he felt only an exuberant elation. As soon as Teal and Fairweather got out, which they must do in a comparatively short time, he would be a hunted man with all the nation-wide networks of the law spread out to catch him; but he only felt as if a burden had been taken off his shoulders. He had lived like that in the old days, when every man's hand was against him and death or ignominious defeat waited for him around every carelessly turned corner, and in those days he had known life at its keenest rapture, with a fullness that men who led safe humdrum existences could never know. Now at least the issues were clean cut and unevadable. Perhaps he had been respectable for too long…
The telephone was ringing again. He picked it up.
"Hi, boss," said Mr Uniatz plaintively. "We got cut off."
"We didn't," said the Saint tersely. "That was your old friend Claud Eustace Teal you were talking to."
There was a long silence.
"Did I hear what you said, boss?"
"I hope so."
"You mean he hears what I said about de goil?"
"Yes."
"But I ask him is he you and he says he is," complained Hoppy, as if appalled by this revelation of the depths of perfidy to which a human being could sink.
Words rose to Simon's lips — short Anglo-Saxon words, colourful and expressive. But what was the use? Dull thudding noises reminiscent of an enraged crocodile lashing its tail in a wooden crate reached him through the walls. His time was short.
"Never mind," he said. "It's done now. Let me talk to Patricia."
"She ain't got back yet, boss. She goes out in de baby car just now to buy some more scotch, and she is out when dis happens."
"When did it happen?"
"Just two-t'ree minutes back, boss. It's like dis. I am taking lunch up to de wren, and when I go in she says 'Lookit, de rug is boining.' It is boining, at dat. I go out for de extinguisher and squoit it on de fire, and when I have been squoiting it for some time I see de broad has beat it."
"I suppose you'd left the door open for her."
"I dunno, boss," said Mr Uniatz aggrievedly. He seemed to feel that Lady Valerie had taken an unfair advantage of him. "Anyway, de door is open and she has hung it on de limb. I beat it downstairs and I hear a car going off outside, and when I open de door she is lamming out of here wit' your Daimler. So I call you up," said Mr Uniatz, conscientiously completing his narrative.
Simon opened his cigarette case on the telephone table.
"All right," he said crisply. "Now listen. Hell is going to pop over this party, and it's going to pop at you. You'd better get out from under. Stick around till Patricia gets back, and tell her what's happened. Then pile yourself and Orace into the pram and tell her to take you to the station. Buy tickets to Southampton and make enough fuss about it so they'll remember you at the booking office. Come out the other side of the station with the next crop of passengers, walk back to Brooklands, get out the old kite and fly over to Heston. Peter will be there waiting for you. Do just what he tells you. Have you got it?"