"Because if you'd plugged that guy you'd have had us both in the hoosegow before you knew what had happened, you poor sap," he said tersely and slipped the lethal weapon cautiously back into its owner's pocket. "Now keep that Betsy of yous buttoned up until I tell you to let it out--and try to remember which side of the Atlantic you're on, will you?"
They walked round to the garage where Simon kept his car, with Mr. Uniatz preserving a silence of injured perplexity. The ways of the Old World were strange to him; and his brain had never been geared to lightning adaptability. If one guy could lake a shot at another guy and get away with it, but the other guy couldn't take a shot back at the first guy without being clapped in the hoosegow, what the hell sort of a country was this England, lor God's sake? There was just no percentage in trying to hold down a racket in those parts, reflected Hoppy Uniatz, and laboured over the subtleties of this sociological observation for twenty minutes, while Simon Templar whisked the huge purring Hirondel through the traffic to the southwest.
Simon had a difficult problem to ponder, and he was inclined to share it.
"Tell me, Hoppy," he said. "Suppose a bloke had some papers that he was blackmailing you with--papers that would be the end of you if they ever came out. Suppose he'd got your signed confession to a murder, or something like that. What would you do about it?"
Mr. Uniatz rubbed his nose.
"Dat's easy, boss. I'd bump de guy off, sure."
"I'm afraid you would," said the Saint. "But suppose you did bump him off--those papers would still be around somewhere, and you wouldn't know who was going to get hold of them next."
This had not occurred to Mr. Uniatz. He frowned gloomily for a while; and then he brightened again as the solution struck him like a ray of sunshine.
"Why, boss," he said, "I know what I'd do. After I'd bumped him off, I'd look for de papers."
"And where would you look for them?" asked the Saint.
"In de guy's pocket," said Mr. Uniatz promptly.
"And suppose they weren't there?" Hoppy sighed. The corrugations of worried thought returned to his brow. Thinking had never been his greatest talent--it was one of the very f ew things that were capable of hurting his head.
Simon shot the Hirondel between a lorry and an omnibus with the breadth of a finger to spare, on either side and tried to assist.
"I mean, Hoppy," he said, "you might have thought: 'Suppose I bump this guy off. Suppose he isn't carrying the papers in his pocket. Well, when a guy's bumped off, one of the first things; the cops want to know is who did it. And one of the ways of finding that out is to find out who might have had a reason to do it. And one of the ways of finding that out is to go through his letters and everything else like that that you can get hold of.' So if you'd thought all that out, Hoppy, you might have decided that if you bumped him off, the cops might get hold of the papers, and that wouldn't be too healthy for you."
Mr. Uniatz ruminated over this point for two or three miles, and finally he shrugged.
"I dunno," he said. "It looks like we better not bump off dis guy, at dat. Whadda you t'ink, boss?"
Simon realized that he would have to be content with his own surmises, which were somewhat disturbing. He had been prepared to bank heavily on his immunity from death, if not from organized discomfort, so long as the ungodly were in doubt about the concurrent fate of Her Wedding Secret; but the recent episode was a considerable discouragement to his faith. Leaving aside the possibility that Lord Iveldown had gone completely and recklessly berserk, it meant that the ungodly were developing either a satanic cunning or a denseness of cranium equalled only by that of Hoppy Uniatz.
He made a rough summary of the opposition. They had been five in number originally, and it was only to be expected that out of those five a solid percentage would have been nonresisters; Sir Barclay Edingham had paid. Major General Sir Humbolt Quipp would pay. The active dissenters consisted of Lord Iveldown, who had already declared his hand, a certain Mr. Neville Yorkland, M.P., with whom the Saint was going to have an interview, and perhaps the Honourable Leo Farwill, who might jump either way. But none of these three gentlemen, undesirable citizens though they might be, could lightly be accused of excessive denseness of cranium. Neither, as a matter of fact, had the Saint been prepared to credit them with talents of satanic cunning; but on that score it was dawning on him that he might do well to maintain an open mind.
The inevitable triangle possessed a third corner --if anything so nearly spherical could be described as a corner--in the rotund shape of Chief Inspector Claud Eustace Teal. Whatever his other errors may have been, Simon Templar was not guilty of kidding himself that he had finally and eternally disposed of that menace in the brief tete-a-tete they had enjoyed that morning.
The Saint, it must be confessed, had sometimes been guilty of deceiving Chief Inspector Teal. He, had not always unbosomed all his secrets as Mr. Teal had liked him to. At times, even, he had de-| liberately and grievously misled that persistent en-forcer of the law--a breach of the Public School Code which all English Gentlemen will un-doubtedly deplore.
He had misled Mr. Teal that morning, when telling him that he had an appointment in ten| minutes. As a matter of fact, the Saint's appointment was not until that evening, and he had merely been promising himself an idle day in the country on the way, with which he did not propose to allow Scotland Yar$ to interfere. It was a casual and almost pointless untruth; but he might have thought more about it if he had foreseen its results.
Mr. Teal brooded all day over his problem. In the course of the afternoon he had a second interview with the Honourable Leo Farwill; and that estimable politician's reaction to his report, far f rom consoling him, made him still more uneasy.
Later that evening he saw the assistant commissioner.
There's something darned funny going on, sir," he summarized his conclusions tentatively.
The assistant commissioner sniffed. He had a sniff which annoyed Mr. Teal almost as much as Simon Templar's irreverently prodding forefinger.
"I, in my humble way, had reached the same conclusion," said the commissioner sarcastically. "Has Farwill said any more?"
"He was just wooden," said Teal. "That's what I don't like about it. If he'd gone off the deep end and ranted about the inefficiency of the police and the questions he was going to ask in Parliament-- all the usual stuff, you know--I'd have felt happier about it. That was what I was expecting him to do, but he didn't do it. He seemed to go hack into a sort of shell."
"You mean you got the impression that he was rather regretting having gone to the police with that letter?"
Teal nodded.
"It did seem like that. I've seen it happen before, when the Saint's on a job. The fellow may kick up a fuss at first, but pretty soon he shuts down like a clam. Either he pays, or he tries to deal with the Saint on his own. He doesn't ask us to interfere again."
"And yet you haven't the faintest idea why solid and respectable people--public men like Farwill, for instance--crumple up like frightened babies just because this man writes them a letter," remarked the assistant commissioner acidly.
The detective twiddled a button on his coat.
"I have got the faintest idea, sir," he said redly. "I've got more than a faint idea. I know why they do it. I know why they're doing it now. It's blackmail."
"Do you know, I really believe you've solved the mystery," said the commissioner, with a mildness that singed the air.
"If I've done that, I've done more than anyone else in this building," retorted Teal heatedly. "But there are plenty of people sitting in their offices criticizing me who couldn't have got half as far as I have, even if that isn't saying much." He glared at his chief stubbornly, while all the ac-cumulated wrath and resentment of a score of such conferences rose up recklessly in his breast and strangled his voice for a moment. "Everybody knows that it's some kind of blackmail, but that doesn't help. We can't prove it. When I produced that letter, Templar simply laughed at me. And he was right. There wasn't a line of blackmail in it--except to anyone who knew what was in that book he mentions."