Follow the Saint s-20 Page 2

  The Saint's foot on the accelerator gave the great car a last burst in the direction of the spot where these exciting things were happening, and then he stood on the brakes. The thug who had committed the assault was already bending over Teal's prostrate form when the screech of skidding tyres made him stop and look up in startled fear. For a split second he hesitated, as if considering whether to stand his ground and give battle; but something about the sinewy breadth of the Saint's shoulders and the athletic and purposeful speed with which the Saint's tall frame catapulted itself out of the still sliding car must have discouraged him. A profound antipathy to the whole scene and everyone in it appeared to overwhelm him; and he turned and began to depart from it like a stone out of a sling.

  The Saint started after him. At that moment the Saint had no idea that the object of his timely rescue was Chief Inspec­tor Teal in person: it was simply that the sight of one bloke hitting another bloke with a length of gaspipe was a spectacle which inevitably impelled him to join in the festivities with the least possible delay. But as he started in pursuit he caught his first glimpse of the fallen victim's face, and the surprise checked his stride as if he had run into a wall. He paused involuntarily to confirm the identification; and that brief delay lost him any chance he might have had of making a capture. The thug was already covering the ground with quite remarkable velocity, and the extra start he had gained from the Saint's hesitation had given him a lead which even Simon Templar's long legs doubted their ability to make up. Simon gave up the idea with a regretful sigh, and stooped to find out how much damage had been sustained by his favourite enemy.

  It only took him a moment to assure himself that his existence was unlikely to be rendered permanently unevent­ful by the premature removal of its most pungent spice; but nevertheless there was also no doubt that Teal was tempor­arily in the land of dreams, and that it would do the Saint himself no good to be found standing over his sleeping body. On the other hand, to leave Mr Teal to finish his sleep in peace on the sidewalk was something which no self-respect­ing buccaneer could do. The actual commotion from which the situation had evolved had been practically negligible. Not a window had been flung up; not a door had been opened. The street remained sunken in its twilight torpor, and once again there was no other living soul in sight.

  The Saint shrugged. There seemed to be only one thing to do, so he did it. With a certain amount of effort, he picked up Mr Teal's weighty person and heaved it into the car, dumped Teal's macintosh and hat on top of him, picked up an oblong yellow package which had fallen out of his pocket and slung that in as well, got into the driving seat himself, and drove away.

  That Simon's diagnosis had been accurate was proved by the fact that Teal was beginning to groan and blink his eyes when the Hirondel pulled up at his front door. The Saint lighted a cigarette and looked at him reproachfully.

  "I'm ashamed of you," he said. "An old man of your age, letting yourself be picked up in the gutter like that. And not even during licensing hours, either. Where did you get the embalming fluid ?"

  "So it was you, was it ?" Teal muttered thickly.

  "I beg your pardon ?"

  "What the hell was the idea?" demanded Teal, with a growing indignation which left no doubt of his recovery.

  "The idea of what?"

  "Creeping up behind me and knocking me on the head! If you think I'm going to let you get away with that——"

  "Claud," said the Saint, "do I understand that you're accusing me again?"

  "Oh, no!" Teal had his eyes wide open now, and they were red with wrath. The edge of his sarcasm was as silky and delicate as the blade of a crosscut saw. "It was two other people. They fell out of the sky with parachutes——"

  The Saint sighed.

  "I don't want to interrupt you. But can this great brain of yours see any particular reason why I should cosh you today ? We haven't seen each other for ages, and so far as I know you haven't been doing anything to make me angry. And even if you had, and I thought it would be good for you to be bopped over the bean, do you think I'd take the trouble to bring you home afterwards? And even if I brought you home afterwards, do you think I'd let you wake up while I was still around, instead of bopping you again and leaving you to wake up without knowing I'd been anywhere near you? I am a very modest man, Claud," said the Saint untruthfully, "but there are some aspersions on my intelligence which cut me to the quick, and you always seem to be the guy who thinks of them."

  Mr Teal rubbed his head.

