"You've done everything you could, Mr. Teal," he said. "If Vascoe refuses to give us any assistance, he can't expect much."
"The trouble is that if anything goes wrong, that won't stop him squawking," Teal said gloomily.
Of all the persons concerned, Simon Templar was probably the most untroubled. For two days he peacefully followed the trivial rounds of his normal law-abiding life; and the plain-clothes men whom Teal had set to watch him, in spite of his instructions, grew bored with their vigil.
At about two o'clock in the morning of the third day his telephone rang.
"This is Miss Vascoe's chauffeur, sir," said the caller. "She couldn't reach a telephone herself, so she asked me to speak to you. She said that she must see you."
Simon's blood ran a shade faster — he had been half expecting such a call.
"When and where?" he asked crisply.
"If you can be in Regent's Park near the Zoo entrance in an hour's time, sir — she'll get there as soon as she has a chance to slip away."
"Tell her I'll be there," said the Saint.
He hung up the instrument and looked out of the window. On the opposite pavement, a man paced wearily up and down, as he had done for two nights before, wondering why he should have been chosen for a job that kept him out of bed to so little purpose.
But on this particular night the monotony of the sleuth's existence was destined to be relieved. He followed his quarry on a brief walk which led to Soho and into one of the many night haunts which crowd a certain section of that fevered district, where the Saint was promptly ushered to a favoured table by a beaming head waiter. The sleuth, being an unknown and unprofitable-looking stranger, was ungraciously hustled into an obscure corner. The Saint sipped a drink and watched the dancing for a few minutes, and then got up and sauntered back through the darkened room towards the exit. The sleuth, noting with a practised eye that he had still left three-quarters of his drink and a fresh packet of cigarettes on the table, and that he had neither asked for nor paid a bill, made the obvious deduction and waited without anxiety for his return. After a quarter of an hour he began to have faint doubts of his wisdom; after half an hour he began to sweat; and in forty-five minutes he was in a panic. The lavatory attendant didn't remember noticing the Saint, and certainly he wasn't in sight when the detective arrived; the doorman was quite certain that he had gone out nearly an hour ago, because he had left him ten shillings to pay the waiter.
An angry and somewhat uncomfortable sleuth went back to the Saint's address and waited for some time in agony before the object of his attention came home. As soon as he was relieved at eight o'clock, he telephoned headquarters to report the tragedy; but by then it was too late.
Chief Inspector Teal's eyes swept scorchingly over the company that had collected in Vascoe's drawing-room. It consisted of Elliot Vascoe himself, Meryl, the Comte de Beaucroix, an assortment of servants, and the night guard from Ingerbeck. "I might have known what to expect," he complained savagely. "You wouldn't help me to prevent anything like this happening, but after it's happened you expect me to clean up the mess. It'd serve you right if I told you to let your precious Ingerbeck do the cleaning up. If the Saint was here now—"
He broke off, with his jaw dropping and his eyes rounding into reddened buttons of half-unbelieving wrath.
The Saint was there. He was drifting through the door like a pirate entering a captured city, with an impotently protesting butler fluttering behind him like a flustered vulture — sauntering coolly in with a cigarette between his lips and blithe brows slanted banteringly over humorous blue eyes. He nodded to Meryl, and smiled over the rest of the congregation.
"Hullo, souls," he murmured. "I heard I'd won my bet, I toddled over to make sure."
For a moment Vascoe himself was gripped in the general petrification; and then he stepped forward, his face crimson with fury.
"There you are," he burst out incoherently. "You come here — you — There's your man, Inspector. Arrest him!"
Teal's mouth clamped up again.
"You don't have to tell me," he said grimly.
"And just why," Simon inquired lazily, as the detective — moved towards him, "am I supposed to be arrested?"
"Why?" screamed the millionaire. "You — you stand there and ask why? I'll tell you why! Because you've been too clever for once, Mr. Smarty. You said you were going to burgle this house, and you've done it — and now you're going to prison where you belong!"
The Saint leaned back against an armchair, ignoring the handcuffs that Teal was dragging from his pocket.
"Those are harsh words, Comrade," he remarked reproachfully. "Very harsh. In fact, I'm not sure that they wouldn't be actionable. I must ask my lawyer. But would anybody mind telling me what makes you so sure that I did this job?"
"I'll tell you why," Teal spoke. "Last night the guard got tired of working so hard and dozed off for a while." He shot a smoking glance at the wretched private detective who was trying to obliterate himself behind the larger members of the crowd. "When he woke up again, somebody had opened that window, cut the alarms, opened that centre showcase, and taken about twenty thousand pounds' worth of small stuff out of it. And that somebody couldn't resist leaving his signature." He jerked out a piece of Vascoe's own notepaper, on which had been drawn a spidery skeleton figure with an elliptical halo poised at a rakish angle over its round blank head. "You wouldn't recognise it, would you?" Teal jeered sarcastically.
Even so, his voice was louder that it need have been. For in spite of everything, at the back of his mind there was a horrible little doubt. The Saint had tricked him so many times, had led him up the garden path so often and then left him freezing in the snow, that he couldn't make himself believe that anything was certain. And that horrible doubt made his head swim as he saw the Saint's critical eyes rest on the drawing.
"Oh, yes," said the Saint patiently. "I can see what it's meant to be. And now I suppose you'd like me to give an account of my movements last night."
"If you're thinking of putting over another of your patent alibis," Teal said incandescently, "let me tell you before you start that I've already heard how you slipped the man I had watching you — just about the time that this job was done."
Simon nodded.
"You see," he said, "I had a 'phone message that Miss Vascoe wanted to see me very urgently, and I was to meet her at the entrance of the Zoo in Regent's Park."
The girl gasped as everyone suddenly looked at her.
"But Simon — I didn't—"
Her hand flew to her mouth.
Teal's eyes lighted with triumph as they swung back to the Saint.
"That's fine," he said exultantly. "And Miss Vascoe doesn't know anything about it. So who else is going to testify that you spent your time waiting there — the man in the moon?"
"No," said the Saint. "Because I didn't go there."
Teal's eyes narrowed with the fog that was starting to creep into his brain.
"Well, what—"
"I was expecting some sort of call like that," said the Saint. "I knew somebody was going to knock off this exhibition — after the bet I'd made with Vascoe, the chance of getting away with it and having me to take the rap was too good to miss. I meant it to look good — that's why I made the bet. But of course, our friend had to be sure I wouldn't have an alibi, and he was pretty cunning about it. He guessed that you'd be having me shadowed, but he knew that a message like he sent me would make me shake my shadow. And then I'd have a fine time trying to prove that I spent an hour or so standing outside the Zoo at that hour of the night. Only I'm pretty cunning myself, when I think about it; so I didn't go. I came here instead."