Follow the Saint

I

This story starts with four wild coincidences; so we may as well admit them at once and get it over with, and then there will be no more argument. The chronicler makes no apologies for them. A lot of much more far-fetched coincidences have been allowed to happen without protest in the history of the world, and all that can be done about it is to relate them exactly as they took place. And if it should be objected that these particular coincidences led to the downfall of sundry criminals who might otherwise never have been detected, it must be pointed out that at least half the convicts at present taking a cure in the cooler were caught that way.

Chief Inspector Claud Eustace Teal sat in a tea shoppe that was not much more than a powerful stone's throw from Scotland Yard. Dispassionately considered, it was quite a suitable target for stone-throwing, being one of those dens of ghastly chintz-curtained cheerfulness which stand as grisly omens of what the English-speaking races can expect from a few more generations of purity and hygiene; but Mr Teal held it in a sort of affection born of habit.

He had finished his tea, and he sat glancing over a newspaper. And in order that there may be positively no deception about this, it must be admitted at once that not even the most enthusiastic advocate of temperance would have chosen him as an advertisement of the place that he was in. Mr Teal, in fact, who even at his best suffered from certain physical disadvantages which made it permanently impossible for him to model for a statue of Dancing Spring, was at that moment not even in the running for a picture of Mellow Autumn. His round pink pace had a distinctly muddy tinge under its roseate bloom; the champing of his jaws on the inevitable wodge of spearmint was visibly listless; and his china-blue eyes contained an expression of joyless but stoical endurance. He looked, to speak with complete candour, rather like a discontented cow with a toothache.

After a while he put the newspaper aside and simply sat, gazing mournfully into space. It was a Sunday afternoon, and at that rather late hour he had the place to himself, except for a vacant-faced waitress who sat in a corner knitting some garment in a peculiarly dreadful shade of mustard yellow. A small radio on the mantelpiece, strategically placed between a vase of artificial flowers and a bowl of wax fruit, was emitting strains of that singularly lugubrious and eviscerated music which supplies the theme song of modern romance. Mr Teal appeared to be enduring that infliction in the same spirit as Job might have endured the development of his sixty-second boil. He looked as if he was only waiting for someone to come along and relieve him of the cares of the Universe.

Someone did come along, but not with that intention. The crash of the door opening made Mr Teal's overwrought nerves wince; and when he saw who it was he closed his eyes for a moment in sheer agony. For although Mr William Kennedy was easily the most popular of the Assistant Commissioners, his vast and jovial personality was approximately the last thing that a man in Mr Teal's condition is able to appreciate.

"Hullo, laddie!" he roared, in a voice that boomed through the room like a gale. "What's the matter? You look like a cold poached egg left over from yesterday's breakfast. What are you doing — thinking about the Saint?"

Mr Teal started as if an electric current had been applied to his posterior. He had expected the worst, but this was worse than that. If anything could have been said to fill his cup of suffering to the brim, that something had been said. Mr Teal now looked as if there was nothing left except for him to find some suitably awful spot in which to die.

Scientists, whose restless researches leave no phenomenon unprobed, have discovered that certain persons are subject to quite disproportionately grievous reactions from stimuli which to other persons are entirely innocuous. These inordinate sensitivities are known as allergies. Some people are allergic to oysters, others to onions; others need only eat a strawberry to be attacked by violent pains and break out in a rash.

Chief Inspector Teal was allergic to the Saint. But it must be admitted that this was an acquired rather than a congenital allergy. It is true that Mr Teal, on account of his profession, was theoretically required to be allergic to every kind of law breaker; but there was nothing in his implied contract with the State which required him to be pierced by such excruciating pains or to break out in such a vivid erythema as he was apt to do whenever he heard the name or nickname of that incorrigible outlaw who had been christened Simon Templar.

But the Saint was the kind of outlaw that no officer of the Law can ever have had to cope with since the Sheriff of Nottingham was pestered into apoplexy by the Robin Hood of those more limited days. There was no precedent in modern times for anything like him; and Mr Teal was convinced that it could only be taken as evidence of the deliberate maliciousness of Fate that out of all the other police officers who might have been chosen for the experiment the lot had fallen upon him. For there was no doubt at all in his mind that all the griefs and woes which had been visited upon him in recent years could be directly attributed to that amazing buccaneer whose unlawful excursions against evildoers had made criminal history, and yet whose legal conviction and punishment was beginning to seem as hopelessly improbable an event as the capture of a genuine and indisputable sea-serpent. Kennedy was not being deliberately cruel. It was simply his uninhibited proclamation of what was an almost automatic association of ideas to anyone who knew anything at all about Teal's professional life: that whenever Mr Teal looked as if he was in acute agony he was undergoing a spell of Saint trouble. The fact that Mr Teal, as it happened, had not been thinking about the Saint at all when Kennedy came in only gave the reminder a deeper power to wound.

"No, sir," said Mr Teal, with the flimsiest quality of restraint. "I was not thinking about the Saint. I haven't seen him for weeks; I don't know what he's doing; and what's more, I don't care."

Kennedy raised his eyebrows.

"Sorry, laddie. I thought from your appearance—"

"What's wrong with my blasted appearance?" snarled the detective, with a reckless disregard for discipline of which in normal times he would never have been capable; but Kennedy had no great respect for trivial formalities.

"Blasted is right," he agreed readily. "You look like something the lightning had started out to strike and then given up as a work of supererogation. What is it, then? Have you been getting hell for falling down on that espionage business?"

Mr Teal was able to ignore that. It was true that he had made very little headway with the case referred to, but that was not worrying him unduly. When official secrets spring a leak, it is usually a slow job to trace the leakage to its source, and Teal was too old a hand to let himself be disturbed by the slowness of it.

His trouble was far more intimate and personal; and the time has now come when it must be revealed.

Mr Teal was suffering from indigestion.

It was a complaint that had first intruded itself on his consciousness some weeks ago; since when its symptoms had become steadily more severe and regular, until by this time he had come to regard a stomach-ache as the practically inevitable sequel to any meal he ate. Since Mr Teal's tummy constituted a very large proportion of Mr Teal, his sufferings were considerable. They made him pessimistic and depressed, and more than usually morose. His working days had become long hours of discomfort and misery, and it seemed an eternity since he had spent a really restful and dreamless night. Even now, after having forgone his Sunday dinner in penitence for the price he had had to pay for bacon and eggs at breakfast, the cream bun to whose succulent temptation he had not long ago succumbed was already beginning to give him the unhappily familiar sensation of having swallowed a live and singularly vicious crab. And this was the mortal dolour in addition to which he had had to receive a superfluous reminder of the Saint.

The waitress at last succeeded in gaining audience.

"Yes," boomed Kennedy. "Tea. Strong tea. And about half a ton of hot buttered crumpets."

Mr Teal closed his eyes again as another excruciating cramp curled through him.

In his darkened loneliness he became aware that the music had been interrupted and the radio was talking.

"… and this amazing tea is not only guaranteed to relieve indigestion immediately, but to effect a complete and permanent cure," said a clear young voice with a beautiful Oxford accent. "Every day we are receiving fresh testimonials—"

"My God," said Teal with a shudder, "where is that Eric-or-Little-by-Little drivelling from?"

"Radio Calvados," answered Kennedy. "One of the new continental stations. They go to work every Sunday. I suppose we shall have to put up with it as long as the BBC refuses to produce anything but string quartets and instructive talks on Sundays."

"Miracle Tea" said Eric, continuing little by little. "Remember that name. Miracle Tea. Obtainable from all high-class chemists, or direct by post from the Miracle Tea Company, 909 Victoria Street, London. Buy some Miracle Tea tonight!… And now we shall conclude this programme with our signature song — Tea for You."

Mr Teal held on to his stomach as the anguishing parody proceeded to rend the air.

"Miracle Tea!" he rasped savagely. "What'll they think of next? As if tea could cure indigestion! Pah!"

The way he said "Pah!" almost blew his front teeth out; and Kennedy glanced at him discerningly.

"Oh, so that's the trouble, is it? The mystery is solved."

"I didn't say—"

Kennedy grinned at him.

The door of the tea shoppe opened again, to admit Inspector Peters, Kennedy's chief assistant.

"Sorry I was so long, sir," he apologized, taking the vacant chair at their table. "The man was out—"

"Never mind that," said Kennedy. "Teal's got indigestion."

"You can fix that with a bit of bicarb," said Peters helpfully.

"So long as it isn't something more serious," said Kennedy, reaching for the freshly-arrived plate of hot buttered crumpets with a hand like a leg of mutton and the air of massive confidence which can only be achieved by a man of herculean physique who knows that his interior would never dare to give him any backchat. "I've been noticing his face lately. I must say I've been worried about it, but I didn't like to mention it before he brought it up."

"You mean the twitching?" asked Peters.

"Not so much the twitching as the jaundiced colour. It looks bad to me."

"Damn it," began Teal explosively.

"Acid," pronounced Kennedy, engulfing crumpets. "That's generally the beginning of the trouble. Too much acid swilling around the lining of your stomach, and where are you? In next to no time you're a walking mass of gastric ulcers. You know what happens when a gastric ulcer eats into a blood vessel?"

"You bleed to death?" asked Peters interestedly.

"Like a shot," said Kennedy, apparently unaware of the fact that Teal was starting to simmer and splutter like a pan full of hot grease. "It's even worse when the ulcer makes a whacking great hole in the wall of the stomach and your dinner falls through into the abdominal cavity…"

Mr Teal clung to his chair and wished that he had been born deaf.

It was no consolation at all to him to recall that it had actually been the Saint himself who had started the fashion of making familiar and even disgusting comments on the shape and dimensions of the stomach under discussion, a fashion which Mr Teal's own colleagues, to their eternal disgrace, had been surprisingly quick to adopt. And now that it had been revealed that his recent irritability had been caused by acute indigestion, the joke would take a new lease of life. It is a curious but undeniable fact that a man may have a headache or a toothache or an earache and receive nothing but sympathy from those about him; but let his stomach ache and all he can expect is facetiousness of the most callous and offensive kind. Mr Teal's stomach was a magnificently well-developed organ, measuring more inches from east to west than he cared to calculate and he was perhaps excessively sensitive about it; but in its present condition the most faintly flippant reference to it was exquisite torment.

He stood up.

"Will you excuse me, sir?" he said, with as much dignity as he could muster. "I've got a job to do this evening."

"Don't forget to buy some Miracle Tea on your way home," was Kennedy's farewell.

Mr Teal walked up Victoria Street in the direction of his modest lodgings. He had no job to do at all; but it would have been physically impossible for him to have stomached another minute of the conversation he had left behind him. He walked, because he had not far to go, and the exercise helped to distract his thoughts from the feeling that his intestines were being gnawed by a colony of hungry rats. Not that the distraction was by any means complete: the rats continued their remorseless depredations. But he was able to give them only half his attention instead of the whole of it. In the circumstances it was perhaps natural that the broadcast which had been added to his current griefs should remain vaguely present in the background of his mind. The address given had been in Victoria Street. And therefore it was perhaps not such a wild coincidence after all that he should presently have found himself gazing at a large showcard in the window of a chemist's shop which he must have been passing practically every day for the last two months.

Mr Teal was not even averagely gullible; but a man in his state of mind is not fully responsible for his actions. The tribulations of the last few weeks had reduced him to a state of desperation in which he would have tried a dose of prussic acid if it had been recommended with sufficient promises of alleviating his distress.

With a furtive glance around him, as if he was afraid of being caught in a disreputable act, he entered the shop and approached the counter, behind which stood a shifty-eyed young man in a soiled white coat.

"A packet of Miracle Tea," said Mr Teal, lowering his voice to a mumble, although the shop was empty, as though he had been asking for some unmentionable merchandise.

He planked down a half-crown with unconvincing defiance.

