The Saint vs Scotland Yard (The Holy Terror)

'I admit it seemed rather odd, but I thought maybe Lionel hadn't got a spare seat in his office.'

Teal and Patricia between them got him as far as the top of the stairs where he put the chair down, sat on it, and refused to move.

'I'm going home,' said Patricia finally.

'Bring some oranges back with you,' said the Saint. 'And don't forget your knitting. What time do the early doors open?'

The situation was only saved by the return of the harassed clerk.

'Mr. Delborn will see you, sir.'

He led the way through the general office and opened a door at the end.

'What name, sir?'

'Ghandi,' said the Saint, and stalked into the room.

And there he stopped.

For the first time in his life, Simon Templar stood frozen into a kind of paralysis of sheer incredulous startlement.

In its own genre, that moment was the supremely flabber­gasting instant of his life. Battle, murder, and sudden death of all kinds and varieties notwithstanding, the most hectic mo­ments of the most earth-shaking cataclysms in which he had been involved paled their ineffectual fires beside the eye-shriv­elling dazzle of that second. And the Saint stood utterly still, with every shadow of expression wiped from his face, momentarily robbed of even his facile power of speech, simply staring.

For the man at the desk was Wilfred Garniman.

Wilfred Garniman himself, exactly as the Saint had seen him on that very first expedition to Harrow—black-coated, black-tied, the perfect office gentleman with a fifty-two-inch waist. Wilfred Garniman sitting there in a breathless immobil­ity that matched the Saint's, but with the prosperous colour draining from his face and his coarse lips going grey.

And then the Saint found his voice.

'Oh, it's you, Wilfred, is it?' The words trickled very softly into the deathly silence. 'And this is Simon Templar speaking —not a ghost. I declined to turn into a ghost, even though I was buried. And Patricia Holm did the same. She's outside at this very moment, if you'd like to see her. And so is Chief Inspector Teal—with your photograph in his pocket. . . . Do you know that this is very tough on me, sweetheart? I've promised you to Teal, and I ought to be killing you myself. Buried Pat alive, you did—or you meant to. ... And you're the greasy swine that's been pestering me to pay your knock-kneed taxes. No wonder you took to Scorping in your spare time. I wouldn't mind betting you began in this very office, and the capital you started with was the things you wormed out of people under the disguise of official inquiries. . . . And I came in to give you one thousand, three hundred and thirty-seven pounds, nineteen and fivepence of your own money, all out of the strong-box under that very interesting chair, Wilfred——'

He saw the beginning of the movement that Garniman made, and hurled himself sideways. The bullet actually skinned one of his lower ribs, though he did not know it until later. He swerved into the heavy desk, and got his hands under the edge. For one weird instant he looked from a range of two yards into the eyes of Wilfred Garniman, who was in the act of rising out of his chair. Garniman's automatic was swinging round for a second shot, and the thunder of the first seemed to still be hanging in the air. And behind him Simon heard the rattle of the door.

And then—to say that he tipped the desk over would be absurd. To have done anything so feeble would have been a sentence of death pronounced simultaneously upon Patricia Holm and Claud Eustace Teal and himself—at least. The Saint knew that.

But as the others burst into the room, it seemed as if the Saint gathered up the whole desk in his two hands, from the precarious hold that he had on it, and flung it hugely and terrifically into the wall; and Wilfred Garniman was carried before it like a great bloated fly before a cannon-ball. . . .And, really, that was that. . . .

The story of the Old Bailey trial reached Palma about six weeks later, in an ancient newspaper which Patricia Holm produced one morning.

Simon Templar was not at all interested in the story; but he was vastly interested in an illustration thereto which he dis­covered at the top of the page. The Press photographer had done his worst; and Chief Inspector Teal, the hero of the case, caught unawares in the very act of inserting some fresh chew­ing gum in his mouth as he stepped out on to the pavement of Newgate Street, was featured looking almost libellously like an infuriated codfish afflicted with some strange uvular growth.

Simon clipped out the portrait and pasted it neatly at the head of a large plain postcard. Underneath it he wrote:

Claud Eustace  Teal, when  overjoyed,