Follow the Saint

of your famous alibis. All right, then. Where were you ?'

'I was at home.'

'Whose home?'

'My own. This one.'

'Yeah ? And who else knows about it ?'

'Not a lot of people,' Simon confessed. 'We were being quiet. You know. One of these restful, old-fashioned, fire-side evenings. If it comes to that, I suppose there isn't an army of witnesses. You can't have a quiet restful evening with an army of witnesses cluttering up the place. It's a contradiction in terms. There was just Pat, and Hoppy, and of course good old Orace——'

'Pat and Hoppy and Orace,' jeered the detective. 'Just a quiet restful evening. And that's your alibi——'

'I wouldn't say it was entirely my alibi,' Simon mentioned diffidently. 'After all, there are several other houses in England. And I wouldn't mind betting that in at least half of them, various people were having quiet restful evenings last night. Why don't you go and ask some of them whether they can prove it ? Because you know that being a lot less tolerant and forbearing than I am, they'd only tell you to go back to Scotland Yard and sit on a radiator until you'd thawed some of the clotted suet out of your brains. How the hell would you expect anyone to prove he'd spent a quiet evening at home ? By bringing in a convocation of bishops for wit­nesses ? In a case like this, it isn't the suspect's job to prove he was home. It's your job to prove he wasn't.'

Chief Inspector Teal should have been warned. The ghosts of so many other episodes like this should have risen up to give him caution. But they didn't. Instead, they egged him on. He leaned forward in a glow of vindictive exultation.

'That's just what I'm going to do,' he said, and his voice grew rich with the lusciousness of his own triumph. 'We aren't always so stupid as you think we are. We found fresh tyre tracks in the drive, and they didn't belong to Verdean's car. We searched every scrap of ground for half a mile to see if we could pick them up again. We found them turning into a field quite close to the end of Greenleaf Road. The car that made 'em was still in the field—it was reported stolen in Windsor early yesterday morning. But there were the tracks of another car in the field, overlapping and under-lapping the tracks of the stolen car, so that we know the kidnappers changed to another car for their getaway. I've got casts of those tracks, and I'm going to show that they match the tyres on your car!'

The Saint blinked.

'It would certainly be rather awkward if they did,' he said uneasily. 'I didn't give anybody permission to borrow my car last night, but of course——'

'But of course somebody might have taken it away and brought it back without your knowing it,' Teal said with guttural sarcasm. 'Oh, yes.' His voice suddenly went into a squeak. 'Well, I'm going to be in court and watch the jury laugh themselves sick when you try to tell that story! I'm going to examine your car now, in front of police witnesses, and I'd like them to see your face when I do it!'

It was the detective's turn to march away and leave the Saint to follow. He had a moment of palpitation while he pondered whether the Saint would do it. But as he flung open the front door and crunched into the drive, he heard the Saint's footsteps behind him. The glow of triumph that was in him warmed like a Yule log on a Christmas hearth. The Saint's expression had reverted to blandness quickly enough, but not so quickly that Teal had missed the guilty start which had broken through its smooth surface. He knew, with a blind ecstasy, that at long last the Saint had tripped....

He waved imperiously to the two officers in the prowl car outside, and marched on towards the garage. The Saint's Hirondel stood there in its glory, an engineering symphony in cream and red trimmed with chromium, with the more sedate black Daimler in which Patricia had driven down standing beside it; but Teal had no aesthetic admiration for the sight. He stood by like a pink-faced figure of doom while his assistants reverently unwrapped the moulage impres­sions ; and then, like a master chef taking charge at the vital moment in the preparation of a dish for which his under­lings had laid the routine foundations, he took the casts in bis own hands and