The struggle that followed was short and onesided. 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.
Ill
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.
"Will you come out, fair lady?" he said.
She got out, staring at him uncertainly; and he indicated the door of the house.
"This is where I live--sometimes," he explained. "Don't look so surprised. Even cab drivers can be artists. I draw voluptuous nudes with engine oil on old cylinder blocks--it's supposed to be frightfully modern."
Abbot's Yard, Chelsea, is one of those multitudinous little lanes which open off the King's Road. To say that not twenty years ago it had been a row of slum cottages would be practising a bourgeois suppressio veri: it had certainly been a slum, but it still was. If anything, Simon was inclined to think that the near-artists and synthetic Bohemians who now populated it had lowered the tone of the neighbourhood; but the studio which he rented in No. 26 had often served him well as an emergency address, and in his irregular life it was sometimes an advantage to have quarters in a district where eccentric goings-on attracted far less attention than they would have in South Kensington.
He steered the girl up the dark narrow stairs with a hand on her arm and felt that she was trembling--he was not surprised. From the studio, as they drew near, came the sounds of a melancholy voice raised in inharmonious song; and the Saint grinned. He opened the door, passing the girl in and closing it again behind them, and surveyed Mr. Uniatz reprovingly.
"I see you found the whisky," he said.
"Sure," said Mr. Uniatz, rising a trifle unsteadily, but beaming an honest welcome none the less. "It was in de pantry, jus' like ya tole me, boss."
The Saint sighed.
"It'll never be there again," he said, "unless you lose your way." He was stripping off his taxi driver's overcoat and peaked cap; and as he did so, in the full light, the girl recognized him, and he saw her eyes widen. "This bloke with the skinful is Mr. Hoppy Uniatz, old dear--a handy man with a Roscoe but not so hot on the Higher Thought. If I knew your name I'd introduce you."
"I'm Annette Vickery," said the girl. "But I don't even know who you are."
"I'm Simon Templar," he said. "They call me the Saint."
She caught her breath for an instant; and suddenly she seemed to see him again for the first time, and the flicker of fear came and went in her brown eyes. He stood with his hands in his pockets, lean and dark and dangerous and debonair, smiling at her with a cigarette between his lips and a wisp of smoke curling past his eyes; and it is only fair to say that he enjoyed his moment. But still he smiled, at himself and her.
"Well, I'm not a cannibal," he murmured, "although you may have heard rumours. Why don't you sit down and let's finish our talk?" She sat down slowly.
"About--pillows?" she said, with the ghost of a smile; and he began to laugh. "Or something."
He sent Hoppy Uniatz out to the kitchen to brew coffee and gave her a cigarette. She might have been twenty-two or twenty-three, he saw-- the indifferent lighting of Bond Street had had no need to be kind to her. He was more sure than ever that her red mouth would smile easily and there would be mischief in the brown eyes; but he would have to lift more than a corner of the shadow to see those things.
"I told you the Barnyard Club was no place to go," he said, drawing up a chair. "Why wouldn't you take my advice?"