Mr. Teal into sharing a meal with him, and Mr. Teal would accept it with an air of implacable suspicion; but they would both end their evening with a vague feeling of regret.
On this particular occasion, however, thanks to the egregious Mr. Quinquapotti, the feeling of regret was doomed on one side to be the reverse of vague; but this vision of the future was hidden from Claud Eustace Teal.
He wedged himself into the telephone booth in the foyer of the restaurant with the pathetic trustfulness of a guinea pig trotting into a vivisection-ist's laboratory and took up the receiver.
'Teal speaking,' he said.
The familiar voice of his assistant at the Yard clacked back at him through the diaphragm. It uttered one sentence. It uttered another.
Once upon a time there was a small non-Aryan happily making mud pies in Palestine with a party of pals. Looking up from his harmless play, this urchin happened to behold the prophet Elisha hiking up towards Bethel, and in a spirit of pure camaraderie heaved a brick at him and encouraged him after the fashion of healthy urchins of all time, saying, 'Go up, thou baldhead.' Whereupon, to his vast and historic surprise, a brace of she-bears came out of a wood and used him for a quick-lunch bar, along with forty-one of his playmates.
Chief Inspector Teal, it must be confessed, had outgrown the instinct to heave bricks at bald-headed prophets many years ago. In the course of his professional career, indeed, he had even learned to regard them with some reverence, and had, since the supply of kind-hearted she-bears in London is somewhat limited, been detailed at times to protect them from similar affronts. But he was still capable of experiencing some of the emotions that must have assailed that ancient Hebrew guttersnipe as he felt himself, out of a clear sky, being sucked down the gullet of a bear. The voice of Mr. Teal's assistant went on uttering, and the mouth of Mr. Teal opened wider as the recital went on. The milk of human kindness, always an unstable element in Mr. Teal's sorely tried cosmogony, curdled while he listened. By the time his assistant had finished, it would, if Laid aside in a cool place, have turned itself gradually into a piece of cheese.
'All right,' he said thickly, at the end. 'I'll call you back.'
He hung up the receiver and levered himself out of the cabinet. Squeezing his way between the tables on his way back across the restaurant, he was grimly conscious of the Saint's face watching his approach. It was a face that inevitably stood out among the groups of commonplace diners, a lean and darkly handsome face which would have arrested any wandering glance; but it was no less inevitably the face of an Elizabethan buccaneer, lacking only the beard. The lean relaxed figure struck the imagination like a sword laid down among puddings; and for the same reason it was indescribably dangerous. The very clear and humorous blue eyes had a mocking recklessness which could never have stood in awe of man or devil; and Mr. Teal knew that that also was true. The detective's mind went back once again over the times when he had confronted that face, that debonair immaculate figure, those gay piratical blue eyes; and the remembrance was no more comforting than it had been before. But he went back to the table and sat down.
'Thanks for the dinner, Saint,' he said.
Simon blew a smoke ring.
'I enjoyed it, too,' he remarked. 'Call it a small compensation for the other times when everything hasn't been so rosy. I often feel that if only our twin souls, freed from the contagion of this detectivitis which comes over you sometimes------'
'It's a pity you didn't complete the party,' Teal said with a certain curious shortness.
The Saint raised his eyebrows.
'How?'
'That American gunman you've been going about with, for instance--what's his name?'
'Hoppy Uniatz? He's gone to the Ring to have a look at some wrestling. Ran into some Yankee grunter he knew over on the other side, who's doing a tour over here; so Hoppy felt he'd better go and root for him.'
'Yes?' Teal was jerkily unwrapping a fresh slice of gum, although the wad in his mouth was still putting forth flavour in a brave endeavour to live up to its advertising department. 'He wouldn't have gone there alone, of course.'
'I think he went with this wriggler's manager and a couple of his clutching partners,' said the Saint.
Mr. Teal nodded. Something was happening to his blood pressure--something which had begun its deadly work while he was listening to the voice of his assistant on the telephone. He knew all the symptoms. The movements with which he folded his wafer of naked spearmint and stuffed it into his mouth had a stupendous slothfulness which cost him a frightful effort to maintain.
'Or your girl friend, perhaps--Patricia Holm,' Teal articulated slowly. 'What's happened to her?'
'She came over all evening dress and went to a party--one of these Mayfair orgies. Apart from that she's quite normal.'
'She'd have a good time at a party, wouldn't she?' Teal said ruminatively.
The Saint swilled liqueur brandy around in the bowl of a pear-shaped glass.
'I believe lots of young men do get trampled to death in the stampede when she turns up,' he admitted.
'But there'd be enough survivors left to be able to swear she'd been dancing or sitting out with one or other of 'em from the time she arrived till well after midnight--wouldn't there?' Teal insisted.
Simon sat up. For one or two minutes past he had been aware that a change had come over the detective since he returned to the table, and there had been a sudden grittiness in the way that last question mark had been tagged on which he couldn't have missed if he had been stone deaf. He looked Teal over with thoughtful blue eyes.
'Claud!' he exclaimed accusingly. 'I believe there's something on your mind!'
For a moment Teal's windpipe tied itself into a knot of indignation which threatened to strangle him. And then, with a kind of dogged resolution, he untied it and waded on.
'There's plenty on my mind,' he said crunchily. 'And you know what it is. I suppose you've been laughing
