Simon kindled a fresh cigarette from the lighter on the dash and thrust the Hirondel over the southward artery with one hand on the wheel and the speedometer quivering around seventy, driving automatically and thinking about other things.
Before that, he had sometimes wondered why such a notorious scapegoat as himself should have been passed over for so long by the alibi experts of the underworld, and he had only been able to surmise that the fear of attracting his own attention was what had deterred them. The man who had set a new precedent this night must either have been very confident or very rash; and the Saint wanted to know him. And there was an edge of quiet steel in the Saint's narrowed eyes as they followed the road in the blaze of his sweeping headlights which indicated that he would have an account to settle with his unauthorized substitute when they met. . . .
Perhaps it was because he was very anxious to learn something more which might help to bring that meeting nearer, or perhaps it was only because the Saint never felt really comfortable in a car unless it was using the king's highway for a race track, but it was exactly thirty-five minutes after they left the restaurant when he swung the car round the last two-wheeled corner and switched off the engine under the blue lamp of Horley police station. For the latter half of the journey Mr. Teal had actually forgotten to chew; but he released his hold on his bowler hat and climbed out phlegmatically enough. Simon followed him up the steps and heard Teal introduce himself to the night sergeant.
'They're in the inspector's office, sir,' said the man.
Simon went in at Teal's shoulder and found three men drinking coffee in the bare distempered room. One of them, from his typical bulk and the chair he occupied at the desk, appeared to be the inspector; the second, a grey-haired man in pince-nez and an overcoat, was apparently the police surgeon; the third was a motorcycle patrol in uniform.
'I thought I'd better come down at once,' Teal said laconically.
The inspector, who shared the dislike of all provincial inspectors for interference from Scotland Yard, but accepted it as an unfortunate necessity, nodded no less briefly and indicated the motorcycle patrol.
'He can tell you all about it.'
'There ain't much to tell, sir,' said the patrol, putting down his cup. 'Just about two mile from here, it was, on the way to Balcombe. I was on me way home when I saw a car pulled up by the side of the road an' two men beside it carryin' what looked like a body. Well, it turned out it was a body. They said they saw it lyin' in the road an' thought it was someone been knocked down by another car, but when I had a look I saw the man had been shot. I helped 'em put the body in their car and rode in alongside of 'em to the police station here.'
'What time was this?' Teal asked him. 'About half-past ten, sir, when I first stopped.
It was exactly a quarter to eleven when we got here.'
'How had this man been shot?'
It was the doctor who answered:
'He was shot through the back of the head, at close range--probably with an automatic or a revolver. Death must have been instantaneous.''
Mr. Teal rolled his gum into a spindle, pushed his tongue into the middle to shape a horseshoe, and chewed it back into a ball.
'I was told you'd found the Saint's mark on the body,' he said. 'When was that?'
The inspector turned over the papers on his desk.
'That was when we were going through his things. It was in his outside breast pocket.'
He found a scrap of paper and handed it over. Teal took it and smoothed it out. It was a leaf torn from a cheap pocket diary; and on one side of it had been drawn, in pencil, a squiggly skeleton figure whose round blank head was crowned with a slanting elliptical halo.
Teal's heavy eyes rested on the drawing for a few seconds, and then he turned and held it out to the Saint.
'And I suppose you didn't do that?' he said.
There was a sudden stillness of incomprehension over the other men in the room, who had accepted Simon without introduction as an assistant of the Scotland Yard man; and Teal glanced back at them with inscrutable stolidity.
'This is the Saint,' he explained.
A rustle of astonishment stirred the local men, arid Teal bit on his gum and met it with his own soured disillusion: 'No, I haven't done anything clever. He's been with me all the evening. He hasn't been out of my sight from seven o'clock till now--not for five minutes.'
The police surgeon blew a bubble in his coffee cup and wiped his lips on his handkerchief, gaping at him stupidly.
'But that's impossible!' he spluttered. 'The body was still warm when I saw it, and the pupils contracted with atropine. He couldn't have been dead three hours at the outside!'
'I expected something like that,' said the detective, with sweltering restraint. 'That's all it wanted to round off the alibi.'
Simon put the torn scrap of paper back on the inspector's desk. It had given him a queer feeling, looking at that crude sketch on it. He hadn't drawn it; but it was his. It had become too well known for him to be able to use it very often now, for the precise reason which Mr. Teal had overlooked--that when that little drawing was found anywhere on the scene of a crime, there was only one man to search for. But it still had its meaning. That childish haloed figure had stood for an ideal, for a justice that struck swiftly where the law could not strike, a terror which could not be turned aside by technicalities: it had never been used wantonly. . . . The three local men were staring at him inquisitively, more like morbid sightseers at a sensational trial than professional sifters of crime; but the Saint's gaze met them with an arctic calm.
'Who was this man?' he asked.
The inspector did not answer at once, until Teal's shifting glance repeated the question. Then | he turned back
