Follow the Saint s-20 Page 3

  IV

  SIMON TEMPLAR had been out and come in again after a visit to the nearest chemist. Now he was industriously stirring an interesting mixture in a large basin borrowed from the kitchen. Patricia Holm sat in an armchair and watched him despairingly.

  "Did you ever hear a proverb about little things pleasing little minds ?" she said.

  Unabashed, the Saint put down his spoon and admired his handiwork. To any but the most minute examination, it looked exactly like a high-grade small-leaf tea. And some of it was. The other ingredients were hardly less ordinary, except in that particular combination.

  "Did you ever hear another proverb about a prophet in his own country ?" he answered. "If you had a little more reverence for my mind, you'd see that it was nearly double its normal size. Don't you get the idea ?"

  "Not yet."

  "This is what I originally meant to do. Maybe it wasn't such a huge idea then; although if I could get enough little ideas that handed me fifteen hundred quid a time I wouldn't worry so much about passing up the big stuff. But still that was just good clean fun. Now it's more than that. If I'm right, and Teal still doesn't know what he had in his pocket this after­noon, we don't want him to even start thinking about it. Therefore I just want to return him his Miracle Tea, and I'll be sure he won't give it another thought. But I never had any Miracle Tea. Therefore I've got to concoct a passable substitute. I don't know the original formula; but if this recipe doesn't live up to the name I'll drink a gallon of it."

  "Of course," she said, "you couldn't just go out and buy another packet to give him."

  Simon gazed at her in stunned admiration.

  "Could you believe that I never thought of that ?"

  "No," said Patricia.

  "Maybe your right," said the Saint ruefully.

  He gave the basin another stir, and shrugged.

  "Anyway," he said, "it'd be a pity to waste all this work, and the chance of a lifetime as well."

  He sat down at the table and cheerfully proceeded to pack his own remarkable version of Miracle Tea into the original carton. Having stuffed it full, he replaced the seals and wrappings with as much care as he had removed them; and when he had finished there was not a trace to show that the package had ever been tampered with.

  "What will you do if he dies ?" asked the girl.

  "Send a wreath of tea roses to his funeral," said the Saint. He put down the completed packet after he had inspected it closely from every angle, and moved himself over to a more comfortable lounging site on the settee. His eyes were alert and hot with a gathering zest of devilment. "Now we go into the second half of this brilliant conspiracy."

  "What does that mean ?"

  "Finding out where Claud Eustace buys fifteen hundred quid for half a dollar. Just think, sweetheart—we can go shopping once a week and keep ourselves in caviar without ever doing another stroke of work!"

  He reached for the telephone and set it on his lap while he dialled Teal's private number with a swift and dancing fore­finger. The telephone, he knew, was beside Teal's bed; and the promptness with which his ring was answered established the detective's location with quite miraculous certainty.

  "I hope," said the Saint, with instantaneous politeness, "that I haven't interrupted you in the middle of any import­ant business, Claud."

  The receiver did not actually explode in his ear. It was a soundly constructed instrument, designed to resist spontane­ous detonation. It did, however, appear to feel some strain in reproducing the cracked-foghorn cadence in which the answering voice said: "Who's that?"

  "And how," said the Saint, "is the little tum-tum tonight ?"

  Mr Teal did not repeat his question. He had no need to. There was only one voice in the whole world which was capable of inquiring after his stomach with the exact inflec­tion which was required to make that hypersensitive organ curl up into tight knots that sent red and yellow flashes squirting across his eyeballs.

  Mr Teal did not groan aloud; but a minute organic groan swept through him like a cramp from his fingertips to his toes.

  It is true that he was in bed, and it is also true that he had been interrupted in the middle of some important business; but that important business had been simply and exclusively concerned with trying to drown his multitudinous woes in sleep. For a man in the full bloom of health to be smitten over the knob with a blunt instrument is usually a somewhat trying experience; but for a man in Mr Teal's dyspeptic condition to be thus beaned is ultimate disaster. Mr Teal now had two fearful pains rivalling for his attention, which he had been trying to give to neither. The only way of evad­ing this responsibility which he had been able to think of had been to go to bed and go to sleep, which is what he had set out to do as soon as the Saint had left him at his door; but sleep had steadfastly eluded him until barely five minutes before the telephone bell had blared its recall to conscious suffering into his anguished ear. And when he became aware that the emotions which he had been caused by that recall had been wrung out of him for no better object than to answer some Saintly badinage about his abdomen, his throat dosed up so that it was an effort for him to breathe.

  "Is that all you want to know ?" he got out in a strangled squawk. "Because if so——"

  "But it bothers me, Claud. You know how I love your tummy. It would break my heart if anything went wrong with it."

  "Who told you anything was wrong with it?"

  "Only my famous deductive genius. Or do you mean to tell me you drink Miracle Tea because you like it ?"

  There was a pause. With the aid of television, Mr Teal could have been seen to wriggle. The belligerent blare crumpled out of his voice.

  "Oh," he said weakly. "What miracle tea ?"

