The frog-like voice of Sir Joseph Whipplethwaite boomed. He was speaking from the annual dinner of the British Badminton Society. "Badminton is an excellent means of acquiring and retaining that fitness of body which is so necessary to all of us in these strenuous times. We politicians have to keep fit, the same as everyone else. And many of us — as I do myself — retain that fitness by playing badminton.
"Badminton," he boomed, "is a game which pre-eminently requires physical fitness — a thing which we politicians also require. I myself could scarcely be expected to carry out my work at the Ministry of International Trade if I were not physically fit. And badminton is the game by which I keep myself fit to carry out my duties as a politician. Of course I shall never play as well as you people do; but we politicians can only try to do our best in the intervals between our other duties." There was a static hum.
"Badminton," boomed the frog-like voice tirelessly, "is a game which makes you fit and keeps you fit; and we politicians —"
Simon Templar groaned aloud, and hurled himself at the radio somewhat hysterically. At odd times during the past year he had accidentally switched on to Sir Joseph Whipplethwaite speaking at the annual dinners of the North British Lacrosse League, the British Bowling Association, the Southern Chess Congress, the International Ice Skating Association, the Royal Toxophilite Society, and the British Squash Racquets Association; and he could have recited Sir Joseph Whipplethwaite's speech from memory, with all its infinite variations.
In that mellow oak-beamed country pub, where he had gone to spend a restful week-end, the reminder of that appalling politician was more than he could bear.
"It's positively incredible," he muttered to himself, returning limply to his beer. "I'll swear that if you put that into a story as an illustration of the depths of imbecility that can be reached by a man who's considered fit to govern this purblind country, you'd simply raise a shriek of derisive laughter. And yet you've heard it with your own ears — half a dozen times. You've heard him playing every game under the sun in his after-dinner speeches, and mixing it fifty-fifty with his godlike status as a politician. And that — that — that blathering oaf is a member of His Majesty's Cabinet and one of the men on whom the British Empire's fate depends. O God, O Montreal!"
Words failed him, and he buried his face wrathfully in his tankard.
But he was not destined to forget Sir Joseph Whipplethwaite that week-end or ever again; for early on the Monday morning a portly man with a round red face and an unrepentant bowler hat walked into the hotel, and Simon recognized him with some astonishment.
"Claud Eustace himself, by the Great White Spat of Professor Clarence Skinner!" he cried. "What brings my little ray of sunshine here?"
Chief Inspector Claud Eustace Teal looked at him suspiciously. "I might ask the same question."
"I'm recuperating," said the Saint blandly, "from many months of honest toil. There are times when I have to get away from London just to forget what gas fumes and soot smell like. Come and have a drink."
Teal handed his bag to the boots and chewed on his gum continuously.
"What I'm wanting just now is some breakfast. I've been on the go since five o'clock this morning without anything to eat."
"That suits me just as well," murmured the Saint, taking the detective's arm and steering him towards the dining-room. "I see you're staying. Has some sinister local confectioner been selling candy at illegal hours?"
They sat down in the deserted room, and Teal ordered himself a large plate of porridge. Then his sleepily cherubic blue eyes gazed at the Saint again, not so suspiciously as before, but rather regretfully.
"There are times when I wish you were an honest man, Saint," Teal said.
Simon raised his eyebrows a fraction. "There's something on your mind, Claud," he said. "May I know it?"
Mr. Teal pondered while his porridge was set before him, and dug a spoon into it thoughtfully. "Have you heard of Sir Joseph Whipplethwaite?"
Simon stared at him; and then he covered his eyes. "Have I not!" he articulated tremulously. He flung out a hand. " 'Badminton,' " he boomed, " 'is a game that has made we politicians what we are. Without badminton, we politicians —' "
"I see you have heard of him. Did you know he lived near here?"
Simon shook his head. He knew that Sir Joseph Whipplethwaite had acquired the recently-created portfolio of the Minister of International Trade, and had gathered from broadcast utterances that Sir Joseph considered Whipplethwaite an ideal man for the job, but he had not felt moved to investigate the matter further. His energetic life was far too full to allow him time to trace the career of every pinhead who exercised his jaw in the Houses of Parliament at the long-suffering taxpayer's expense.
