Prelude For War

3

Teal put down the telephone with a sharp clunk of concen­trated viciousness. Any reversal of emotion that he had suffered before was a childish tantrum compared with this. The Saint had not only been on the verge of making a monkey out of him for the second time in an hour—he had lured him on to the brink of affronting Fairweather in a way that might easily have cost him his job into the bar­gain. Whatever sentient faculties Mr Teal possessed at that moment were merely a curried hash of boiling vitriol. His face was congested to a deep shade of heliotrope, but his nostrils were livid with the whiteness of a berserk passion that would have been fuelled rather than assuaged by buckets of human blood.

He dug into his hip pocket and dragged out a pair of handcuffs as he lurched across towards the Saint.

'Come on,' he said in a voice that could scarcely be recognized as his own. 'You can write the rest of it down in Vine Street.'

Simon watched him approach while he thought faster than he had ever done since this story began. Why and how Valerie Woodchester had escaped and what momentous consequences that escape might bring after it were ques­tions that had to be crushed out of the activity of his mind. They could be dealt with afterwards; unless he forgot them now, there would be no useful afterwards in which to deal with them.

This was a time when his fluent tongue would be no more use to him—he might as well have tried to argue Niagara to a standstill. From where he stood he could have reached a gun, but that would have been almost as useless. It would certainly have cowed Fairweather; but the paroxysm of cold rage that was propelling Teal across the floor would have kept him walking straight on into it until it blasted him down. And the Saint knew that he would never be capable of using a gun on Claud Eustace Teal for anything more than a bluff. Equally beyond doubt, he knew that he would never be capable of letting himself be handcuffed and taken to Vine Street without knowing how he was going to get out again.

He said: 'Wait a minute, Claud. You win. I'll give you Lady Valerie.'

It was the only thing he could have said that the detective would even have heard. It stopped Teal a yard from him, with the handcuffs held out.

'Where is she?'

Simon gazed at him with a sad wistful smile.

'It's been a good long scrap and a lot of fun, hasn't it, Claud?' he said. 'But I suppose you were bound to come out on top in the end. . . . Oh well, let's make a clean sheet of it while we're at it. Hoppy was getting excited about nothing. Lady Valerie hasn't got away. I took her away myself, only I didn't have time to tell him. She's here in this apartment now, only about half-a-dozen yards away from you.'

Teal gawped at him.

'Here?'

'Yes. You didn't think of that, did you? Well, you'll find her perfectly safe and sound, without even a speck of powder brushed off her nose.'

'Where?'

'Come through the bedroom and I'll show you.'

He turned away with an air of stoical resolution and sauntered steadily towards the door. Teal followed on his heels. Fairweather grasped his umbrella and followed Teal. As they entered the room, where the bed was still disor­dered from the Saint's recent rising, Simon said: 'You've always suspected that I had a collection of secret passages and things here. You were pretty close to the mark, too. This ought to amuse you.'

He indicated the door to one side of the bed.

Teal jerked it open. It revealed the interior of a big built-in cupboard in which