The assistant hesitated for a moment, turned, and took an oblong yellow packet from a shelf behind him. He hesitated again, still holding it as if he was reluctant to part with it.

"Yes, sir?" he said suggestively.

"What d'you mean — 'yes, sir?' " blared Mr Teal with the belligerence of increasing embarrassment.

"Isn't there something else, sir?"

"No, there isn't anything else!" retorted the detective, whose sole remaining ambition was to get out of the place as quickly as possible with his guilty purchase. "Give me that stuff and take your money."

He reached over and fairly snatched the yellow packet out of the young man's hand, stuffed it into his pocket, and lumbered out as if he were trying to catch a train. He was in such a hurry that he almost bowled over another customer who was just entering the shop — and this customer, for some reason, quickly averted his face.

Mr Teal was too flustered even to notice him. He went plodding more rapidly than usual on his homeward way, feeling as if his face was a bright crimson which would announce his shame to any passerby, and never dreaming that Destiny had already grasped him firmly by the scruff of the neck.

Five minutes later he was trudging through a narrow side street within a couple of blocks of his apartment. The comatose dusk of Sunday evening lay over it like a shroud: not a single other human creature was in sight, and the only sound apart from the solid tread of his own regulation boots was a patter of hurried footsteps coming up behind him. There was nothing in that to make him turn his head… The footsteps caught up until they were almost on his heels; and then something hit him a terrific blow on the side of the head and everything dissolved into black darkness.

II

Simon Templar's views on the subject of Chief Inspector Teal, unlike Chief Inspector Teal's views on the subject of the Saint, were apt to fluctuate between very contradictory extremes. There were times when he felt that life would lose half its savour if he were deprived of the perpetual joy of dodging Teal's constant frantic efforts to put him behind bars; but there were other times when he felt that his life would be a lot less strenuous if Teal's cardinal ambition had been a little less tenacious. There had been times when he had felt sincere remorse for the more bitter humiliations which he had sometimes been compelled to inflict on Mr Teal, even though these times had been the only alternatives to his own defeat in their endless duel; there had been other times when he could have derived much satisfaction from beating Teal over the head with a heavy bar of iron with large knobs on the end.

One thing which the Saint was certain about, however, was that his own occasional urges to assault the detective's cranium with a blunt instrument did not mean that he was at any time prepared to permit any common or garden thug to take the same liberties with that long-suffering dome.

This was the last of the coincidences of which due warning has already been given — that Simon Templar's long sleek Hirondel chanced to be taking a short cut through the back streets of the district at that fateful hour, and whirled round a corner into the one street where it was most needed at the precise moment when Teal's ample body was spreading itself over the pavement as flat as a body of that architecture can conveniently be spread without the aid of a steam roller.

The Saint's foot on the accelerator gave the great car a last burst in the direction of the spot where these exciting things were happening, and then he stood on the brakes. The thug who had committed the assault was already bending over Teal's prostrate form when the screech of skidding tyres made him stop and look up in startled fear. For a split second he hesitated, as if considering whether to stand his ground and give battle; but something about the sinewy breadth of the Saint's shoulders and the athletic and purposeful speed with which the Saint's tall frame catapulted itself out of the still sliding car must have discouraged him. A profound antipathy to the whole scene and everyone in it appeared to overwhelm him; and he turned and began to depart from it like a stone out of a sling.

The Saint started after him. At that moment the Saint had no idea that the object of his timely rescue was Chief Inspector Teal in person: it was simply that the sight of one bloke hitting another bloke with a length of gaspipe was a spectacle which inevitably impelled him to join in the festivities with the least possible delay. But as he started in pursuit he caught his first glimpse of the fallen victim's face, and the surprise checked his stride as if he had run into a wall. He paused involuntarily to confirm the identification; and that brief delay lost him any chance he might have had of making a capture. The thug was already covering the ground with quite remarkable velocity, and the extra start he had gained from the Saint's hesitation had given him a lead which even Simon Templar's long legs doubted their ability to make up. Simon gave up the idea with a regretful sigh, and stooped to find out how much damage had been sustained by his favourite enemy.

It only took him a moment to assure himself that his existence was unlikely to be rendered permanently uneventful by the premature removal of its most pungent spice; but nevertheless there was also no doubt that Teal was temporarily in the land of dreams, and that it would do the Saint himself no good to be found standing over his sleeping body. On the other hand, to leave Mr Teal to finish his sleep in peace on the sidewalk was something which no self-respecting buccaneer could do. The actual commotion from which the situation had evolved had been practically negligible. Not a window had been flung up; not a door had been opened. The street remained sunken in its twilight torpor, and once again there was no other living soul in sight.

The Saint shrugged. There seemed to be only one thing to do, so he did it. With a certain amount of effort, he picked up Mr Teal's weighty person and heaved it into the car, dumped Teal's macintosh and hat on top of him, picked up an oblong yellow package which had fallen out of his pocket and slung that in as well, got into the driving seat himself, and drove away.

That Simon's diagnosis had been accurate was proved by the fact that Teal was beginning to groan and blink his eyes when the Hirondel pulled up at his front door. The Saint lighted a cigarette and looked at him reproachfully.

"I'm ashamed of you," he said. "An old man of your age, letting yourself be picked up in the gutter like that. And not even during licensing hours, either. Where did you get the embalming fluid?"

"So it was you, was it?" Teal muttered thickly.

"I beg your pardon?"

"What the hell was the idea?" demanded Teal, with a growing indignation which left no doubt of his recovery.

"The idea of what?"

"Creeping up behind me and knocking me on the head! If you think I'm going to let you get away with that—"

"Claud," said the Saint, "do I understand that you're accusing me again?"

"Oh, no!" Teal had his eyes wide open now, and they were red with wrath. The edge of his sarcasm was as silky and delicate as the blade of a crosscut saw. "It was two other people. They fell out of the sky with parachutes—"

The Saint sighed.

"I don't want to interrupt you. But can this great brain of yours see any particular reason why I should cosh you today? We haven't seen each other for ages, and so far as I know you haven't been doing anything to make me angry. And even if you had, and I thought it would be good for you to be bopped over the bean, do you think I'd take the trouble to bring you home afterwards? And even if I brought you home afterwards, do you think I'd let you wake up while I was still around, instead of bopping you again and leaving you to wake up without knowing I'd been anywhere near you? I am a very modest man, Claud," said the Saint untruthfully, "but there are some aspersions on my intelligence which cut me to the quick, and you always seem to be the guy who thinks of them."

Mr Teal rubbed his head.

"Well, what did happen?" he demanded grudgingly.

"I don't really know. When I shot over the horizon, there was some guy in the act of belting you over the lid with a handy piece of lead pipe. I thought of asking him to stop and talk it over, but he ran too fast. So I just loaded you into the old jalopy and brought you home. Of course, if you really wanted to go on dozing in the gutter I can take you back."

The detective looked about him. His aching skull was clearing a little, enough at least for him to be able to see that this latest misfortune was something which, for once, might not be chargeable to the Saint's account. The realization did not actually improve his temper.

"Have you any idea who it was?"

"That's a large order, isn't it? If you're as charming to all your other clients as you usually are to me, I should say that London must be crawling with birds who'd pay large sums of money for the fun of whacking you on the roof with a lump of iron."

"Well, what did this one look like?" snarled Teal impatiently.

"I'm blowed if I could draw his picture, Claud. The light was pretty bad, and he didn't stay very long. Medium height, ordinary build, thin face — nothing definite enough to help you much, I'm afraid."

Teal grunted.

Presently he said: "Thanks, anyway."

He said it as if he hated to say it, which he did. Being under any obligation to the Saint hurt him almost as much as his indigestion. Promptly he wished that he hadn't thought of that comparison. His stomach, reviving from a too fleeting anaesthesia, reminded him that it was still his most constant companion. And now he had a sore and splitting head as well. He realized that he felt about as unhappy as a man can feel.

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.

III

"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!"

The Saint's eyes were kindling with an impish excitement that had no direct connection with the windfall that had just dropped into his lap. Patricia did not need him to say any more to tell her what was going on in his mind. To the Saint, any puzzle was a potential adventure; and the Saint on the trail of adventure was a man transformed, a dynamic focus of ageless and superhuman forces against which no ordinary mortal could argue. She had known him so well for so many years, had known so long that he was beyond her power to change, even if she had wished to change him.

She said slowly: "But what is the racket?"

"That would be worth knowing," he said; and he had no need to say that he intended to know. He leaned back ecstatically. "But just think of it, darling I If we could only see the uproar and agitation that must be going on at this minute in the place where this tea came from…"

As a matter of record, the quality of the uproar and the agitation in the shop where Mr Teal had made his purchase would not have disappointed him at all; although in fact it had preceded this conversation by some time.

Mr Henry Osbett, registered proprietor of the drug store at 909 Victoria Street which was also the registered premises of the Miracle Tea Company, was normally a man of quite distinguished and even haughty aspect, being not only tall and erect, but also equipped with a pair of long and gracefully curved moustaches which stuck out on either side of his face like the wings of a soaring gull, which gave him a rather old-fashioned military air in spite of his horn-rimmed glasses. Under the stress of emotion, however, his dignity was visibly frayed. He listened to his shifty-eyed assistant's explanations with fuming impatience.

"How was I to know?" the young man was protesting. "He came at exactly the right time, and I've never seen Nancock before. I didn't mean to give him the packet without the password, but he snatched it right out of my hand and rushed off."

"Excuses!" snarled the chemist, absent-mindedly grabbing handfuls of his whiskers and tying them in knots."Why if you'd even known who he was—"

"I didn't know — not until Nancock told me. How could I know?"

"At least you could have got the package back."

The other swallowed.

"I'd only have got myself caught," he said sullenly. "That chap who jumped out of the car was twice my size. He'd've killed me!"

Mr Osbett stopped maltreating his moustache and looked at him for a long moment in curiously contrasting immobility.

"That might have saved someone else the trouble," he said; and the tone in which he said it made the young man's face turn grey.

Osbett's cold stare lasted for a moment longer: and then he took a fresh grip on his whiskers and turned and scuttled through to the back of the shop. One might almost have thought that he had gone off in the full flush of enthusiasm to fetch an axe.

Beyond the dispensing room there was a dark staircase. As he mounted the stairs his gait and carriage changed in subtle ways until it was as if a different man had entered his entered his clothes. On the upper landing his movements were measured and deliberate. He opened a door and went into a rather shabby and nondescript room which served as his private office. There were two or three old-fashioned filing cabinets, a littered desk with the polish worn off at the edges, a dingy carpet, and a couple of junk-store chairs. Mr Osbett sat down at the desk and opened a packet of cheap cigarettes.

He was a very worried man, and with good reason: but he no longer looked flustered. He had, at that moment, a very cold-blooded idea of his position. He was convinced that Teal's getaway with the packet of Miracle Tea had been neither premeditated nor intentional — otherwise there would have been further developments before this. It had simply been one of those fantastic accidents which lie in wait for the most careful conspiracies. That was a certain consolation; but not much. As soon as the contents of the packet were opened there would be questions to answer; and while it was quite certain that nothing criminal could be proved from any answers he cared to give, it would still make him the object of an amount of suspicious attention which might easily lead to disaster later. There remained the chance that Teal might not decide to actually take a dose of Miracle Tea for some hours yet, and it was a chance that had to be seized quickly. After another moment's intensive consideration, Mr Osbett picked up the telephone.

IV

Simon Templar had been out and come in again after a visit to the nearest chemist. Now he was industriously stirring an interesting mixture in a large basin borrowed from the kitchen. Patricia Holm sat in an armchair and watched him despairingly.

"Did you ever hear a proverb about little things pleasing little minds?" she said.

Unabashed, the Saint put down his spoon and admired his handiwork. To any but the most minute examination, it looked exactly like a high-grade small-leaf tea. And some of it was. The other ingredients were hardly less ordinary, except in that particular combination.

