He went out of the room very much like a beaten dog, and if he had had a tail it would have been hanging between his legs. The Saint followed him out, closed the door and lighted a fresh cigarette.
"Cheer up, Claud," he said kindly. "You've got over these things before, and you'll get over it again. Look me squarely in the eye and tell me you're sorry I'm not the Z-Man, and I'll spread you all over the hall in a mass of squashy pulp."
The detective looked at him for a long time.
"Damn it, Saint, you've got me," he growled sheepishly. "You know how much I want to get my hands on you, but I'd still be glad if you weren't the Z-Man."
"Then why not be glad?"
"I think I'm getting some more ideas now," Teal went on, flashing the Saint a glance which was very far from sleepy. "Miss Avery — Miss Cromwell — Miss Ireland. Top-line film stars, every one. Let me make another guess. Those girls are the Z-Man's intended victims; and if you aren't the Z-Man yourself you've brought them here so that they'll be safe while you go after him."
"You must have been eating a lot of fish and spinach," said the Saint respectfully. "Your ideas are improving every minute — except for one minor detail. I've been out after the Z-Man already, I've met him, and we had quite an interesting Jive minutes."
Mr Teal, who had just rolled up a fresh slice of spearmint with his tongue like a miniature piece of music, shook his head sceptically.
"Just because I'll believe you up to a point—"
"Would I lie to you, Claud?" asked the Saint. "Have I ever told you anything but the truth? Listen, brother, I don't know much about the Z-Man, but I can tell you this. Until this evening he has been known as Mr Otto Zeidelmann, and he's large and fat and has a black beard and wears horn-rimmed glasses and speaks with a phony German accent. He has been using an office in Bryerby House, Victoria, for his business address; but you needn't trouble to look for him there, because I don't think he likes the place so much now. And I doubt if his appearance in ordinary life is anything like my description. But that's where I saw him, and that's what he looked like to me."
Mr Teal opened his mouth, but words failed him.
"And here's a gun," Simon went on, taking something wrapped in a silk handkerchief from his pocket. "It's one of my own, but I fooled a gentleman who goes by the name of Raddon into making a grab for it, and you ought to find a fair sample of his fingerprints. Get Records to look them up, will you? I have an idea it's what you professionals call a Clue. I'll drop into your office in the morning and get your report. Has that percolated?"
"Yes," replied Mr Teal, taking the gun and putting it carefully away. "But I'm damned if I get the rest. Is this another of your tricks, or are you playing the game for once? We've been trying to get a line on the Z-Man for months—"
"And I heard of him for the first time today," murmured the Saint with a smile. "You can call it luck if you like, but most of it's due to the fact that I'm not festooned with red tape until I look like a Bolshevik Egyptian mummy. Having a free and unfettered hand is a great help. It might even help you to solve a mystery sometimes — but I'm not so sure about that."
"Well, what are you getting out of it?" asked Mr Teal with reasonable curiosity. "If you think I'm going to believe that you're doing this for fun—"
"Maybe I might persuade the Z-Man to contribute towards my old age pension," Simon admitted meditatively, as though the idea had just occurred to him. "But it's still a lot of fun. And if you get his body, dead or alive, you ought to be satisfied. Don't you think you're asking rather a lot of questions?"
Mr Teal did, but he couldn't help it. His mind would never be at ease about anything so long as he knew that the Saint was busy. He stared resentfully at the smiling man in front of him and wondered if he was still only being hoodwinked again.
"I've got to get back to town," he said curtly. "I'm sorry about the misunderstanding. But who the devil did phone that message through to the Yard?"
"That was Comrade Raddon, whose fingerprints are carefully preserved on that gun in your pocket," Simon replied. "I expect he thought it was a bright idea. Now run along home and play with your toys."
Mr Teal hitched his coat round.
"I'm going," he said, fighting a losing battle with the new crop of gnawing suspicions that were springing up all over the well-fertilized tracts of his unhappy mind. "But get this. If you still think you're putting anything over on me—"
"I know," said the Saint. "I needn't think I can get away with it. How empty the days would be if I couldn't hear that dear old litany! I think I could recite it in my sleep. Come again, Claud, and we'll have some new grey hairs for you." He opened the front door and steered the detective affectionately down the steps. "Take care of Mr Teal, George," he said to the police driver who still sat at the wheel of the car. "He isn't feeling very strong just now."
He patted the detective's bowler hat well down over his ears and went back into the house.
IX
Back in the living room the Saint's air of leisured badinage fell off him like a cloak. He draped himself on the mantelpiece with a cigarette tilting from his mouth and a drink in his hand and started to ask questions. He had a lot to ask.
They were not easy questions, and the answers were mostly vague and unsatisfactory. The subject of the Z-Man was not one that seemed to encourage conversation; but Simon Templar had a knack of his own of making people talk, and what he did learn was significant enough. Two or three months earlier Mercia Landon, dancing and singing star of Atlantic Studios, had been working in the final sequences of a new supermusical when for no apparent reason she had had a breakdown. All work on the production was held up, the overhead mounted perilously, and finally the picture had to be shelved. It was rumoured that Mercia was being threatened by a blackmailer, but nobody knew anything for certain. And then one morning she was found dead in her apartment from the conventional overdose of veronal.
"Accidental death," said the coroner's jury, since there was no evidence to show that the overdose had been deliberately taken; but those "in the know" — people on the inside of the screen world — knew perfectly well that Mercia Landon had taken her own life. And for a good and sufficient reason. Although she was only twenty-two and in perfect health, she had known that her screen career was finished. For when her maid found her there was a deep and jagged cut on her face in the rough zigzag shape of a Z. The upper line crossed her eyebrows, the diagonal crossed her nose, and the lower horizontal gashed her mouth almost from ear to ear. No amount of plastic surgery, no miracles of skin grafting could ever have restored the famous modelling of her face or made it possible for her to smile again that quick sunny smile that had been reflected from a million screens.
"Nobody ever knew who Mercia met that night or even where she went," said Sheila Ireland, her slim white fingers nervously twisting her empty cigarette holder. "I suppose they took her away like — like they thought they were taking Beatrice. Nobody could have blackmailed Mercia. She never had any affairs, and everybody loved her. And she just laughed at the idea of being kidnapped — here in England. When they started demanding money she just laughed at it. She wouldn't even go to the police. All anybody knows about this is that she once said to her maid: 'That idiotic Z-Man who keeps phoning must be an escaped lunatic' And then—" She shivered. "Since then we've all been terrified."
"It's an old racket with a new twist," said the Saint. "The ordinary blackmailer has something on his victim. The Z-Man has nothing — except the threat that he'll disfigure them and ruin their screen careers if they don't come across. I seem to remember that some other actress recently had a nervous breakdown, exactly like Mercia Landon. The picture she was in was shelved, too, and it's still shelved. She went to Italy to recuperate. I take it that she was victim number two. She was threatened, she lost her nerve, and she paid. She saved her good looks, but her bank balance wasn't big enough to go on paying. So Beatrice is probably victim number three."