13 The Saint Intervenes (Boodle)

Teal let out a shout and started across the room. Simon's hand dived into the drawer, came out with a nickel-plated revolver—it was exactly the same as the one with which Lewis Enstone had shot himself, but Teal wasn't noticing things like that. His impression was that the Saint really had gone raving mad after all, and the sight of the gun pulled him up for a moment as the sight of a gun in the hands of any other raving maniac would have pulled him up.

"Put that down, you fool!" he yelled, and then he let out another shout as he saw the Saint turn the muzzle of the gun close up to his right eye, with his thumb on the trigger, exactly as Enstone must have held it. Teal lurched forward and knocked the weapon aside with a sweep of his arm; then he grabbed Simon by the wrist. "That's enough of that," he said, without realising what a futile thing it was to say.

Simon looked at him and smiled.

"Thanks for saving my life, old beetroot," he murmured kindly. "But it really wasn't necessary. You see, Claud, that's the gun Enstone thought he was playing with!"

The maid was under the table letting out the opening note of a magnificent fit of hysterics. Teal let go the Saint, hauled her out, and shook her till she was quiet. There were more events cascading on him in those few seconds than he knew how to cope with, and he was not gentle.

"It's all right, miss," he growled. "I am from Scotland Yard. Just sit down somewhere, will you ?" He turned back to Simon. "Now, what's all this about?"

"The gun, Claud. Enstone's toy."

The Saint raised it again—his smile was quite sane, and with the feeling that he himself was the madman, Teal let him do what he wanted. Simon put the gun to his eye and pulled the trigger—pulled it, released it, pulled it again, keeping up the rhythmic movement. Something inside the gun whirred smoothly, as if wheels were whizzing round under the working of the lever. Then he pointed the gun straight into Teal's face and did the same thing.

Teal stared frozenly down the barrel and saw the black hole leap into a circle of light. He was looking at a flickering cine­matograph film of a boy shooting a masked burglar. It was tiny, puerile in subject, but perfect. It lasted about ten sec­onds, and then the barrel went dark again.

"Costello's present for Enstone's little boy," explained the Saint quietly. "He invented it and made it himself, of course-he always had a talent that way. Haven't you ever seen those electric flashlights that work without a battery? You keep on squeezing a lever, and it turns a miniature dynamo. Costello made a very small one, and fitted it into the hollow casting of a gun. Then he geared a tiny strip of film to it. It was a jolly good new toy, Claud Eustace, and he must have been proud of it. They took it along to Enstone's; and when he'd turned down their merger and there was nothing else for them to do, they let him play with it just to tickle his palate, at just the right hour of the evening. Then they took it away from him and put it back in its box and gave it to him. They had a real gun in another box ready to make the switch."

Chief Inspector Teal stood like a rock, his jaws clamping a wad of spearmint that he had at last forgotten to chew. Then he said: "How did they know he wouldn't shoot his own son?"

"That was Hammel. He knew that Enstone wasn't capable of keeping his hands off a toy like that; and just to make certain he reminded Enstone of it the last thing before they left. He was a practical psychologist—I suppose we can begin to speak of him in the past tense now." Simon Templar smiled again, and fished a cigarette out of his pocket. "But why I should bother to tell you all this when you could have got it out of a stool pigeon," he murmured, "is more than I can understand. I must be getting soft-hearted in my old age, Claud. After all, when you're so far ahead of Sherlock Holmes ——"

Mr.  Teal gulped  pinkly,   and picked  up  the telephone.

XIV

The Mixture as Before

"Crime," explained Simon Templar, squeezing lemon-juice meditatively over a liberal slice of smoked salmon, "is a kind of Fourth Dimenson. The sucker moves and has his being com­pletely enclosed in a sphere of limitations which he assumes to be the natural laws of the universe. When he is offered an egg, he expects to be given an egg—not a sewing machine. The bloke who takes the money off him is the bloke who breaks the rules—the bloke who hops outside the sucker's di­mension, skids invisibly round ahead of him, and pops in again exactly at the point where the sucker would never dream of looking for him. But the bloke who takes money off the bloke who takes money off the sucker—the real aristocrat of the profession—is something even brighter. He duly delivers the egg; only it's also an aubergine. It's a plant."

He could have continued in the same strain for some time, and not infrequently did.