The Saint shook his head.
'I'd like you to. But I can't be everywhere at once, and I shall want someone in London. You mayn't have realised it, but we still have our own bills to pay. The swine knocked a fiver off me when they took me for that ride, and I want it back. Teal's going to achieve his ambition and lag the High Fence, and that parcel of jools that's going to give the High Fence away is evidence now; but we've got our Old Age Pensions to think about. Anyone who wants to amuse himself by pumping me up with gas and dope and heaving me into the river has got to pay for his fun. And that's where you two come in.'
He told them more of what was in his mind, in terse sparkling sentences, while he dressed. His brain was working at high pressure by that time, throwing ideas together with his own incomparable audacity, building a plan out of a situation that had not yet come to pass, leaving them almost out of breath behind the whirlwind pace of his imagination. And yet, despite the breakneck pace at which he had swept his strategy together, he had no misgivings about it afterwards-not even while he drove his great thundering car recklessly through the night to Harwich, or when he stood outside the post-office in the early morning waiting for the doors to open.
It should be all right.... About some things he had a feeling of sublime confidence, a sense of joyous inevitability, that amounted to actual foreknowledge; and he had the same feeling that morning. These things were ordained: they were the rewards of adventure, the deserved corollaries of battle, murder, and-a slight smile touched his lips-the shadow of sudden death. But with all this assurance of foreknowledge, there was still a ghostly pulse of nervous excitement flickering through his spinal cells when the doors opened to let him in- a tingle of deep delight in the infinitely varied twists of the game which he loved beyond anything else in life.
He went up to the counter and propped his elbows on the flat of the telegraph section. He wanted to send a cable to Umpopo in British Bechuanaland; but before he sent it he wanted to know all about the comparative merits of the various word rates. He was prepared, according to the inducements offered, to consider the relative attractions of Night Letters, Weed-end Letters, or Deferreds; and he wanted to know everything there was to know about each. Naturally, this took time. The official behind the grille, although he claimed a sketchy familiarity with the whereabouts of British Bechuanaland, had never heard of Umpopo; which is not surprising, because the Saint had never heard of it either before he set out to invent a difficult place to want to send a cable to. But with that indomitable zeal which is the most striking characteristic of post-office officials, he applied himself diligently to the necessary research, while Simon Templar lighted another cigarette and waited patiently for results.
He was wearing a brown tweed cap of a pattern which would never ordinarily have appealed to him, and a pair of tortoiseshell glasses and a black military moustache completed the job of disguising him sufficiently to be overlooked on a casual glance even by anyone who knew him. As the last man on earth whom the High Fence would be expecting to meet, he was as well hidden as if he had been buried under the floor. . . . The official behind the counter, meanwhile, was getting buried deeper and deeper under a growing mound of reference books.
'I can't seem to find anything about Umpopo,' he complained peevishly, from behind his unhelpful barricade. 'Are you sure there is a telegraph office there?'
'Oh, yes,' said the Saint blandly. 'At least,' he added, 'there's one at Mbungi, which is only half a mile away.'
The clerk went back through his books in a silence too frightful to describe; and the Saint put his cigarette back between his lips, and then suddenly remained very still.
Another early customer had entered the office. Simon heard his footsteps crossing the floor and passing behind him, but he did not look round at once. The footsteps travelled along to the Poste Restante section, a couple of yards away, and stopped there.
'Have you anything for Pond?'
The soft voice came clearly to Simon's ears, and he lifted his eyes sidelong. The man was leaning on the counter, like himself, so that his back was half turned; but the Saint's heart stopped beating for a moment.
'What is the first name?' asked the clerk, clearing out the contents of one of the pigeon-holes behind him.
'Joshua.'
Rather slowly and dreamily, the Saint hitched himself up off his elbow and straightened up. Behind his heaped breakwater of reference books, the steaming telegraph official was muttering something profane and plaintive; but the Saint never heard it. He saw the cardboard box which he had posted pushed over to its claimant, and moved along the counter without a sound. His hand fell on the man's shoulder.
'Would you like to see a good-looking ghost?' he drawled, with a throb of uncontrollable beatitude in his voice.
The man spun round with a kind of gasp that was almost a sob. It was Junior Inspector Desmond Pryke.
X
THE writer, whose positively Spartan economy of verbiage must often have been noted and admired by every cultured student, recoils instinctively from the temptation to embellish the scene with a well-chosen anthology of those apt descriptive adjectives with which his vocabulary is so richly stocked. The pallor of flabbergasted faces, the glinting of wild eyes, the beading of cold perspirations, the trembling of hands, the tingling of spines, the sinking of stomachs, the coming and going of breath in little short pants-all those facile cliches which might lure less ruggedly disciplined scribes into the pitfall of endeavouring to make every facet of the situation transparent to the most nit- witted reader-none of these things, on this occasion at least, have sufficient enticement to seduce him. His readers, he assures himself, are not nit-wits: they are highly gifted and intelligent citizens, of phenomenal perspicacity and acceleration on the uptake. The situation, he feels, stated even in the baldest terms, could hide none of its facets from them.
It hid none of them from Simon Templar, or from Junior Inspector Pryke. But Simon Templar was the first to speak again.
'What are you doing here, Desmond?' he asked gently.
Pryke licked his lips, without answering. And then the question was repeated, but Simon Templar did not repeat it.
Chief Inspector Teal stepped out from behind a screen which cut off the Savings Bank section of the counter, and repeated it. His hands were in the pockets of his unnecessary raincoat, and his movement had the same suggestion of weary and reluctant effort that his movements always had; but there was something in the set of his round plump jaw and the narrowness of his sleepy-lidded eyes which explained beyond any need of words that he had watched the whole brief incident from beginning to end, and had missed none of the reactions which a police officer on legitimate business need not have shown.
