Leslie Charteris - Follow the Saint

He opened the door of the car, and took hold of his raincoat and bowler hat.

"G'night," he said.

"Goodnight," said the Saint cheerfully. "You know where I live, any time you decide you want a bodyguard."

Mr Teal did not deign to reply. He crossed the sidewalk rather unsteadily, mounted the steps of the house, and let himself in without looking back. The door closed again behind him.

Simon chuckled as he let in the clutch and drove on towards the appointment to which he had been on his way. The episode which had just taken place would make a mildly amusing story to tell: aside from that obvious face value, he didn't give it a second thought. There was no reason why he should. There must have been enough hoodlums in the metropolis with long-cherished dreams of vengeance against Mr Teal, aside from ordinary casual footpads, to account for the sprinting beater-up who had made such an agile getaway: the only entertaining angle was that Coincidence should have chosen the Saint himself, of all possible people, to be the rescuer.

That was as much as the Saint's powers of clairvoyance were worth on that occasion.

Two hours later, when he had parked the Hirondel in the garage at Cornwall House, his foot kicked something out of the door as he got out. It was the yellow packet that had slipped out of Teal's pocket, which had fallen on to the floor and been left there forgotten by both men.

Simon picked it up; and when he saw the label he sighed, and then grinned again. So that was a new depth to which Mr Teal had sunk; and the revelation of the detective's dyspepsia would provide a little extra piquancy to their next encounter in badinage…

He went on reading the exaggerated claims made for Miracle Tea on the wrapper as he rode up in the elevator to his apartment. And as he read on, a new idea came to him, an idea which could only have found a welcome in such a scapegrace sense of mischief as the Saint's. The product was called Miracle Tea, and there seemed to be no reason why it should not be endowed with miraculous properties before being returned to its owner. Chief Inspector Teal would surely be disappointed if it failed to perform miracles. And that could so easily be arranged. The admixture of a quantity of crushed senna pods, together with a certain amount of powdered calomel — the indicated specific in all cases of concussion…

In his own living-room, the Saint proceeded to open the packet with great care, in such a way that it could be sealed again and bear no trace of having been tampered with.

Inside, there seemed to be a second paper wrapping. He took hold of one corner of it and pulled experimentally. A complete crumpled piece of paper came out in his fingers. Below that, there was another crumpled white pad. And after that, another. It went on until the whole package was empty, and the table on which he was working was covered with those creased white scraps. But no tea came to light. He picked up one of the pieces of paper and cautiously unfolded it, in case it should be the container of an individual dose. And then suddenly he sat quite still, while his blue eyes froze into narrowed pools of electrified ice as he realized what he was looking at.

It was a Bank of England note for fifty pounds.

"Miracle tea," said the Saint reverently, "is a good name for it."

There were thirty of those notes — a total of fifteen hundred pounds in unquestionably genuine cash, legal tender and ripe for immediate circulation.

There was a light step behind him, and Patricia Holm's hand fell on his shoulder.

"I didn't know you'd come in, boy," she said; and then she didn't go on. He felt her standing unnaturally still. After some seconds she said: "What have you been doing — breaking into the baby's moneybox?"

"Getting ready to write some letters," he said. "How do you like the new notepaper?"

She pulled him round to face her.

"Come on," she said. "I like to know when you're going to be arrested. What's the charge going to be this time — burgling a bank?"

He smiled at her.

She was easy to smile at. Hair like ripe corn in the sun, a skin like rose petals, blue eyes that could be as wicked as his own, the figure of a young nymph, and something else that could not have been captured in any picture, something in her that laughed with him in all his misdeeds.

"Tea-drinking is the charge," he said. "I've signed the pledge, and henceforward this will be my only beverage."

She raised her fist.

"I'll push your face in."

"But it's true."

He handed her the packet from which the money had come. She sat on the table and studied every side of it. And after that she was only more helplessly perplexed.

"Go on," she said.

He told her the story exactly as it had happened.

"And now you know just as much as I do," he concluded. "I haven't even had time to do any thinking on it. Maybe we needn't bother. We shall wake up soon, and everything will be quite all right."

She put the box down again and looked at one of the notes.

"Are they real?"

"There isn't a doubt of it."

"Maybe you've got away with Teal's life savings."

"Maybe. But he has got a bank account. And can you really see Claud Eustace hoarding his worldly wealth in packets of patent tea?"

"Then it must be evidence in some case he's working on."

"It could be. But again, why keep it in this box?" Simon turned the yellow packet over in his supple hands. "It was perfectly sealed before I opened it. It looked as if it had never been touched. Why should he go to all that trouble? And suppose it was evidence just as it stood, how did he know what the evidence was without opening it? If he didn't know, he'd surely have opened it on the spot, in front of witnesses. And if he did know, he had no business to take it home. Besides, if he did know that he was carrying dangerous evidence, he wouldn't have had to think twice about what motive there might be for slugging him on his way home; but he didn't seem to have the slightest idea what it was all about."

Patricia frowned.

"Could he be taking graft? This might be a way of slipping him the money."

Simon thought that over for a while; but in the end he shook his head.

"We've said a lot of rude things about Claud Eustace in our time, but I don't think even we could ever have said that seriously. He may be a nuisance, but he's so honest that it runs out of his ears. And still again, he'd have known what he was carrying, and known what anybody who slugged him might have been after, and the first thing he did when he woke up would have been to see if he's still got the dough. But he didn't. He didn't even feel in his pockets."

"But wasn't he knocked silly?"

"Not that silly."

"Perhaps he was quite sure what had happened, and didn't want to give himself away."

"With me sitting beside him? If he'd even thought he'd lost something valuable, it wouldn't have been quite so easy for me to convince him that I wasn't the warrior with the gaspipe. He could have arrested me himself and searched me on the spot without necessarily giving anything away."

The girl shrugged despairingly.

"All right. So you think of something."

The Saint lighted a cigarette.

"I suppose I'm barmy, but there's only one thing I can think of. Claud Eustace didn't have the foggiest idea what was in the packet. He had a pain in his tum-tum, and he just bought it for medicine on the way home. It was meant to be handed to someone else, and the fellow in the shop got mixed up. As soon as Teal's gone out with it, the right man comes in, and there is a good deal of commotion. Somebody realizes what's happened, and goes dashing after Teal to get the packet back. He bends his blunt instrument over Teal's head, and is just about to frisk him when I arrive and spoil everything, and he has to lam. I take Teal home, and Teal has something else to think about besides his tummy-ache, so he forgets all about his Miracle Tea, and I win it. And is it something to win!"