"His house is only about a mile away — a big modern place with four or five acres of garden. And whatever you like to think about him yourself, the fact remains that he has fairly important work to do. Things go through his office that it's sometimes important to keep absolutely secret until the proper time comes to publish them."
Simon Templar had never been called slow. "Good Lord, Teal — is this a stolen treaty business?"
The detective nodded slowly. "That sounds a little sensational, but it's about the truth of it. The draft of our commercial agreement with the Argentine is going before the House tomorrow, and Whipplethwaite brought it down here on Saturday night late to work on it — he has the pleasure of introducing it for the Government. I don't know much about it myself, except that it's to do with tariffs, and some people could make a lot of money out of knowing the text of it in advance."
"And it's been stolen?"
"On Sunday afternoon."
Simon reached thoughtfully for his cigarette-case. "Teal, why are you telling me this?"
"I don't really know," said the detective, looking at him sombrely.
"When you walked in and found me here, I suppose you thought I was the man."
"No — I didn't think that. A thing like that is hardly in your line, is it?"
"It isn't. So why bring me in?"
"I don't really know," repeated the detective stubbornly, watching his empty porridge plate being replaced by one of bacon and eggs. "In fact, if you wanted to lose me my job you could go right out and sell the story to a newspaper. They'd pay you well for it."
The Saint tilted back his chair and blew a succession of smoke-rings towards the ceiling. Those very clear and challenging blue eyes rested almost lazily on the detective's somnolent pink half-moon of a face.
"I get you, Claud," he said seriously, "and for once the greatest criminal brain of this generation shall be at the disposal of the Law. Shoot me the whole works."
"I can do more than that," said Teal, with a certain relief. "I'll show you the scene presently. Whipplethwaite's gone to London for a conference with the Prime Minister."
The detective finished his breakfast, and refused a cigarette.
After a few minutes they set out to walk to Whipplethwaite's house, where Teal had already spent several hours of fruitless searching for clues after a special police car had brought him down from London.
Teal, having given his outline of the barest facts, had become taciturn, and Simon made no attempt to force the pace. The Saint appreciated the compliment of the detective's confidence — although perhaps it was only one of many occasions on which those two epic antagonists had been silent in a momentary recognition of the impossible friendship that might have been just as epic if their destinies had lain in different paths. Those were the brief interludes when a truce was possible between them; and the hint of a sigh in Teal's silent ruminations might have been taken to indicate that he wished the truce could have been extended indefinitely.
In the same silence they turned in between the somewhat pompous concrete gate-pillars that gave entrance to the grounds of Sir Joseph Whipplethwaite's country seat. From there, a gravelled carriage drive led them in a semicircular curve through a rough, densely-grown plantation and brought them rather suddenly into sight of the house, which was invisible from the road. A uniformed local constable was patrolling in front of the door; he saluted as he saw Teal, and looked at the Saint inquiringly.
Teal, however, was uncommunicative. He stood aside for the Saint to pass, and ushered him personally through the front door — a performance which, from the village constable's point of view, was sufficient introduction to one who could scarcely have been less than an Assistant Commissioner.
The house was not only modern, as Teal had described it — it was almost prophetic. From the outside, it looked at first glance like the result of some close in-breeding between an aquarium, a wedding cake, and a super cinema. It was large, white and square, with enormous areas of window and erratic balconies which looked as if they had been transferred bodily from the facade of an Atlantic liner. Inside, it was remarkably light and airy, with a certain ascetic barrenness of furnishing that made it seem too studiously sanitary to be comfortable, like a hospital ward.
Teal led the way down a long wide white hall, and opened a door at the end. Simon found himself in a room that needed no introduction as Sir Joseph's study. Every wall had long bookshelves let into its depth in the modern style, and there was a glass-topped desk with a steel-framed chair behind it; the upper reaches of the walls were plastered with an assortment of racquets, bats, skis, skates, and illuminated addresses that looked oddly incongruous.
"Is this architecture Joseph's idea?" asked the Saint.
"I think it's his wife's," said Teal. "She's very progressive."
It certainly looked like a place in which any self-respecting mystery should have died of exhaustion looking for a suitable place to happen. The safe in which the treaty had reposed was the one touch about it that showed any trace of fantasy, for it was sunk in flush with the wall and covered by a mirror, which, when it was opened, proved to be the door of the safe itself, and the keyhole was concealed in a decorative scroll of white metal worked into a frame of the glass which slid aside in cunningly-fashioned grooves to disclose it.