  "The stuff you had in your pocket this afternoon. I threw it into the car with your other things when I picked you up, but we forgot it when you got out. I've just found it. Guaranteed to cure indigestion, colic, flatulence, constipa­tion, venomous bile, spots before the eyes ... I didn't know you had so many troubles, Claud."

  "I haven't!" Teal roared defiantly. His stomach promptly performed two complicated and unprecedented evolutions and made a liar of him. He winced, and floundered. "I—I just happened to hear it advertised on the radio, and then I saw another advertisement in a shop window on the way home, so I thought I'd try some. I—I haven't been feeling very fit lately——"

  "Then I certainly think you ought to try something," said the Saint charitably. "I'll beetle over with your poison right away; and if I can help out with a spot of massage, you only have to say the word."

  Mr Teal closed his eyes. Of all the things he could think of which might aggravate his miseries, a visit from the Saint at that time was the worst.

  "Thanks," he said with frantic earnestness, "but all I want now is to get some sleep. Bring it over some other time, Saint."

  Simon reached thoughtfully for a cigarette.

  "Just as you like, Claud. Shall we say the May Fair to­morrow, at four o'clock ?"

  "You could send it round," Teal said desperately. "Or just throw it away. I can get some more. If it's any bother."

  "No bother at all, dear old collywobble. Let's call it a date. Tomorrow at four—and we'll have a cup of tea together...."

  The Saint laid the telephone gently back on its bracket and replaced it on the table beside him. His thumb flicked over the wheel of his lighter; and the tip of his cigarette kindled to a glow that matched the brightening gleam of certainty in his blue eyes.

  He had obtained all the information he wanted without pressing a single conspicuous question. Mr Teal had bought his Miracle Tea on the way home—and Simon knew that Mr Teal's way home, across Parliament Square and up Victoria Street, was so rigidly established by years of unconscious habit that a blind man could almost have followed it by tracing the groove which the detective's regulation boots must by that time have worn along the pavement. Even if there were more than one chemist's along that short trail with a Miracle Tea advertisement in the wind
ow, the process of elimination could not take long. . . .

  Patricia was watching him.

  She said: "So what?"

  "So we were right," said the Saint; and his voice was lilting with incorrigible magic. "Claud doesn't give a damn about his tea. It doesn't mean a thing in his young life. He doesn't care if he never sees it again. He just bought it by a fluke, and he doesn't even know what sort of a fluke it was."

  "Are you sure?" asked Patricia cautiously. "If he just doesn't want you to suspect anything——"

  The Saint shook his head.

  "I know all Claud's voices much too well. If he'd tried to get away with anything like that, I should have heard it. And why should he try ? I offered to bring it round at once, and he could have just said nothing and let me bring it. Why should he take any risk at all of something going wrong when he could have had the package back in half an hour. Teal may look dumb sometimes, but you can't see him being so dumb as that." Simon stood up, and his smile was irresist­ibly expectant. "Come out into the wide world with me, darling, and let's look for this shop where they sell miracles!"

  His energy carried her off like a tide race; the deep purr of the Hirondel as he drove it at fantastic speed to Parliament Square was in tune with his mood. Why it should have happened again, like this, he didn't know; but it might as well have been this way as any other. Whatever the way, it had been bound to happen. Destiny could never leave him alone for long, and it must have been at least a week since anything exciting had happened to him. But now that would be all put right, and there would be trouble and adventure and mystery again, and with a little luck some boodle at the end; that was all that mattered. Somewhere in this delirious business of Miracle Tea and Bank of England notes there must be crime and dark conspiracies and all manner of mis­chief—he couldn't surmise yet what kind of racket could subsist on trading handfuls of bank notes for half-crowns, but it was even harder to imagine anything like that in a line of legitimate business, so some racket or other it must be, and new rackets could never be altogether dull. He parked the car illegally on the corner of Victoria Street, and got out.

  "Let's walk," he said.

  He took Patricia's arm and strolled with her up the street; and as they went he burbled exuberantly.

  "Maybe it's an eccentric millionaire who suffered from acute dyspepsia all his life, and in his will he directed that all his fortune was to be distributed among other sufferers, because he knew that there really wasn't any cure at all, but at least the money would be some consolation. So without any publicity his executors had the dough wrapped up in packets labelled as an indigestion cure, feeling pretty sure that nobody who didn't have indigestion would buy it, and thereby saving themselves the trouble of sorting through a lot of applicants with bogus belly-aches. ... Or maybe it's some guy who has made all the money in the world out of defrauding the poor nitwitted public with various patent medicines, whose conscience has pricked him in his old age so that he is trying to fix himself up for the Hereafter by making restitution, and the most appropriate way he can think of to do that is to distribute the geetus in the shape of another patent medicine, figuring that that is the way it's most likely to fall into the same hands that it originally came from.... Or maybe——"

  "Or maybe," said Patricia, "this is the place you're looking for."

  Simon stopped walking and looked at it.

  There was a showcard in the centre of the window—the same card, as a matter of fact, which Mr Teal had seen. But the Saint was taking no chances.

