Free Follow the Saint by Leslie Charteris Page B

let’s see if we agree. What time did I sling this
stiff out of my car?”
    “A few minutes after
three—and he was only killed a few minutes
before that.”
    The Saint
opened his cigarette case.
    “That
rather tears it,” he said slowly; and Teal’s eye kindled with triumph.
    “So
you weren’t quite so smart—— ”
    “Oh,
no,” said the Saint diffidently. “I was just thinking of it from
your point of view. You see, just at that time I was at the Hirondel
factory at Staines, talking about a new blower that I’m thinking of
having glued on to the old buzz-wagon. We had quite a
conference over it. There was the works manager, and the service manager, and
the shop foreman, and a couple of mechanics thrown in, so far as I remember. Of course, everybody knows that the whole staff down there is in my pay, but the only
thing I’m worried about is whether you’ll be able to make a jury believe
it.”
    A queerly
childish contraction warped itself across Mr Teal’s rubicund
features. He looked as if he had been sud denly seized with an
acute pain below the belt, and was about to burst into tears.
    Both of
these diagnoses contained a fundament of truth. But they were far from
telling the whole story.
    The whole
story went too far to be compressed into a space less than
volumes. It went far back into the days when Mr Teal had been a
competent and contented and common place detective, adequately doing a
job in which miracles did not happen and the natural laws of the
universe were re spected and cast-iron cases were not being perennially
dis integrated under his noise by a bland and tantalizing buc caneer
whose elusiveness had almost started to convince him of the reality of
black magic. It coiled through an infinite history of incredible
disasters and hair breadth frustrations that would have wrung the
withers of anything softer
than a marble statue. It belonged to the hysterical saga of his whole hopeless duel with the Saint.
    Mr Teal
did not burst into tears. Nor, on this one unpre cedented occasion,
did he choke over his gum while a flush of apoplectic fury
boiled into his round face. Perhaps there were no more such reactions left in
him; or perhaps on this one occasion an inescapable foreboding of the uselessness of it all strangled the spasm before it could mature
and gave him the supernatural strength to stifle his emotions under the pose of stolid somnolence that he could so rarely
preserve against the Saint’s
fiendishly shrewd attack. But however he achieved the feat, he managed to sit quite still while his hot resentful
eyes bored into the Saint’s smiling face for a time before he struggled slothfully to his feet.
    “Wait
a minute,” he said thickly.
    He went
over and spoke to a tall cadaverous man who was hovering in the
background. Then he came back and sat down again.
    Simon
trickled an impudent streamer of smoke towards him.
    “If I were a sensitive man
I should be offended, Claud. Do you have to
be quite so obvious about it when you send Sergeant Barrow to find out whether I’m telling you the truth? It isn’t good manners, comrade. It savours
of distrust.”
    Mr Teal
said nothing. He sat champing soporifically, staring steadfastly
at the polished toes of his regulation boots, until Sergeant Barrow
returned.
    Teal got up and spoke to him at
a little distance; and when he rejoined the
Saint the drowsiness was turgid and treacle- thick on his pink full-moon
face.
    “All
right,” he bit out in a cracked voice, through lips that were
stiff and clumsy with the bitterness of defeat. “Now suppose you
tell me how you did it.”
    “But
I didn’t do it, Claud,” said the Saint, with a serious ness that
edged through his veneer of nonchalance. “I’m as keen as you are to
get a line on this low criminal who takes my trademark in vain.
Who was the bloke they picked up this afternoon ?”
    For some
reason which was beyond his understanding, the detective stopped
short on the brink of a sarcastic come