12 The Saint in London (The Misfortunes of Mr Teal)

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 yourself sick ever since you sat down at the table. I suppose you've been wondering if there were any limits on earth to what you could make me swallow. Well, I've bought it. I've given you your rope. And now suppose you tell me why you think it isn't going to hang you?"

"Claud!" The Saint's voice was wicked. "Are you sure you haven't had too much of this brandy? I feel that your bile is running away with you. Is this------"

"Never mind my bile!" Teal got out through his teeth. "I'm waiting for you to talk about something else. And before you start, let me tell you that I'm going to tear this alibi to pieces if it takes me the rest of my life!"

Simon raised his eyebrows.

"Alibi?" he repeated gently.

"That's what I said."

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"No?" Teal meant to be derisive, but the word plopped out of his mouth like a cork out of a bottle. "I'm talking about this precious alibi of yours which accounts for everything that fellow Uniatz and that girl Patricia Holm have been doing all the evening--and probably accounts for all your other friends as well. I mean this alibi you think you've framed me into giving you----"

"What on earth are you talking about?" asked the Saint patiently; and Teal drew another laboured breath.

"I mean," he said, and all the cumulative rancour of five years of that unequal duel was rasping through his voice like a red-hot file--"I mean that you must be thinking it was damned clever of you to get me to have dinner with you on this night of all nights, and keep me here with you from seven o'clock till now, when a dead man was picked up on the Brighton road half an hour ago with your mark on him!"

II

SIMON stared at him blankly. And even while he did so, he realized that he was letting the opportunity of a lifetime of Teal-baiting dawdle past him and raise its hat as it went by, without so much as lifting a hand to grab it. To be accused for once of a crime of which he was as innocent as an unborn Eskimo, and to have a made-to-measure alibi presented to him on a plate at the same time, should have presented vistas of gorgeous possibility to warm the heart. But he didn't even see them. He was too genuinely interested. \

"Say that again," he suggested.

''You've heard me already," retorted the detective gratingly. "It's your turn now. Well, I'm waiting for it. I like your fairy tales. What is it this time? Did he commit suicide and tie your mark round his neck for a joke? Did the Emperor of Abyssinia do it for you, or was it arranged by the Sultan of Turkey? Whatever your story is, I'll hear it!"

It has been urged by some captious critics of these records that Chief Inspector Teal has rarely been observed in them to behave like a normal detective. This charge the scribe is forced to admit. But he points out that there are very few of these chronicles in which Chief Inspector Teal has had any chance to be a normal detective. Confronted with the slow smile and bantering blue eyes of the Saint, something went haywire inside Mr. Teal. He was not himself. He was overwrought. He gave way. He behaved, in fact, exactly as a man who had been burned many times might have been expected to behave in the presence of fire. But it wasn't his fault; and the Saint knew it.