"Did you ever hear another proverb about a prophet in his own country?" he answered. "If you had a little more reverence for my mind, you'd see that it was nearly double its normal size. Don't you get the idea?"

"Not yet."

"This is what I originally meant to do. Maybe it wasn't such a huge idea then; although if I could get enough little ideas that handed me fifteen hundred quid a time I wouldn't worry so much about passing up the big stuff. But still that was just good clean fun. Now it's more than that. If I'm right, and Teal still doesn't know what he had in his pocket this afternoon, we don't want him to even start thinking about it. Therefore I just want to return him his Miracle Tea, and I'll be sure he won't give it another thought. But I never had any Miracle Tea. Therefore I've got to concoct a passable substitute. I don't know the original formula; but if this recipe doesn't live up to the name I'll drink a gallon of it."

"Of course," she said, "you couldn't just go out and buy another packet to give him."

Simon gazed at her in stunned admiration.

"Could you believe that I never thought of that?"

"No," said Patricia.

"Maybe your right," said the Saint ruefully.

He gave the basin another stir, and shrugged.

"Anyway," he said, "it'd be a pity to waste all this work, and the chance of a lifetime as well."

He sat down at the table and cheerfully proceeded to pack his own remarkable version of Miracle Tea into the original carton. Having stuffed it full, he replaced the seals and wrappings with as much care as he had removed them; and when he had finished there was not a trace to show that the package had ever been tampered with.

"What will you do if he dies?" asked the girl.

"Send a wreath of tea roses to his funeral," said the Saint. He put down the completed packet after he had inspected it closely from every angle, and moved himself over to a more comfortable lounging site on the settee. His eyes were alert and hot with a gathering zest of devilment. "Now we go into the second half of this brilliant conspiracy."

"What does that mean?"

"Finding out where Claud Eustace buys fifteen hundred quid for half a dollar. Just think, sweetheart — we can go shopping once a week and keep ourselves in caviar without ever doing another stroke of work!"

He reached for the telephone and set it on his lap while he dialled Teal's private number with a swift and dancing forefinger. The telephone, he knew, was beside Teal's bed; and the promptness with which his ring was answered established the detective's location with quite miraculous certainty.

"I hope," said the Saint, with instantaneous politeness, "that I haven't interrupted you in the middle of any important business, Claud."

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—"

"Or maybe," said Patricia, "this is the place you're looking for."

Simon stopped walking and looked at it.

There was a showcard in the centre of the window — the same card, as a matter of fact, which Mr Teal had seen. But the Saint was taking no chances.

"Let's make sure," he said.

He led her the rest of the way up the street for a block beyond the turning where Mr Teal would have branched off on the most direct route to his lodgings, and back down the opposite side; but no other drug-store window revealed a similar sign.

Simon stood on the other side of the road again, and gazed across at the brightly lighted window which they had first looked at. He read the name 'HENRY OSBETT & CO.' across the front of the shop.

He let go Patricia's arm.

"Toddle over, darling," he said, "and buy me a packet of Miracle Tea."

"What happens if I get shot?" she asked suspiciously.

"I shall hear the bang," he said, "and phone for an ambulance."

Two minutes later she rejoined him with a small neat parcel in her hand. He fell in beside her as she came across the road, and turned in the direction of the lower end of the street, where he had left the car.

"How was Comrade Osbett?" he murmured. "Still keeping up with the world?"

"He looked all right, if he was the fellow who served me." She passed him the packet she was carrying. "Now do you mind telling me what good this is supposed to do?"

"We must listen to one of their broadcasts and find out. According to the wrapper, it disperses bile—"

She reached across to his hip pocket, and he laughed.

"Okay, darling. Don't waste any bullets — we may need them. I just wanted to find out if there were any curious features about buying Miracle Tea, and I didn't want to go in myself because I'm liable to want to go in again without being noticed too much."

"I didn't see anything curious," she said. "I just asked for it, and he wrapped it up and gave it to me."

"No questions or stalling?"

"No. It was just like buying a toothbrush or anything else."

"Didn't he seem to be at all interested in who was buying it?"

"Not a bit."

He held the package to his ear, shook it, and crunched it speculatively.

"We'll have a drink somewhere and see if we've won anything," he said.

At a secluded corner table in the Florida, a while later, he opened the packet, with the same care to preserve the seals and wrappings as he had given to the first consignment, and tipped out the contents on to a plate. The contents, to any ordinary examination, consisted of nothing but tea — and, by the smell and feel of it, not very good tea either.

The Saint sighed, and called a waiter to remove the mess.

"It looks as if we were wrong about that eccentric millionaire," he said. "Or else the supply of doremi has run out… Well, I suppose we shall just have to go to work again." He folded the container and stowed it carefully away in his pocket; and if he was disappointed he was able to conceal his grief. A glimmer of reckless optimism curled the corners of his mouth. "You know, darling, I have a hunch that some interesting things are going to happen before this time tomorrow night."

He was a better prophet than he knew, and it took only a few hours to prove it.

V

Simon Templar slept like a child. A thunderstorm bursting over his roof would not have woken him; a herd of wild elephants stampeding past his bed would scarcely have made him stir; but one kind of noise that other ears might not have heard at all even in full wakefulness brought him back instantaneously to life with every faculty sharpened and on tiptoe.

He awoke in a breathless flash, like a watchdog, without the slightest perceptible alteration in his rate of breathing or any sudden movement. Anyone standing over him would not have even sensed the change that had taken place. But his eyes were half open, and his wits were skidding back over the last split second of sleep like the recoil of taut elastic, searching for a definition of the sound that had aroused him.

The luminous face of a clock across the room told him that he had slept less than two hours. And the thinly phosphorescent hands hadn't moved on enough for the naked eye to see when he knew why he was awake.

In the adjoining living-room, something human had moved.

Simon drew down the automatic from under his pillow and slid out of bed like a phantom. He left the communicating door alone, and sidled noiselessly through the other door which led out into the hall. The front door was open just enough to split the darkness with a knife-edge of illumination from the lights on the landing outside: he eased over to it like a cat, slipped his fingers through the gap, and felt the burred edges of the hole which had been drilled through the outside of the frame so that the catch of the spring lock would be pushed back.

A light blinked beyond the open door of the living-room. The Saint came to the entrance and looked in. Silhouetted against the subdued glow of an electric torch he saw the shape of a man standing by the table with his back to the door, and his bare feet padded over the carpet without a breath of sound until they were almost under the intruder's heels. He leaned over until his lips were barely a couple of inches from the visitor's right ear.

"Boo," said the Saint.

It was perhaps fortunate for the intruder that he had a strong heart, for if he had had the slightest cardiac weakness the nervous shock which spun him round would have probably popped it like a balloon. As it was, an involuntary yammer of sheer primitive fright dribbled out of his throat before he lashed out blindly in no less instinctive self-defence.

Simon had anticipated that. He was crouching almost to his knees by that time, and his left arm snaked around the lower part of the man's legs simultaneously with a quick thrust of his shoulder against the other's thighs.

The burglar went over backwards with a violent thud; and as most of his breath jolted out of him he freighted it with a selection of picturesque expletives which opened up new vistas of biologic theory. One hand, swinging up in a vicious arc, was caught clearly in the beam of the fallen flashlight, and it was not empty.

"I think," said the Saint, "we can do without the persuader."

He jabbed the muzzle of his gun very hard into the place where his guest's ribs forked, and heard a satisfactory gasp of pain in response. His left hand caught the other's wrist as it descended, twisted with all the skill of a manipulative surgeon, and let go again to grab the life-preserver as it dropped out of the man's numbed fingers.

"You mustn't hit people with things like this," he said reprovingly. "It hurts… Doesn't it?"

The intruder, with jagged stars shooting through his head, did not offer an opinion; but his squirming lost nearly all of its early vigour. The Saint sat on him easily, and made sure that there were no other weapons on his person before he stood up again.

The main lights clicked on with a sudden dazzling brightness. Patricia Holm stood in the doorway, the lines of her figure draping exquisite contours into the folds of a filmy neglige, her fair hair tousled with sleep and hazy startlement in her blue eyes.

"I'm sorry," she said. "I didn't know you had company."

"That's all right," said the Saint. "We're keeping open house."

He lounged back to rest the base of his spine against the edge of the table and inspected the caller in more detail. He saw a short-legged barrel-chested individual with a thatch of carroty hair, a wide coarse-lipped mouth, and a livid scar running from one side of a flattened nose to near the lobe of a misshapen ear; and recognition dawned in his gaze.

He waved his gun in a genial gesture.

"You remember our old pal and playmate, Red McGuire?" he murmured. "Just back from a holiday at Parkhurst after his last job of robbery with violence. Somebody told him about all those jewels we keep around, and he couldn't wait to drop in and see them. Why didn't you ring the bell, Red, and save yourself the trouble of carving up our door?"

McGuire sat on the floor and tenderly rubbed his head.

"Okay," he growled. "I can do without the funny stuff. Go on an' call the cops."

Simon considered the suggestion. It seemed a very logical procedure. But it left an unfinished edge of puzzlement still in his mind.

There was something about finding himself the victim of an ordinary burglary that didn't quite ring bells. He knew well enough that his reputation was enough to make any ordinary burglar steer as far away from him as the landscape would allow. And serious burglars didn't break into any dwelling chosen at random and hope for the best, without even knowing the identity of the occupant — certainly not burglars with the professional status of Red McGuire. Therefore…

His eyes drained detail from the scene with fine drawn intentness. Nothing seemed to have been touched. Perhaps he had arrived too quickly for that. Everything was as he had left it when he went to bed. Except—

The emptied packet of Miracle Tea which Patricia had bought for him that evening was still in his coat pocket. The packet which he had refilled for Teal's personal consumption was still on the table… Or was it?

For on the floor, a yard from where Red McGuire had fallen, lay another identical packet of Miracle Tea.

Simon absorbed the jar of realization without batting an eyelid. But a slowly increasing joy crept into the casual radiance of his smile.

"Why ask me to be so unfriendly, Red?" he drawled. "After all, what's a packet of tea between friends?"

If he needed any confirmation of his surmise, he had it in the way Red McGuire's small green eyes circled the room and froze on the yellow carton beside him before they switched furtively back to the Saint's face.

"Wot tea?" McGuire mumbled sullenly.

"Miracle Tea," said the Saint gently. "The juice that pours balm into the twinging tripes. That's what you came here for tonight, Red. You came here to swipe my beautiful packet of gut-grease and leave some phony imitation behind instead!"

McGuire glowered at him stubbornly.

"I dunno wot yer talkin' abaht."

"Don't you?" said the Saint, and his smile had become almost affectionate. "Then you're going to find the next half hour tremendously instructive."

He straightened up and reached over for a steel chair that stood close to him, and slid it across in the direction of his guest.

"Don't you find the floor rather hard?" he said. "Take a pew and make yourself happy, because it looks as if we may be in for a longish talk."

A wave of his gun added a certain amount of emphasis to the invitation, and there was a crispness in his eyes that carried even more emphasis than the gun.

McGuire hauled himself up hesitantly and perched on the edge of the chair, And the Saint beamed at him.

"Now if you'll look in the top drawer of the desk, Pat — I think there's quite a collection of handcuffs there. About three pairs ought to be enough. One for each of his ankles, and one to fasten his hands behind him."

McGuire shifted where he sat.

"Wot's the idea?" he demanded uneasily.

"Just doing everything we can to make you feel at home," answered the Saint breezily. "Would you mind putting your hands behind you so that the lady can fix you up?… Thanks ever so much… Now if you'll just move your feet back up against the legs of the chair—"

Rebellious rage boiled behind the other's sulky scowl, a rage that had its roots in a formless but intensifying fear. But the Saint's steady hand held the conclusive argument, and he kept that argument accurately aligned on McGuire's wishbone until the last cuff had been locked in place and the strong-arm expert was shackled to the steel chair-frame as solidly as if he had been riveted on to it.

