"Dear me!" said the Saint.
The detective's china-blue eyes were as hard and bright as porcelain. His mouth had disappeared altogether — it was a mere slit in the hardened round chubbiness of his face.
"I suppose you can explain that away," he snapped.
"Of course I can," said the Saint easily. "The same low criminal who was taking my name in vain on the Brighton road last night—"
"Is that all the alibi you've got this time?" Teal asked, with a kind of saw-edged note in his voice.
"More or less," said the Saint. He watched the detective take a second grip on himself, watched a glimmer of tentative relief and triumph creep hesitantly into the angry baby-blue eyes, watched the thinned mouth begin to open for an answer — and added, with a seraphically apologetic smile, at the very last and most devastating instant: "Oh, yes, there was something I forgot to mention. On the way from St. Paul's to the Haymarket I did stop at the Lex Garage off Piccadilly to collect my car; and now I come to think of it, Claud, it must have been exactly half-past eleven."
Mr. Teal blinked. It was not the nervous bashful blink of a gentle botanist being rudely confronted with the facts of mammalian reproduction: it was the dizzy blink of a bather who has made unwary contact with an electric eel. His chest appeared to deflate; then it swelled up again to a point where his coat was straining on its seams.
"You expect me to believe that?" he blared.
"Of course not," said the Saint. "You haven't enough intelligence to save yourself that much time. But you can verify it. Go to the garage and find out. Their records'll show what time I checked out. The night staff'll remember me. Go and ask 'em. Push off and amuse yourself. But if that's all that's on your mind tonight, I'm going to bed."
"You can wait a little longer," retorted Teal. "Half-past eleven isn't the only time I want you to account for."
The Saint sighed.
"What's the rest of it?"
"You seemed rather interested in Sir Hugo Renway last night," Teal said waspily, "so I asked the police down there to keep an eye on his place. I know your methods pretty well by now, and I had an idea you might go there. At half-past one this morning the constable was cycling round the estate when he saw your car — and him!"
"What, Brother Uniatz?" drawled Simon. "Did you see a cop, Hoppy?"
Mr. Uniatz, who had been trying to unlock the cellaret with a piece of bent wire, turned round vacantly.
"Yes, boss," he said.
"Ha!" barked Mr. Teal. It may sound improbable, but that is a close approximation to the noise he made.
"I see one only yesterday," Hoppy elaborated hastily, with the Saint's blue stare scorching through him. "In de Haymarket."
Chief Inspector Teal did not burst. Perhaps it is not actually possible for the human organism to become so inflated with spleen that it explodes into small fragments — the chronicler is inclined to take this as the only plausible reason why his favourite detective did not stand there and pop. But there was something about him which suggested that even the point of a joke might have punctured him into the power of performing that impossible disintegration. He glared at the Saint again with reddening eyes.
"This constable was also knocked on the head," he went on, getting the words out somehow through his contracting larynx; "and when he woke up—"
"The garden gate had been forced open and March House had been stolen," murmured Simon. "I know. The bloke flew off with it in the aeroplane."
"He reported to the local station, and they telephoned me. The other thing I want to know is what you were doing at that time."
"We were driving round and round Regent's Park; and I'll give you half a million pounds if you can prove we weren't!"
The detective bit on his long-forgotten chewing gum with a force that almost fractured his jaw.
"Do you think you can make a monkey out of me?" he roared.
Simon shook his head.
"Certainly not," he replied solemnly. "I wouldn't try to improve on God's creation."
The chronicler has already submitted, perhaps somewhat rashly, his opinion that the human organism is not capable of literally expanding into small and separate pieces under no other influence than the dilation of its own wrath. But he has, fortunately, offered the suggestion that some outside prod might succeed in procuring this phenomenal disruption.
Mr. Teal did not burst, physically. But he performed the psychological equivalent. Moved by a cosmic passion which stronger men than he might have failed lamentably to control, he grasped destiny in both his quivering hands. He did something which he had never in all his life contrived to do before.
"All right," he said throatily. "I've heard all I want to hear tonight. You can tell the rest of it to a jury. I'm arresting you on charges of common assault, burglary, and willful murder."
V
Simon extinguished his cigarette in an ashtray. The ticking of his heart was going faster, but not so very much faster. It was Curious how Teal's ultimate explosion surprised him; curious also that it did not find him unprepared. Perhaps, in his heart of hearts, he had always known that something of the kind must happen, some day. The gay career of Teal-baiting could not go on for ever: it had gone on for a long time, but Mr. Teal was human. There was no more concrete evidence now than there had ever been; but the Saint had a good deal of belated psychological understanding. In Teal's place, he would probably have done the same.
The detective was still speaking, with the same rather frantic restraint and rather frantic consciousness of the awful temerity of what he was going to do:
"I caution you that anything you say now will be taken down and may be used in evidence at your trial."
The Saint smiled. He understood. He deeply sympathized. In Teal's place, he would probably have done the same. But he was not in Teal's place.
"If you want to make a fool of yourself, Claud, I can't stop you," he said; and his left fist leapt out and crashed like a cannon ball into the furrow between Chief Inspector Teal's first and second chins.
The expression of compressed wrathfulness vanished startlingly from the detective's face. For a moment it was superseded by a register of grotesque surprise; and then every other visible emotion was smudged out by a vast blank sleepiness which for once was entirely innocent of pose. Mr. Teal's legs folded up not ungracefully beneath him; he lay down on the floor and went to sleep.
Mr. Teal's mute equerry was starting forward, and his mouth was opening: it is possible that at any moment some human sound might have emerged from that preternaturally silent man, but Simon gave it no-chance. The man was grabbing for his wrists, and the Saint obligingly permitted him to get his hold. Then he planted his left foot firmly in the detective's stomach and rolled over backwards, pushing his foot vimfully upwards as he pulled his wrists down. The man sailed over his head in an adagio flying somersault and hit the carpet with an explosive "wuff!" which any medium-sized dog could have vocalized much better; and Simon somersaulted after him more gently and sat astride his chest. He grasped the man's coat collar in his hands and twisted his knuckles scientifically into the carotid arteries — unconsciousness can be produced in two or three seconds by that method, when employed by a skilful exponent, and Sergeant Barrow's resistance had been considerably impaired already by the force with which his shoulder blades had landed on the floor. It was all over in far less time than it takes to describe; and Simon looked up at Mr. Uniatz, who was prancing about like a puppy with his revolver reversed in his hand.