Teal's glance scorched round it. There was plenty of furniture, but not a thing that would have given cover to a full-grown man. Then he saw a communicating door in another wall, and swore.
He dashed through, leaving his men to deal with the easy prisoner. Curtains flapping before an open window caught his eye, and instinctively he went over and stuck his head out. A man standing by a bush below looked up.
'Seen anyone?' Teal shouted.
'No, sir.'
Teal withdrew his head and noticed a second door standing ajar. He went through it and found himself back on the landing he had just left, and his language became lurid.
Simon Templar and Perrigo stopped for a moment in the hall. Perrigo was a tough guy from the Uskides upwards, but Simon felt personally responsible for his safety and he took the responsibility seriously. There were irrefutable financial reasons for his solicitude—one hundred thousand of them. And for the duration of the fast-travelling episode he had got Perrigo's confidence. He tapped the gangster's bosom impressively.
'In case we should get separated, 7, Upper Berkeley Mews is the address,' he stated. 'See you remember it.'
Perrigo gloomed sidelong at him, still fuddled with suspicious perplexity.
'I don't want to see you again,' he growled.
'You will,' said the Saint, and pushed him onwards.
Chief Inspector Teal floundered to the top of the stairs, and two of his men pressed close behind him. They looked down and saw Simon Templar alone in the hall, hands on hips, with his back to the door and an angelic smile on his upturned face.
'About that rhyme,' said the Saint. 'I've just thought of something. Suppose the old colonel 'went up in smoke for his gluttony? Would the Poet Laureate pass it? Would Wilhelmina Stitch approve?'
'Get him!' snapped Teal.
The detectives swept down in a bunch.
They saw the Saint open the door, and heard outside the sharp pipping of a motor-horn. Patricia Holm was cruising round. But this they did not know. The door slammed shut again, and as a kind of multiple echo to the slam came the splattering cackle of an automatic. It fired four times, and then Teal got the door open.
He faced a considerable volume of pitchy darkness, out of which spoke the voice of one of the men he had posted to guard the courtyard.
'I'm sorry, sir—they got away.'
'What happened?'
'Shot out the lights and slipped us in the dark, sir.' Way down the road, a horn tooted seven times, derisively.
Chapter IV
A tinge of old beetroot suffused Mr. Teal's rubicund complexion.
To say that his goat was completely and omnipotently got conveys nothing at all. In the last ten minutes his goat had been utterly annihilated, and the remains spirited away to the exact point in space where (so Einstein says) eternity changes its socks and starts back on the return journey. He was as comprehensively de-goated as a man can be.
With a foaming cauldron of fury bubbling just below his collar, he stood and watched his two outposts come up the steps towards him.
'Did you see Perrigo?' he rasped.
'Yes, sir. He came out first, and waited. I didn't recognise him at once—thought it was one of our own men. Then another bloke came out '
Teal turned on the men behind him.
'And what are you loafing about here for?' he stormed. 'D'you want your nannies to hold your hands when you go out at night? Get after them!'
He left the pursuit in their hands, and fumed back up the stairs. There he found a bedraggled Isadore Elberman, released at last from his eccentric headgear, in charge of a plain-clothes constable. The receiver was as loquacious as Teal allowed him to be.
'You can't hold me for nothing, Mr. Teal. Those men attacked me and tied me up. You saw how I was fixed when you came in.'
'I know all about you,' said Teal unpleasantly.