Then Simon put down his automatic and languidly flipped open the cigarette box.

"I hate to do this to you," he said conversationally, "but we've really got to do something about that memory of yours. Or have you changed your mind about answering a few questions?"

McGuire glared at him without replying.

Simon touched a match to his cigarette and glanced at Patricia through a placid trail of smoke.

"Can I trouble you some more, darling? If you wouldn't mind plugging in that old electric curling-iron of yours—"

McGuire's eyes jerked and the handcuffs clinked as he strained against them.

"Go on, why don't yer call the cops?" he blurted hoarsely. "You can't do anything to me!"

The Saint strolled over to him.

"Just who do you think is going to stop me?" he asked kindly.

He slipped his hands down inside McGuire's collar, one on each side of the neck, and ripped his shirt open clear to the waist with one swift wrench that sprung the buttons pinging across the room like bullets.

"Get it good and hot, darling," he said over his shoulder, "and we'll see how dear old Red likes the hair on his chest waved."

VI

Red McGuire stared up at the Saint's gentle smile and ice-cold eyes, and the breath stopped in his throat. He was by no means a timorous man, but he knew when to be afraid — or thought he did.

"You ain't given me a charnce, guv'nor," he whined. "Why don't yer arsk me somethink I can answer? I don't want to give no trouble."

Simon turned away from him to flash a grin at Patricia — a grin that McGuire was never meant to see.

"Go ahead and get the iron, sweetheart," he said, with bloodcurdling distinctness, and winked at her. "Just in case old dear Red changes his mind."

Then the wink and the grin vanished together as he whipped round on his prisoner.

"All right," he snapped. "Tell me all you know about Miracle Tea!"

"I dunno anythink about it, so help me, guv'nor. I never heard of it before tonight. All I know is I was told to come here wiv a packet, an' if I found another packet here I was to swop them over an' bring your packet back. That's all I know about it, strike me dead if it ain't."

"I shall probably strike you dead if it is," said the Saint coldly. "D'you mean to tell me that Comrade Osbett didn't say any more than that?"

"Who's that?"

"I said Osbett. You know who I'm talking about."

"I never heard of 'im."

Simon moved towards him with one fist drawn back.

"That's Gawd's own truth!" shouted McGuire desperately. "I said I'd tell yer anythink I could, didn't I? It ain't my fault if I don't know everythink—"

"Then who was it told you to come here and play tea-parties?"

"I dunno… Listen!" begged McGuire frantically. "This is a squeal, ain't it? Well, why won't yer believe me? I tell yer, I don't know. It was someone who met me when I come out of stir. I dunno wot is name is, an' in this business yer don't arsk questions. He ses to me, would I like fifty quid a week to do any dirty work there is going, more er less. I ses, for fifty quid a week I'll do anythink he can think of. So he gives me twenty quid on account, an' tells me to go anywhere where there's a telephone an' just sit there beside it until he calls me. So tonight he rings up—"

"And you never knew who he was?"

"Never in me life, strike me dead—"

"How do you get the rest of your money?"

"He just makes a date to meet me somewhere an' hands it over."

"And you don't even know where he lives?"

"So help me, I don't. All I got is a phone number where I can ring him."

"What is this number?"

"Berkeley 3100."

Simon studied him calculatingly. The story had at least a possibility of truth, and the way McGuire told it it sounded convincing. But the Saint didn't let any premature cameraderie soften his implacably dissecting gaze.

He said: "What sort of a guy is he?"

"A tall thin foreign-looking bloke wiv a black beard."

It still sounded possible. Whatever Mr Osbett's normal appearance might be, and whatever kind of racket he might be in, he might easily be anxious not to have his identity known by such dubiously efficient subordinates as Red McGuire.

"And exactly how," said the Saint, "did your foreign-looking bloke know that I had any miracles in the house?"

"I dunno—"

Patricia Holm came back into the room with a curling-iron that glowed dull red.

Simon turned and reached for it.

"You're just in time, darling," he murmured. "Comrade McGuire's memory is going back on him again."

Comrade McGuire gaped at the hot iron, and licked his lips.

"I found that out meself, guv'nor," he said hurriedly. "I was goin' to tell yer —"

"How did you find out?"

"I heard somethink on the telephone." The Saint's eyes narrowed.

"Where?"

"In the fust house I went to — somewhere near Victoria Station. That was where I was told to go fust an' swop over the tea. I got in all right, but the bloke was there in the bedroom. I could hear 'im tossing about in bed. I was standin' outside the door, wondering if I should jump in an' cosh him, when the telephone rang. I listened to wot he said, an' all of a sudding I guessed it was about some tea, an' then once he called you 'Saint', an' I knew who he must be talkin' to. So I got out again an' phoned the guvnor an' told him about it; an' he ses, go ahead an' do the same thing here."

Simon thought back over his conversation with Mr Teal; and belief grew upon him. No liar could have invented that story, for it hung on the fact of a telephone call which nobody else besides Teal and Patricia and himself could have known about.

He could see how the mind of Mr Osbett would have worked on it. Mr Osbett would already know that someone had interrupted the attempt to recover the package of tea from Chief Inspector Teal on his way home, that that someone had arrived in a car, and that he had presumably driven Teal the rest of the way after the rescue. If someone was phoning Teal later about a packet of tea, the remainder of the sequence of accidents would only have taken a moment to reconstruct… And when the Saint thought about it, he. would have given a fair percentage of his fifteen hundred pounds for a glimpse of Mr Osbett's face when he learned into what new hands the packet of tea had fallen.

He still looked at Red McGuire.

"How would you like to split this packet of tea with me?" he asked casually.

McGuire blinked at him.

"Blimey, guv'nor, wot would I do wiv art a packet of tea?"

Simon did not try to enlighten him. The answer was enough to consolidate the conclusion he had already reached. Red McGuire really didn't know what it was all about — that was also becoming credible. After all, any intelligent employer would know that Red McGuire was not a man who could be safely led into temptation.

The Saint had something else to think about. His own brief introductory anonymity was over, and henceforward all the attentions of the ungodly would be lavished on himself — while he was still without one single solid target to shoot back at.

He sank into a chair and blew the rest of his cigarette into a meditative chain of smoke rings; and then he crushed the butt into an ashtray and looked at McGuire again.

"What happens to your fifty-quid-a-week job if you go back to stir, Red?" he inquired deliberately.

The thug chewed his teeth.

"I s'pose it's all over with, guv'nor."

"How would you like to phone your boss now — for me?"

Fear swelled in McGuire's eyes again as the Saint's meaning wore its way relentlessly into his understanding. His mouth opened once or twice without producing any sound.

"Yer carn't arsk me to do that!" he got out at last. "If he knew I'd double-crorst 'im — he said—"

Simon rose with a shrug.

"Just as you like," he said carelessly. "But one of us is going to use the telephone, and I don't care which it is. If I ring up Vine Street and tell 'em to come over and fetch you away, I should think you'd get about ten years, with a record like yours. Still, they say it's a healthy life, with no worries

"Wait a minute," McGuire said chokily. "What do you do if I make this call?"

"I'll give you a hundred quid in cash; and I'll guarantee that when I'm through with your boss he won't be able to do any of those things he promised."

McGuire was no mathematician, but he could do simple arithmetic. He gulped something out of his throat.

"Okay," he grunted. "It's a bet."

Simon summed him up for a moment longer, and then hauled his chair over to within reach of the table where the telephone stood. He picked up the microphone and prodded his forefinger into the first perforation of the dial.

"All you're going to do," he said, as he went on spelling out BER 3100, "is tell the big bearded chief that you've been through this place with a fine comb, and the only tea-leaf in it is yourself. Do you get it? No Saint, no tea — no soap… And I don't want to frighten you or anything like that, Red, but I just want you to remember that if you try to say any more than that, I've still got you here, and we can easily warm up the curling-tongs again."

"Don't yer think I know wot's good for me?" retorted the other sourly.

The Saint nodded warily, and heard the ring of the call in the receiver. It was answered almost at once, in a sharp cultured voice with a slight foreign intonation.

"Yes? Who is that?"

Simon put the mouthpiece to McGuire's lips.

"McGuire calling," said the burglar thickly.

"Well?"

"No luck, guv'nor. It ain't here. The Saint's out, so I had plenty of time. I couldn't 've helped findin' it if it'd been here."

There was a long pause.

"All right," said the voice curtly. "Go home and wait for further orders. I'll call you tomorrow."

The line went down with a click.

"And I wouldn't mind betting," said the Saint, as he put the telephone back, "that that's the easiest hundred quid you ever earned."

"Well, yer got wot yer wanted, didn't yer?" he snarled. "Come on an' take off these ruddy bracelets an' let me go."

The Saint shook his head.

"Not quite so fast, brother," he said. "You might think of calling up your boss again and having another chat with him before you went to bed, and I'd hate him to get worried at this hour of the night. You stay right where you are and get some of that beauty sleep which you need so badly, because after what I'm going to do tomorrow your boss may be looking for you with a gun!"

VII

Early rising had never been one of the Saint's favourite virtues, but there were times when business looked more important than leisure. It was eleven o'clock the next morning — an hour at which he was usually beginning to think drowsily about breakfast — when he sauntered into the apothecarium of Mr Henry Osbett.

In honour of the occasion, he had put on his newest and most beautiful suit, a creation in pearl-grey fresco over which his tailor had shed tears of ecstasy in the fitting room; his piratically tilted hat was unbelievably spotless; his tie would have humbled the gaudiest hues of dawn. He had also put on, at less expense, a vacuous expression and an inanely chirpy grin that completed the job of typing him to the point where his uncle, the gouty duke, loomed almost visible in his background.

The shifty-eyed young assistant who came to the counter might have been pardoned for keeling over backwards at the spectacle; but he only recoiled half a step and uttered a perfunctory "Yes, sir?"

He looked nervous and preoccupied. Simon wondered whether this nervousness and preoccupation might have had some connection with a stout and agitated-looking man who had entered the shop a few yards ahead of the Saint himself. Simon's brightly vacant eyes took in the essential items of the topography without appearing to notice anything — the counter with its showcases and displays of patent pills and liver salts, the glazed compartment at one end where presumably prescriptions were dispensed, the dark doorway at the other end which must have led to the intimate fastnesses of the establishment. Nowhere was the stout man visible; therefore, unless he had dissolved into thin air, or disguised himself as a bottle of bunion cure, he must have passed through that one doorway… The prospects began to look even more promising than the Saint had expected…

"This jolly old tea, old boy," bleated the Saint, producing a package from his pocket. "A friend of mine — chappie named Teal, y'know, great detective and all that sort of thing — bought it off you last night and then he wouldn't risk taking it. He was goin' to throw it down the drain; but I said to him 'Why waste a perfectly good half-dollar, what?' I said. 'I'll bet they'll change it for a cake of soap, or something,' I said. I'll take it in and change it myself,' I told him. That's right, isn't it? You will change it, won't you?"

The shifty-eyed youth was a bad actor. His face had gone white, then red, and finally compromised by remaining blotchy. He gaped at the packet as if he was really starting to believe that there were miracles in Miracle Tea.

"We — we should be glad to change it for you, sir," he gibbered.

"Fine!" chortled the Saint. "That's just what I told jolly old Teal. You take the tea, and give me a nice box of soap. I expect Teal can use that, but I'm dashed if I know what he could do with tea—"

He was talking to a vanishing audience. The youth, with a spluttered "Excuse me, sir," had grabbed the package off the counter and was already making a dive for the doorway at the far end; and the imbecile grin melted out of the Saint's face like a wax mould from a casting of hot bronze.

One skeleton instant after the assistant had disappeared, he was over the counter with the swift silence of a cat.