  "Well, what did happen ?" he demanded grudgingly.

  "I don't really know. When I shot over the horizon, there was some guy in the act of belting you over the lid with a handy piece of lead pipe. I thought of asking him to stop and talk it over, but he ran too fast. So I just loaded you into the old jalopy and brought you home. Of course, if you really wanted to go on dozing in the gutter I can take you back."

  The detective looked about him. His aching skull was clearing a little, enough at least for him to be able to see that this latest misfortune was something which, for once, might not be chargeable to the Saint's account. The realization did not actually improve his temper.

  "Have you any idea who it was ?"

  "That's a large order, isn't it ? If you're as charming to all your other clients as you usually are to me, I should say that London must be crawling with birds who'd pay large sums of money for the fun of whacking you on the roof with a lump of iron."

  "Well, what did this one look like?" snarled Teal im­patiently.

  "I'm blowed if I could draw his picture, Claud. The light was pretty bad, and he didn't stay very long. Medium height, ordinary build, thin face—nothing definite enough to help you much, I'm afraid."

  Teal grunted.

  Presently he said: "Thanks, anyway."

  He said it as if he hated to say it, which he did. Being under any obligation to the Saint hurt him almost as much as his indigestion. Promptly he wished that he hadn't thought of that comparison. His stomach, reviving from a too fleeting anaesthesia, reminded him that it was still his most constant companion. And now he had a sore and splitting head as well. He realized that he felt about as unhappy as a man can feel.

  He opened the door of the car, and took hold of his rain­coat and bowler hat.

  "G'night," he said.

  "Goodnight," said the Saint cheerfully. "You know where I live, any time you decide you want a bodyguard."

  Mr Teal did not deign to reply. He crossed the sidewalk rather unsteadily, mounted the steps of the house, and let himself in without looking back. The door closed again behind him.

  Simon chuckled as he let in the clutch and drove on to­wards the appointment to which he had been on his way. The episode which had just taken place would make a mildly amusing story to tell: aside from that obvious face value, he didn't give it a second thought. There was no reason why he should. There must have been enough hoodlums in the metropolis with long-cherished dreams of vengeance against Mr Teal, aside from ordinary casual footpads, to account for the sprinting beater-up who had made such an agile getaway: the only entertaining angle was that Coincidence should have chosen the Saint himself, of all possible people, to be the rescuer.

  That was as much as the Saint's powers of clairvoyance were worth on that occasion.

  Two hours later, when he had parked the Hirondel in the garage at Cornwall House, his foot kicked something out of the door as he got out. It was the yellow packet that had slipped out of Teal's pocket, which had fallen on to the floor and been left there forgotten by both men.

  Simon picked it up; and when he saw the label he sighed, and then grinned again. So that was a new depth to which Mr Teal had sunk; and the revelation of the detective's dyspepsia would provide a little extra piquancy to their next encounter in badinage. . . .

  He went on reading the exaggerated claims made for Miracle Tea on the wrapper as he rode up in the elevator to his apartment. And as he read on, a new idea came to him, an idea which could only have
found a welcome in such a scape­grace sense of mischief as the Saint's. The product was called Miracle Tea, and there seemed to be no reason why it should not be endowed with miraculous properties before being returned to its owner. Chief Inspector Teal would surely be disappointed if it failed to perform miracles. And that could so easily be arranged. The admixture of a quantity of crushed senna pods, together with a certain amount of powdered calomel—the indicated specific in all cases of concussion....

  In his own living-room, the Saint proceeded to open the packet with great care, in such a way that it could be sealed again and bear no trace of having been tampered with.

  Inside, there seemed to be a second paper wrapping. He took hold of one corner of it and pulled experimentally. A complete crumpled piece of paper came out in his fingers. Below that, there was another crumpled white pad. And after that, another. It went on until the whole package was empty, and the table on which he was working was covered with those creased white scraps. But no tea came to light. He picked up one of the pieces of paper and cautiously unfolded it, in case it should be the container of an individual dose. And then suddenly he sat quite still, while his blue eyes froze into narrowed pools of electrified ice as he realized what he was looking at.

