"You're crazy," she said; and he laughed.
"I am and I'm not," he said. "But this time I have the perfect alibi; and I want to get you every cent I can lay hold of before I cash in my chips." The lilt in his voice made it impossible to take him literally. "God bless you, keed," he said. "Be seein' ya!"
He hung up the handpiece and leaned back in his chair, inhaling the last puffs of his cigarette. Surely, this time, he had the perfect and immutable alibi. A dry sardonic smile touched his lips; but the fine-cut sapphires in his eyes were twinkling. It would give Claud Eustace something more to think about, anyway. . . . He looked out of the windows, down the long gentle slope that was just being gilded by the sun, and saw his own Tiger Moth standing beside the old tithe barn, the propeller lost" in a swirling circle of light, the mechanic's hair fluttering in the cockpit, a thin plume of haze drifting back from the exhaust. The sky was a pale crystalline eggshell blue, clear and still as a dream, a sky that could give a man pleasant memories to carry with him into the long dark. . . .
Without conscious thought, he hauled out his helmet from a side pocket, pulled it over his head, buckled the strap, and adjusted the goggles on his
forehead. And he was doing that when a shadow fell across the desk, and he looked up.
A broad-shouldered portly form, with a round cherubic pink face and small baby-blue eyes, crowned with an incongruous black bowler hat of old-fashioned elevation, was filling the open French doors. It was Chief Inspector Teal.
X
Simon sprang up impetuously.
"Claud!" he cried. "I never thought I should be glad to see your huge stomach------"
"I thought you might be here," said the detective stiffly.
He came on into the room, but only far enough to allow Sergeant Barrow to follow him through the window. With that end accomplished, he kept his distance. There was still a puffy tenderness in his jaw to remind him of a fist like a chunk of stone driven by a bolt of lightning, which had reached him once already when he came too near.
"It must be this deductive business that Scotland Yard is taking up," Simon remarked more slowly.
Teal nodded without relaxing.
"I knew you were interested in Renway, and I knew you'd been here once before--when Uniatz knocked out the policeman. It occurred to me that it'd be just like you to come back, in spite of everything."
"In spite of hell and high water," Simon murmured with a faint smile, "we keep on doing our stuff. Well, it's not a bad reputation to have. . . . But this time I've got something more important to say to you."
"I've got the same thing to say to you as I had last time," said the detective, iron-jawed. "I want you, Saint."
Simon started round the desk.
"But this is serious!"
"So is this," said Teal implacably. He took his right hand out of his pocket, and there was a gun in it. "I don't want to have to use it, but I'm going to take you back this time if it's the last thing I do."
The Saint's eyes narrowed to shreds of flint.
"You're damn right it'll be the last thing you do!" he shot back. And then his tensed lips moved into the thinnest of thin smiles. "Now listen to me, you great oaf. You want me for being mixed up with a guy named Hoppy Uniatz who smacked a cop on the button outside here the other night. Guilty. But you also want me for the murder of Manuel Enrique and the knocking off of an aeroplane from Hawker's. Not guilty and not guilty. That's what I wanted to see you for. That's the only reason on earth why I couldn't have been more glad to see anything else walk in here than your fatuous red face. I want to tell you whom you | really do want!"
"I know whom I want," answered Teal stonily.
"Yeah?" The Saint's voice was one vicious upward swoop of derision. "Then did you know you were standing inside his house right now?"
Mr. Teal blinked. His eyes began a fractional widening; his mouth began an infinitesimal opening.
"Renway?" he said. And then the baleful skepticism came back into his face with a tinge of colour. "Is that your new alibi?" he jeered.
"That's my new alibi," said the Saint, rather quickly and quietly; "and you'd better listen to it. Did you know that Renway was the man who stole that aeroplane from Hawker's?"
"I didn't. And I don't know it yet."
"He brought it here and landed it here, and I watched him. Go down to that field out there and have a look at the scars in the grass where he had his flares, if you're too dumb to believe me. Did you know that he had a submarine in a cave in the cliffs, with live torpedoes on board?"
"Did I know------"
"Did you know that the crew of the submarine have been sleeping in a secret room under this house for months? Did you know they were the toughest bunch of hoodlums I've seen in England for years?"
"Did I------"
"Did you know," asked the Saint, in a final rasp, "that three million pounds in gold is on its way flying from Croydon to Paris right now while you're getting in my hair with your blathering imitation of a bum detective--and Renway has got everything set to shoot it down and set up a crime record that'll make Scotland Yard look more halfwitted than it's ever looked since I started taking it apart?"
The detective swallowed. There was an edge of savage sincerity in the Saint's voice which bit into the leathery hide of his incredulity. He suffered a wild fantastic temptation to begin to listen, to take in the preposterous story that the Saint was putting up, to consider the items of it soberly and seriously. And he was sure he was making a fool of himself. He gulped down the ridiculous impulse and plunged into defensive sarcasm.
"Of course I didn't know all that," he almost purred. "Is Einstein going to prove it for you, or will Renway admit it himself?"
"Renway will admit it himself," said the Saint grimly. "But even that won't be necessary. Did you know that these ten tons of gold were being shipped on aeroplane G-EZQX, which took off from Croydon at seven?" He ripped the top sheet off the memorandum block on the desk and thrust it out. "Do you know that that's his handwriting, or will you want his bank manager to tell you?"
Teal looked at the sheet.
"It doesn't matter much whether it's his writing or your version of it," he said, with an almost imperceptible break in the smoothness of his studied purr. "As a Treasury official, Renway has a per-fect right to know anything like that."
"Yeah?" Simon's voice was suddenly so soft that it made Teal's laboured suaveness sound like the sreech of a circular saw. "And I suppose he had a perfect right to know Manuel Enrique, and not say anything about it when he brought him into the police station at Horley?"
"Who says he knew Enrique?"
The Saint smiled.
"Not me, Claud. If I tell you he did, it'll just make you quite sure he didn't. This is what says so."
He put his hand in his pocket and took out the letter which he had found in the safe. "Or maybe I faked this, too?" he suggested mildly.
"You may have done," said Teal dispassionately; but his baby-blue eyes rested with a rather queer intensity on Simon's face.
"Come for a walk, Claud," said the Saint gently, "and tell me I faked this."
He turned aside quite calmly under the muzzle of Teal's gun and walked to the door. For no earthly reason that he could have given in logical terms, Mr. Teal followed him. And all the time he had a hot gnawing fear that he was making a fool of himself.
Sergeant Barrow followed Mr. Teal because that was his job. He was a fool anyway, and he knew it. Mr. Teal had often told him so.
In the billiard room, Simon pointed to the panel sagging loose on its hinges as he had torn it off-- the hole he had chipped through the wall, the wooden stairway going steeply down into the chalk.
"That's where those six men have been living, so that the ordinary servants never knew there was anything going on. You'll find their beds and everything. That's where I was shut up when they got wise to who I was; and that's where I've just got out of."