But even if he had made any noise, it is doubtful whether the other would have noticed it. The shifty-eyed youth was so drunk with excitement that his brain had for the time being practically ceased to function. If it hadn't he might have stopped to wonder why Mr Teal should have handed the tea to a third party; or why the third party, being so obviously a member of the idle rich, should have even bothered about exchanging it for a box of soap. He might have asked himself a great many inconvenient questions; but he didn't. Perhaps the peculiarly fatuous and guileless character which the Saint had adopted for the interview had something to do with that egregious oversight — at least, that was what Simon Templar had hoped for… And it is at least certain that the young man went blundering up the stairs without a backward glance, while the Saint glided like a ghost into the gloomy passage-way at the foot of the stairs…

In the dingy upper room which was the young man's destination, Mr Osbett was entertaining the stout and agitated man. That is to say, he was talking to him. The agitated man did not look very entertained.

"It's no good cursing me, Nancock," Osbett was saying, in his flustered old-maidish way. "If you'd been on time last night—"

"I was on time!" yelped the perspiring Mr Nancock. "It was that young idiot's fault for handing the package over without the password — and to Teal, of all people. I tell you, I've been through hell! Waiting for something to happen every minute — waiting, waiting… It isn't even safe for me to be here now—"

"That's true," said Osbett, with one of his curiously abrupt transformations to deadly coldness. "Who told you to come here?"

"I came here because I want my money!" bawled the other hysterically. "What do you think I've done your dirty work for? Do you think I'd have taken a risk like this if I didn't need the money? Is it my fault if your fool of an assistant gives the money to the wrong man? I don't care a damn for your pennydreadful precautions, and all this nonsense about signs and countersigns and keeping out of sight. What good has that done this time? I tell you, if I think you're trying to cheat me—"

"Cheat you?" repeated the chemist softly. The idea seemed to interest him. "Now, I wonder why you should be the first to think of that?"

There was a quality of menace in his voice which the stout man did not seem to hear. His mouth opened for a fresh outburst; but the outburst never came. The first word was on his lips when the door opened and the shifty-eyed youth burst in without the formality of a knock.

"It's Teal's — packet!" he panted out. "A man just came in and said he wanted to change it! He said — Teal gave it to him. It hasn't been opened!"

Nancock jumped up like a startled pig, with his mouth still open where the interruption had caught it. An inarticulate yelp was the only sound that came out of it.

Osbett got up more slowly.

"What sort of man?" he snapped, and his voice was hard and suspicious.

The youth wagged his hands vaguely.

"A silly-ass sort of fellow — Burlington Bertie kind of chap — I didn't notice him particularly—"

"Well, go back and notice him now!" Mr Osbett was flapping ditherily again. "Keep him talking. Make some excuse, but keep him there till I can have a look at him."

The assistant darted out again and went pelting down the stairs — so precipitately that he never noticed the shadow that faded beyond the doorway of the stockroom on the opposite side of the landing.

Osbett had seized the packet of tea and was feeling it eagerly. The suspicious look was still in his eyes, but bis hands were shaking with excitement.

"It feels like it!" he muttered. "There's something funny about this—"

"Funny!" squeaked Nancock shrilly. "It's my money, isn't it? Give it to me and let me get out of here!"

"It will be lucky for you if it is your money," Osbett said thinly. "Better let me make sure." He ripped open the package. There was no tea in it — only crumpled pieces of thin white paper. "Yes, this is it. But why… My God!"

The oath crawled through his lips in a tremulous whisper. He looked as if he had opened the package and found a snake in his hands. Nancock, staring at him, saw that his face had turned into a blank grey mask in which the eyes bulged like marbles.

Osbett spread out the piece of paper which he had opened. It was not a banknote. It was simply a piece of perforated tissue on which had been stamped in red the drawing of a quaint little figure with straight lines for body and legs and arms and an elliptical halo slanted over his round featureless head… Osbett tore open the other papers with suddenly savage hands. Every one of them was the same, stamped with the same symbolic figure…

"The Saint!" he whispered.

Nancock goggled stupidly at the scattered drawings.

"I–I don't understand," he faltered, and he was white at the lips.

Osbett looked up at him.

"Then you'd better start thinking!" he rasped, and his eyes had gone flat and emotionless again. "The Saint sent this, and if he knows about the money—"

"Not 'sent', dear old Whiskers, not 'sent'," a coolly mocking voice corrected him from the doorway. "I brought it along myself, just for the pleasure of seeing your happy faces."

The Saint stood leaning against the jamb of the door smiling and debonair.

VIII

The two men stood and gawped at him as if he had been a visitor from Mars. A gamut of emotions that must have strained their endocrine glands to bursting point skittered over their faces like foam over a waterfall. They looked as if they had been simultaneously goosed with high-voltage wires and slugged in the solar plexus with invisible sledgehammers. Simon had to admit that there was some excuse for them. In fact, he had himself intentionally provided the excuse. There were certain reactions which only the ungodly could perform in their full richness that never failed to give him the same exquisite and fundamental joy that the flight and impact of a well-aimed custard pie gives to a movie audience; and for some seconds he was regaled with as ripe and rounded an exhibition of its kind as the hungriest heart could desire.

The Saint propped himself a little more comfortably against his backrest, and flicked a tiny bombshell of ash from his cigarette.

"I hope you don't mind my asking myself in like this," he remarked engagingly. "But I thought we ought to get together on this tea business. Maybe I could give you some new ideas. I was mixing a few odds and ends together myself yesterday—"

Credit must be given to Mr Osbett for making the first recovery. He was light-years ahead of Nancock, who stood as if his feet had sunk into the floor above the ankles, looking as though his lower jaw had dislocated itself at its fullest stretch. In one sheeting flash of dazzling clarity it dawned upon him that the man who stood there was unarmed — that the Saint's hands were empty except for a cigarette. His mouth shut tight under the spreading plumes of his moustache as he made a lightning grab towards the inside of his coat.

"Really!" protested the Saint. "Weren't you ever taught not to scratch yourself in public?"

Osbett had just time to blink — once. And then he felt as if a cyclone had hit him. His fingers had not even closed on the butt of the automatic in his shoulder holster when he found himself full in the path of what seemed like a ton of incarnate dynamite moving with the speed of an express train. Something like a chunk of teak zoomed out of the cyclone and collided with his jaw: as if from a great distance, he heard it make a noise like a plank snapping in half. Then his head seemed to split open and let in a gash of light through which his brain sank down into cottony darkness.

The rest of him cannoned soggily into Nancock, bounded sideways, and cascaded over a chair. Osbett and the chair crashed to the floor together; and the stout man reeled drunkenly.

"Here," he began.

Perhaps he did not mean the word as an invitation, but it appeared to have that effect. Something possessed of staggering velocity and hardness accepted the suggestion and moved into his stomach. The stout man said "Oof!" and folded over like a jack-knife. This put his chin in line with another projectile that seemed to be travelling up from the floor. His teeth clicked together and he lay down quite slowly, like a collapsing concertina.

Simon Templar straightened his tie and picked up the cigarette which he had dropped when the fun started. It had not even had time to scorch the carpet.

He surveyed the scene with a certain shadow of regret. That was the worst of having to work quickly — it merely whetted the appetite for exercise, and then left nothing for it to expend itself on. However, it was doubtful whether Osbett and Nancock could ever have provided a satisfactory workout, even with plenty of time to develop it… The Saint relieved Osbett of his gun, felt Nancock's pockets for a weapon and found nothing, and then rose quickly as a scutter of footsteps on the stairs reminded him that he still had one more chance to practise his favourite uppercut. He leaped behind the door as the shifty-eyed assistant tumbled in.

The assistant was blurting out his news as he came.

"Hey, the fellow's disappeared—"

Simon toed the door away from between them and grinned at him.

"Where do you think he went to?" he inquired interestedly.

His fist jolted up under the youth's jaw, and the assistant sat down and unrolled himself backwards and lay still.

The Saint massaged his knuckles contentedly, and pulled a large roll of adhesive tape from his pocket. He used it to fasten the three sleeping beauties' hands and feet together, and had enough left to fasten over their mouths in a way that would gravely handicap any loquacity to which they might be moved when they woke up.

Not that they were showing any signs of waking up for some time to come, which was another disadvantage attached to the effectiveness of that sizzling uppercut. By all the symptoms, it would be quite a while before they were in any condition to start a conversation. It was an obstacle to further developments which Simon had not previously considered, and he scratched his head over it in a moment of indecision. As a matter of fact, he had not given much previous consideration to anything beyond that brief and temporarily conclusive scuffle — he never made any definite plans on such occasions, but he had an infinite faith in impromptu action and the bountiful inspirations of Providence. Meanwhile, no harm would probably be done by making a quick and comprehensive search of the premises, or—

In the stillness of his meditation and the surrounding atmosphere of sleep, an assortment of sounds penetrated to his ears from the regions downstairs. There was some forced and pointed coughing, an impatient shuffling of feet, and the tapping of a coin on plate glass. More business had apparently arrived, and was getting restive.

A faintly thoughtful tilt edged itself into his eyebrows. He glanced round the room, and saw a slightly grubby white coat hanging behind the door. In a moment he had slipped into it and was buttoning it as he skated down the stairs.

The customer was a fat and frowsy woman in a bad temper.

"Tike yer time, dontcher?" she said scathingly. "Think I've got all die ter wiste, young man? You're new here, aintcher? Where's Mr Osbett?"

"Some people, madam, prefer to call me fresh," replied the Saint courteously. "Mr Osbett is asleep at the moment, but you may confide in me with perfect confidence."

"Confide in yer?" retorted the lady indignantly. "None o' your sauce, young feller! I want three pennyworth of lickerish an' chlorodeen lozenges, an' that's all. Young Alf's corf is awful bad agin this morning."

"That's too bad," said the Saint, giving the shelves a quick once-over, and feeling somewhat helpless. "Just a minute, auntie — I'm still finding my way around."

"Fresh," said the lady tartly, "is right."

Liquorice and chlorodyne lozenges were fairly easy. The Saint found a large bottle of them after a short search, and proceeded to tip half of it into a paper bag.

" 'Ere, I don't want all that," yelped the woman. "Three pennyworth, I said!"

Simon pushed the bag over the counter.

"As an old and valued customer, please accept the extra quantity with Mr Osbett's compliments," he said generously. "Threepence is the price to you, madam, and a bottle of cough mixture thrown in. Oh, yes, and you'd better give young Alf some cod-liver oil—"

He piled merchandise towards her until she grabbed up as much as she could carry and palpitated nervously out into the street. Simon grinned to himself and hoped he had not overdone it. If the news of his sensational bargain sale spread around the district, he would have his hands full.

During the lull that followed he tried to take a survey of the stock. He would be safe enough with proprietary goods, but if anyone asked for some more complicated medicine he would have to be careful. He had no grudge to work off against the neighbourhood at large; which was almost a pity.

The next customer required nothing more difficult than aspirin, and left the shop in a kind of daze when the Saint insisted on supplying a bottle of a hundred tablets for the modest price of twopence.

Simon took a trip upstairs and found that his three prizes had still failed to progress beyond the stage of half conscious meanings and a spasmodic twitching of the lower limbs. He returned downstairs to attend to a small snotty-nosed urchin who was asking for a shilling tin of baby food. Simon blandly handed her the largest size he could see, and told her that Mr Osbett was making special reductions that morning.

"Coo!" said the small child, and added a bag of peardrops to the order.

Simon poured out a pound of them — "No charge for that, Delilah — Mr Osbett is giving peardrops away for an advertisement" — and the small child sprinted out as if it was afraid of waking up before it got home.

The Saint lighted another cigarette and waited thoughtfully. Supplying everybody who came in with astounding quantities of Mr Osbett's goods at cut-throat prices was amusing enough, admittedly, but it was not getting him anywhere. And yet a hunch that was growing larger every minute kept him standing behind the counter.

