"I suppose so," agreed Teal formally. "Unfortunately there's no Third Degree in this country, and when you get into high places you have to walk very carefully. Sometimes we're set almost impossible tasks. My orders are to avoid a scandal at any cost."
The Saint sat quietly, taking in the full significance of that astounding revelation that was so much more momentous for having been made without any direct statement. And, as he looked up at the house in a kind of breathlessness, he visualized the scene.
There was no space for secret passages in such an edifice as that; but for reasons known only to the architect a sun balcony on the first floor, built over the study, was linked with the ground by two flying buttresses on either side of it that angled down on either side of the study windows like gigantic staircases of three-foot steps. He could see the podgy figure of Sir Joseph Whipplethwaite creeping out with exaggerated caution, like a rhinoceros walking on tiptoe, and surveying the scene below. He saw the man clambering down the steps of the flying buttress, one by one, hampered by the sandbag clutched in one hand… saw him creeping up behind the unconscious artist… striking that single clumsy blow. With a scapegoat whom he disliked so heartily ready to be accused, why should he think he ran any risk?
"I know what you think of our abilities at the Yard," Teal was saying, in the same passionless way. "But we do get ideas sometimes. What you don't make allowances for is the fact that in our position we can't act on nothing more substantial than a brilliant idea, like detectives do in stories."
He was chewing monotonously, with his cherubic blue eyes fixed expressionlessly on the flying white ball on the court. "I think that if the treaty could somehow be recovered and put back where it was taken from, the guilty man would have to confess. An adventurer in a story, I suppose, might kidnap the suspected person and force him to say where it was hidden; but we can't do that. If anything like that happened in real life and the kidnapper was caught, he'd be for it.
"By the way, Whipplethwaite will be driving back from London this evening. He has a green Rolls Royce, number XZ9919… I expect you've had enough of this, haven't you?"
The detective stood up; and for the first time in a long while he looked at the Saint again. Simon had rarely seen those baby blue eyes so utterly sleepy and impassive.
"Yes — it's about time for my morning tankard of ale," Simon murmured easily.
They strolled slowly back to the house.
"That's Joseph's room — the one with the balcony — is it?" Simon asked idly.
Teal nodded. "Yes. That's where he was lying down."
"Does he suffer from indigestion?"
The detective flashed a glance at him. "I don't know. Why?"
"I should like to know," said the Saint.
Back in the house, he asked to be shown the dining-room. On the sideboard he discovered a round cardboard box carefully labelled — after the supererogatory habit of chemists — "The Pills." Underneath was the inscription: "Two to be taken with water after each meal, as required."
The Saint examined the tablets, and smiled gently to himself.
"Now could I see the bathroom?"
A very mystified Mr. Teal rang for the butler, and they were shown upstairs. The bathroom was one of those magnificent halls of coloured marble and chromium plate which the most modern people find necessary for the preservation of their personal cleanliness; but Simon was interested only in the cupboard over the washbasin. It contained an imposing array of bottles, which Simon surveyed with some awe. Sir Joseph was apparently something of a hypochondriac.
Simon read the labels one by one, and nodded. "Is he shortsighted?"
"He wears glasses," said the detective.
"Splendid," murmured Simon, and went back to the hotel to supervise the refuelling of his car without relieving Teal's curiosity.
At six o'clock that evening a very frightened man, who had undergone one of the slickest feats of abduction with violence that he could ever have imagined, and who had been very efficiently gagged, bound, blindfolded, and carried across country by the masked bandit who was responsible, sat with his back to a tree where he had been roughly propped up in a deep glade of the New Forest and watched the movements of his captor with goggling eyes.
The Saint had kindled a small, crisp fire of dry twigs, and he was feeding more wood to it and blowing into it with the dexterity of long experience, nursing it up into a solid cone of fierce red heat. Down there in the hollow where they were, the branches of the encircling trees filtered away the lingering twilight until it was almost as dark as midnight; but the glow of the fire showed up the Saint's masked face in macabre shading of red and black as he worked over it, like the face of a pantomime devil illuminated on a darkened stage.
The Saint's voice, however, was far from devilish — it was almost affectionate.
"You don't seem to realize, brother," he said, "that stealing secret treaties is quite a serious problem, even when they're the daft sort of treaties that We Politicians amuse ourselves with. And it's very wrong of you to think that you can shift the blame for your crimes on to that unfortunate ass whom you dislike so much. So you're going to tell me just where you put that treaty, and then there'll be no more nonsense about it."