Teal demonstrated its working; and the Saint was interested.
"The burglars don't seem to have damaged it much," he remarked, and Teal gave him a glance that seemed curiously lethargic.
"They haven't damaged it at all," he said. "If you go over it with a magnifying glass you won't find a trace of its having been tampered with."
"How many keys?"
"Two. Whipplethwaite wears one on his watch-chain, and the other is at his bank in London."
For the first time that day two thin hair-lines of puzzlement cut vertically down between the Saint's level brows. They were the only outward signs of a wild idea, an intuition too ludicrous even to hint at, that flickered through his mind at the tone of the detective's voice.
"Whipplethwaite went to church on Sunday morning," said Teal, with an expressionless face, "and worked over the treaty when he came back. He took it to lunch with him; and then he locked it up in the safe and went upstairs to his room to rest. He was rather taken up with the importance of secrecy, and he had demanded two guards from the local police. One of them was at the front door, where we came in. The other was outside here."
Teal walked towards the tall windows which filled nearly the whole of one wall of the room. Right in the centre of these windows, on the stone-flagged terrace outside, the back of a seated man loomed against the light like a statuette in a glass case.
Simon had noticed him as soon as they entered the room: he appeared to be painting a scene of the landscape, and as they went through the windows and came out behind him Simon observed that the canvas on his easel was covered with brightly-coloured daubs of paint in various abstruse geometrical shapes. He looked up at the sound of their footsteps, gave the Saint a casual nod, and bowed politely to the detective.
"Well, sir," he said, with a trace of mockery, "how are the investigations going?"
"We're doing the best we can," said Teal vaguely, and turned to Simon. "This is Mr. Spencer Vallance, who was painting exactly where you see him now when the robbery took place. Down there" — he pointed to a grass tennis-court which was cut bodily, like a great step, out of the fairly steep slope below them—"those same four people you see were playing. They're finalists in the South of England Junior Championships, and they're staying here as Whipplethwaite's guests for a week."
"The other constable on guard was supposed to be patrolling the back of the house — we're at the back now — and at the time when the burglary was committed he was about three-quarters of the way down this slope, with his back to the house, watching the game. In fact, the scene you see is almost exactly the same as it was at half past three yesterday afternoon."
Simon nodded, and glanced again at Mr. Vallance, who had resumed his interrupted task of painting a neat blue border around a green isosceles triangle on a short brown stalk that was presumably intended to represent a poplar in the foreground. The Art of Mr. Spencer Vallance was so perfectly appropriate to his background that it gave one a sense of shock. One felt that such a preposterous aptness outraged one's canons of that human inconsistency which we have come to accept as normal. It was like seeing a doorman in Arab costume outside a restaurant called "The Oasis," and discovering that he really was a genuine Arab. Vallance's picture was exactly like the house behind it: scientific, hygienic, and quite inhuman.
Simon spent a few seconds trying to co-ordinate the masses of colour on the canvas with the scene before his eyes, which was particularly human and charming. To left and right of him strips of untouched plantation which were probably continuations of the spinney through which they had approached the house flanked the grounds right down beyond the tennis-court to the banks of a stream; while beyond the stream the land rose again up a long curve of hill crowned with a dark sprawl of woods.
"There are two poplars there, Mr. Vallance," Simon ventured to point out, when he had got his bearings on the picture, and the artist turned to him with an exasperated glare.
"My dear sir, what people like you want isn't an artist — it's a photographer. There are millions of blades of grass on that lawn, and you'd like me to draw every one of them. What I paint," said Spencer Vallance magnificently, "is the Impression of Poplar. The Soul of all Poplars is expressed in this picture, if you had the eyes to see it."
Mr. Vallance himself was the very antithesis of his art, being a small straggly man with straggly hair and a thin straggly beard. His clothes hung about him shapelessly; but his scrawny frame was obviously capable of so much superb indignation under criticism that Simon thought it best to accept the rebuke in all humility. And then Chief Inspector Teal took the Saint's arm and urged him firmly down the slope away from temptation.
"I'd better tell you what happened from our point of view," said the detective. "At twenty minutes to four the constable who was out here turned around and started to walk back towards the house. He had been watching the tennis for about a quarter of an hour. You might remember that all this time both the back and the front of the house had been covered, and nothing larger than a field mouse could have come through the plantation at the sides without making a noise that would certainly have attracted attention.
