13 The Saint Intervenes (Boodle)

"I seem to remember that you retired from this business some months ago, Peter," he murmured. "A really respectable citizen wouldn't be asking that question with so much interest. However, since your beautiful wife is away—if you'd like to lend a hand, you could help me a lot."

"But what's the plan?" insisted Patricia.

Simon Templar smiled.

"We are going to dematerialise ourselves," he said blandly. "Covetous but invisible, we shall lift the crown of Cherkessia from under Claud Eustace's very nose, and put it on a shelf in the fourth dimension."

She was no wiser when the party broke up some hours later. Simon informed her that he and Peter Quentin would be moving into Prince Schamyl's hotel to take up residence there for a couple of days; but she knew that they would not be there under their own names, and the rest of his plan remained wrapped in the maddening mystery with which the Saint's sense of the theatrical too often required him to tantalise his confederates.

Chief Inspector Teal would have been glad to know even as little as Patricia; but the evidence which came before him was far less satisfactory. It consisted of a plain postcard, ad­dressed to Prince Schamyl, on which had been drawn a skeleton figure crowned with a rakishly tilted halo. A small arrow pointed to the halo, and at the other end of the arrow was written in neat copperplate the single word: "Thursday."

"If the Saint says he's coming on Thursday, he's coming on Thursday," Teal stated definitely, in a private conference to which he was summoned when the card arrived.

Prince Schamyl elevated his shoulders and spread out his hands.

"I do not attempt to understand your customs, Inspector. In my country, if we require evidence, we beat the criminal with rods until he provides it."

"You can't do that in this country," said Teal, as if he wished you could. "That postcard wouldn't be worth tuppence in a court of law—not with the sort of lawyers the Saint could afford to engage. We couldn't prove that he sent it. We know it's his trade-mark, but the very fact that everybody in England knows the same thing would be the weakest point in our case. The prosecutor could never make the jury believe that a crook as clever as the Saint is supposed to be would sent out a warning that could be traced back to him so easily. The Saint knows it, and he's been trading on it for years—it's the strongest card in his hand. If we arrested him on evidence like that, he'd only have to swear that the card was a fake—that some other crook had sent it out as a blind—and he could make a fool of anyone who tried to prove it wasn't. Our only chance is to catch him more or less red-handed. One of these days he'll go too far, and I'm only hoping it'll be on Thursday."

Teal thumbed the pages of a cheap pocket diary, although he had no need to remind himself of dates.

"This is Wednesday," he said. "You can say that Thursday begins any time after midnight. I'll be here at twelve o'clock myself, and I'll stay here till midnight tomorrow."

Mr. Teal was worried more than he would have cared to admit. The idea that even such a satanic ingenuity as he knew the Saint to possess could contrive a way of stealing anything from under the eyes of a police guard who had been forewarned that he was coming for it was obviously fantastic. It belonged to sensational fiction, to the improbable world of Arsène Lupin. Arsène Lupin would have disguised himself as Chief Inspector Teal or the Chief Commissioner, and walked out with the crown under his arm; but Teal knew that such miracles of impersonation only happened in the romances of unscrupulous and reader-cheating authors. Yet he knew the Saint too well, he had crossed swords too often with that amazing brigand of the twentieth century, to derive any solid consolation from that thought.

When he came back to the hotel that night, he checked over his defences as seriously as if he had been guarding the emperor of a great European power from threatened assassi­nation. There were men posted at the entrances of the hotel, and one at a strategic point in the lobby which covered the stairs and elevators. A Flying Squad car stood outside. Every member of the hotel staff who would be serving the Prince during the next twenty-four hours had been investigated. A burly detective paced the corridor outside the Prince's suite, and two more equally efficient men were posted inside. Teal added himself to the last number. The £100,000 crown of Cherkessia reposed in a velvet-lined box on a table in the sitting-room of the suite—Teal had unsuccessfully attempted more than once to induce Prince Schamyl to authorise its removal to a safe-deposit or even to Scotland Yard itself.

"Where is the necessity?" inquired the Prince blankly. "You have your detectives everywhere. Are you afraid that they will be unable to cope with this absurd criminal?"