He threw open the front door and plunged solidly into the comfortably cushioned façade of Chief Inspector Claud Eustace Teal.
Mr Teal said, “Oof!” — and caught him as he bounced off, then set him upright in the hall.
“What’s the matter, Mr Clarron?” Teal asked drowsily.
As his torpid bulk evacuated the doorway, it revealed two uniformed men on the step outside.
“My wife,” Clarron babbled. “Dead in her bed! Drawer broken open — her jewels gone! And Mrs Jafferty—”
He broke off there. The first words had come out, incoherently enough, but unhesitatingly, with a kind of reflex assurance made glib by the number of times he had mentally rehearsed just such a speech. But after he had blurted out Mrs Jafferty’s name he did not know how to go on. He had never visualized having to say anything about her in her presence.
Mr Teal, however, did not seem to notice the aposiopesis. He was staring over Mr Clarron’s shoulder, and upwards, with his baby-blue eyes dilating in a most peculiar manner.
“Bejabers,” trumpeted a voice of distilled shamrock, “and if it isn’t me ould friend the fat boy of Scotland Yard, himself, arrivin’ late for the wake as usual.”
Mr Clarron turned, drawn by an awful but irresistible magnetism.
Billowing down the stairs came an exuberant female figure crowned with a bird’s-nest of hideous ginger hair.
“She must have done it,” Clarron chattered hysterically. “I should never have taken her without references. She was hiding up there—”
“Sure, and is that any way for a gentleman to be talkin’, tryin’ to put the blame on an honest workin’ woman? And himself all the time schemin’ to murdher his own wife, the poor soul, an’ run off with his fancy lady next door, who I see sneakin’ in here already to be with him before the body is cold!”
Teal glanced back for a moment, at Adrienne Halberd who was sidling in behind the two constables, and turned back to the staircase with a tinge of purple creeping into his rubicund complexion.
“Take off that ridiculous get-up, Saint,” he roared, “and let’s hear what you think you’re up to!”
“Well, if you insist,” said the Saint meekly. “But I was just starting to get the feel of the part.”
He unbuttoned the old-fashioned black dress, peeled it off, and draped it over the stair rail. Underneath it he wore a kind of upholstered combination garment extending down to his knees and padded in all the necessary places to produce Mrs Jafferty’s voluptuous contours. He took that off and hung it similarly over the rail, where it slid down to join the dress. Completing his descent of the stairs, he removed the orange-colored wig and set it carefully on the banister knob at the bottom.
“It’s Templar!” croaked Mr Clarron. And for one delirious instant he felt inspired, invulnerable. “He did it in that disguise! He was with Mrs Halberd this afternoon when I said I was going to London. She’s probably his accomplice—”
“Miss Halberd,” Teal said precisely, “is a police officer, acting under my orders.”
“As it eventually dawned on me,” said the Saint. “And there never was a Mrs Jafferty, except when Reginald dressed up in that outfit. Instead of trying to dream up the perfect alibi, which has tripped up a lot of bright lads, he dreamed up the perfect scapegoat. And before he has any more attacks of genius, and before I budge from here, I wish someone would go through his pockets, where they’ll find Mrs Clarron’s jewels. And if he has anything to say after that, ask him why he’s wearing those white cotton gloves.”
8
“What do you mean, it eventually dawned on you that I was with the police?” Adrienne Halberd demanded sulkily.
Simon lighted a cigarette.
“The way you picked me up at Skindle’s was rather determined,” he said. “But I could swallow that temporarily. When you told me you were investigating for an insurance company, I could take that for a while too. There are such things as female private eyes, even if they aren’t very often eyefuls. And when you said you’d been a distant adorer of mine since you were in pigtails, it was piling it up a bit tall, but I could still open my mouth that wide. Weird as it may seem, I have met such crazy gals. But with all that build-up, you’d set yourself a lot to live up to. And soon after you found out that I hadn’t any information to add to what you’d told me, or any definite plan to let you in on, you changed quite startlingly. Gone was the worshiping bug-eyed fan. You became impatient, critical — even caustic. You couldn’t see any merit at all in the idea that I adlibbed on two seconds’ notice when Reggie started to amble over. And it wasn’t such a bad one, either. But it made you almost rude.”
“If I remember,” she said, “you weren’t such a paragon—”
“But I wasn’t trying to sell anything, darling. You had been. And the transformation was just too sudden. A real fan would have thought anything I suggested was marvelous, no matter how screwy or dangerous it sounded. And then I realized something else. This was Claud Eustace’s last big case, and he’d warned me to keep out of it, but I told him I intended to stick my nose in anyway. Yet I came straight to Maidenhead, and none of the local constabulary was around to meet me and back up Teal’s orders. More surprising still, there wasn’t even a vestige of a cop anywhere around here, keeping tabs on Reggie or trying to save Mrs Clarron from being bumped off. So at last I connected. The cop had to be you. Teal had plenty of time to phone you while I was driving down from Heathrow, tell you I was headed for Skindle’s, tell you to pick me up there, rope me, keep me handy. The explanation you had to hatch up between you wasn’t so hard to invent, but I could almost hear the wheels whirring in Teal’s fat head, and see his buttons popping with pride at his own brilliance.”
Chief Inspector Teal thumbed open a tiny envelope of spearmint and mailed the contents in his mouth.
“All right,” he said trenchantly. “But what happened after Miss Halberd left you in her cottage?”
“After she left me to phone you for more advice,” said the Saint smoothly, “I went over those random hunches again and convinced myself. Then I knew I wouldn’t have much more time to work on my own, and I really was seriously worried about what my appearance and my story might rush Reggie into doing. And I decided I just had to see if I couldn’t find a clue in his house — which you couldn’t have tried without a search warrant. You know my methods, Claud. Impulsive. So I picked up the phone and called Mrs Clarron, and said I was the local police.”
“Falsely representing yourself to be a police officer,” barked Teal.
“For which I might easily get fined a few pounds,” said the Saint sadly. “I said that Mr Clarron had asked us to keep an eye on her on account of a suspicious character in the neighborhood, and it was really a break when she wasn’t a bit surprised. Reggie had warned her about the Saint. So I asked if we might send a man over to make sure that everything was all right. She said yes, but she couldn’t let him in. I said that was all right, Mr Clarron had left us a key. I moved my car up the road, walked back, and jiggered the lock, which is a very easy one.”
“He broke in,” jabbered Mr Clarron forlornly. “He admits it!”
It was not a very effective effort, considering the heap of jewels from his pockets which one of the constables was laboriously inventorying while the other counted them on to an outspread handkerchief, and Teal glanced at him almost pityingly.