Follow the Saint

A queerly childish contraction warped itself across Mr Teal's rubicund features. He looked as if he had been sud­denly seized with an acute pain below the belt, and was about to burst into tears.

Both of these diagnoses contained a fundament of truth. But they were far from telling the whole story.

The whole story went too far to be compressed into a space less than volumes. It went far back into the days when Mr Teal had been a competent and contented and common­place detective, adequately doing a job in which miracles did not happen and the natural laws of the universe were re­spected and cast-iron cases were not being perennially dis­integrated under his noise by a bland and tantalizing buc­caneer whose elusiveness had almost started to convince him of the reality of black magic. It coiled through an infinite history of incredible disasters and hair breadth frustrations that would have wrung the withers of anything softer than a marble statue. It belonged to the hysterical saga of his whole hopeless duel with the Saint.

Mr Teal did not burst into tears. Nor, on this one unpre­cedented occasion, did he choke over his gum while a flush of apoplectic fury boiled into his round face. Perhaps there were no more such reactions left in him; or perhaps on this one occasion an inescapable foreboding of the uselessness of it all strangled the spasm before it could mature and gave him the supernatural strength to stifle his emotions under the pose of stolid somnolence that he could so rarely preserve against the Saint's fiendishly shrewd attack. But however he achieved the feat, he managed to sit quite still while his hot resentful eyes bored into the Saint's smiling face for a time before he struggled slothfully to his feet.

'Wait a minute,' he said thickly.

He went over and spoke to a tall cadaverous man who was hovering in the background. Then he came back and sat down again.

Simon trickled an impudent streamer of smoke towards him.

'If I were a sensitive man I should be offended, Claud. Do you have to be quite so obvious about it when you send Sergeant Barrow to find out whether I'm telling you the truth? It isn't good manners, comrade. It savours of distrust.'

Mr Teal said nothing. He sat champing soporifically, staring steadfastly at the polished toes of his regulation boots, until Sergeant Barrow returned.

Teal got up and spoke to him at a little distance; and when he rejoined the Saint the drowsiness was turgid and treacle-thick on his pink full-moon face.

'All right,' he bit out in a cracked voice, through lips that were stiff and clumsy with the bitterness of defeat. 'Now suppose you tell me how you did it.'

'But I didn't do it, Claud,' said the Saint, with a serious­ness that edged through his veneer of nonchalance. 'I'm as keen as you are to get a line on this low criminal who takes my trademark in vain. Who was the bloke they picked up this afternoon ?'

For some reason which was beyond his understanding, the detective stopped short on the brink of a sarcastic come­back.

'He was an Admiralty draughtsman by the name of Nancock,' he said; and the gauzy derision in the Saint's glance faded out abruptly as he realized that in that simple answer he had been given the secret of Mr Osbett's remark­able chemistry.

XI

IT WAS as if a distorting mirror had been suddenly flattened out, so that it reflected a complete picture with brilliant and lifelike accuracy. The figures in it moved like marion­ettes.

Simon even knew why Nancock had died. He himself, ironically for Teal's disappointment, had sealed the fat man's death-warrant without knowing it. Nancock was the man for whom the fifteen-hundred-pound packet of Miracle Tea had been intended; Nancock had been making a fuss at the shop when the Saint arrived. The fuss was due to nothing but Nancock's fright and greed, but to suspicious eyes it might just as well have looked like the overdone attempt of a guilty conscience to establish its own innocence. Nancock's money had passed into the Saint's hands, the Saint had got into the shop on the pretext of bringing the same package back, and the Saint had said: 'I know all