Leslie Charteris - Follow the Saint

The receiver did not actually explode in his ear. It was a soundly constructed instrument, designed to resist spontaneous detonation. It did, however, appear to feel some strain in reproducing the cracked-foghorn cadence in which the answering voice said: "Who's that?"

"And how," said the Saint, "is the little tum-tum tonight?"

Mr Teal did not repeat his question. He had no need to. There was only one voice in the whole world which was capable of inquiring after his stomach with the exact inflection which was required to make that hypersensitive organ curl up into tight knots that sent red and yellow flashes squirting across his eyeballs.

Mr Teal did not groan aloud; but a minute organic groan swept through him like a cramp from his fingertips to his toes.

It is true that he was in bed, and it is also true that he had been interrupted in the middle of some important business; but that important business had been simply and exclusively concerned with trying to drown his multitudinous woes in sleep. For a man in the full bloom of health to be smitten over the knob with a blunt instrument is usually a somewhat trying experience; but for a man in Mr Teal's dyspeptic condition to be thus beaned is ultimate disaster. Mr Teal now had two fearful pains rivalling for his attention, which he had been trying to give to neither. The only way of evading this responsibility which he had been able to think of had been to go to bed and go to sleep, which is what he had set out to do as soon as the Saint had left him at his door; but sleep had steadfastly eluded him until barely five minutes before the telephone bell had blared its recall to conscious suffering into his anguished ear. And when he became aware that the emotions which he had been caused by that recall had been wrung out of him for no better object than to answer some Saintly badinage about his abdomen, his throat dosed up so that it was an effort for him to breathe.

"Is that all you want to know?" he got out in a strangled squawk. "Because if so—"

"But it bothers me, Claud. You know how I love your tummy. It would break my heart if anything went wrong with it."

"Who told you anything was wrong with it?"

"Only my famous deductive genius. Or do you mean to tell me you drink Miracle Tea because you like it?"

There was a pause. With the aid of television, Mr Teal could have been seen to wriggle. The belligerent blare crumpled out of his voice.

"Oh," he said weakly. "What miracle tea?"

"The stuff you had in your pocket this afternoon. I threw it into the car with your other things when I picked you up, but we forgot it when you got out. I've just found it. Guaranteed to cure indigestion, colic, flatulence, constipation, venomous bile, spots before the eyes… I didn't know you had so many troubles, Claud."

"I haven't!" Teal roared defiantly. His stomach promptly performed two complicated and unprecedented evolutions and made a liar of him. He winced, and floundered. "I–I just happened to hear it advertised on the radio, and then I saw another advertisement in a shop window on the way home, so I thought I'd try some. I–I haven't been feeling very fit lately—"

"Then I certainly think you ought to try something," said the Saint charitably. "I'll beetle over with your poison right away; and if I can help out with a spot of massage, you only have to say the word."

Mr Teal closed his eyes. Of all the things he could think of which might aggravate his miseries, a visit from the Saint at that time was the worst.

"Thanks," he said with frantic earnestness, "but all I want now is to get some sleep. Bring it over some other time, Saint."

Simon reached thoughtfully for a cigarette.

"Just as you like, Claud. Shall we say the May Fair tomorrow, at four o'clock?"

"You could send it round," Teal said desperately. "Or just throw it away. I can get some more. If it's any bother."

"No bother at all, dear old collywobble. Let's call it a date. Tomorrow at four — and we'll have a cup of tea together…"

The Saint laid the telephone gently back on its bracket and replaced it on the table beside him. His thumb flicked over the wheel of his lighter; and the tip of his cigarette kindled to a glow that matched the brightening gleam of certainty in his blue eyes.

He had obtained all the information he wanted without pressing a single conspicuous question. Mr Teal had bought his Miracle Tea on the way home — and Simon knew that Mr Teal's way home, across Parliament Square and up Victoria Street, was so rigidly established by years of unconscious habit that a blind man could almost have followed it by tracing the groove which the detective's regulation boots must by that time have worn along the pavement. Even if there were more than one chemist's along that short trail with a Miracle Tea advertisement in the window, the process of elimination could not take long…

Patricia was watching him.

She said: "So what?"

"So we were right," said the Saint; and his voice was lilting with incorrigible magic. "Claud doesn't give a damn about his tea. It doesn't mean a thing in his young life. He doesn't care if he never sees it again. He just bought it by a fluke, and he doesn't even know what sort of a fluke it was."

"Are you sure?" asked Patricia cautiously. "If he just doesn't want you to suspect anything—"

The Saint shook his head.

"I know all Claud's voices much too well. If he'd tried to get away with anything like that, I should have heard it. And why should he try? I offered to bring it round at once, and he could have just said nothing and let me bring it. Why should he take any risk at all of something going wrong when he could have had the package back in half an hour. Teal may look dumb sometimes, but you can't see him being so dumb as that." Simon stood up, and his smile was irresistibly expectant. "Come out into the wide world with me, darling, and let's look for this shop where they sell miracles!"

His energy carried her off like a tide race; the deep purr of the Hirondel as he drove it at fantastic speed to Parliament Square was in tune with his mood. Why it should have happened again, like this, he didn't know; but it might as well have been this way as any other. Whatever the way, it had been bound to happen. Destiny could never leave him alone for long, and it must have been at least a week since anything exciting had happened to him. But now that would be all put right, and there would be trouble and adventure and mystery again, and with a little luck some boodle at the end; that was all that mattered. Somewhere in this delirious business of Miracle Tea and Bank of England notes there must be crime and dark conspiracies and all manner of mischief — he couldn't surmise yet what kind of racket could subsist on trading handfuls of bank notes for half-crowns, but it was even harder to imagine anything like that in a line of legitimate business, so some racket or other it must be, and new rackets could never be altogether dull. He parked the car illegally on the corner of Victoria Street, and got out.

"Let's walk," he said.

He took Patricia's arm and strolled with her up the street; and as they went he burbled exuberantly.

"Maybe it's an eccentric millionaire who suffered from acute dyspepsia all his life, and in his will he directed that all his fortune was to be distributed among other sufferers, because he knew that there really wasn't any cure at all, but at least the money would be some consolation. So without any publicity his executors had the dough wrapped up in packets labelled as an indigestion cure, feeling pretty sure that nobody who didn't have indigestion would buy it, and thereby saving themselves the trouble of sorting through a lot of applicants with bogus belly-aches… Or maybe it's some guy who has made all the money in the world out of defrauding the poor nitwitted public with various patent medicines, whose conscience has pricked him in his old age so that he is trying to fix himself up for the Hereafter by making restitution, and the most appropriate way he can think of to do that is to distribute the geetus in the shape of another patent medicine, figuring that that is the way it's most likely to fall into the same hands that it originally came from… Or maybe—"