Leslie Charteris - Follow the Saint

The waitress at last succeeded in gaining audience.

"Yes," boomed Kennedy. "Tea. Strong tea. And about half a ton of hot buttered crumpets."

Mr Teal closed his eyes again as another excruciating cramp curled through him.

In his darkened loneliness he became aware that the music had been interrupted and the radio was talking.

"… and this amazing tea is not only guaranteed to relieve indigestion immediately, but to effect a complete and permanent cure," said a clear young voice with a beautiful Oxford accent. "Every day we are receiving fresh testimonials— "

"My God," said Teal with a shudder, "where is that Eric-or-Little-by-Little drivelling from?"

"Radio Calvados," answered Kennedy. "One of the new continental stations. They go to work every Sunday. I suppose we shall have to put up with it as long as the BBC refuses to produce anything but string quartets and instructive talks on Sundays."

"Miracle Tea" said Eric, continuing little by little. "Remember that name. Miracle Tea. Obtainable from all high-class chemists, or direct by post from the Miracle Tea Company, 909 Victoria Street, London. Buy some Miracle Tea tonight!… And now we shall conclude this programme with our signature song — Tea for You."

Mr Teal held on to his stomach as the anguishing parody proceeded to rend the air.

"Miracle Tea!" he rasped savagely. "What'll they think of next? As if tea could cure indigestion! Pah!"

The way he said "Pah!" almost blew his front teeth out; and Kennedy glanced at him discerningly.

"Oh, so that's the trouble, is it? The mystery is solved."

"I didn't say—"

Kennedy grinned at him.

The door of the tea shoppe opened again, to admit Inspector Peters, Kennedy's chief assistant.

"Sorry I was so long, sir," he apologized, taking the vacant chair at their table. "The man was out—"

"Never mind that," said Kennedy. "Teal's got indigestion."

"You can fix that with a bit of bicarb," said Peters helpfully.

"So long as it isn't something more serious," said Kennedy, reaching for the freshly-arrived plate of hot buttered crumpets with a hand like a leg of mutton and the air of massive confidence which can only be achieved by a man of herculean physique who knows that his interior would never dare to give him any backchat. "I've been noticing his face lately. I must say I've been worried about it, but I didn't like to mention it before he brought it up."

"You mean the twitching?" asked Peters.

"Not so much the twitching as the jaundiced colour. It looks bad to me."

"Damn it," began Teal explosively.

"Acid," pronounced Kennedy, engulfing crumpets. "That's generally the beginning of the trouble. Too much acid swilling around the lining of your stomach, and where are you? In next to no time you're a walking mass of gastric ulcers. You know what happens when a gastric ulcer eats into a blood vessel?"

"You bleed to death?" asked Peters interestedly.

"Like a shot," said Kennedy, apparently unaware of the fact that Teal was starting to simmer and splutter like a pan full of hot grease. "It's even worse when the ulcer makes a whacking great hole in the wall of the stomach and your dinner falls through into the abdominal cavity…"

Mr Teal clung to his chair and wished that he had been born deaf.

It was no consolation at all to him to recall that it had actually been the Saint himself who had started the fashion of making familiar and even disgusting comments on the shape and dimensions of the stomach under discussion, a fashion which Mr Teal's own colleagues, to their eternal disgrace, had been surprisingly quick to adopt. And now that it had been revealed that his recent irritability had been caused by acute indigestion, the joke would take a new lease of life. It is a curious but undeniable fact that a man may have a headache or a toothache or an earache and receive nothing but sympathy from those about him; but let his stomach ache and all he can expect is facetiousness of the most callous and offensive kind. Mr Teal's stomach was a magnificently well-developed organ, measuring more inches from east to west than he cared to calculate and he was perhaps excessively sensitive about it; but in its present condition the most faintly flippant reference to it was exquisite torment.

He stood up.

"Will you excuse me, sir?" he said, with as much dignity as he could muster. "I've got a job to do this evening."

"Don't forget to buy some Miracle Tea on your way home," was Kennedy's farewell.

Mr Teal walked up Victoria Street in the direction of his modest lodgings. He had no job to do at all; but it would have been physically impossible for him to have stomached another minute of the conversation he had left behind him. He walked, because he had not far to go, and the exercise helped to distract his thoughts from the feeling that his intestines were being gnawed by a colony of hungry rats. Not that the distraction was by any means complete: the rats continued their remorseless depredations. But he was able to give them only half his attention instead of the whole of it. In the circumstances it was perhaps natural that the broadcast which had been added to his current griefs should remain vaguely present in the background of his mind. The address given had been in Victoria Street. And therefore it was perhaps not such a wild coincidence after all that he should presently have found himself gazing at a large showcard in the window of a chemist's shop which he must have been passing practically every day for the last two months.

Mr Teal was not even averagely gullible; but a man in his state of mind is not fully responsible for his actions. The tribulations of the last few weeks had reduced him to a state of desperation in which he would have tried a dose of prussic acid if it had been recommended with sufficient promises of alleviating his distress.

With a furtive glance around him, as if he was afraid of being caught in a disreputable act, he entered the shop and approached the counter, behind which stood a shifty-eyed young man in a soiled white coat.

"A packet of Miracle Tea," said Mr Teal, lowering his voice to a mumble, although the shop was empty, as though he had been asking for some unmentionable merchandise.

He planked down a half-crown with unconvincing defiance.

The assistant hesitated for a moment, turned, and took an oblong yellow packet from a shelf behind him. He hesitated again, still holding it as if he was reluctant to part with it.

"Yes, sir?" he said suggestively.

"What d'you mean — 'yes, sir?' " blared Mr Teal with the belligerence of increasing embarrassment.

"Isn't there something else, sir?"

"No, there isn't anything else!" retorted the detective, whose sole remaining ambition was to get out of the place as quickly as possible with his guilty purchase. "Give me that stuff and take your money."

He reached over and fairly snatched the yellow packet out of the young man's hand, stuffed it into his pocket, and lumbered out as if he were trying to catch a train. He was in such a hurry that he almost bowled over another customer who was just entering the shop — and this customer, for some reason, quickly averted his face.

Mr Teal was too flustered even to notice him. He went plodding more rapidly than usual on his homeward way, feeling as if his face was a bright crimson which would announce his shame to any passerby, and never dreaming that Destiny had already grasped him firmly by the scruff of the neck.

Five minutes later he was trudging through a narrow side street within a couple of blocks of his apartment. The comatose dusk of Sunday evening lay over it like a shroud: not a single other human creature was in sight, and the only sound apart from the solid tread of his own regulation boots was a patter of hurried footsteps coming up behind him. There was nothing in that to make him turn his head… The footsteps caught up until they were almost on his heels; and then something hit him a terrific blow on the side of the head and everything dissolved into black darkness.