Leslie Charteris - Follow the Saint

He went all round the Hirondel twice.

He was breathing a trifle laboriously, and his face was redder than before — probably from stooping — when he turned his attention to the Daimler.

He went all round the Daimler twice, too.

Then he straightened up and came slowly back to the Saint. He came back until his face was only a few inches from the Saint's. His capillaries were congested to the point where his complexion had a dark purple hue. He seemed to be having more trouble with his larynx.

"What have you done to those tyres?" he got out in a hysterical blare.

The Saint's eyebrows drew perplexedly together.

"What have I done to them? I don't get you, Claud. Do you mean to say they don't match?"

"You know damn well they don't match! You knew it all the time." Realization of the way the Saint had deliberately lured him up to greater heights of optimism only to make his downfall more hideous when it came, brought something like a sob into the detective's gullet. "You've changed the tyres!"

Simon looked aggrieved.

"How could I, Claud? You can see for yourself that these tyres are a long way from being new—"

"What have you done with the tyres you had on the car last night?" Teal almost screamed.

"But these are the only tyres I've had on the car for weeks," Simon protested innocently. "Why do you always suspect me of such horrible deceits? If my tyres don't match the tracks you found in that field, it just looks to me as if you may have made a mistake about my being there."

Chief Inspector Teal did a terrible thing. He raised the casts in his hands and hurled them down on the concrete floor so that they shattered into a thousand fragments. He did not actually dance on them, but he looked as if only an effort of self-control that brought him to the brink of an apoplectic stroke stopped him from doing so.

"What have you done with Verdean?" he yelled.

"I haven't done anything with him. Why should I have? I've never even set eyes on the man."

"I've got a search warrant—"

"Then why don't you search?" demanded the Saint snappily, as though his patience was coming to an end. "You don't believe anything I tell you, anyhow, so why don't you look for yourself? Go ahead and use your warrant. Tear the house apart. I don't mind. I'll be waiting for you in the living-room when you're ready to eat some of your words."

He turned on his heel and strolled back to the house.

He sat down in the living-room, lighted a cigarette, and calmly picked up a magazine. He heard the tramp of Teal and his minions entering the front door, without looking up. For an hour he listened to them moving about in various parts of the house, tapping walls and shifting furniture; but he seemed to have no interest beyond the story he was reading, Even when they invaded the living-room itself, he didn't even glance at them. He went on turning the pages as if they made no more difference to his idleness than a trio of inquisitive puppies.

Teal came to the living-room last. Simon knew from the pregnant stillness that presently supervened that the search had come to a stultifying end, but he continued serenely to finish his page before he looked up.

"Well," he said at length, "have you found him?"

"Where is he?" shouted Teal, with dreadful savagery.

Simon put down the magazine.'

"Look here," he said wearily. "I've made a lot of allowances for you, but I give up. What's the use? I tell you I was at home last night, and you can't prove I wasn't; but just because you want me to have been out, I must be faking an alibi. You've got casts of the tyre tracks of a car that was mixed up in some dirty business last night, and they don't match the tracks of either of my cars; but just because you think they ought to match, I must have changed my tyres. I tell you I haven't kidnapped this fellow Verdean, and you can't find him anywhere in my house; but just because you think I ought to have kidnapped him, I must have hidden him somewhere else. Every shred of evidence is against you, and therefore all the evidence must be wrong. You couldn't possibly be wrong yourself, because you're the great Chief Inspector Claud Eustace Teal, who knows everything and always gets his man. All right. Every bit of proof there is shows that I'm innocent, but I must be guilty because your theories would be all wet if I wasn't. So why do we have to waste our time on silly little details like this? Let's just take me down to the police station and lock me up."

"That's just what I'm going to do," Teal raved blindly.

The Saint looked at him for a moment, and stood up.

"Good enough," he said breezily. "I'm ready when you are."

He went to the door and called: "Pat!" She answered him, and came down the stairs. He said: "Darling, Claud Eustace has had an idea. He's going to lug me off and shove me in the cooler on a charge of being above suspicion. It's a new system they've introduced at Scotland Yard, and all the laws are being altered to suit it. So you'd better call one of our lawyers and see if he knows what to do about it. Oh, and you might ring up some of the newspapers while you're on the job — they'll probably want to interview Claud about his brainwave."

"Yes, of course," she said enthusiastically, and went towards the telephone in the study.

Something awful, something terrifying, something freezing and paralysing, damp, chilly, appalling, descended over Chief Inspector Teal like a glacial cascade. With the very edge of the precipice crumbling under his toes, his eyes were opened. The delirium of fury that had swept him along so far coagulated sickeningly within him. Cold, pitiless, inescapable facts hammered their bitter way through into the turmoil of his brain. He was too shocked at the moment even to feel the anguish of despair. His mind shuddered under the impact of a new kind of panic. He took a frantic step forward — a step that was, in its own way, the crossing of a harrowing Rubicon.

"Wait a minute," he stammered hoarsely.

Fifteen minutes later, Simon Templar stood on the front steps and watched the police car crawl out of the drive with its cargo of incarnate woe. He felt Patricia's fingers slide into his hand, and turned to smile at her.

"So far, so good," he said thoughtfully. "But only so far."

"I thought you were joking, at breakfast," she said. "How did he get here so soon?"

He shrugged.

"That wasn't difficult. I suppose he stayed down at Staines last night; and the Chertsey police would have phoned over about the Verdean business first thing this morning, knowing that he was the manager of the bank that had been held up. Claud must have shot off on the scent like a prize greyhound, and I'm afraid I can sympathize with the way he must have felt when he arrived here."

"Well, we're still alive," she said hopefully. "You got rid of him again."

"Only because his nerves are getting a bit shaky from all the times I've slipped through his fingers, and he's so scared of being made a fool of again that he daren't move now without a cast-iron case, and I was able to pick a few awkward holes in this one. But don't begin thinking we've got rid of him for keeps. He's just gone away now to see if he can stop up the holes again and put some more iron in the evidence, and he's sore enough to work overtime at it. He's going to be three times as dangerous from now on. Worse than that, he's not so dumb that he isn't going to put two and two together about all this commotion around Verdean coming right on top of the robbery. You can bet the Crown Jewels to a showgirl's virtue that he's already figured out that Verdean was mixed up in it in some way. While we're stuck with Verdean, and Verdean is stuck with amnesia." The Saint closed the front door with sombre finality. "Which is the hell of a layout from any angle," he said. "Tell Orace to bring me a large mug of beer, darling, because I think I am going to have a headache."