"The constable noticed that Vallance was not at his easel, and the windows of Whipplethwaite's study behind were open — he couldn't remember if they had been open before. Of course, he thought nothing of that. I don't think I mentioned that Vallance is also staying here as a guest. Then, just as the constable reached the top of the slope, Vallance came staggering out of the study, holding his head and bellowing that he'd been sandbagged. He was working at his painting, it appeared, when he was hit on the head from behind and stunned; and he remembered nothing more until he woke up on the floor of the study.
"The constable found a sandbag lying on the terrace just behind Vallance's stool. He went into the study and found the safe wide open. The theory, of course, would be that the robber dragged Vallance inside so that his body would not attract attention if the constable looked around."
Teal's voice was as detached and expressionless as if he had been making his statement in court. But once again that uncanny premonition flashed through the Saint's mind, rising ridiculously from that odd-sounding subjunctive in the detective's last sentence. Simon lighted a cigarette.
"I gather that Vallance is Lady Whipplethwaite's guest," he said presently.
Teal was only slightly surprised. "That is correct. How did you know?"
"His art fits in too perfectly with the house — and you said she was very progressive. I suppose he's been investigated?"
"This is Lady Whipplethwaite's statement," he said, taking out a notebook. "I'll read it to you."
" 'I first met Mr. Vallance in Brisbane fifteen years ago. He fell in love with me and wanted to marry me, but I refused him. For five years after that he continued to pester me, although I did my best to get rid of him. When I became engaged to Sir Joseph he was insanely jealous. There was never anything between us that could have given him the slightest grounds for imagining that he had a claim on me. For a few years after I was married he continued to write and implore me to leave Sir Joseph and run away with him, but I did not answer his letters.
" 'Six months ago he wrote to me again in London, apologizing humbly for the past and begging me to forgive him and meet him again, as he said he was completely cured of his absurd infatuation. I met him with my husband's consent, and he told me that he had been studying art in Paris and was getting quite a name among the Moderns. I liked his pictures, and when he begged me to let him paint me a picture of our house to give me I asked him down to stay, although Sir Joseph was very much against it. Sir Joseph has never liked him. They have had several heated arguments while he has been staying with us.' "
Teal closed the notebook and put it away. "As soon as the theft was discovered," he said, "Sir Joseph wanted me to arrest Vallance at once, and I had a job to make him see that we couldn't possibly do that without any evidence."
They had reached a rustic seat at the end of the tennis-court, Teal rested his weight on it gingerly, and produced a fresh packet of chewing gum.
"Our problem," he said, gazing intently at the tennis players, "is to find out how the man who opened the safe got in here — and got out again."
Simon nodded quietly. "The tennis players would hardly make any difference," he remarked. "They'd be so intent on their game that they wouldn't notice anything else."
"And yet," said Teal, "the man who did it had to pass the constable in front or the constable at the back — and either of them should have seen him."
"It sounds impossible," said the Saint; and the man beside him put a slip of gum in his mouth and masticated stolidly.
"It does," Teal said, without moving a muscle.
At that moment the fantastic idea that had been creeping round the Saint's mind sprang into incredulous life. "Good God! Teal — you don't mean —"
"I don't mean anything," said Teal in the same toneless voice. "I can't possibly tell you any more than I've told you already. If I mentioned that Whipplethwaite was badly hit in the Doncaster Steel Company's crash three months ago — that a Cabinet Minister's salary may be a large one, but you need a lot more than that to keep up the style that the Whipplethwaites like to live in — I should only be mentioning things that have nothing to do with the case. If I said that the man who could open that safe without damaging it in any way would be a miracle worker, I'd only be theorizing."
Simon's cigarette had gone out, but he did not notice it.
"And I suppose," he said, in a slightly strained voice — "just taking an entirely mythical case — I suppose that if the details of that treaty got about, the Powers would know that there'd been a leakage? I mean, if there was only one man through whom the leakage could have occurred, he'd have to cover himself by staging some set of circumstances that would account for it without hurting his reputation?"
"I suppose so," agreed Teal formally. "Unfortunately there's no Third Degree in this country, and when you get into high places you have to walk very carefully. Sometimes we're set almost impossible tasks. My orders are to avoid a scandal at any cost."
