FOLLOW
THE SAINT
LESLIE CHARTERIS
UNABRIDGED
PAN BOOKS LTD : LONDON
First published 1939 by Hodder & Stoughton Ltd.
This edition published 1961 by Pan Books Ltd.,
8 Headfort Place, London, S.W.1.
THE CHARACTERS IN THIS BOOK ARE ENTIRELY
IMAGINARY AND HAVE NO RELATION TO ANY
LIVING PERSON
I
THIS STORY starts with four wild coincidences; so we may as well admit them at once and get it over with, and then there will be no more argument. The chronicler makes no apologies for them. A lot of much more far-fetched coincidences have been allowed to happen without protest in the history of the world, and all that can be done about it is to relate them exactly as they took place. And if it should be objected that these particular coincidences led to the downfall of sundry criminals who might otherwise never have been detected, it must be pointed out that at least half the convicts at present taking a cure in the cooler were caught that way.
Chief Inspector Claud Eustace Teal sat in a tea shoppe that was not much more than a powerful stone's throw from Scotland Yard. Dispassionately considered, it was quite a suitable target for stone-throwing, being one of those dens of ghastly chintz-curtained cheerfulness which stand as grisly omens of what the English-speaking races can expect from a few more generations of purity and hygiene; but Mr Teal held it in a sort of affection born of habit.
He had finished his tea, and he sat glancing over a newspaper. And in order that there may be positively no deception about this, it must be admitted at once that not even the most enthusiastic advocate of temperance would have chosen him as an advertisement of the place that he was in. Mr Teal, in fact, who even at his best suffered from certain physical disadvantages which made it permanently impossible for him to model for a statue of Dancing Spring, was at that moment not even in the running for a picture of Mellow Autumn. His round pink pace had a distinctly muddy tinge under its roseate bloom; the champing of his jaws on the inevitable wodge of spearmint was visibly listless; and his china-blue eyes contained an expression of joyless but stoical endurance. He looked, to speak with complete candour, rather like a discontented cow with a toothache.
After a while he put the newspaper aside and simply sat, gazing mournfully into space. It was a Sunday afternoon, and at that rather late hour he had the place to himself, except for a vacant-faced waitress who sat in a corner knitting some garment in a peculiarly dreadful shade of mustard yellow. A small radio on the mantelpiece, strategically placed between a vase of artificial flowers and a bowl of wax fruit, was emitting strains of that singularly lugubrious and eviscerated music which supplies the theme song of modern romance. Mr Teal appeared to be enduring that infliction in the same spirit as Job might have endured the development of his sixtysecond boil. He looked as if he was only waiting for someone to come along and relieve him of the cares of the Universe.
Someone did come along, but not with that intention. The crash of the door opening made Mr Teal's overwrought nerves wince; and when he saw who it was he closed his eyes for a moment in sheer agony. For although Mr William Kennedy was easily the most popular of the Assistant Commissioners, his vast and jovial personality was approximately the last thing that a man in Mr Teal's condition is able to appreciate.