The prisoner's eyes looked as if they might pop out of his head at any moment, and strangled grunts came through the gag as he struggled with the ropes that bound his arms to his sides; but the Saint was unmoved. The fire had been heaped up to his complete satisfaction.
"Our friend Mr. Teal," continued the Saint, in the same oracular vein, as he began to unlace the captive's shoes, "has been heard to complain about there being no Third Degree in this country. Now that's obviously ridiculous, because you can see for yourself that there is a Third Degree, and I'm it. Our first experiment is the perfect cure for those who suffer from cold feet. I'll show it to you now — unless you'd rather talk voluntarily?"
The prisoner shook his head vigorously, and emitted further strangled grunts which the Saint rightly interpreted as a refusal. Simon sighed, and hauled the man up close to the fire.
"Very well, brother. There's no compulsion at all. Any statement you like to make will be made of your own free will." He drew one of the man's bared feet closer to his little fire. "If you change your mind," he remarked genially, "you need only make one of those eloquent gurgling noises of yours, and I expect I shall understand."
It was only five minutes before the required gurgling noise came through the gag. But after the gag had been taken out it was another five minutes before the red-faced prisoner's speech became coherent enough to be useful.
Simon left him there, and met Teal in the hotel at half past seven. "The treaty is pushed under the carpet in Whipplethwaite's study," he said.
The detective's pose of mountainous sleepiness failed him for once in his life. "As near as that?" he ejaculated. "Good Lord!"
The Saint nodded. "I don't think you'll have to worry your heads about whether he'll prosecute," he said. "The man's mentally deficient — I thought so from the beginning. And my special treatment hasn't improved his balance a lot…
"As a general rule, problems in detection bore me stiff — it's so much more entertaining to commit the crime yourself — but this one had its interesting points. A man who could hate a harmless ass like that enough to try and ruin him in such an elaborate way is a bit of a museum specimen. You know, Claud, I've been thinking about those brilliant ideas you say policemen get sometimes; it strikes me that the only thing you want —"
"Tell me about it when I come back," said Teal, looking at his watch. "I'd better see Whipplethwaite at once and get it over with."
"Give him my love," drawled the Saint, dipping his nose into the pint of beer which the detective had bought for him. "He'll get his satisfaction all right when you arrest Vallance."
The detective stood stock still and stared at him with an owl-like face. "Arrest who?" he stammered.
"Mr. Spencer Vallance — the bloke who put insomnia tablets in Whipplethwaite's dyspepsia bottle at lunch-time, nipped up to Whipplethwaite's room for the key, opened the safe, replaced the key, and then staggered out of the study bellowing that he'd been sandbagged. The bloke I've just been having words with," said the Saint. —
Teal leaned back rather limply against the bar.
"Good Lord alive, Templar "
"You meant well, Claud," said the Saint kindly. "And it was quite easy really. The only difficult part was that insomnia-tablet business. But I figured that the culprit might want to make quite sure that Joseph would be sleeping soundly when he buzzed up for the key, and the method was just an idea of mine. Then I saw that Joseph's insomnia dope was white, while his indigestion muck was light grey, and I guessed he must have been short-sighted to fall for the change-over.
"When I looked up at the house it was quite obvious that if anyone could climb down that flying buttress, someone else could just as easily climb up. That's why I was going to say something about your brilliant police ideas."
The Saint patted the detective consolingly on the back. "Policemen are swell so long as they plod along in their methodical way and sort out facts — they catch people that way quite often. But directly they get on to a really puzzling case, and for some reason it strikes them that they ought to be Great Detectives just for once — they fall down with the gooseberries. I've noticed those symptoms of detectivosis in you before, Claud. You ought to keep a tighter hand on yourself."
"How long have you known it wasn't Whipplethwaite?" asked Teal.
"Oh, for months," said the Saint calmly. "But when your elephantine hints conjured up the vision of Joseph creeping stealthily down from the balcony upon his foe, couldn't you see a sort of grisly grotesqueness about it? I could. To stage a crime so that another man would naturally be suspected requires a certain warped efficiency of brain. To think for a moment that Joseph could have produced a scheme like that was the sort of brilliant idea that only a policeman in your condition would get. How on earth could Joseph have worked all that out?"
The Saint smiled blandly. "He's only a politician."