Maybe it wasn't such a waste of time… The package of Miracle Tea in which he had found fifteen hundred testimonials to the lavish beneficence of his guardian angel had come from that shop; presumably it had been intended for some special customer; presumably also it was not the only eccentric transaction that had taken place there, and there was no reason why it should be the last. Maybe no other miracles of the same kind were timed to take place that day; and yet…

Mr Osbett's boxes of extra special toilet soap, usually priced at seven and sixpence, were reduced for the benefit of a charming young damsel to a shilling each. The charming damsel was so impressed that she tentatively inquired the price of a handsome bottle of bath salts.

"What, this?" said the Saint, taking the flagon down and wrapping it up. "As a special bargain this morning, sweetheart, we're letting it go for sixpence."

It went for sixpence, quickly. The Saint handed over her change without encouraging further orders — as a matter of fact, he was rather anxious to get rid of the damsel, in spite of her charm and obvious inclination to be friendly, for a man with a thin weasel face under a dirty tweed cap already overdue for the dustbin had come in, and was earnestly inspecting a showcase full of safety razors and other articles which are less widely advertised. Quite obviously the man was not anxious to draw attention to himself while there was another customer in the shop; and while there was at least one perfectly commonplace explanation for that kind of bashfulness the Saint felt a spectral tingle of expectation slide over his scalp as the girl went out and Weasel Face angled over to the counter.

"I haven't seen you before," he stated.

His manner was flatly casual, but his small beady eyes flitted over Simon's face like flies hovering.

"Then you should be enjoying the view," said the Saint affably. "What can I sell you today, comrade? Hot water bottles? Shaving cream? Toothpaste? We have a special bargain line of castor oil—"

"Where's Ossy?"

"Dear old Ossy is lying down for a while — I think he's got a headache, or something. But don't let that stop you. Have you tried some of our Passion Flower lipstick, guaranteed to seduce at the first application?"

The man's eyes circled around again. He pushed out a crumpled envelope.

"Give Ossy my prescription, and don't talk so much."

"Just a minute," said the Saint.

He took the envelope back towards the staircase and slit it open. One glance even in the dim light that penetrated there was enough to show him that whatever else the thin sheet of paper it contained might mean, it was not a prescription that any ordinary pharmacist could have filled.

He stuffed the sheet into his pocket and came back.

"Will you call again at six o'clock?" he said, and his flippancy was no longer obtrusive. "I'll have it ready for you than."

"Awright."

The beady eyes sidled over him once more, a trifle puzzedly, and the man went out.

Simon took the paper back into the dispensing room and spread it out under a good light. It was a scale plan of a building, with every detail plainly marked even to the positions of the larger pieces of furniture, and provided in addition with a closely-written fringe of marginal notes which to the Saint's professional scrutiny provided every item of information that a careful burglar could have asked for; and the first fascinating but still incomplete comprehension of Mr Osbett's extraordinary business began to reveal itself to him as he studied it.

IX

The simple beauty of the system made his pulses skip. Plans like that could be passed over in the guise of prescriptions; boodle, cash payments for services rendered, or almost anything else, could be handed over the counter enclosed in tubes of cold cream or packets of Miracle Tea; and it could all be done openly and with impunity even while other genuine customers were in the shop waiting to be served. Even if the man who did it were suspected and under surveillance, the same transactions could take place countless times under the very eyes of a watcher, and be dismissed as an entirely unimportant feature of the suspect's daily activities. Short of deliberate betrayal, it left no loophole through which Osbett himself could be involved at all — and even that risk, with a little ingenuity, could probably be manipulated so as to leave someone like the shifty-eyed young assistant to hold the baby. It was foolproof and puncture-proof — except against such an unforeseen train of accidents as had delivered one fatal package of Miracle Tea into Chief Inspector Teal's unwitting paws, and tumbled it from his pocket into Simon Templar's car.

The one vast and monumental question mark that was left was wrapped all the way round the mystery of what was the motive focus of the whole machinery.

A highly organized and up-to-date gang of thieves, directed by a Master Mind and operating with the efficiency of a big business? The answer seemed trite but possible. And yet…

All the goods he could see round him were probably as genuine as patent slimming salts and mouth washes can be — any special packages would certainly be kept aside. And there was nothing noticeably out of place at that time. He examined the cash register. It contained nothing but a small amount of money, which he transferred to a hospital collecting box on the counter. The ancient notes and invoices and prescriptions speared on to hook files in the dispensing compartment were obviously innocuous — nothing incriminating was likely to be left lying about there.

The first brisk spell of trade seemed to have fallen off, and no one else had entered the shop since the visit of Weasel Face. Simon went back upstairs, and investigated the room into which he had dodged when he followed the shifty-eyed youth up the stairs. He remembered it as having had the air of a storeroom of some kind, and he was right. It contained various large jars, packing cases, and cardboard cartons labelled with assorted names and cryptic signs, some of them prosaically familiar, stacked about in not particularly methodical piles. But the whole rear half of the room, in contrasting orderliness, was stacked from floor to ceiling with mounds of small yellow packages that he could recognize at a glance.

He looked around again, and on one wall he found in a cheap frame the official certificate which announced to all whom it might concern that Mr Henry Osbett had dutifully complied with the Law and registered the fact that he was trading under the business name of The Miracle Tea Company.

"Well, well, well!" said the Saint dreamily. "What a small world it is after all…"

He fished out his cigarette case and smoked part of the way through a cigarette while he stood gazing abstractedly over the unilluminating contents of the room, and his brain was a whirlpool of new and startling questions.

Then he pulled himself together and went back to the office.

The three men he had left there were all awake again by then and squirming ineffectually. Simon shook his head at them.

"Relax, boys," he said soothingly. "You're only wearing yourselves out. And think what a mess you're making of your clothes."

Their swollen eyes glared at him mutely with three individual renderings of hate and malevolence intensified by different degrees of fear; but if the Saint had been susceptible to the cremating power of the human eye he would have been a walking cinder many years ago.

Calmly he proceeded to empty their pockets and examine every scrap of paper he found on them; but except for a driving licence which gave him Mr Nancock's name and address in Croydon he was no wiser when he had finished.

After that he turned his attention to the filing cabinet; but as far as a lengthy search could tell it contained nothing but a conventional collection of correspondence on harmless matters concerned with the legitimate business of the shop and the marketing of Miracle Tea. He sat down in Mr Osbett's swivel chair and went systematically through the drawers of the desk, but they also provided him with no enlightenment. The net result of his labours was a magnificent and symmetrically rounded zero.

The Saint's face showed no hint of his disappointment. He sat for a few seconds longer, tilting himself gently back and forth; and then he stood up.

"It's a pity you don't keep more money on the premises, Henry," he remarked. "You could have saved yourself a stamp."

He picked up a paperknife from the desk and tested the blade with his thumb. It was sharp enough. The eyes of the bound men dilated as they watched him.

The Saint smiled.

"From the way you were talking when I first came in, it looks as if you know my business," he said. "And I hope you've realized by this time that I know yours. It isn't a very nice business; but that's something for you to worry about. All I'm concerned with is to make sure that you pay the proper luxury tax to the right person, which happens to be me. So will you attend to it as soon as possible, Henry? I should think about ten thousand pounds will do for a first instalment. I shall expect it in one-pound notes, delivered by messenger before two-thirty pm tomorrow. And it had better not be late." The Saint's blue eyes were as friendly as frozen vitriol. "Because if it is, Chief Inspector Teal will be calling here again — and next time it won't be an accident… Meanwhile" — the knife spun from his hands like a whirling white flame, and the three men flinched wildly as the point buried itself with a thud in the small space of carpet centrally between them—"if one of you gets to work with that, you ought to be up and about again in a few minutes. Goodbye, girls; and help yourself to some sal volatile when you get down stairs."

It was nearing one o'clock by his watch when he reached the street; and Patricia was ordering herself a second Martini when he strolled into the cocktail room at Quaglino's.

She leaned back and closed her eyes.

"I know," she said. "Teal and the Flying Squad are about two blocks behind you. I can tell by the smug look on your face."

"For once in your life you're wrong," he said as he lowered himself into a chair. "They're so far behind that if Einstein is right they ought to have been here an hour ago."

Over lunch he gave her an account of his morning.

"But what is it all about?" she said.

He frowned.

"I just wish I knew, darling. But it's something bigger than burglary — you can take bets on that. If Henry Osbett is the Miracle Teapot in person, the plot is getting so thick you could float rocks on it. If I haven't got mixed on what Claud Eustace told me last night, they run a radio programme, and that costs plenty of dough and trouble. No gang of burglars would bother to go as far as that, even to keep up appearances. Therefore this is some racket in which the dough flows like water; and I wish I could think what that could be. And it's run by experts. In the whole of that shop there wasn't a single clue. I'll swear that Claud Eustace himself could put it through a sieve and not find anything… I was just bluffing Henry, of course, but I think I made a good job of it."

"You don't think he'll pay, do you?"

"Stranger things have happened," said the Saint hopefully. "But if you put it like that — no. That was just bait. There wasn't anything else useful that I could do. If I'd had them somewhere else I might have beaten it out of them, but I couldn't do it there, and I couldn't put them in a bag and bring them home with me. Anyhow, this may be a better way. It means that the next move is up to the ungodly, and they've got to make it fast. And that may give us our break."

"Of course it may," she agreed politely. "By the way, where did you tell me once you wanted to be buried?"

He chuckled.

"Under the foundation stone of a brewery," he said. ''But don't worry. I'm going to take a lot of care of myself."

His idea of taking care of himself for that afternoon was to drive the Hirondel down to the factory at an average speed of about sixty miles an hour to discuss the installation of a new type of supercharger designed to make the engine several degrees more lethal than it was already, and afterwards to drive back to London at a slightly higher speed in order to be punctual for his appointment with Mr Teal. Considering that ride in retrospect, he sometimes wondered whether he would have any chance of claiming that the astounding quality of care which it showed could be credited entirely to his own inspired forethought.

It was on the stroke of four when he sailed into the May Fair and espied the plump and unromantic shape of Chief Inspector Teal dumped into a pink brocade armchair and looking rather like a bailiff in a boudoir.

Teal got up as the Saint breezed towards him; and something in the way he straightened and stood there almost checked Simon in the middle of a stride. Simon forced himself to keep coming without a flaw in the smooth surface of his outward tranquillity; but a sixth sense was rocketing red danger signals through his brain even before he heard the detective's unnaturally hard gritty voice.

"I've been waiting for you, Saint!"

"Then you must have been early, Claud," said the Saint. His smile was amiable and unruffled, but there was an outlaw's watchfulness at the back of his bantering eyes. "Is that any excuse for the basilisk leer? Anyone would think you'd eaten something—"

"I don't want to hear any more of that," Teal said crunchily. "You know damned well why I'm waiting for you. Do you know what this is?"

He flourished a piece of paper in Simon's face.

The Saint raised his eyebrows.

"Not another of those jolly old warrants?" he murmured. "You must be getting quite a collection of them."

"I'm not going to need to collect any more," Teal said grimly. "You went too far when you left your mark on the dead man you threw out of your car in Richmond Park this afternoon. I'm taking you into custody on a charge of wilful murder!"

X

Simon took Mr Teal by the arm and led him back to a seat. He was probably the only man in the world who could have got away with such a thing, but he did it without the faintest sign of effort. He switched on about fifty thousand watts of his personality, and Mr Teal was sitting down beside him before he recovered from it.

"Damn it, Templar, what the hell do you think you're doing?" he exploded wrathfully. "You're under arrest!"

"All right, I'm under arrest," said the Saint accommodatingly, as he stretched out his long legs. "So what?"

"I'm taking you into custody—"

"You said that before. But why the hurry? It isn't early closing day at Vine Street, is it? Let's have our tea first, and you can tell me all about this bird I'm supposed to have moidered. You say he was thrown out of a car—"

"Your Hirondel!"

