moment is that a cop who arrived two minutes too late to be useful got my number. With Beppo in the back, I couldn't stop to hold converse with him, and you can bet he's jumped to the worst conclusions. In which he's damned right, but not in the way he thinks he is. There was a phone box twenty yards away, and unless the Negro Spiritual strangled him first he's referred my number to London most of an hour ago, and Teal will be snorting down a hot scent as soon as they can get him out of bed. Now, all you've got to know is this: I've just arrived, and I'm in my bath. Tell the glad news to anyone who rings up and anyone who calls; and if it's a call, hang a towel out of the window.'
'But where are you going?'
'The Berkeley—to park the patient. I just dropped in to give you your cue.' Simon Templar drew the end of a cigarette red, and snapped his lighter shut again. 'And I'll be right back,' he said, and wormed in behind the wheel.
A matter of seconds later the big car was in Berkeley Street, and he was pushing through the revolving doors of the hotel.
'Friend of mine had a bit of a car smash,' he rapped at a sleepy reception clerk. 'I wanna room for him now, and a doctor at eleven. Will you send a coupla men out to carry him in? Car at the door.'
'One four eight,' said the clerk, without batting an eyelid.
Simon saw the unconscious man carried upstairs, shot half-crowns into the hands of the men who performed the transportation, and closed the door on them.
Then he whipped from his pocket a thin nickelled case which he had brought from a pocket in the car. He snapped the neck of a small glass phial and drew up the colourless fluid it contained into the barrel of a hypodermic syringe. His latest protege was still sleeping the sleep of sheer exhaustion, but Simon had no guarantee of how long that sleep would last. He proceeded to provide that guarantee himself, stabbing the needle into a limp arm and pressing home the plunger until the complete dose had been administered.
Then he closed and locked the door behind him and went quickly down the stairs.
Below, the reception clerk stopped him. 'What name shall I register, sir?'
'Teal,' said the Saint, with a wry flick of humour. 'Mr. C. E. Teal. He'll sign your book later.'
'Yes, sir. . . . Er—has Mr. Teal no luggage, sir?' 'Nope.' A new ten-pound note drifted down to the desk. 'On account,' said the Saint. 'And see that the doctor's waiting here for me at eleven, or I'll take the roof off your hotel and crown you with it.'
He pulled his cap sideways and went back to his car. As he turned into Upper Berkeley Mews for the second time, he saw that his first homecoming had only just been soon enough. But that did not surprise him, for he had figured out his chances on that schedule almost to a second. A warning blink of white from an upper window caught his expectant eye at once, and he locked the wheel hard over and pulled up broadside on across the mews. In a flash he was out of his seat unlocking a pair of garage doors right at the street end of the mews, and in another second or two the car was hissing back into that garage with the cut-out firmly closed.
The Saint, without advertising the fact, had recently become the owner of one complete side of Upper Berkeley Mews, and he was in process of making some interesting structural alterations to that block of real estate of which the London County Council had not been informed and about which the District Surveyor had not even been consulted. The great work was not yet by any means completed, but even now it was capable of serving part of its purposes.
Simon went up a ladder into the bare empty room above. In one corner a hole had been roughly knocked through the wall; he went through it into another similar room, and on the far side of this was another hole in a wall; thus he passed in quick succession through numbers 1, 3, and 5, until the last plunge through the last hole and a curtain beyond it brought him into No. 7 and his own bedroom.
His tie was already off and his shirt unbuttoned by that time, and he tore off the rest of his clothes in little more than the time it took him to stroll through to the bathroom. And the bath was already full—filled long ago by Patricia.
'Thinks of everything!' sighed the Saint, with a wide grin of pure delight.
He slid into the bath like an otter, head and all, and came out of it almost in the same movement with a mighty splash, tweaking the plug out of the waste pipe as he did so. In another couple of seconds he was hauling himself into an enormously woolly blue bath-robe and grabbing a towel . . . and he went paddling down the stairs with his feet kicking about in a pair of gorgeously dilapidated moccasins, humming the hum of a man with a copper-plated liver and not one solitary little baby sin upon his conscience.
