The Saint lounged back in his chair and crossed his feet on a sheaf of reports on Mr. Teal's sacred desk.
"As a matter of fact, it was true," he said. "But it doesn't provide a motive-it destroys it."
If anybody else had made such a statement Mr. Teal would have jeered at him, more or less politely according to the intruder's social standing; but he had been sitting at that desk for too many years to jeer spontaneously at anything the Saint said. He shuffled his chewing gum to the back of his mouth and gazed across the Saint's vandal shoes with soporously clouded eyes.
"How do you know?"
"Because she came to see me yesterday morning with the same story, and I'd promised to see what I could do for her."
"You think it was murder?" asked Teal, with cherubic impassivity.
Simon shrugged.
"I'd promised to look into it," he repeated. "In fact, she had a date to come and see me again on Friday evening and hear if I'd managed to find out anything. If she had enough faith in me to bring me her troubles in the first place, I don't see her diving into the river before she knew the verdict."
Teal brought his spearmint back into action, and worked on it for a few seconds in silence. He looked as if he were on the point of falling asleep.
"Did she say anything to make you think she might be murdered?"
"Nothing that I understood. But I feel kind of responsible. She was killed after she'd been to see me, and it's always on the cards that she was killed because of it. There was something fishy about her story, anyhow, and people in fishy rackets will do plenty to keep me out of 'em. ... I was nearly murdered myself last night."
"Nearly?" said Mr. Teal.
He seemed disappointed.
"I'm afraid so," said the Saint cheerfully. "Give me something to drink and find out for yourself whether I'm a ghost."
"Do you think it was because of something Mrs. Ellshaw told you?"
"I'm damned if I know, Claud. But somebody put down all the makings of a Guy Fawkes picnic in Cornwall House last night, and I shouldn't be talking to you now if I hadn't been born careful as well as lucky-there's something about the way I insist on keeping on living which must be frightfully discouraging to a lot of blokes, but I wouldn't believe for a moment that you were one of them."
Chief Inspector Teal chewed his way through another silence. He knew that the Saint had called on him to extract information, not to give it. Simon Templar gave nothing away, where Scotland Yard was at the receiving end. A Commissioner's post-mortem on the remains of a recent sensational case in which the Saint had played a leading and eventually helpful part had been held not long ago: it had, however, included some unanswerable questions about the fate of a large quantity of stolen property which the police had expected to recover when they laid the High Fence by the heels, and Mr. Teal was still smarting from some of the things which had been said. He had been wielding his unavailing bludgeon in the endless duel between Scotland Yard and that amazing outlaw too long to believe that the Saint would ever consult him with no other motive than a Boy Scout ambition to do him a good turn. Every assistance that Simon Templar had ever given the Metropolitan Police had had its own particular string tied to it, but in Teal's job he had to take the strings with the favours. The favours had helped to put paid to the accounts of many elusive felons; the strings accounted for many of the silver threads among Mr. Teal's dwindling fleece of gold, and seemed likely to account for many more.
"If you think Mrs. Ellshaw was murdered, that's your affair," he said at last. "We haven't any reason to suspect it- yet. Or do you want to give us any?"
Simon thought for a moment, and said: "Do you know anything about the missing husband?"
"As a matter of fact, we did use to know him. He was about the worst card sharp we ever had on our records. He used to work the race trains, usually-he always picked on someone who'd had too much to drink, and even then he was so clumsy that he'd have been lagged a dozen times if the mugs he found hadn't been too drunk to remember what he looked like. Does that fit in with your theory?" Teal asked, with the disarming casualness of a gamboling buffalo.
The Saint smiled.
"I have no theory, Claud. That's what I'm looking for. When I've got one, we might have another chat."
There was nothing more to be got out of him; and the detective saw him go with an exasperated frown creasing down over his sleepy blue eyes.
As a matter of fact, the Saint had been perfectly straightforward-chiefly because he had nothing to conceal. He had no theory, but he was certainly looking for one. The only thing he had kept back was the address where Mrs. Ellshaw had seen her mysterious husband. It was the only information he had from which to start his inquiries; and Mr. Teal remembered that he had forgotten to ask for it five minutes after the Saint had left.
It was not much consolation for him to realise that the Saint would never have given him the information even if he had asked for it. Simon Templar's idea of criminal investigation never included any premature intrusions by the Department provided by London's ratepayers for the purpose, and he had his own methods of which that admirable body had never approved.
He went out of Scotland Yard and walked round to Parliament Square with a strange sensation going through him as if a couple of dozen fleas in hobnailed boots were playing hopscotch up and down his spine. The sensation was purely psychic, for his nerves were as cold as ice, as he knew by the steadiness of his hand when he stopped to light a cigarette at the corner of Whitehall; but he recognised the feeling. It was the supernatural, almost clairvoyant tingle that rippled through his consciousness when intuition leapt ahead of logic-an uncanny positive prescience for which logic could only trump up weak and fumbling reasons. He knew that Adventure had opened her arms to him again-that something had happened, or was happening, that was bound to bring him once more into the perilous twisted trails in which he was most at home -that because a garrulous charwoman had taken it into her head to bring him her troubles, there must be fun and games and boodle waiting for him again under the shadow of sudden death. That was his life, and it seemed as if it always would be.
He had nothing much to go on, but that could be rectified. The Saint had a superb simplicity of outlook in these matters. A taxi came cruising by, and stopped when he put up his hand.
"Take me to Duchess Place," he said. "It's just at the back of Curzon Street. Know it?"
The driver said that he knew it. Simon relaxed in a corner and propped up his feet on the spare seat diagonally opposite, while the cab turned up Birdcage Walk and wriggled through the Green Park towards Hyde Park Corner. Once he roused himself to test the mechanism of the automatic in his hip pocket; once again to loosen the thin-bladed knife in its sheath under his left sleeve. Neither of those weapons were part of the conventional outfit which anyone so impeccably dressed as he was would have been expected to wear, but for many years the Saint had placed caution so far before convention that convention was out of sight.
He paid off his taxi at the corner of Duchess Place and walked up towards number six. It was one of a row of those dingy unimaginative brick houses, with rusty iron railings and shabbily painted windows, which would be instantly ranked as cheap tenement cottages by any stranger who had not heard of the magic properties of the word "Mayfair." Simon went up the steps and rang the tarnished brass bell without hesitation -he hadn't the faintest notion how he would continue when the door was opened, if it was opened, but he had gone into and emerged from a great deal of trouble with the same blithe willingness to let circumstances provide for him.