Follow the Saint

The Saint's eyebrows slowly lifted.

'But why ?' he persisted.

Eventually Mr Teal told him.

XIII

SIMON TEMPLAR sat on the desk in Chief Inspector Teal's office a fortnight later. The police court proceedings had just concluded after a remand, and Baron Inescu, alias Henry Osbett, had been committed for trial in company with some three dozen smaller cogs in his machine. The report was in the evening paper which Simon had bought, and he pointed it out to Teal accusingly.

'At least you could have rung me up and thanked me again for making you look like a great detective,' he said.

Mr Teal stripteased a slice of chewing gum and fed it into his mouth. 'I'm sorry,' he said. 'I meant to do it, but there was a lot of clearing-up work to do on the case. Anyway, it's out of my hands now, and the Public Prosecutor is pretty satisfied. It's a pity there wasn't enough direct evidence to charge Inescu with the murder of Nancock, but we haven't done badly.'

'You're looking pretty cheerful,' said the Saint.

This was true. Mr Teal's rosy face had a fresh pink glow, and his cherubic blue eyes were clear and bright under his sleepily drooping lids.

'I'm feeling better,' he said. 'You know, that's the thing that really beats me about this case. Inescu could have made a fortune out of Miracle Tea without ever going in for espionage ——'

The Saint's mouth fell open.

'You don't mean to say——' he ejaculated, and couldn't go on. He said: 'But I thought you were ready to chew the blood out of everyone who had anything to do with Miracle Tea, if you could only have got away from——'

'I know it was rather drastic,' Teal said sheepishly. 'But it did the trick. Do you know, I haven't had a single attack of indigestion since I took that packet; and I even had roast pork for dinner last night!'

Simon Templar drew a long deep breath and closed his eyes. There were times when even he felt that he was stand­ing on holy ground.

PART 2: THE INVISIBLE MILLIONAIRE

I

THE GIRL'S eyes caught Simon Templar as he entered the room, ducking his head instinctively to pass under the low lintel of the door; and they followed him steadily across to the bar. They were blue eyes with long lashes, and the face to which they belonged was pretty without any distinctive feature, crowned with curly yellow hair. And besides any­thing else, the eyes held an indefinable hint of strain.

Simon knew all this without looking directly at her. But he had singled her out at once from the double handful of riverside weekenders who crowded the small bar-room as the most probable writer of the letter which he still carried in his pocket—the letter which had brought him out to the Bell that Sunday evening on what anyone with a less incor­rigibly optimistic flair for adventure would have branded from the start as a fool's errand. She was the only girl in the place who seemed to be unattached; there was no positive reason why the writer of that letter should have been un­attached, but it seemed likely that she would be. Also she was the best looker in a by no means repulsive crowd; and that was simply no clue at all except to Simon Templar's own unshake­able faith in his guardian angel, who had never thrown any other kind of damsel in distress into his buccaneering path.

But she was still looking at him. And even though he couldn't help knowing that women often looked at him with more than ordinary interest, it was not usually done quite so fixedly. His hopes rose a notch, tentatively; but it was her turn to make the next move. He had done all that had been asked of him when he walked in there punctually on the stroke of eight.

He leaned on the counter, with his wide shoulders seeming to take up half the length of the bar, and ordered a pint of beer for himself and a bottle of Vat