The Saint vs Scotland Yard (The Holy Terror)

disadvantage sooner than he could help. The searing vials of righteous indignation within him had sim­mered down still further during the drive from Regent's Park, and out of the travail caution had been born. His purpose hadn't weakened in the least, but he wasn't going to trip over his own feet in the attempt to achieve it. The lights of battle glittering about in the Saint's blue eyes augured a heap of snags along the route that was to be paddled, and for once Chief Inspector Teal was trying to take the hint.

'Coming quietly?' he asked.

The feeler went out, gruffly noncommital; and Simon smiled.

'You're expecting me to ask why,' he drawled, 'but I refuse to do anything that's expected of me. Besides, I know.'

'How do you know?'

'My spies are everywhere. Sit down, Claud. That's a collapsi­ble chair we bought specially for you, and the cigars in that box explode when you light them. Oh, and would you mind taking off your hat?—it doesn't go with the wallpaper.'

Teal removed his bowler with savage tenderness. He realised that he was going to have an uphill fight to keep the promise he had made to himself. There was the faintest thickening in his lethargic voice as he repeated his question.

'How do you know what I want you for?'

'My dear soul, how else could I have known except by being with you when you first conceived the idea of wanting me?' answered the Saint blandly.

'So you're going to admit it really was you I was talking to at Regent's Park?'

'Between ourselves—it was.'

'Got some underground way out of here, haven't you?'

'The place is a rabbit-warren.'

'And where's Perrigo?'

'He's playing bunny.'

Teal twiddled a button, and his eyelids lowered. The lead­ing tentacles of a nasty cold sensation were starting to weave clammily up his spine. It was something akin to the sensation experienced by a man who, in the prelude to a nightmare, has been cavorting happily about in the middle of a bridge over a fathomless abyss, and who suddenly discovers that the bridge has turned into a thin slab of toffee and the temperature is rising.

Something was springing a leak. He hadn't the ghost of a presentiment of what the leak was going to be, but the symp­toms of its approach were bristling all over the situation like the quills on a porcupine.

'You helped Perrigo to escape at Regent's Park, didn't you?' He tried to make his voice sleepier and more bored than it had ever been before, but the strain clipped minute snippets off the ends of the syllables. 'You're admitting that you caused a wilful breach of the peace by discharging firearms in a public thoroughfare, and you obstructed and assaulted the police in the execution of their duty, and that you became an accessory to wilful murder?'

'Between these four walls,' said the Saint, 'and in these trousers, I cannot tell a lie.'

'Very well.' Teal's knuckles whitened over the brim of his hat. 'Templar, I arrest you——'

'Oh, no,' said the Saint. 'Oh, no, Claud, you don't.'

The detective tautened up as if he had received a blow. But Simon Templar wasn't even looking at him. He was selecting a cigarette from a box on the centre table. He flicked it into the air and caught it between his lips, with his hands complacently outspread. 'My only parlour trick,' he remarked, changing the subject.

Teal spoke through his teeth.

'And why?' he flared.

'Only one I ever learnt,' explained the Saint naively.

'Why don't I arrest you?'

Simon ranged himself side-saddle on the table. He stroked the cog of an automatic lighter and put his cigarette in the flame.

'Because, Claud, what I say to you now, between these four walls and in these trousers, and what I'd say in the witness-box, are two things so totally different you'd hardly believe they came from the same rosebud mouth.'