"Where's the nearest taxi rank?" he asked.
"Nearest one I know is at Victoria Station — that's abaht ten minnits' walk," said the man. "Arf a sec, guv'nor — I think p'raps she'll go now."
He went round to the front and swung the handle. The taxi did go. It went better than Sergeant Durham had ever expected.
Confronting the seething wrath of Chief Inspector Teal later, he was unable to give any satisfactory explanation of what happened to him. He knew that the driver straightened up and walked round to resume his post at the wheel; but he did not notice that the man reached his seat quicker than any other taxi driver in Durham's experience had ever known to complete such a manoeuvre. And in any case, Sergeant Durham was not expecting to be left behind.
But that was what indubitably happened to him. At one moment, a practical hard-headed detective, secure in his faith in the commonplace facts of life, he was putting out his hand to open the door of the cab; in the next moment, the handle had been whisked away from under his very fingertips, and he was staring open-mouthed at the retreating stern of the vehicle as it faded noisily away down the road. The only other fact he had presence of mind enough to grasp was that its tail light was out so that he could not read the number — which, as Mr. Teal later pointed out to him, was not useful.
Chief Inspector Teal, however, had not yet got down to that unprofitable post-mortem. The jerk with which the taxi started off flung him forward into the arms of his captives and some distance was travelled before he could disentangle himself. He rapped violently on the partition window, without securing any response. More distance was covered before he got it open and unleashed his voice into the din of the thumping engine.
"You fool!" he shouted. "You've left the other man behind!"
"Wot?" said the driver, without turning his head or slackening speed.
"You've left the other man behind, you damned Idiot!" Mr. Teal bawled furiously.
"Behind wot?" yelled the driver, taking a corner on two wheels.
Mr. Teal hauled himself up from the corner into which the sudden lurch had thrown him, and thrust his face through the opening.
"Stop the cab, will you?" he bellowed at the top of his voice.
The driver shook his head and reeled round another corner.
"You'll 'ave to talk lahder, guv'nor," he said. "I'm a bit 'ard of 'earing."
Teal clung savagely to the strap, and his rubicund complexion took on a tinge of heliotrope. He put a hand through the window, grasped the man's collar, and shook him viciously.
"Stop, I said!" he roared past the driver's ea "Stop, or I'll break your bloody neck!"
"Wot did you say abaht my neck?" demanded the driver.
Thousands of things which he had not said, but which he had a sudden yearning to say, combined with multitudinous other observations on the anatomy of the man and his ancestors, flooded into the detective's overheated mind; but at that moment he felt rather than heard a movement behind him and turned round quickly. The florid man had seen heaven-sent opportunity in the accident, and Teal was just in time to dodge the savage blow that was aimed at his head.
The struggle that followed was short and one-sided. Mr. Teal's temper had been considerably shortened in the last few minutes, and he had a good deal of experience in handling refractory prisoners. In about six seconds he had the man securely handcuffed to one of the hand grips inside the cab, and as an added precaution he manacled the girl in the same way. Then, with his wrath in no way relieved by those six seconds of violent exercise, he turned again to resume his vendetta with the driver.
But the taxi was already slowing down. Filling his lungs, Teal devoted one delicious instant to a rapid selection of the words in which he would blast the chauffeur off the face of the earth; and then the cab stopped, and his vocabulary stuck in his gullet. For without a word the driver bowed over the wheel and buried his face in his arms. His shoulders heaved. Mr. Teal could scarcely believe what he heard. It sounded like a sob.
"Hey," said Mr. Teal, tentatively.
The driver did not move.
Mr. Teal began to feel uncomfortable. He reviewed the things he had said during his moment of exasperation. Had he been unduly harsh? Perhaps the driver really was hard of hearing. Perhaps he had some kind of sensitive complex about his neck. Mr. Teal did not wish to be unkind.
"Hey," he said, more loudly. "What's the matter?"
Another sob answered him. Mr. Teal ran a finger round the inside of his collar. A demonstration like that was beyond the scope of his training in first aid. He wondered what he ought to do. Hysterical women, he seemed to remember having read somewhere, were best brought to their senses by judicious firmness.
"Hey," shouted Teal suddenly. "Sit up!"
The driver did not sit up.
Mr. Teal cleared his throat awkwardly. He glanced at his two prisoners. They were safely held. The grief-stricken driver's need seemed to be greater than theirs and Mr. Teal wanted to get on to Cannon Row and finish his night's work.
He opened the door and got down into the road.
And it was then, exactly at the moment when Chief Inspector Teal's heavy boots grounded on the tarmac, that the second remarkable incident in that ride occurred. It was a thing which handicapped Mr. Teal rather unfairly in his subsequent interview with Sergeant Durham. For as soon as he had got down, the driver, obeying his last command as belatedly as he had obeyed the former ones, did sit up. He did more than that. He lifted his foot off the clutch and simultaneously trod on the accelerator; and the taxi went rattling away and left Mr. Teal gaping foolishly after it.
III
Simon Templar drove to Lower Sloane Street before he stopped again, and then he got down and opened the door of the passenger compartment. The dark florid man glowered at him uncertainly; and Simon decided that fifty per cent of his freight had no further romantic possibilities.
"I don't think you're going any farther with us, brother," he said.
He produced a key from his ring, unlocked one of the handcuffs, and hauled the passenger out. The man made a lunge at him, and Simon calmly tripped him across the sidewalk and clipped the loose bracelet onto a bar of the nearest area railings. Then he went back to the cab and smiled at the girl.
"I expect you'd be more comfortable without that jewelry, wouldn't you?" he murmured.
He detached her handcuffs with the same key and used them to pinion the florid man's other wrist to a second rail.
"I'm afraid you'll have to be the consolation prize, Theobald," he remarked and stooped to remove the square emerald from the cursing consolation's shirtfront. "You won't mind if I borrow this, will you? I've got a friend who likes this sort of thing."
With only one other stop, which he made in Sloane Square to rekindle the rear light from which he had thoughtfully removed the bulb some time before, he drove the creaking taxi to Abbot's Yard. The tears were rolling down his cheeks, and from time to time his body was shaken by one of those racking sobs which Mr. Teal had so grievously misunderstood. It is given to every man to enjoy just so many immortal memories and no more; and the Saint liked to enjoy them when they came.
Ten minutes later he stopped the palpitating cab in Abbot's Yard, outside the door of No. 26. Anyone else would have driven it twenty miles out of London and buried it in a field before going home, in his frantic desire to eliminate all trace of his association with it; but Simon Templar's was an inspired simplicity which amounted to genius. He knew that if the cab was found in Abbot's Yard by any prowling sleuth who could identify it, then Abbot's Yard was the last place on earth where the same sleuth would look for him and he was still smiling as he climbed down and opened the door.