  "Let's make sure," he said.

  He led her the rest of the way up the street for a block beyond the turning where Mr Teal would have branched off on the most direct route to his lodgings, and back down the opposite side; but no other drug-store window revealed a similar sign.

  Simon stood on the other side of the road again, and gazed across at the brightly lighted window which they had first looked at. He read the name 'HENRY OSBETT & CO.' across the front of the shop.

  He let go Patricia's arm.

  "Toddle over, darling," he said, "and buy me a packet of Miracle Tea."

  "What happens if I get shot?" she asked suspiciously.

  "I shall hear the bang," he said, "and phone for an ambulance."

  Two minutes later she rejoined him with a small neat parcel in her hand. He fell in beside her as she came across the road, and turned in the direction of the lower end of the street, where he had left the car.

  "How was Comrade Osbett?" he murmured. "Still keep­ing up with the world?"

  "He looked all right, if he was the fellow who served me." She passed him the packet she was carrying. "Now do you mind telling me what good this is supposed to do ?"

  "We must listen to one of their broadcasts and find out. According to the wrapper, it disperses bile——"

  She reached across to his hip pocket, and he laughed.

  "Okay, darling. Don't waste any bullets—we may need them. I just wanted to find out if there were any curious features about buying Miracle Tea, and I didn't want to go in myself because I'm liable to want to go in again without being noticed too much."

  "I didn't see anything curious," she said. "I just asked for it, and he wrapped it up and gave it to me."

  "No questions or stalling?"

  "No. It was just like buying a toothbrush or anything else."

  "Didn't he seem to be at all interested in who was buying it?"

  "Not a bit."

  He held the package to his ear, shook it, and crunched it speculatively.

  "We'll have a drink somewhere and see if we've won any­thing," he said.

  At a secluded corner table in the Florida, a while later, he opened the packet, with the same care to preserve the seals and wrappings as he had given to the first consignment, and tipped out the contents on to a plate. The contents, to any ordinary examination, consisted of nothing but tea—and, by the smell and feel of it, not very good tea either.

  The Saint sighed, and called a waiter to remove the mess.

  "It looks as if we were wrong about that eccentric millionaire," he said. "Or else the supply of doremi has run out.... Well, I suppose we shall just have to go to work again." He folded the container and stowed it carefully away in his pocket; and if he was disappointed he was able to conceal his grief. A glimmer of reckless optimism curled the corners of his mouth. "You know, darling, I have a hunch that some interesting things are going to happen before this time to­morrow night."

  He was a better prophet than he knew, and it took only a few hours to prove it.

  V

  SIMON TEMPLAR slept like a child. A thunderstorm bursting over his roof would not have woken him; a herd of wild elephants stampeding past his bed would scarcely have made him stir; but one kind of noise that other ears might not have heard at all even in full wakefulness brought him back instantaneously to life with every faculty sharpened and on tiptoe.

  He awoke in a breathless flash, like a watchdog, without the slightest perceptible alteration in his rate of breathing or any sudden movement. Anyone standing over him would not have even sensed the change that had taken place. But his eyes were half open, and his wits were skidding back over the last split second of sleep like the recoil of taut elastic, searching for a definition of the sound that had aroused him.

  The luminous face of a clock across the room told him that he had slept less than two hours. And the thinly phos­phorescent hands hadn't moved on enough for the naked eye to see when he knew why he was awake.

  In the adjoining living-room, something human had moved.

  Simon drew down the automatic from under his pillow and slid out of bed like a phantom. He left the communicating door alone, and sidled noiselessly through the other door which led out into the hall. The front door was open just enough to split the darkness with a knife-edge of illumina­tion from the lights on the landing outside: he eased over to it like a cat, slipped his fingers through the gap, and felt the burred edges of the hole which had been d
rilled through the outside of the frame so that the catch of the spring lock would be pushed back.

  A light blinked beyond the open door of the living-room. The Saint came to the entrance and looked in. Silhouetted against the subdued glow of an electric torch he saw the shape of a man standing by the table with his back to the door, and his bare feet padded over the carpet without a breath of sound until they were almost under the intruder's heels. He leaned over until his lips were barely a couple of inches from the visitor's right ear.

  "Boo," said the Saint.

  It was perhaps fortunate for the intruder that he had a strong heart, for if he had had the slightest cardiac weakness the nervous shock which spun him round would have probably popped it like a balloon. As it was, an involuntary yammer of sheer primitive fright dribbled out of his throat before he lashed out blindly in no less instinctive self-defence.

  Simon had anticipated that. He was crouching almost to his knees by that time, and his left arm snaked around the lower part of the man's legs simultaneously with a quick thrust of his shoulder against the other's thighs.

  The burglar went over backwards with a violent thud; and as most of his breath jolted out of him he freighted it with a selection of picturesque expletives which opened up new vistas of biologic theory. One hand, swinging up in a vicious arc, was caught clearly in the beam of the fallen flashlight, and it was not empty.

  "I think," said the Saint, "we can do without the persua­der."