11 The Brighter Buccaneer

CHIEF INSPECTOR TEAL caught Larry the Stick at Newcastle trying to board an outward-bound Swedish timber ship. He did not find the fifty thousand pounds' worth of bonds and jewellery which Larry took from the Temple Lane Safe Deposit; but it may truthfully be reported that no one was more surprised about that than Larry himself.

They broke open the battered leather suit-case to which Larry was clinging as affectionately as if it contained the keys of the Bank of England, and found in it a cardboard box which was packed to bursting-point with what must have been one of the finest collections of small pebbles and old newspa­pers to which any burglar had ever attached himself; and Larry stared at it with glazed and incredulous eyes.

"Is one of you busies saving up for a rainy day?" he de­manded, when he could speak; and Mr. Teal was not amused.

"No one's been to that bag except when you saw us open it," he said shortly. "Come on, Larry-let's hear where you hid the stuff."

"I didn't hide it," said Larry flatly. He was prepared to say more, but suddenly he shut his mouth. He could be an im­mensely philosophic man when there was nothing left for him to do except to be philosophic, and one of his major problems had certainly been solved for him very providentially. "I hadn't anything to hide, Mr. Teal. If you'd only let me ex­plain things I could've saved you busting a perfickly good lock and making me miss my boat."

Mr. Teal tilted back his bowler hat with a kind of weary patience.

"Better make it short, Larry," he said. "The night watchman saw you before you coshed him, and he said he'd recognize you again."

"He must've been seeing things," asserted Larry. "Now, if you want to know all about it, Mr. Teal, I saw the doctor the other day, and he told me I was run down. 'What you want, Larry, is a nice holiday,' he says-not that I'd let anyone call me by my first name, you understand, but this doc is quite a good-class gentleman. 'What you want is a holiday,' he says. 'Why don't you take a sea voyage?' So, seeing I've got an old aunt in Sweden, I thought I'd pay her a visit. Naturally, I thought, the old lady would like to see some newspapers and read how things were going in the old country --"

"And what did she want the stones for?" inquired Teal po­litely. "Is she making a rock garden?"

"Oh, them?" said Larry innocently. "Them was for my uncle. He's a geo - geo -"

"Geologist is the word you want," said the detective, without smiling. "Now let's go back to London, and you can write all that down and sign it."

They went back to London with a resigned but still chatty cracksman, though the party lacked some of the high spirits which might have accompanied it. The most puzzled member of it was undoubtedly Larry the Stick, and he spent a good deal of time on the journey trying to think how it could have happened.

He knew that the bonds and jewels had been packed in his suit-case when he left London, for he had gone straight back to his lodgings after he left the Temple Lane Safe Deposit and stowed them away in the bag that was already half-filled in anticipation of an early departure. He had dozed in his chair for a few hours, and caught the 7.25 from King's Cross-the bag had never been out of his sight. Except . . . once during the morning he had succumbed to a not unreasonable thirst, and spent half an hour in the restaurant car in earnest collab­oration with a bottle of Worthington. But there was no sign of his bag having been tampered with when he came back, and he had seen no familiar face on the train.

It was one of the most mystifying things that had ever hap­pened to him, and the fact that the police case against him had been considerably weakened by his bereavement was a some­what dubious compensation.

Chief Inspector Teal reached London with a theory of his own. He expounded it to the Assistant Commissioner without enthusiasm.

"I'm afraid there's no doubt that Larry's telling the truth," he said. "He's no idea what happened to the swag, but I have. Nobody double-crossed him, because he always works alone, and he hasn't any enemies that I know of. There's just one man who might have done it-you know who I mean."

The Assistant Commissioner sniffed. He had an irritating and eloquent sniff.

"It would be very tiresome if anything happened to the Saint," he remarked pointedly. "The C.I.D. would have a job to find another stock excuse that would sound quite as con­vincing."

When Mr. Teal had cooled off in his own room, he had to admit that there was an element of truth in the Assistant Commissioner's acidulated comment. It did not mellow his toler­ance of the most unpopular Police Chief of his day; he had had similar thoughts himself, without feeling as if he had dis­covered the elixir of life.