  It was a Bank of England note for fifty pounds.

  III

  "MIRACLE TEA," said the Saint reverently, "is a good name for it."

  There were thirty of those notes—a total of fifteen hund­red pounds in unquestionably genuine cash, legal tender and ripe for immediate circulation.

  There was a light step behind him, and Patricia Holm's hand fell on his shoulder.

  "I didn't know you'd come in, boy," she said; and then she didn't go on. He felt her standing unnaturally still. After some seconds she said: "What have you been doing— breaking into the baby's moneybox ?"

  "Getting ready to write some letters," he said. "How do you like the new notepaper ?"

  She pulled him round to face her.

  "Come on," she said. "I like to know when you're going to be arrested. What's the charge going to be this time— burgling a bank ?"

  He smiled at her.

  She was easy to smile at. Hair like ripe corn in the sun, a skin like rose petals, blue eyes that could be as wicked as his own, the figure of a young nymph, and something else that could not have been captured in any picture, something in her that laughed with him in all his misdeeds.

  "Tea-drinking is the charge," he said. "I've signed the pledge, and henceforward this will be my only beverage."

  She raised her fist.

  "I'll push your face in."

  "But it's true."

  He handed her the packet from which the money had come. She sat on the table and studied every side of it. And after that she was only more helplessly perplexed.

  "Go on," she said.

  He told her the story exactly as it had happened.

  "And now you know just as much as I do," he concluded. "I haven't even had time to do any thinking on it. Maybe we needn't bother. We shall wake up soon, and everything will be quite all right."

  She put the box down again and looked at one of the notes.

  "Are they real?"

  "There isn't a doubt of it."

  "Maybe you've got away with Teal's life savings."

  "Maybe. But he has got a bank account. And can you really see Claud Eustace hoarding his worldly wealth in packets of patent tea ?"

  "Then it must be evidence in some case he's working on."

  "It could be. But again, why keep it in this box ?" Simon turned the yellow packet over in his supple hands. "It was perfectly sealed before I opened it. It looked as if it had never been touched. Why should he go to all that trouble? And suppose it was evidence just as it stood, how did he know what the evidence was without opening it ? If he didn't know, he'd surely have opened it on the spot, in front of witnesses. And if he did know, he had no business to take it home. Besides, if he did know that he was carrying dangerous evidence, he wouldn't have had to think twice about what motive there might be for slugging him on his way home; but he didn't seem to have the slightest idea what it was all about."

  Patricia frowned.

  "Could he be taking graft ? This might be a way of slipping him the money."

  Simon thought that over for a while; but in the end he shook his head.

  "We've said a lot of rude things about Claud Eustace in our time, but I don't think even we could ever have said that seriously. He may be a nuisance, but he's so honest that it runs out of his ears. And still again, he'd have known what he was carrying, and known what anybody who slugged him might have been after, and the first thing he did when he woke up would have been to see if he's still got the dough. But he didn't. He didn't even feel in his pockets."

  "But wasn't he knocked silly ?"

  "Not that silly."

  "Perhaps he was quite sure what had happened, and didn't want to give himself away."

  "With me sitting beside him ? If he'd even thought he'd lost something valuable, it wouldn't have been quite so easy for me to convince him that I wasn't the warrior with the gaspipe. He could have arrested me himself and searched me on the spot without necessarily giving anything away."

  The girl shrugged despairingly.

  "All right. So you think of something."

  The Saint lighted a cigarette.

  "I suppose I'm barmy, but there's only one thing I can think of. Claud Eustace didn't have the foggiest idea what was in the packet. He had a pain in his tum-tum, and he just bought it for medicine on the way home. It was meant to be handed to someone else, and the fellow in the shop got mixed up. As soon as Teal's gone out with it, the right man comes in, and there is a good deal of commotion. Somebody realizes what's happened, and goes dashing after Teal to get the packet back. He bends his blunt instrument over Teal's head, and is just about to frisk him when I arrive and spoil everything, and he has to lam. I take Teal home, and Teal has something else to think about besides his tummy-ache, so he forgets all about his Miracle Tea, and I win it. And is it something to win!"