The Saint sat quietly, taking in the full significance of that astounding revelation that was so much more momentous for having been made without any direct statement. And, as he looked up at the house in a kind of breathlessness, he visualized the scene.
There was no space for secret passages in such an edifice as that; but for reasons known only to the architect a sun balcony on the first floor, built over the study, was linked with the ground by two flying buttresses on either side of it that angled down on either side of the study windows like gigantic staircases of three-foot steps. He could see the podgy figure of Sir Joseph Whipplethwaite creeping out with exaggerated caution, like a rhinoceros walking on tiptoe, and surveying the scene below. He saw the man clambering down the steps of the flying buttress, one by one, hampered by the sandbag clutched in one hand… saw him creeping up behind the unconscious artist… striking that single clumsy blow. With a scapegoat whom he disliked so heartily ready to be accused, why should he think he ran any risk?
"I know what you think of our abilities at the Yard," Teal was saying, in the same passionless way. "But we do get ideas sometimes. What you don't make allowances for is the fact that in our position we can't act on nothing more substantial than a brilliant idea, like detectives do in stories."
He was chewing monotonously, with his cherubic blue eyes fixed expressionlessly on the flying white ball on the court. "I think that if the treaty could somehow be recovered and put back where it was taken from, the guilty man would have to confess. An adventurer in a story, I suppose, might kidnap the suspected person and force him to say where it was hidden; but we can't do that. If anything like that happened in real life and the kidnapper was caught, he'd be for it.
"By the way, Whipplethwaite will be driving back from London this evening. He has a green Rolls Royce, number XZ9919… I expect you've had enough of this, haven't you?"
The detective stood up; and for the first time in a long while he looked at the Saint again. Simon had rarely seen those baby blue eyes so utterly sleepy and impassive.
"Yes — it's about time for my morning tankard of ale," Simon murmured easily.
They strolled slowly back to the house.
"That's Joseph's room — the one with the balcony — is it?" Simon asked idly.
Teal nodded. "Yes. That's where he was lying down."
"Does he suffer from indigestion?"
The detective flashed a glance at him. "I don't know. Why?"
"I should like to know," said the Saint.
Back in the house, he asked to be shown the dining-room. On the sideboard he discovered a round cardboard box carefully labelled — after the supererogatory habit of chemists — "The Pills." Underneath was the inscription: "Two to be taken with water after each meal, as required."
The Saint examined the tablets, and smiled gently to himself.
"Now could I see the bathroom?"
A very mystified Mr. Teal rang for the butler, and they were shown upstairs. The bathroom was one of those magnificent halls of coloured marble and chromium plate which the most modern people find necessary for the preservation of their personal cleanliness; but Simon was interested only in the cupboard over the washbasin. It contained an imposing array of bottles, which Simon surveyed with some awe. Sir Joseph was apparently something of a hypochondriac.
Simon read the labels one by one, and nodded. "Is he shortsighted?"
"He wears glasses," said the detective.
"Splendid," murmured Simon, and went back to the hotel to supervise the refuelling of his car without relieving Teal's curiosity.
At six o'clock that evening a very frightened man, who had undergone one of the slickest feats of abduction with violence that he could ever have imagined, and who had been very efficiently gagged, bound, blindfolded, and carried across country by the masked bandit who was responsible, sat with his back to a tree where he had been roughly propped up in a deep glade of the New Forest and watched the movements of his captor with goggling eyes.
The Saint had kindled a small, crisp fire of dry twigs, and he was feeding more wood to it and blowing into it with the dexterity of long experience, nursing it up into a solid cone of fierce red heat. Down there in the hollow where they were, the branches of the encircling trees filtered away the lingering twilight until it was almost as dark as midnight; but the glow of the fire showed up the Saint's masked face in macabre shading of red and black as he worked over it, like the face of a pantomime devil illuminated on a darkened stage.
The Saint's voice, however, was far from devilish — it was almost affectionate.
"You don't seem to realize, brother," he said, "that stealing secret treaties is quite a serious problem, even when they're the daft sort of treaties that We Politicians amuse ourselves with. And it's very wrong of you to think that you can shift the blame for your crimes on to that unfortunate ass whom you dislike so much. So you're going to tell me just where you put that treaty, and then there'll be no more nonsense about it."
