the assistant commissioner's acidulated sniff. It was a sharp stab of memory that brought back all the occasions when Mr Teal had seen triumph dangling in front of his nose only to have it jerked away by invisible strings at the very moment when he thought his hands were closing round it; and with it came a revival of the barren desolation that had followed so many of those episodes, when Mr Teal had felt that he was merely the dumb quarry of an unjust destiny, doomed to be harried through eternity with the stars themselves conspiring against him. And at the same time it was pervaded with the realization that the identical story was starting all over again.
All these accumulated indignations and despairs drained through Mr Teal's intestines in one corrosive moment of appalling stillness before he finally wrenched a response out of his vocal cords.
'How the hell did you get here?' he glurked.
It was not, perhaps, the most fluent and comprehensive speech that Mr Teal had ever made. But it conveyed, with a succinctness which more rounded oratory might well have failed to achieve, the distilled essence of what was seething through the overloaded cauldrons of his mind. Its most serious defect was in the enunciation, which lacked much of that flutelike clarity which is favoured by the cognoscenti of the science of elocution. It sounded in fact, as if his throat were full of hot porridge.
Simon smiled at him rather thoughtfully. He also had his memories; and the prime deduction which they offered him was that the unexpected intrusion of Chief Inspector Teal, at that particular moment of all moments, was definitely an added complication in an affair that was already complicated enough. But the sublimely bantering slant of his brows never wavered.
'I might ask you the same,' he murmured. 'But I see that your feet are looking as flat as ever, so I suppose you're still wearing them down.'
The detective's face under his staid bowler hat remained a glaring purple, but his inflated china-blue eyes were receding fractionally.
'I noticed your car outside,' he said.
He was a liar. He had seen it, but not noticed it. That shining cream-and-red monster was something that it would have been almost impossible to overlook in any landscape; but Mr Teal's thoughts had been far away from any subject so disturbing as the Saint. They had simply been moving in a fool's paradise where detectives from Scotland Yard were allowed to plod along investigating ordinary crimes committed by ordinary criminals without even a hint of such fantastic freaks as Simon Templar to mar the serenity of their dutiful labours. But Mr Teal had to say something like that to try and recover the majestic dominance from which in the agony of the moment he had so ruinously lapsed.
The Saint dissected his effort with a sardonically generous tolerance that made the detective's collar feel as if it were shrinking into his neck like a garrote.
'Of course, Claud,' he said mildly. 'Of course you did. I was forgetting what a sleuth you were. And while we're on the subject of sleuthing, I must say that you seem to have arrived in the nick of time. I don't know whether you've noticed it yet, but there's a dead man on the floor behind me. Without pretending to your encyclopedic knowledge of crime I should say that he appears to have been murdered.'
'That's right,' Teal said raspingly. 'And I should say that I knew who did it.'
The Saint raised his eyebrows.
'I don't want to seem unduly sensitive,' he remarked, 'but there's something about your tone of voice that makes me feel uncomfortable. Can you by any chance be suggesting——'
'We'll see about that,' Teal retorted. He stepped aside out of the doorway. 'Search him!' he barked.
Behind him a lanky uniformed sergeant unfolded himself into full view. Somewhat apprehensively he stepped up to the Saint and went over his coat pockets. He took out a platinum cigarette case, a