  The Saint's eyes were kindling with an impish excitement that had no direct connection with the windfall that had just dropped into his lap. Patricia did not need him to say any more to tell her what was going on in his mind. To the Saint, any puzzle was a potential adventure; and the Saint on the trail of adventure was a man transformed, a dynamic focus of ageless and superhuman forces against which no ordinary mortal could argue. She had known him so well for so many years, had known so long that he was beyond her power to change, even if she had wished to change him.

  She said slowly: "But what is the racket?"

  "That would be worth knowing," he said; and he had no need to say that he intended to know. He leaned back ecstatically. "But just think of it, darling I If we could only see the uproar and agitation that must be going on at this minute in the place where this tea came from . . ."

  As a matter of record, the quality of the uproar and the agitation in the shop where Mr Teal had made his purchase would not have disappointed him at all; although in fact it had preceded this conversation by some time.

  Mr Henry Osbett, registered proprietor of the drug store at 909 Victoria Street which was also the registered premises of the Miracle Tea Company, was normally a man of quite distinguished and even haughty aspect, being not only tall and erect, but also equipped with a pair of long and grace­fully curved moustaches which stuck out on either side of his face like the wings of a soaring gull, which gave him a rather old-fashioned military air in spite of his horn-rimmed glasses. Under the stress of emotion, however, his dignity was visibly frayed. He listened to his shifty-eyed assistant's explanations with fuming impatience.

  "How was I to know?" the young man was protesting. "He came at exactly the right time, and I've never seen Nancock before. I didn't mean to give him the packet without the password, but he snatched it right out of my hand and rushed off."

  "Excuses!" snarled the chemist
, absent-mindedly grabbing handfuls of his whiskers and tying them in knots."Why if you'd even known who he was——"

  "I didn't know—not until Nancock told me. How could I know?"

  "At least you could have got the package back."

  The other swallowed.

  "I'd only have got myself caught," he said sullenly. "That chap who jumped out of the car was twice my size. He'd've killed me!"

  Mr Osbett stopped maltreating his moustache and looked at him for a long moment in curiously contrasting immo­bility.

  "That might have saved someone else the trouble," he said; and the tone in which he said it made the young man's face turn grey.

  Osbett's cold stare lasted for a moment longer: and then he took a fresh grip on his whiskers and turned and scuttled through to the back of the shop. One might almost have thought that he had gone off in the full flush of enthusiasm to fetch an axe.

  Beyond the dispensing room there was a dark staircase. As he mounted the stairs his gait and carriage changed in subtle ways until it was as if a different man had entered his entered his clothes. On the upper landing his movements were measured and deliberate. He opened a door and went into a rather shabby and nondescript room which served as his private office. There were two or three old-fashioned filing cabinets, a littered desk with the polish worn off at the edges, a dingy carpet, and a couple of junkstore chairs. Mr Osbett sat down at the desk and opened a packet of cheap cigarettes.

  He was a very worried man, and with good reason: but he no longer looked flustered. He had, at that moment, a very cold-blooded idea of his position. He was convinced that Teal's getaway with the packet of Miracle Tea had been neither premeditated nor intentional—otherwise there would have been further developments before this. It had simply been one of those fantastic accidents which lie in wait for the most careful conspiracies. That was a certain consolation; but not much. As soon as the contents of the packet were opened there would be questions to answer; and while it was quite certain that nothing criminal could be proved from any answers he cared to give, it would still make him the object of an amount of suspicious attention which might easily lead to disaster later. There remained the chance that Teal might not decide to actually take a dose of Miracle Tea for some hours yet, and it was a chance that had to be seized quickly. After another moment's intensive consideration, Mr Osbett picked up the telephone.