13 The Saint Intervenes (Boodle)

'And yet you'll probably be trying to arrest me again next week,' said the Saint.

'I shouldn't be surprised,' said Mr. Teal heavily.

They stood in the doorway of Arthur's, preparing to sepa­rate; and Simon was idly scanning the street when the moustache of Mr. Sumner Journ hove into view.

Let it be said at once that it was no ordinarily overgrown moustache, attracting attention by nothing but its mere vulgar size. It was, in fact, the reverse. From a slight distance no moustache was visible at all; and the Saint was looking at Mr. Journ simply by accident, as a man standing in the street will sometimes absent-mindedly follow the movements of another. As Mr. Journ drew nearer, the moustache was still imperceptible; but there appeared to be a slight shadow on his upper lip, as if it were disfigured by a small mole. And it was not until he was passing a yard away that the really exquisite singularity of the growth dawned upon Simon Templar's mind.

On Mr. Sumner Journ's upper lip, approximately fourteen hairs had been allowed to grow, so close together that the area they occupied could scarcely have been larger than a shirt button. These fourteen hairs had been carefully parted in the middle; and each little clique of seven had been care­fully waxed and twisted together so that they stuck out about half an inch from their patron's face like the horns of a snail. In the whole of Simon Templar's life, which had en­countered a perhaps unusual variety of developments of facial hair, ranging from the handlebar protuberances of the South-shire Insurance Company's private detective to the fine walrus effect sported by a Miss Gertrude Tinwiddle who contributed the nature notes in the Daily Gazette, he had never seen any example of hair culture in which such passionate devotion to detail, such a concentrated ecstasy of miniaturism, such an unostentatious climax of originality, had simultaneously ar­rived at concrete consummation.

Thus did the moustache of Mr. Journ enter the Saint's horizon and pass on, accompanied by Mr. Journ, who looked at them rather closely as he went by; and lest any suspicious reader should be starting to get ideas into his head, the historian desires to explain at once that this moustache has nothing more to do with the story, and has been described at such length solely on account of its own remarkable features qua face-hair. But, as we claimed at the beginning, it is an immutable fact that if it had not been for this phenom­enal decoration the Saint would hardly have noticed Mr. Journ at all, and would thereby have been many thousands of pounds poorer. For, shorn of that incomparable appen­dage, Mr. Journ was quite an ordinary-looking business man, thin, dark, hatchet-faced, well and quietly dressed; and al­though he was noticeably hard about the eyes and mouth, there was really nothing else about him which would have caused the Saint to stare fascinatedly after him and ejaculate in a hushed voice: 'Well, I am a piebald pelican balancing rubber balls on my beak!'

Wherefore Mr. Teal would have had no reason to turn his somnolent gaze back to the Saint with a certain dour and puzzled humour, and to say: 'I should have thought he was a fellow you'd be sure to know.'

'Never set eyes on him in my life,' said the Saint. 'Do you know who he is?'

'His name's Sumner Journ,' Mr. Teal said reluctantly, after a slight pause.

Simon shook his head.

'Even that doesn't ring a bell,' he said. 'What does he do? No bloke who cultivated a nose-tickler like that could do anything ordinary.'

'Sumner Journ doesn't,' stated the detective flatly.

He seemed to have realised that he had said too much al­ready; and it was impossible to draw any further information from him. He took his leave rather abruptly, and Simon gazed after his plump departing back with a tiny frown. The only plausible explanation of Teal's sudden taciturnity was that Mr. Journ was engaged in some unlawful or nearly un­lawful activities—Teal had had enough trouble with the vic­tims whom the Saint found for himself, without conceiving any ambition to press fresh material into his hands. But if Chief Inspector Teal did not want the Saint to know more about Mr. Sumner Journ, that was sufficient reason for the Saint to become abnormally inquisitive; and as a matter of fact, his investigations had not proceeded very far when a minor coincidence brought them up to date without further effort.

'This might interest you,' said Monty Hayward one eve­ning.