The Saint and Mr Teal (Once More the Saint)

'Yes. But they were half-masked, of course. I got the number of the car; but it looked new, so I suppose it was stolen.'

Teal rubbed his chin.

'If you can wait till I've finished here I'd like to have a talk with you.'

'Oke. We'll toddle along to Sandy's and sniff some coffee. See you there.'

The Saint took Patricia's arm, and they strolled through to Oxenden Street. Three quarters of an hour later Chief Inspector Teal came in and took his place at the counter.

'Did you get anything useful?' asked the Saint.

'Nothing,' said Teal shortly. 'The men had scarves over their faces, as you said. They were both in evening dress, which lets you out.'

Simon sighed.

'That bee in your bonnet buzzes an awful lot,' he protested. 'Can't you think up anything better than that?'

'You've been abroad for a week, haven't you?'

'I have. Drinking good beer and associating with some stout Huns. The Secret Service must have been working overtime.'

'I didn't suspect you seriously.' Teal stirred three lumps of sugar into his cup. 'This wholesale murder isn't in your line, is it ? A wretched clerk and one of our own uniformed men shot down in a week-and nothing to show for it. It fairly makes your blood boil.'

The detective's round face was unwontedly hollow in the cheeks. The failures of the last few hectic days were making their mark on his ponderous self-assurance.

'We've tried all the regulars,' he said. 'The Green Cross boys are the nucleus of it, we know, but so far they've been able to work a system of alibis that have left us flat. Most of them have come into a lot of money that they can't account for since this trouble started, but that isn't a crime. We had one of their best men in the other day-a fellow named Orping. He was playing the American gangster to the life. Between ourselves, we knocked him about a bit-you know what can be done-but we couldn't shake a thing out of him. I don't like that American line that Orping's got hold of. It looks ugly.'

'Any idea where the stuff's being fenced?'

'I'm afraid not. I don't think it's being fenced in this country at all.'

Simon Templar smiled inwardly, but he forbore to point a moral.

'Who's the Big Noise?' he asked; and the detective shrugged grimly.

'If we knew that, the trouble would be practically over. There are rumours that it's some sort of Yank, and all the registered aliens have come under obser­vation, but we haven't learned much. Whoever he is, he's got his men right under his thumb. I've never met so many oysters before. The story is that Corrigan was one of the bunch who threatened to squeal, and what happened to him has put the fear of God into everyone else who might have talked.'

The Saint pushed his hands into his pockets and gazed at the detective with a faint suggestion of mockery.

' It must have made you wish I was on the road again, Claud. It's something to think that you may have admitted that my reign of terror wasn't so bad after all.'

Mr. Teal finished his coffee and unwrapped a wafer of chewing gum. His baby-blue eyes looked the Saint over with a certain seriousness.

'If you only had the sense to keep out of the news­papers and save the assistant commissioner from prac­tising sarcastic remarks on me,' he said, 'I shouldn't be sorry if you were on the road for a while. You can do things that we can't do officially. We're trying to get special powers, but you know what that's likely to mean. It may take us months-and men will be killed every day while we're helpless. There's only one way to deal with this sort of thing. You've got to fight guns with guns, killing with killing, fear with fear.'

They separated on an arrangement to lunch together in three days' time, which was the friendliest parting they had had for many months. It rather tickled Simon to think how the advent of a common enemy might make a branded outlaw almost persona grata with the Law, merely because his killings were more discrimi­nate.

Patricia and the Saint drove boldly back to Manson Place in a taxi. There was a man tinkering with a motorcycle at the open end of the cul-de-sac: Simon saw him look up as the taxi passed, and reckoned that Tex Goldman would shortly be receiving some interest­ing news.

Curiously enough, it did not occur to him that a sharp pair of eyes in the car that had carried the hold-up men away from the Baytree Club might have noticed him where he stood in the street a few doors from the scene of the crime.

He paid off the taxi and mounted the short flight of steps to the front door of his temporary home circumspectly. The man at the corner still tinkered with his motorcycle. Simon slid aside the pivoted metal plate under the knocker and studied the indicator bulb which it concealed to make sure that no one had entered the house in his absence before he called Patricia to join him. He kept his right hand in his pocket while he unlocked the door and let her through, and his eyes never ceased their watchful survey of the street; but his precautions were a matter of routine. He was not expecting trouble immediately.

'It's rather a pity I let those Green Cross boys know who I was,' he said.

There were several letters waiting for him, and he sat on the table in the sitting room and read them while Patricia Holm went to the kitchen to find him a bottle of beer.

She came back with a tray. He heard her put it down, and then he heard a crash.

'Never mind the glass,' he said, without looking round. 'We can always burgle Woolworth's for some more. Break the lot if you feel like it.'