"But why mine? After all, there are others. I don't use enough of them to keep the factory going by myself."

The detective's jaws clamped on his chewing gum.

"You can say all that to the magistrate in the morning," he retorted dourly. "It isn't my job to listen to you. It's my job to take you to the nearest police station and leave you there, and that's what I'm going to do. I've got a car and a couple of men at each of the entrances, so you'd better not give any trouble. I had an idea you'd be here at four o'clock —"

"So I spent the afternoon moidering people and chucking them out of cars, and then rush off to meet you so you needn't even have the trouble of looking for me. I even use my own famous Hirondel so that any cop can identify it, and put my trademark on the deceased to make everything easy for the prosecution. You know, Claud," said the Saint pensively, "there are times when I wonder whether I'm quite sane."

Teal's baby blue eyes clung to him balefully.

"Go on," he grated. "Let's hear the new alibi. It'll give me plenty of time to get it torn down before you come up for trial!"

"Give me a chance," Simon protested. "I don't even know what time I'm supposed to have been doing all these exciting things."

"You know perfectly well—"

"Never mind. You tell me, and 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 suddenly 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 commonplace detective, adequately doing a job in which miracles did not happen and the natural laws of the universe were respected and cast-iron cases were not being perennially disintegrated under his noise by a bland and tantalizing buccaneer 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 unprecedented 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 seriousness 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 comeback.

"He was an Admiralty draughtsman by the name of Nancock," he said; and the gauzy derision in the Saint's glance faded out abruptly as he realized that in that simple answer he had been given the secret of Mr Osbett's remarkable chemistry.

XI

It was as if a distorting mirror had been suddenly flattened out, so that it reflected a complete picture with brilliant and lifelike accuracy. The figures in it moved like marionettes.

Simon even knew why Nancock had died. He himself, ironically for Teal's disappointment, had sealed the fat man's death-warrant without knowing it. Nancock was the man for whom the fifteen-hundred-pound packet of Miracle Tea had been intended; Nancock had been making a fuss at the shop when the Saint arrived. The fuss was due to nothing but Nancock's fright and greed, but to suspicious eyes it might just as well have looked like the overdone attempt of a guilty conscience to establish its own innocence. Nancock's money had passed into the Saint's hands, the Saint had got into the shop on the pretext of bringing the same package back, and the Saint had said: "I know all about your business." Simon could hear his own voice saying it. Osbett has made from that the one obvious deduction. Nancock had been a dead man when the Saint left the shop.

And to dump the body out of a Hirondel, with a Saint drawing pinned to it, was a no less obvious reply. Probably they had used one of his own authentic drawings, which had still been lying on the desk when he left them. He might have been doing any one of a dozen things that afternoon which would have left him without an alibi.

He had told Patricia that the next move was up to the ungodly, and it had come faster than he had expected. But it had also fulfilled all his other hopes.

"Claud," he said softly, "how would you like to make the haul of a lifetime?"

Teal sat and looked at him.

"I'll trade it," said the Saint, "for something that'll hardly give you any trouble at all. I was thinking of asking you to do it for me anyhow, in return for saving your life last night. There are certain reasons why I want to know the address where they have a telephone number Berkeley 3100. I can't get the information from the telephone company myself, but you can. I'll write it down for you." He scribbled the figures on a piece of paper. "Let me know where that number lives, and I'll give you your murderer and a lot more."

Teal blinked suspiciously at the memorandum.

"What's this got to do with it?" he demanded,

"Nothing at all," said the Saint untruthfully. "So don't waste your time sleuthing around the place and trying to pick up clues. It's just some private business of my own. Is it a sale?"

The detective's eyes hardened.

"Then you do know something about all this!"

"Maybe I'm just guessing. I'll be able to tell you later. For once in your life, will you let me do you a good turn without trying to argue me out of it?"

Mr Teal fought with himself. And for no reason that he could afterwards justify to himself, he said grudgingly: "All right. Where shall I find you?"

"I'll stay home till I hear from you." Simon stood up, and suddenly remembered for the first time why he was there at all. He pulled a yellow package out of his pocket and dropped it in the detective's lap. "Oh yes. And don't forget to take some of this belly balm as soon as you get the chance. It may help you to get back that sweet disposition you used to have, and stop you being so ready to think unkind thoughts about me."

On the way home he had a few qualms about the ultimate wisdom of that parting gesture, but his brain was too busy to dwell on them. The final patterns of the adventure were swinging into place with the regimented precision that always seemed to come to his episodes after the most chaotic beginnings, and the rhythm of it was like wine in his blood.

He had made Teal drive slowly past Cornwall House with him in a police car, in case there were any watchers waiting to see whether the attempt to saddle him with Nancock's murder would be successful. From Cannon Row police station, which is also a rear exit from Scotland Yard, he took a taxi back to his apartment, and stopped at a newsagent's on the way to buy a copy of a certain periodical in which he had hitherto taken little interest. By the time he got home it had given him the information he wanted.

Sam Outrell, the janitor, came out from behind the desk as he entered the lobby.

"Those men was here, sir, about two hours ago, like you said they would be," he reported. "Said you'd sent 'em to measure the winders for some new curtains. I let 'em in like you told me, an' they went through all the rooms."

"Thanks a lot, Sam," said the Saint, and rode up in the lift with another piece of his mosaic settled neatly into place,

He came into the living-room like a ray of sunshine and spun his hat over Patricia's head into a corner.

"Miracle Tea is on the air in about ten minutes," he said, "with a program of chamber music. Could anything be more appropriate?"

Patricia looked up from her book.

"I suppose you've heard about our curtain measurers."

"Sam Outrell told me. Do I get my diploma in advanced prophetics? After the party I had this morning, I knew it wouldn't be long before someone wanted to know what had happened to Comrade McGuire. Did you get him to Weybridge in good condition?"

"He didn't seem to like being locked in the trunk of the Daimler very much."

The Saint grinned, and sat down at the desk to dismantle his automatic. He opened a drawer and fished out brushes and rags and cleaning oil.

"Well, I'm sure he preferred it to being nailed up in a coffin," he said callously. "And he's safe enough there with Orace on guard. They won't find him in the secret room, even if they do think of looking down there… Be a darling and start tuning in Radio Calvados, will you?"

For a short while she was busy with the dials of the radiogram; and then she came back and watched him in silence while he went over his gun with the loving care of a man who knew how much might hang on the light touch of a trigger.

"Something else has happened," she said at last. "And you're holding out on me."

Simon squinted complacently up a barrel like burnished silver, and snapped the sliding jacket back into place. There was a dynamic exuberance in his repose that no artist could have captured, an aura of resilient swiftness poised on a knife-edge of balance that sent queer little feathery ripples up her spine.

"A lot more is going to happen," he said. "And then I'll tell you what a genius I am."

She would have made some reply; but suddenly he fell into utter stillness with a quick lift of his hand.

Out of the radio, which had been briefly silent, floated the opening bars of the Spring Song. And his watch told him that it was the start of the Miracle Tea Company's contribution to the load that the twentieth-century ether has to bear.

Shortly the music faded to form a background for a delicate Oxford accent informing the world that this melody fairly portrayed the sensations of a sufferer from indigestion after drinking a nice big cup of Miracle Tea. There followed an unusually nauseating dissertation on the manifold virtues of the product, and then a screeching slaughter of the Grand March from Tannhäuser played by the same string quartet. Patricia got up pallidly and poured herself out a drink.

"I suppose we do have to listen to this?" she said.

"Wait," said the Saint.

The rendition came to its awful end, and the voice of Miracle Tea polluted the air once again.

"Before we continue our melody programme, we should like to read you a few extracts from our file of unsolicited letters from sufferers who have tried Miracle Tea. Tonight we are choosing letters one thousand and six, one thousand and fourteen, and one thousand and twenty-seven…"

The unsolicited letters were read with frightful enthusiasm, and the Saint listened with such intentness that he was obviously paying no attention to the transparently bogus effusions. He sat with the gun turning gently in his hands and a blindingly beatific smile creeping by hesitant degrees into the lines of his chiselled fighting mouth, so that the girl looked at him in uncomprehending wonderment.

"… And there, ladies and gentlemen, you have the opinions of the writers whose letters are numbered one thousand and six, one thousand and fourteen, and one thousand and twenty-seven in our files," said the voice of the announcer, speaking with tedious deliberation. "These good people cured themselves by drinking Miracle Tea. Let me urge you to buy Miracle Tea — tonight. Buy Miracle Teal… And now the string quartet will play Drink to Me Only—"

There were two more short numbers and the broadcast was over. Simon switched off the radio as the next advertiser plunged into his act.

"Well," said Patricia mutinously, "are you going to talk?"

"You heard as much as I did."

"I didn't hear anything worth listening to."

"Nor did I. That's the whole point. There wasn't anything worth listening to. I was looking for an elaborate code message. An expert like me can smell a code message as far off as a venerable gorgonzola — there's always a certain clumsiness in the phrasing. This was so simple that I nearly missed it."

Patricia gazed into the depths of her glass.

She said: "Those numbers—"

He nodded.

"The 'thousand' part is just coverage. Six, fourteen, and twenty-seven are the operative words. They have to buy Miracle Tea — tonight. Nothing else in the programme means a thing. But according to that paper I brought in, Miracle Tea broadcasts every night of the week; and that means that any night the Big Shot wants to he can send out a call for the men he wants to come and get their orders or anything else that's waiting for them. It's the last perfect touch of organization. There's no connecting link that any detective on earth could trace between a broadcast and any particular person who listens to it. It means that even if one of his operatives should be under suspicion, the Big Shot can contact him without the shadow of a chance of transferring suspicion to himself. You could think of hundreds of ways of working a few numbers into an advertising spiel, and I'll bet they have a new one every time."

She looked at him steadily.

"But you still haven't told me what—"

The telephone rang before he could answer.

Simon picked it up.

"Metropolitan Police Maternity Home," he said.

"Teal speaking," said a familiar voice with an unnecessarily pugnacious rasp in it. "I've got the information you asked for about that phone number. The subscriber is Baron Inescu, 16 North Ashley Street, Berkeley Square. Now what was that information you were going to give me in return?"

The Saint unpuckered his lips from a long inaudible whistle.

"Okay, Claud," he said, and the words lilted. "I guess you've earned it. You can start right now. Rush one of your squads to Osbett's Drug Store, 909 Victoria Street — the place where you bought your Miracle Tea. Three other guys will be there shopping for Miracle Tea at any moment from now on. I can't give you any description of them, but there's one sure way to pick them out. Have one of your men go up to everyone who comes out of the shop and say: 'Are you six, fourteen, or twenty-seven?' If the guy jumps halfway out of his skin, he's one of the birds you want. And see that you get his Miracle Tea as well!"

"Miracle Tea!" sizzled the detective, with such searing savagery that the Saint's ribs suddenly ached with awful intuition. "I wish—" He stopped. Then he said: "What's this about Miracle Tea? Are you trying to be funny?"

"I was never so serious in my life, Claud. Get those three guys, and get their packets of Miracle Tea. You'll find something interesting in them."

Teal's silence reeked of tormented indecision.

"If I thought "

"But you never have, Claud. Don't spoil your record now. Just send that Squad out and tell 'em to hustle. You stay by the telephone, and I ought to be able to call you within an hour to collect the Big Shot."

"But you haven't told me—" Again Teal's voice wailed off abruptly. Something like a stifled groan squeezed into the gap. He spoke again in a fevered gabble. "All right all right I'll do it I can't stop now to argue but God help you—"

The connection clicked off even quicker than the sentence could finish.

Simon fitted his automatic into the spring clip holster under his coat, and stood up with a slow smile of ineffable impishness creeping up to his eyes.

XII

16 North Ashley street stood in the middle of one of those rows of crowded but discreetly opulent dwellings which provide the less squalid aspect of certain parts of Mayfair. Lights could be seen in some of the windows, indicating that someone was at home; but the Saint was not at all troubled about that. It was, in fact, a stroke of luck which he had hoped for.

