length, 'have you found him?'
'Where is he?' shouted Teal, with dreadful savagery.
Simon put down the magazine.'
'Look here,' he said wearily. 'I've made a lot of allowances for you, but I give up. What's the use ? I tell you I was at home last night, and you can't prove I wasn't; but just because you want me to have been out, I must be faking an alibi. You've got casts of the tyre tracks of a car that was mixed up in some dirty business last night, and they don't match the tracks of either of my cars; but just because you think they ought to match, I must have changed my tyres. I tell you I haven't kidnapped this fellow Verdean, and you can't find him anywhere in my house; but just because you think I ought to have kidnapped him, I must have hidden him somewhere else. Every shred of evidence is against you, and therefore all the evidence must be wrong. You couldn't possibly be wrong yourself, because you're the great Chief Inspector Claud Eustace Teal, who knows everything and always gets his man. All right. Every bit of proof there is shows that I'm innocent, but I must be guilty because your theories would be all wet if I wasn't. So why do we have to waste our time on silly little details like this ? Let's just take me down to the police station and lock me up.'
'That's just what I'm going to do,' Teal raved blindly.
The Saint looked at him for a moment, and stood up.
'Good enough,' he said breezily. 'I'm ready when you are.'
He went to the door and called: 'Pat!' She answered him, and came down the stairs. He said: 'Darling, Claud Eustace has had an idea. He's going to lug me off and shove me in the cooler on a charge of being above suspicion. It's a new system they've introduced at Scotland Yard, and all the laws are being altered to suit it. So you'd better call one of our lawyers and see if he knows what to do about it. Oh, and you might ring up some of the newspapers while you're on the job—they'll probably want to interview Claud about his brainwave.'
'Yes, of course,' she said enthusiastically, and went towards the telephone in the study.
Something awful, something terrifying, something freezing and paralysing, damp, chilly, appalling, descended over Chief Inspector Teal like a glacial cascade. With the very edge of the precipice crumbling under his toes, his eyes were opened. The delirium of fury that had swept him along so far coagulated sickeningly within him. Cold, pitiless, inescapable facts hammered their bitter way through into the turmoil of his brain. He was too shocked at the moment even to feel the anguish of despair. His mind shuddered under the impact of a new kind of panic. He took a frantic step forward —a step that was, in its own way, the crossing of a harrowing Rubicon.
'Wait a minute,' he stammered hoarsely.
VII
FIFTEEN MINUTES later, Simon Templar stood on the front steps and watched the police car crawl out of the drive with its cargo of incarnate woe. He felt Patricia's fingers slide into his hand, and turned to smile at her.
'So far, so good,' he said thoughtfully. 'But only so far.'
'I thought you were joking, at breakfast,' she said. 'How did he get here so soon ?'
He shrugged.
'That wasn't difficult. I suppose he stayed down at Staines last night; and the Chertsey police would have phoned over about the Verdean business first thing this morning, knowing that he was the manager of the bank that had been held up. Claud must have shot off on the scent like a prize greyhound, and I'm afraid I can sympathize with the way he must have felt when he arrived here.'
'Well, we're still alive,' she said hopefully. 'You got rid of him again.'
'Only because his nerves are getting a bit shaky from all the times I've slipped through his fingers, and he's so scared of being made a fool of again that he daren't move now without a cast-iron case, and I was
