Leslie Charteris - Prelude for War

All these accumulated indignations and despairs drained through Mr Teal's intestines in one corrosive moment of appalling stillness before he finally wrenched a response out of his vocal cords.

"How the hell did you get here?" he glurked.

It was not, perhaps, the most fluent and comprehensive speech that Mr Teal had ever made. But it conveyed, with a succinctness which more rounded oratory might well have failed to achieve, the distilled essence of what was seething through the overloaded cauldrons of his mind. Its most serious defect was in the enunciation, which lacked much of that flute-like clarity which is favoured by the cognoscenti of the science of elocution. It sounded in fact, as if his throat were full of hot porridge.

Simon smiled at him rather thoughtfully. He also had his memories; and the prime deduction which they offered him was that the unexpected intrusion of Chief Inspector Teal, at that particular moment of all moments, was definitely an added complication in an affair that was already complicated enough. But the sublimely bantering slant of his brows never wavered.

"I might ask you the same," he murmured. "But I see that your feet are looking as flat as ever, so I suppose you're still wearing them down."

The detective's face under his staid bowler hat remained a glaring purple, but his inflated china-blue eyes were receding fractionally.

"I noticed your car outside," he said.

He was a liar. He had seen it, but not noticed it. That shining cream-and-red monster was something that it would have been almost impossible to overlook in any landscape; but Mr Teal's thoughts had been far away from any subject so disturbing as the Saint. They had simply been moving in a fool's paradise where detectives from Scotland Yard were allowed to plod along investigating ordinary crimes committed by ordinary criminals without even a hint of such fantastic freaks as Simon Templar to mar the serenity of their dutiful labours. But Mr Teal had to say something like that to try and recover the majestic dominance from which in the agony of the moment he had so ruinously lapsed.

The Saint dissected his effort with a sardonically generous tolerance that made the detective's collar feel as if it were shrinking into his neck like a garrote.

"Of course, Claud," he said mildly. "Of course you did. I was forgetting what a sleuth you were. And while we're on the subject of sleuthing, I must say that you seem to have arrived in the nick of time. I don't know whether you've noticed it yet, but there's a dead man on the floor behind me. Without pretending to your encyclopedic knowledge of crime I should say that he appears to have been murdered."

"That's right," Teal said raspingly. "And I should say that I knew who did it."

The Saint raised his eyebrows.

"I don't want to seem unduly sensitive," he remarked, "but there's something about your tone of voice that makes me feel uncomfortable. Can you by any chance be suggesting—"

"We'll see about that," Teal retorted. He stepped aside out of the doorway. "Search him!" he barked.

Behind him a lanky uniformed sergeant unfolded himself into full view. Somewhat apprehensively he stepped up to the Saint and went over his coat pockets. He took out a platinum cigarette case, a wallet, an automatic lighter and a fountain pen; and an expression of outraged astonishment came over his face.

" 'Ere," he said suspiciously. "What 've you done with that gun?"

"What gun?" asked the Saint puzzledly. "You don't think I'd carry a gun in a suit like this, do you? I've got too much respect for my tailor. Anderson would be horrified and Sheppard would probably throw a fit."

"Search his hip pockets, you fool," snarled Mr Teal. "And under his armpits. That's where he's most likely to have it."

"And don't tickle," said the Saint severely, "It makes me go all girlish."

Breathing heavily, the sergeant searched as instructed and continued to find nothing.

Simon lowered his arms.

"After which little formality," he said amiably, "let us get back to business. As I was tactfully trying to mention, Claud, there seems to be a sort of corpse lying about on the floor. Do you think we ought to do something about it, or shall we shove it into the bathroom and pretend we haven't seen it?"

Chief Inspector Teal's lower jaw moved in a ponderous surge like the first lurch of the pistons of a locomotive getting under way as he dislodged a forgotten bolus of chewing gum from behind his wisdom teeth. The purple tinge was dying out of his face, allowing it to revert a little closer to its normal chubby pink. The negative results of the sergeant's search had almost thrown him back on his heels, but the shock had something homeopathic in its effect. It had jarred him into taking one wild superhuman clutch at the vanishing tail of his self-control; and now he found himself clinging on to it with the frenzied fervour of a man who has inadvertently taken hold of the steering end of a starving alligator.

Behind him, while the search was proceeding, a number of other persons had sidled cautiously into the room — a melancholy plain-clothes sergeant, a bald-headed man with a camera, a small sandy man with a black bag, a constable in uniform. To the experienced eye, they identified themselves as the members of a C.I.D. murder squad as unmistakably as if they had been labelled.

Simon had watched their entrance with interest. He was doing some rapid reconstruction of his own. Mr Teal's advent had been far too flabbergastingly apt to be pure coincidence; and the presence of that compact covey of supporters was extra confirmation of the fact. Even chief inspectors didn't go forth with a retinue of that kind unless they were on a particular and major assignment. And Simon located the origin of the assignment a moment later in the shape of a fat blowzy woman with stringy gray hair who was hovering nervously in the least-exposed part of the background.

Teal turned and looked for her.

"Have you seen this man before?" he demanded.

She gulped.

"N-no. But I bet 'e done it, just the sime. 'E looks just like one o' them narsty capitalists as pore Mr Windlay was always talkin' abaht."

Simon's gaze rested on her.

"Do you live in these parts?" he inquired politely.

She bridled.

"This 'ere is my property, young man, so you mind yer tongue. I come 'ere every week to collect the rent, not that I 'aven't wasted me time coming 'ere the larst two weeks."

"You came here today and found the body?"

"Yes, I did."

"How long ago was that?"

"Not 'arf an hour ago, it wasn't. You oughter know."

"And then you went straight out for the police, I suppose."

"I went an' phoned Scotland Yard, that's wot I done, knowing as it's their business to catch murderers, an' a good thing, too. They got you, all right."

"You didn't scream or anything?" Simon asked interestedly.

The woman snorted.

"Wot, me? Me scream an' 'ave all the neighbours in, an' get me 'ouse a bad nime? Not likely. This is a respectable place, this is, or it was before you come to it." A twinge of grief shot through her suety frame and made it quiver. "An' now ooze going ter pie me rent, that's wot I wanter know."

The Saint extracted a cigarette from his case. The minor details of the situation were satisfactorily cleared up — the remarkably prompt arrival of the C.I.D. combined with the absence of a crowd outside. The fact that that exceptional conjunction of circumstances had resulted in his present predicament unfortunately remained unaltered; but it was some consolation to know that his first wild surmise was wrong and that Teal hadn't been led there in some fantastic way on a definite search for him. It made the odds look rather more encouraging.

"Madam," he said helpfully, "I should think you might do rather well for a while by inviting the public to drop in and charging them sixpence admission. X marks the spot where the body was found, and they can see the original pool of blood on the mat. With Inspector Teal's bowler hat on the mantelpiece in a glass case and a plaster cast of his tummy in the hall—"