The cigar which had slipped stupidly out of Sunny Jim's mouth when the bullet hit him was lying on the carpet in front of him, tainting the room with an acrid smell of singeing wool. Teal put his foot on it. It was his only concrete assurance that the whole fantastic affair hadn't been a grotesque hallucination-that the overworked brain which had struggled through so many of the Saint's shattering surprises hadn't finally weighed its anchor and gone wallowing off into senile monsoons of delirious delusion. His lips thinned out in an effort of self-control which touched the borders of homicidal fever.
'That's what I want to know,' he said. 'The body was here when I went out. When I came in again it had disappeared- and you were here instead. And I think you know something about it.'
'My dear Claud,' Simon protested, 'what d'you think I am-a sort of amateur body-snatcher?'
'I think you're a'
Simon raised his hand.
'Hush,' he said, with a nervous glance at Inspector Pryke. 'Not before the lady.'
Teal gulped.
'I think'
'The trouble is,' said the Saint, 'that you don't. Here you are shooting off your mouth about a body, and nobody knows whether it exists. You wonder whether I could have shot Sunny Jim, when you don't even know whether he's dead. You hint at pinching me for being an accessory after the fact, and you can't produce the fact that I'm supposed to be an accessory to.'
'I can prove'
'You can't. You can't prove anything, except your own daftness. You're doing that now. You ask me what's happened to Sunny Jim's body, with the idea that I must have done some thing with it. But if you can't produce this body, how d'you know it ever was a body? How d'you know it didn't get up and walk out while you were away? How d'you know any crime's been committed at all?' The Saint's lean forefinger shot out and tapped the detective peremptorily on the waistcoat, just above his watch-chain. 'You're going to make a prize idiot of yourself again, Claud, if you aren't very careful; and one of these days I shall be very angry with you. I put up with the hell of a lot of persecution from you----'
'Will you stop that?' barked Mr. Teal, jerking his tummy hysterically back from the prodding finger.
The Saint smiled.
'I am stopping it, dear old pumpkin,' he pointed out. 'I've just told you that my patience is all wore out. I'm not taking any more. Now you go ahead and think out your move. Do you take a chance on running me in for murdering a bloke that nobody can prove was murdered, and stealing a corpse that nobody can prove is a corpse-or do you 'phone for your photographers and finger-print fakers and leave me out of it?'
Glowering at him in a supercharged silence that strained against his ribs, Mr. Teal thought of all the things he would have liked to do, and realised that he could do none of them. He was tied up in a knot which there was no visible way of unravelling. He had seen similar knots wound round him too often to cherish any illusions on that score-had gorged his spleen too often on the maddeningly confident challenges of that debonair picaroon to hope that any amount of thought could make this one more digestible.
It was air-tight and water-tight. It was as smooth as the Saint's languid tantalising voice. It located the one unanswerable loophole in the situation and strolled through it with as much room to spare as an ant going through the Arc de Triomphe. It was exactly the sort of thing that the Saint could always be relied upon to do.
The knowledge soaked down into Mr. Teal's interior like a dose of molten lead. The ancient duel was embarking upon the umpteenth round of a series which seemed capable of going on into eternity; and the prospect seemed as hopeless as it had always seemed. If Mr. Teal had any formulated idea of hell, it was something exactly like that-an endless succession of insoluble riddles that he had to try to solve, while the Saint's impudent forefinger and the Assistant Commissioner's disparaging sniff worked in alternate relays to goad his thoughts away from the last relics of coherence. And there were moments when he wondered if he had already died without knowing it, and was already paying for his long-forgotten sins.
'You can go, for the present,' he said smoulderingly. 'I'll find you again when I want you.'
'I'm afraid you will,' said the Saint sadly, and adjusted the brim of his hat to the correct piratical angle. 'Well, I'll be seein' ya, Claud Eustace. . . .' He turned his vague, unspeakably mischievous smile on to Junior Inspector Pryke, who had been standing sulkily mute since he was last noticed. 'And you too, Sweet Pea,' he said hopefully.
Chief Inspector Claud Eustace Teal watched his departure with malignant gloom. It was discouragingly reminiscent of too many other Saintly exits that Mr. Teal had witnessed, and he had a very apathetic interest in the flashlight photography and finger-print dusting which he had to superintend during the next hour or two.
For those records were made only at the dictation of a system in which Mr. Teal was too congenitally rut-sunk to question. There was a fire escape within easy reach of the bathroom window which had more to tell than any number of photographs of an empty chair from which an unproven corpse had disappeared.
Sunny Jim Fasson had been shot at by somebody who had opened the door of the flatlet while Mr. Teal was interrogating him, the same somebody who had found means of silencing Johnny Anworth on the verge of an identically similar squeak; after which Fasson had vanished off the face of the earth. And Teal had a seething conviction that the only living man who knew every secret of what had happened was walking free in the Saint's custom-built shoes.
The Assistant Commissioner was very polite. 'But it has possibly failed to occur to you,' he commented, 'that this is the sort of thing news editors pray for.'
'If you remember, sir,' Pryke put in smugly, 'I was against the idea from the first.'
'Quite,' said the Commissioner. 'Quite.' He was a man who had won his appointment largely on the qualification of a distinguished career of pig-sticking and polo-playing with the Indian Army, and he was inclined to sympathise with the officer whom he regarded as a pukka sahib, like himself. 'But you went with Mr. Teal, and you may know why Templar was not at least arrested on suspicion.'
'On suspicion of what?' demanded Teal wildly. 'The worst you could prove is that he abetted Fasson's escape; and that means nothing, because Fasson hadn't even been arrested.'
