11 The Brighter Buccaneer

hours of fruitless searching for clues after a special police car had brought him down from London.

Teal, having given his outline of the barest facts, had be­come taciturn, and Simon made no attempt to force the pace. The Saint appreciated the compliment of the detective's confidence-although perhaps it was only one of many occa­sions on which those two epic antagonists had been silent in a momentary recognition of the impossible friendship that might have been just as epic if their destinies had lain in different paths. Those were the brief interludes when a truce was possi­ble between them; and the hint of a sigh in Teal's silent rum­inations might have been taken to indicate that he wished the truce could have been extended indefinitely.

In the same silence they turned in between the somewhat pompous concrete gate-pillars that gave entrance to the grounds of Sir Joseph Whipplethwaite's country seat. From there, a gravelled carriage drive led them in a semicircular curve through a rough, densely-grown plantation and brought them rather suddenly into sight of the house, which was invisi­ble from the road. A uniformed local constable was patrolling in front of the door; he saluted as he saw Teal, and looked at the Saint inquiringly.

Teal, however, was uncommunicative. He stood aside for the Saint to pass, and ushered him personally through the front door-a performance which, from the village constable's point of view, was sufficient introduction to one who could scarcely have been less than an Assistant Commissioner.

The house was not only modern, as Teal had described it-it was almost prophetic. From the outside, it looked at first glance like the result of some close in-breeding between an aquarium, a wedding cake, and a super cinema. It was large, white and square, with enormous areas of window and erratic balconies which looked as if they had been transferred bodily from the facade of an Atlantic liner. Inside, it was remarkably light and airy, with a certain ascetic barrenness of furnishing that made it seem too studiously sanitary to be comfortable, like a hospital ward.

Teal led the way down a long wide white hall, and opened a door at the end. Simon found himself in a room that needed no introduction as Sir Joseph's study. Every wall had long bookshelves let into its depth in the modern style, and there was a glass-topped desk with a steel-framed chair behind it; the upper reaches of the walls were plastered with an assortment of racquets, bats, skis, skates, and illuminated addresses that looked oddly incongruous.

'Is this architecture Joseph's idea?' asked the Saint.

'I think it's his wife's,' said Teal. 'She's very progressive.'

It certainly looked like a place in which any self-respecting mystery should have died of exhaustion looking for a suitable place to happen. The safe in which the treaty had reposed was the one touch about it that showed any trace of fantasy, for it was sunk in flush with the wall and covered by a mirror, which, when it was opened, proved to be the door of the safe itself, and the keyhole was concealed in a decorative scroll of white metal worked into a frame of the glass which slid aside in cunningly-fashioned grooves to disclose it.

Teal demonstrated its working; and the Saint was interested.

'The burglars don't seem to have damaged it much,' he remarked, and Teal gave him a glance that seemed curiously lethargic.

'They haven't damaged it at all,' he said. 'If you go over it with a magnifying glass you won't find a trace of its having been tampered with.'

'How many keys?'

'Two. Whipplethwaite wears one on his watch-chain, and the other is at his bank in London.'

For the first time that day two thin hair-lines of puzzlement cut vertically down between the Saint's level brows. They were the only outward signs of a wild idea, an intuition too ludi­crous even to hint at, that flickered through his mind at the tone of the detective's voice.

'Whipplethwaite went to church on Sunday morning,' said Teal, with an expressionless face, 'and worked over the treaty when he came back. He took it to lunch with him; and then he locked it up in the safe and went upstairs to his room to rest. He was rather taken up with the importance of secrecy, and he had demanded two guards from the local police. One of them was at the front door, where we came in. The other was outside here.'

Teal walked towards the tall windows which filled nearly the whole of one wall of the room. Right in the centre of these windows, on the stone-flagged terrace outside, the back of a seated man loomed against the light like a statuette in a glass case.

Simon had noticed him as soon as they entered the room: he appeared to be painting a scene of the landscape, and as they went through the windows and came out behind him Simon observed that the canvas on his easel was covered with brightly-coloured daubs of paint in various abstruse geometri­cal shapes. He looked up at the sound of their footsteps, gave the Saint a casual nod, and bowed politely to the detective.

'Well, sir,' he said, with a trace of mockery, 'how are the investigations going?'

'We're doing the best we can,' said Teal vaguely, and turned to Simon. 'This is Mr. Spencer Vallance, who was painting exactly where you see him now when the robbery took place. Down there'-he pointed to a grass tennis- court which was cut bodily, like a great step, out of the fairly steep slope below them-'those same four people you see were play­ing. They're finalists in the South of England Junior Championships, and they're staying here as Whipplethwaite's guests for a week.

'The other constable on guard was supposed to be patrol­ling the back of the house-we're at the back now-and at the time when the burglary was committed he was about three-quarters of the way down this slope, with his back to the house, watching the game. In fact, the scene you see is almost exactly the same as it was at half past three yesterday after­noon.'

Simon nodded, and glanced again at Mr. Vallance, who had resumed his interrupted task of painting a neat blue border around a green isosceles triangle on a short brown stalk that was presumably intended to represent a poplar in the fore­ground. The Art of Mr. Spencer Vallance was so perfectly ap­propriate to his background that it gave one a sense of shock. One felt that such a preposterous aptness outraged one's canons of that human inconsistency which we have come to ac­cept as normal. It was like seeing a doorman in Arab costume outside a restaurant called 'The Oasis,' and discovering that he really was a genuine Arab. Vallance's picture was exactly like the house behind it: scientific, hygienic, and quite inhu­man.

Simon spent a few seconds trying to co-ordinate the masses of colour on the canvas with the scene before his eyes, which was particularly human and charming. To left and right of him strips of untouched plantation which were probably continuations of the spinney through which they had approached the house flanked the grounds right down beyond the tennis-court to the banks of a stream; while beyond the stream the land rose again up a long curve of hill crowned with a dark sprawl of woods.