"Now you mention it," Teal said ominously, "why did you happen to be ambling along here?"
"Why shouldn't I, Claud? I have to amble somewhere, and they say this is a free country. There are several thousands of other people ambling around Chelsea, but do you rush out into the streets and grab them and ask them why?"
Mr Teal's pudgy fists clenched inside his pockets. It was happening again — the same as it always had. He set out to be a detective, and some evil spirit turned him into a clown. It wasn't his fault. It was the fault of that debonair, mocking, lazily smiling Mephistopheles who was misnamed the Saint, who seemed to have been born with the uncanny gift of paralyzing the detective's trained and native caution and luring him into howling gaucheries that made Mr Teal go hot and cold when he thought about them. And the more often it happened, the more easily it happened next time. There was an awful fatefulness about it that made Mr Teal want to burst into tears.
He took hold of himself doggedly, glowering up at the Saint with a concentrated uncharitableness that would have made a lion think twice before biting him.
"Well," he said with a restraint that made the veins stand out on his forehead, "what do you want here?"
"I just thought I'd drop in and see how you were getting on with your detecting. Quite a jolly little murder it looks, too, if I may say so."
For the first time since the casual glance he had taken round the room when he came in his cool gaze went back to the crumpled shape on the floor.
It lay on the floor, close to the fireplace and a side table on which stood a bottle of whisky and a siphon — the body of what seemed to have been a man of medium size and build, wearing an ordinary dark suit. His hair looked as if it might have been a pale gingery colour; but it was difficult to be sure about that, because there was not much of it that was not clotted with the blood that had flowed from his smashed skull and spread in a pool over the carpet. There was not much of the back of his head left at all, as a matter of fact, for the smashing had been carried out very methodically and with the obvious intention of making sure that there would never be any need to repeat the dose. A little distance away lay the instrument with which the smashing had been done: it looked like an ordinary cheap hammer, and the wooden handle was so clean that it might well have been bought new for the purpose.
The rest of the room was in disorder. Books had been pulled out of their shelves, the carpet was wrinkled as if it had been pulled up to examine the floor underneath, cushions had been taken out of the chairs, and there were gashes in the upholstery. All the drawers of the desk were open; one of them had been pulled right out and left on the floor, and another was upturned on the table. A mass of papers was scattered around like a stage snowfall. A yard from the dead man's right hand a tumbler lay on its side at the edge of a pool of moisture where its contents had soaked into the carpet.
"Quite a jolly little murder," Simon repeated.
Teal went on watching him suspiciously.
"Do you know anything about it?"
"Not a thing," said the Saint honestly. "Do you?"
Chief Inspector Teal dug into his waistcoat pocket and extracted from it a small pink rectangular packet. From this he drew a small pink envelope, unwrapped it and fed the contents into his mouth. There was a short interval of silence, while his salivary glands responded exquisitely to the stimulus and his teeth mashed the strip of gum into a conveniently malleable wodge.
The delay, coupled with the previous pause while the Saint had been studying the scenery, gave him a chance to complete the recovery of his self-possession; and Mr Teal had been making the most of his respite. Some of the rich purple had faded out of his face, and his eyelids had started to droop. His brain was reviving from its first shock and beginning to function again.
"It looks like an ordinary murder and robbery to me," he answered with a gruff straightforwardness which he hoped was convincing. "Hardly in your line, I should say."
"Anything is in my line if it helps you," said the Saint generously, "Mmrn… robbery. The place does look as if it had been taken apart, doesn't it?" He drifted about the room, taking in details. "Couple of nice silver cups on the mantelpiece. Gold cigarette case. Burglars certainly are getting choosey these days, aren't they, Claud? Why, I can remember a time when none of 'em would have turned up their noses at a few odds and ends like that."
"They may have been looking for something more valuable," Teal said temptingly.
The Saint nodded.
"Yes, that's possible. You must have been reading a book or something."
"Have you any idea what that could have been?"
Simon thought for a moment.
"I know," he said suddenly. "It was the plans for the new death ray which the master spy with, the hare lip stole from the War Office in chapter three."
Mr Teal felt the arteries in his neck throbbing, but with a superhuman effort he clung to his precariously rescued sangfroid, chewing fiercely on his blob of spearmint.
"Oh yes," he said with desperate moderation. "But we don't really believe in things like that. They must have thought he had something here that they could get money for—"
" 'They'?" said the Saint as if the point had just occurred to him. "I see — you've already found that there were several blokes involved in it."
"I was saying that to be on the safe side. Of course we haven't found any evidence yet—"
"Nobody would expect you to," Simon encouraged him liberally. "After all, you're only detectives, and that isn't your job. If this had been a night club where the deceased was serving drinks after hours it would have been quite a different matter. But making allowances for that—"
"What would you see?"
Simon pointed.
"There's whisky and a siphon on that small table. And one glass with what looks like whisky in it. Just one. On the floor there's another glass, surrounded by a certain amount of dampness. What happens when a bloke's dishing up a round of drinks? Normally he pours out the whisky into however many glasses he's using. Then he squirts the soda into the glass of the first victim, tells him to say when, hands him his dose of medicine and goes on to the next. And so on."
"So you think there was only one other man here, and the murderer hit him while he was filling the first glass?"
"I didn't say so," responded the Saint airily. "I didn't say 'man', in the first place. It might have been some of these hairy Olympic female champions — some of 'em sling a pretty hefty hammer, I believe. And all the rest of them may have been teetotallers, so they wouldn't be getting a drink."
Teal wedged his gum into a hollow tooth and held it there heroically.
"All the same," he persisted, "you do think it looks as if he, or she, or they, were on fairly friendly terms with…" He hesitated.
"With Comrade Ingleston?" Simon prompted him kindly.
"How did you know that?"
The brassy note was creeping back into Teal's voice, and he tried to strangle the symptom with a gulp that almost ruptured his larynx. The ensuing silence made him feel as self-conscious as if he had blared out like a bugle; but the Saint was only smiling with unaltered affability.
"How did I know they were friendly? Well, after all, when you start pouring out drinks—"
"How did you know his name was Ingleston?"