The prisoner's eyes looked as if they might pop out of his head at any moment, and strangled grunts came through the gag as he struggled with the ropes that bound his arms to his sides; but the Saint was unmoved. The fire had been heaped up to his complete satisfaction.
"Our friend Mr. Teal," continued the Saint, in the same oracular vein, as he began to unlace the captive's shoes, "has been heard to complain about there being no Third Degree in this country. Now that's obviously ridiculous, because you can see for yourself that there is a Third Degree, and I'm it. Our first experiment is the perfect cure for those who suffer from cold feet. I'll show it to you now — unless you'd rather talk voluntarily?"
The prisoner shook his head vigorously, and emitted further strangled grunts which the Saint rightly interpreted as a refusal. Simon sighed, and hauled the man up close to the fire.
"Very well, brother. There's no compulsion at all. Any statement you like to make will be made of your own free will." He drew one of the man's bared feet closer to his little fire. "If you change your mind," he remarked genially, "you need only make one of those eloquent gurgling noises of yours, and I expect I shall understand."
It was only five minutes before the required gurgling noise came through the gag. But after the gag had been taken out it was another five minutes before the red-faced prisoner's speech became coherent enough to be useful.
Simon left him there, and met Teal in the hotel at half past seven. "The treaty is pushed under the carpet in Whipplethwaite's study," he said.
The detective's pose of mountainous sleepiness failed him for once in his life. "As near as that?" he ejaculated. "Good Lord!"
The Saint nodded. "I don't think you'll have to worry your heads about whether he'll prosecute," he said. "The man's mentally deficient — I thought so from the beginning. And my special treatment hasn't improved his balance a lot…
"As a general rule, problems in detection bore me stiff — it's so much more entertaining to commit the crime yourself — but this one had its interesting points. A man who could hate a harmless ass like that enough to try and ruin him in such an elaborate way is a bit of a museum specimen. You know, Claud, I've been thinking about those brilliant ideas you say policemen get sometimes; it strikes me that the only thing you want —"
"Tell me about it when I come back," said Teal, looking at his watch. "I'd better see Whipplethwaite at once and get it over with."
"Give him my love," drawled the Saint, dipping his nose into the pint of beer which the detective had bought for him. "He'll get his satisfaction all right when you arrest Vallance."
The detective stood stock still and stared at him with an owl-like face. "Arrest who?" he stammered.
"Mr. Spencer Vallance — the bloke who put insomnia tablets in Whipplethwaite's dyspepsia bottle at lunch-time, nipped up to Whipplethwaite's room for the key, opened the safe, replaced the key, and then staggered out of the study bellowing that he'd been sandbagged. The bloke I've just been having words with," said the Saint. —
Teal leaned back rather limply against the bar.
"Good Lord alive, Templar "
"You meant well, Claud," said the Saint kindly. "And it was quite easy really. The only difficult part was that insomnia-tablet business. But I figured that the culprit might want to make quite sure that Joseph would be sleeping soundly when he buzzed up for the key, and the method was just an idea of mine. Then I saw that Joseph's insomnia dope was white, while his indigestion muck was light grey, and I guessed he must have been short-sighted to fall for the change-over.
"When I looked up at the house it was quite obvious that if anyone could climb down that flying buttress, someone else could just as easily climb up. That's why I was going to say something about your brilliant police ideas."
The Saint patted the detective consolingly on the back. "Policemen are swell so long as they plod along in their methodical way and sort out facts — they catch people that way quite often. But directly they get on to a really puzzling case, and for some reason it strikes them that they ought to be Great Detectives just for once — they fall down with the gooseberries. I've noticed those symptoms of detectivosis in you before, Claud. You ought to keep a tighter hand on yourself."
"How long have you known it wasn't Whipplethwaite?" asked Teal.
"Oh, for months," said the Saint calmly. "But when your elephantine hints conjured up the vision of Joseph creeping stealthily down from the balcony upon his foe, couldn't you see a sort of grisly grotesqueness about it? I could. To stage a crime so that another man would naturally be suspected requires a certain warped efficiency of brain. To think for a moment that Joseph could have produced a scheme like that was the sort of brilliant idea that only a policeman in your condition would get. How on earth could Joseph have worked all that out?"
The Saint smiled blandly. "He's only a politician."