bother at all, dear old collywobble. Let's call it a date. Tomorrow at four—and we'll have a cup of tea together....'
The Saint laid the telephone gently back on its bracket and replaced it on the table beside him. His thumb flicked over the wheel of his lighter; and the tip of his cigarette kindled to a glow that matched the brightening gleam of certainty in his blue eyes.
He had obtained all the information he wanted without pressing a single conspicuous question. Mr Teal had bought his Miracle Tea on the way home—and Simon knew that Mr Teal's way home, across Parliament Square and up Victoria Street, was so rigidly established by years of unconscious habit that a blind man could almost have followed it by tracing the groove which the detective's regulation boots must by that time have worn along the pavement. Even if there were more than one chemist's along that short trail with a Miracle Tea advertisement in the window, the process of elimination could not take long. . . .
Patricia was watching him.
She said: 'So what?'
'So we were right,' said the Saint; and his voice was lilting with incorrigible magic. 'Claud doesn't give a damn about his tea. It doesn't mean a thing in his young life. He doesn't care if he never sees it again. He just bought it by a fluke, and he doesn't even know what sort of a fluke it was.'
'Are you sure?' asked Patricia cautiously. 'If he just doesn't want you to suspect anything——'
The Saint shook his head.
'I know all Claud's voices much too well. If he'd tried to get away with anything like that, I should have heard it. And why should he try ? I offered to bring it round at once, and he could have just said nothing and let me bring it. Why should he take any risk at all of something going wrong when he could have had the package back in half an hour. Teal may look dumb sometimes, but you can't see him being so dumb as that.' Simon stood up, and his smile was irresistibly expectant. 'Come out into the wide world with me, darling, and let's look for this shop where they sell miracles!'
His energy carried her off like a tide race; the deep purr of the Hirondel as he drove it at fantastic speed to Parliament Square was in tune with his mood. Why it should have happened again, like this, he didn't know; but it might as well have been this way as any other. Whatever the way, it had been bound to happen. Destiny could never leave him alone for long, and it must have been at least a week since anything exciting had happened to him. But now that would be all put right, and there would be trouble and adventure and mystery again, and with a little luck some boodle at the end; that was all that mattered. Somewhere in this delirious business of Miracle Tea and Bank of England notes there must be crime and dark conspiracies and all manner of mischief—he couldn't surmise yet what kind of racket could subsist on trading handfuls of bank notes for half-crowns, but it was even harder to imagine anything like that in a line of legitimate business, so some racket or other it must be, and new rackets could never be altogether dull. He parked the car illegally on the corner of Victoria Street, and got out.
'Let's walk,' he said.
He took Patricia's arm and strolled with her up the street; and as they went he burbled exuberantly.
'Maybe it's an eccentric millionaire who suffered from acute dyspepsia all his life, and in his will he directed that all his fortune was to be distributed among other sufferers, because he knew that there really wasn't any cure at all, but at least the money would be some consolation. So without any publicity his executors had the dough wrapped up in packets labelled as an indigestion cure, feeling pretty sure that nobody who didn't have indigestion would buy it, and thereby saving themselves the trouble of sorting through a lot of applicants with bogus belly-aches. ... Or maybe it's some guy who has made all the money in the world out of defrauding the poor nitwitted public with various patent medicines, whose conscience has pricked him in his old age so that he is trying to fix himself up for the Hereafter by making restitution, and the most appropriate way he can think of to do that is to distribute the geetus in the shape of another patent medicine, figuring that that is the way it's most likely to fall into the same hands that it originally came from.... Or maybe——'
'Or maybe,' said Patricia, 'this is the place you're looking for.'
