The Saint Meets His Match (She was a Lady)

Teal shrugged.

'And which?' he asked tersely.

'There'll be an inquiry, of course,'

'And what will that find out? We know the Angels had a lot of money, and I know the Saint still has. Sup­pose they've bought someone actually in the Yard, why should it be one man more than another?' Teal reached out a slothful arm and picked up one of the blank sheets. It was creased down the centre, as were the other sheets. Teal shuffled the pile together and folded them over the crease. 'They'd go into a man's breast pocket,' he said. 'It's cheap and ordinary paper—the kind they use in a few hundred offices. We shan't find any clue there.'

He picked up the note.

'What do you make of that?' asked Cullis.

'It's almost the same handwriting as the note they left on Essenden in Paris, isn't it?'

'Not exactly the same, though. But the writing was disguised, anyway. A man can't write a disguised hand as consistently as he writes his own natural fist.'

'Man?' queried Cullis sharply.

'Simon Templar,' said Teal sleepily. 'I'll swear he wrote that note to Essenden in Paris, anyway.'

'And this one?'

'Simon Templar,' said Teal, somewhat inconsequent­ly, 'is a very clever young man.'

Cullis looked at him. He remembered that the feud between Chief Inspector Teal and the Saint was one of the epic legends of the force. There had been truces from time to time—truces and breezy interludes—but the fundamental feud had never finished. And if anything had been wanting to reawaken in Teal's expansive breast the ambition to be the first man to lag Simon Templar, it should have been supplied to him on the night in Lon­don, such a very short time ago, when the Saint had balked him of a coveted prey by a trick which a babe in arms should have spotted and which a middle-aged police constable had somehow failed to spot.

'A very clever young man,' said Teal.

'Have you any idea where he is now?'

'He's in London, living in his own home. I saw him last night.'

'You saw him?' exclaimed Cullis incredulously.-'But—'

'Need we have any more of that?' asked Teal wearily. 'I'm tired of being told I ought to arrest him. I'm tired of explaining that we can't do anything against him in England for robbing Essenden in Paris. And I'm tired of explaining that you can suspect what you like about him and Jill having been at Essenden's the night Essen­den disappeared. But you can't prove anything, and Simon Templar knows it. He can admit anything he likes in private conversations with me, but that evidence dis­appears the moment I walk out into the street again. He's made a fool of me once, and I'm not going to give him the chance of making a fool of me again by charging me with unlawful arrest. Don't you know that the Saint has never yet been inside?' he added.

'With his record?'

'He hasn't got a record,' said Teal. 'He's a suspi­cious character, and an absconding policeman, but that's the worst you can say about him without paying damages for slander—except for that affair in Paris, which we can't do anything about. Once upon a time there were other things we could have held him for, but he got a pardon and wiped all those out. Heavens above, sir,' Teal broke out in a kind of helpless exasperation, 'haven't I spent years of my life trying to