He stepped up to the front door with the easy aplomb of an invited guest, arriving punctually for dinner, and put his finger on the bell. He looked as cool as if he had come straight off the ice, but under the rakish brim of his hat the hell-for-leather mischief still rollicked in his eyes. One hand rested idly between the lapels of his coat, as if he were adjusting his tie…

The door opened, exposing a large and overwhelming butler. The Saint's glance weighed him with expert penetration. Butlers are traditionally large and overwhelming, but they are apt to run large in the wrong places. This butler was large in the right places. His shoulders looked as wide as a wardrobe, and his biceps stretched tight wrinkles into the sleeves of his well-cut coat.

"Baron Inescu?" inquired the Saint pleasantly.

"The Baron is not—"

Simon smiled, and pressed the muzzle of his gun a little more firmly into the stomach in front of him.

The butler recoiled, and the Saint stepped after him. He pushed the door shut with his heel.

"Turn round."

Tensely the butler started to obey. He had not quite finished the movement when Simon lifted his gun and jerked it crisply down again. The barrel made a sharp smacking sound on the back of the butler's bullet head; and the result, from an onlooker's point of view, was quite comical. The butler's legs bowed outwards, and he rolled down on to his face with a kind of resigned reluctance, and lay motionless.

For a second the Saint stood still, listening. But except for that single clear-cut smack there had been no disturbance, and the house remained quiet and peaceful.

Simon's eyes swept round the hall. In the corner close to the front door there was a door which looked as if it belonged to a coat cupboard. It was a coat cupboard. The Saint pocketed his gun for long enough to drag the butler across the marble floor and shove him in. He locked the door on him and took the key — he was a pretty accurate judge of the comparative toughness of gun-barrels and skulls, and he was confident that the butler would not be constituting a vital factor in anybody's life for some time.

He travelled past the other doors on the ground floor like a voyaging wraith, listening at each one of them, but he could hear no signs of life in any of the rooms beyond. From the head of the basement stairs he heard an undisturbed clink of dishes and mutter of voices which reassured him that the rest of the staff were strictly minding their own business.

In another moment he was on his way up the main staircase.

On the first wide landing he knew he was near his destination. Under one door there was a thin streak of light, and as he inched noiselessly up to it he heard the faint syncopated patter of a typewriter. Then the soft burr of a telephone interrupted it.

A voice said: "Yes… Yes." There was a slight pause; then: "Vernon! Here is your copy for the special nine o'clock broadcast. Take it down. 'Why suffer from indigestion when relief is so cheap? Two cups will make your pains vanish — only two. Four cups will set you on the road to a complete cure — so why not take four? But after sixteen cups you will forget that indigestion ever existed. Think of that. Sixteen cups will make you feel ten years younger. Wouldn't you like to feel ten years younger in a few days? Buy Miracle Tea — tonight!'… Have you got that?… Splendid. Good-night!"

The receiver rattled back. And the latch of the door rattled as Simon Templar closed it behind him.

The man at the desk spun round as if a snake had bitten him.

"Good evening, Baron," said the Saint.

He stood there smiling, blithe and elegant and indescribably dangerous.

The Baron stared frozenly back at him. He was a tall, cleanshaven man with dark hair greying at the temples, and he wore impeccable evening clothes with the distinction of an ambassador: but he had spoken on the telephone in a voice that was quite strangely out of keeping with his appearance. And the Saint's smile deepened with the joy of final certainty as he held his gun steadily aligned on the pearl stud in the centre of the Baron's snowy shirt-front.

The first leap of fear across the Baron's dark eyes turned into a convincing blaze of anger.

"What is the meaning of this?"

"At a rough guess, I should say about fifteen years — for you," answered the Saint equably. "It'll be quite a change from your usual environment, I'm afraid. That is, if I can judge by the pictures I've seen of you in the society papers. Baron Inescu driving off the first tee at St Andrew's — Baron Inescu at the wheel of his yacht at Cowes — Baron Inescu climbing into his new racing monoplane. I'm afraid you'll find the sporting facilities rather limited at Dartmoor, Baron… or would you rather I called you — Henry?"

The Baron sat very still.

"You know a great deal, Mr Templar."

"Just about all I need to know, I think. I know you've been running the most efficient espionage organization that poor old Chief Inspector Teal has had to scratch his head over for a long time. I know that you had everything lined up so well that you might have got away with it for years if it hadn't been for one of those Acts of God that the insurance companies never want to underwrite. I told you I knew all about it this morning, but you didn't believe me. By the way, how does the jaw feel tonight?"

The other watched him unwinkingly.

"I'm afraid I did find it hard to believe you," he said evenly. "What else do you know?"

"I know all about your phoney broadcasts. And if it's of any interest to you, there will be a squad of large flat-footed bogey-men waiting for numbers six, fourteen, and twenty-seven when they stop by for their Miracle Tea… I know that instead of getting ready to pay me the tax I asked for, you tried to frame me for the murder of Nancock this afternoon, and I resent that, Henry."

"I apologize," said the Baron suavely. "You shall have your money tomorrow—"

The Saint shook his head, and his eyes were glacially blue.

"You had your chance, and you passed it up. I shall help myself to the money." He saw the other's eyes shift fractionally to the safe in the corner, and laughed softly. "Give me the keys, Henry."

The Baron hesitated a moment before he moved.

Then he put his hand slowly into his trouser pocket and pulled out a bunch of keys on a platinum chain. He detached them and threw them on to the desk.

"You have the advantage, Mr Templar," he said smoothly. "I give you the keys because you could easily take them yourself if I refused. But you're very foolish. There are only about three thousand pounds in the safe. Why not be sensible and wait until the morning?"

"In the morning you'll be too busy trying to put up a defence at the police court to think about me," said the Saint coldly.

He moved towards the desk; but he did not pick up the keys at once. His eyes strayed to the sheet of paper in the typewriter; and yet they did it in such a way that the Baron still knew that the first move he made would call shattering death out of the trim unwavering automatic,

Simon read:

Simon's eyes returned to the Baron's face.

"What more evidence do you think Chief Inspector Teal will need?" he said.

"With a name like mine?" came the scornful answer. "When I tell them that you held me at the point of a gun while you wrote that message on my typewriter—"

"I'm sure they'll be very polite," said the Saint. "Especially when they find that yours are the only fingerprints on the keys."

"If you made me write it under compulsion—"

"And the orders in the packets of Miracle Tea which numbers six, fourteen, and twenty-seven are going to buy tonight came from the same machine."

The Baron moistened his lips.

"Let us talk this over," he said.

The Saint said: "You talk."

He picked up the telephone and dialled 'O'.

He said: "I want to make a call to France — Radio Calvados."

The Baron swallowed.

"Wait a minute," he said desperately. "I—"

"Incidentally," said the Saint, "there'll be a record that you had a call to Radio Calvados this evening, and probably on lots of other evenings as well. And I'm sure we shall find that Henry Osbett moustache of yours somewhere in the house — not to mention the beard you wore when you were dealing with Red McGuire. I suppose you needed some thug outside the organization in case you wanted to deal drastically with any of the ordinary members, but you picked the wrong man in Red. He doesn't like hot curling-irons."

Inescu's fists clenched until the knuckles were bleached. His face had gone pale under its light tan.

The Saint's call came through.

"Mr Vernon, please," he said.

He took out his cigarette case, opening it, and lighted a cigarette with the hand that held his gun, all in some astonishing manner that never allowed the muzzle to wander for an instant from its aim on the Baron's shirt stud; and then an unmistakable Oxford accent said: "Hullo?"

"Vernon?" said the Saint, and his voice was so exactly like the voice affected by Mr Henry Osbett that its originator could scarcely believe his ears. "I've got to make a change in that copy I just gave you. Make it read like this: 'They say there is safety in numbers. In that case, you can't go wrong with Miracle Tea. There are many numbers in our files, but they all praise Miracle Tea. Every number has the same message. Why should you be left out? All of you, buy Miracle Tea — tonight!'… Have you got it?… Good. See that it goes in without fail."

Simon pressed the spring bracket down with his thumb, still holding the microphone.

The Baron's stare was wide and stupefied.

"You're mad!" he said hoarsely. "You're throwing away a fortune—"

Simon laughed at him, and lifted the microphone to his ear again. He dialled the number of Scotland Yard.

"Give me Chief Inspector Teal," he said. "The Saint calling."

There was some delay on the switchboard.

The Saint looked at Baron Inescu and said: "There's one thing you forget, Baron. I like money as much as anybody else, and I use more of it than most people. But that's a side line. I also deliver justice. When you get to Dartmoor, you'll meet some other men that I've sent there. Ask them about it. And then you in your turn will be able to tell the same story."

The voice of Chief Inspector Teal blared short-windedly in his ear.

"Yes?"

"Oh, Claud? How's the old tum-tum getting — … All right, if it's a sore subject; but I wondered — … Yes, of course I have. Just a minute. Did you get six, fourteen, and twenty-seven?" Simon listened, and the contentment ripened on his face. "Well, didn't I tell you? And now you can have some more for the bag. At any time after nine o'clock there's going to be a perfect stampede of blokes asking for Miracle Tea, so you can send your squad back for more. They'd better take over the shop and grab everyone who tries to buy Miracle Tea. And while they're doing that I've got the Big Shot waiting for you. Come and get him. The address is — Excuse me."

The Saint had the telephone in one hand and a gun in the other, and it seemed impossible for him to have done it, but a narrow-bladed ivory-hilted knife stuck quivering in the desk half an inch from the Baron's fingers as they slid towards a concealed bell. And the Saint went on talking as if nothing had happened.

"Sixteen North Ashley Street, Berkeley Square; and the name is Inescu… Yes, isn't that a coincidence? But there's all the evidence you'll need to make you happy, so I don't see why you should complain. Come along over and I'll show you."

"I'll send someone over," Teal said stiffly. "And thanks very much."

Simon frowned a little.

"Why send someone?" he objected. "I thought—"

"Because I'm busy!" came a tortured howl that nearly shattered the receiver. "I can't leave the office just now. I–I'll have to send someone."

The Saint's eyebrows slowly lifted.

"But why?" he persisted.

Eventually Mr Teal told him.

XIII

Simon Templar sat on the desk in Chief Inspector Teal's office a fortnight later. The police court proceedings had just concluded after a remand, and Baron Inescu, alias Henry Osbett, had been committed for trial in company with some three dozen smaller cogs in his machine. The report was in the evening paper which Simon had bought, and he pointed it out to Teal accusingly.

"At least you could have rung me up and thanked me again for making you look like a great detective," he said.

Mr Teal stripteased a slice of chewing gum and fed it into his mouth. "I'm sorry," he said. "I meant to do it, but there was a lot of clearing-up work to do on the case. Anyway, it's out of my hands now, and the Public Prosecutor is pretty satisfied. It's a pity there wasn't enough direct evidence to charge Inescu with the murder of Nancock, but we haven't done badly."

"You're looking pretty cheerful," said the Saint.

This was true. Mr Teal's rosy face had a fresh pink glow, and his cherubic blue eyes were clear and bright under his sleepily drooping lids.

"I'm feeling better," he said. "You know, that's the thing that really beats me about this case. Inescu could have made a fortune out of Miracle Tea without ever going in for espionage —"

The Saint's mouth fell open.

"You don't mean to say—" he ejaculated, and couldn't go on. He said: "But I thought you were ready to chew the blood out of everyone who had anything to do with Miracle Tea, if you could only have got away from—"

"I know it was rather drastic," Teal said sheepishly. "But it did the trick. Do you know, I haven't had a single attack of indigestion since I took that packet; and I even had roast pork for dinner last night!"

Simon Templar drew a long deep breath and closed his eyes. There were times when even he felt that he was standing on holy ground.