"I think he went with this wriggler's manager and a couple of his clutching partners," said the Saint.
Mr. Teal nodded. Something was happening to his blood pressure--something which had begun its deadly work while he was listening to the voice of his assistant on the telephone. He knew all the symptoms. The movements with which he folded his wafer of naked spearmint and stuffed it into his mouth had a stupendous slothfulness which cost him a frightful effort to maintain.
"Or your girl friend, perhaps--Patricia Holm," Teal articulated slowly. "What's happened to her?"
"She came over all evening dress and went to a party--one of these Mayfair orgies. Apart from that she's quite normal."
"She'd have a good time at a party, wouldn't she?" Teal said ruminatively.
The Saint swilled liqueur brandy around in the bowl of a pear-shaped glass.
"I believe lots of young men do get trampled to death in the stampede when she turns up," he admitted.
"But there'd be enough survivors left to be able to swear she'd been dancing or sitting out with one or other of 'em from the time she arrived till well after midnight--wouldn't there?" Teal insisted.
Simon sat up. For one or two minutes past he had been aware that a change had come over the detective since he returned to the table, and there had been a sudden grittiness in the way that last question mark had been tagged on which he couldn't have missed if he had been stone deaf. He looked Teal over with thoughtful blue eyes.
"Claud!" he exclaimed accusingly. "I believe there's something on your mind!"
For a moment Teal's windpipe tied itself into a knot of indignation which threatened to strangle him. And then, with a kind of dogged resolution, he untied it and waded on.
"There's plenty on my mind," he said crunchily. "And you know what it is. I suppose you've been laughing yourself sick ever since you sat down at the table. I suppose you've been wondering if there were any limits on earth to what you could make me swallow. Well, I've bought it. I've given you your rope. And now suppose you tell me why you think it isn't going to hang you?"
"Claud!" The Saint's voice was wicked. "Are you sure you haven't had too much of this brandy? I feel that your bile is running away with you. Is this------"
"Never mind my bile!" Teal got out through his teeth. "I'm waiting for you to talk about something else. And before you start, let me tell you that I'm going to tear this alibi to pieces if it takes me the rest of my life!"
Simon raised his eyebrows.
"Alibi?" he repeated gently.
"That's what I said."
"I don't know what you're talking about."
"No?" Teal meant to be derisive, but the word plopped out of his mouth like a cork out of a bottle. "I'm talking about this precious alibi of yours which accounts for everything that fellow Uniatz and that girl Patricia Holm have been doing all the evening--and probably accounts for all your other friends as well. I mean this alibi you think you've framed me into giving you----"
"What on earth are you talking about?" asked the Saint patiently; and Teal drew another laboured breath.
"I mean," he said, and all the cumulative rancour of five years of that unequal duel was rasping through his voice like a red-hot file--"I mean that you must be thinking it was damned clever of you to get me to have dinner with you on this night of all nights, and keep me here with you from seven o'clock till now, when a dead man was picked up on the Brighton road half an hour ago with your mark on him!"
II
SIMON stared at him blankly. And even while he did so, he realized that he was letting the opportunity of a lifetime of Teal-baiting dawdle past him and raise its hat as it went by, without so much as lifting a hand to grab it. To be accused for once of a crime of which he was as innocent as an unborn Eskimo, and to have a made-to-measure alibi presented to him on a plate at the same time, should have presented vistas of gorgeous possibility to warm the heart. But he didn't even see them. He was too genuinely interested. \
"Say that again," he suggested.
''You've heard me already," retorted the detective gratingly. "It's your turn now. Well, I'm waiting for it. I like your fairy tales. What is it this time? Did he commit suicide and tie your mark round his neck for a joke? Did the Emperor of Abyssinia do it for you, or was it arranged by the Sultan of Turkey? Whatever your story is, I'll hear it!"
It has been urged by some captious critics of these records that Chief Inspector Teal has rarely been observed in them to behave like a normal detective. This charge the scribe is forced to admit. But he points out that there are very few of these chronicles in which Chief Inspector Teal has had any chance to be a normal detective. Confronted with the slow smile and bantering blue eyes of the Saint, something went haywire inside Mr. Teal. He was not himself. He was overwrought. He gave way. He behaved, in fact, exactly as a man who had been burned many times might have been expected to behave in the presence of fire. But it wasn't his fault; and the Saint knew it.
"Now wait a minute, you prize fathead," Simon answered quite pleasantly. "I didn't kill this bloke------"
"I know you didn't," said Teal, in an ecstasy of elephantine sarcasm. "You've been sitting here talking to me all the time. This fellow just died. He drew your picture on a piece of paper and had heart failure when he looked at it."
"Your guess is as good as mine, Claud," drawled the Saint lazily. "But personally I should say that some low crook is trying to frame me."
"You would, eh? Well, if I were looking for this low crook------"
"You'd come to my address." Simon pushed his cigarette into an ashtray, finished his drink, and spread money on the table to pay the bill. "Well, here I am. You gave me the murder and you gave me the alibi. You thought of this game. Why don't you get on with it? Am I arrested?"
Teal gulped and swallowed a piece of gum.
"You'll be arrested as soon as I know some more about this murder. I know where to find you--------"
The Saint smiled.
"I seem to have heard words to that effect before," he said. "But it hasn't always worked out quite that way. My movements are so erratic. Why take a chance? Let me arrest myself. My car's just round the corner, and the night is before us. Let's go and find out some more about this murder of mine."
He stood up; and for some unearthly reason Teal also rose to his feet. An exasperating little bug of uncertainty was hatching out in the detective's brain and starting to dig itself in. He had been through these scenes before, and they had lopped years off his expectation of life. He had known the Saint guilty of innumerable felonies and breaches of the peace, beyond any possible shadow of human doubt, and had got nothing out of it-- nothing but a smile of infuriating innocence and a glimmer of mocking amusement in the Saint's eyes, which was not evidence. He was used to being outwitted, but it had never occurred to him that he might be wrong. Until that very moment, when the smile of infuriating innocence was so startlingly absent. . . . He didn't believe it even then--he had reached the stage when nothing that Simon Templar said or did could be taken at its face value--but the germ of preposterous doubt was brooding in his mind, and he followed the Saint out into the street in silence, without understanding why he did it.
"Where did this news come from?" Simon inquired, as he slid in behind the wheel of the great shining Hirondel which was parked close by.
"Horley," Teal replied curtly, and couldn't help adding: "You ought to know."
The Saint made no retort; and that again was unusual. The tiny maggot of incertitude in Teal's brain laid another egg, and he chewed steadily on his remaining sludge of spearmint in self-defensive taciturnity while the long thrumming nose of the car threaded its way at breath-taking speed through the thinning traffic of south London.
Simon kindled a fresh cigarette from the lighter on the dash and thrust the Hirondel over the southward artery with one hand on the wheel and the speedometer quivering around seventy, driving automatically and thinking about other things.