Chief inspector claud eustace teal thrust his large regulation foot into the opening as soon as the Saint unlatched the door. It was an unnecessary precaution, for Simon flung the door wide and stood aside invitingly with a smile on his lips and the light of irrepressible amusement in his eyes.
"Come in, souls," he said genially. "Make yourselves at home. And what can I do for you today?"
The invitation was somewhat superfluous, for Mr Teal and the man with him, whom Simon recognized as Sergeant Barrow, were already in. They hadn't waited to be asked. They came in practically abreast, and Barrow kicked the door to with his foot. The Saint was compelled to back into the living room in face of that determined entry. There was an unusual aggressiveness about Mr Teal; his plump body seemed taller and broader; the phlegmatic dourness of his round pink face under its shabby derby was increased by the hard lines of his mouth. He looked like a man who was haunted by the memory of many such calls on this smiling young buccaneer — calls which had only lengthened the apparently hopeless duel which he had been waging for years against the most stupendous outlaw of his day. And yet he looked like a man who had a certain foreknowledge that this time he would emerge the victor; and a kind of creepy puzzlement wormed itself into the Saint's consciousness as the meaning of those symptoms forced itself upon him.
"Hi, Claud," said Mr Uniatz in friendly greeting.
Chief Inspector Teal ignored him.
"I want you, Templar," he said, turning his sleepy eyes on the Saint.
"Of course you do, Claud," said the Saint slowly. "Somebody has sold an onion after closing time, and you want me to track him down for you. A gang of lemonade smugglers who have eluded Scotland Yard for years have been—"
"I mean," Teal said immovably, "that I'm taking you into custody on a charge of—"
"Wait!" said the Saint tragically. "Think what you'd be losing if you really pulled me in. What would you do with your afternoons if you couldn't come round here for these charming little conversaziones?"
"All the talking in the world won't save you this time, Templar," said Mr Teal in a hard voice. "Do you want to see the warrants I've got? One for your arrest and another to search this flat."
The Saint shrugged watchfully.
"Well, Claud," he said resignedly, "if you want to make a fool of yourself again it's your funeral. What's the charge this time?"
"Demanding money with menaces," said the detective flatly. For a moment his eyes lost their sham of perpetual boredom; they looked oddly hurt and at the same time contemptuous. "You know how much I've wanted to get you, Templar; but now that the time's come I'd just as soon not have the job. I never thought I shouldn't even want to touch you."
Simon glanced down at his brown hands, and in his mind was a vivid memory of Beatrice Avery's look of unutterable loathing. Teal's voice contained that very look, transmuted into sound. His pulses, which up to that moment had been ticking over as steadily as clockwork, throbbed a shade faster.
"Is there something the matter with me?" he asked curiously. "Have I suddenly taken on a resemblance to Boris Karloff, or is it only a touch of leprosy?"
"You're the Z-Man," retorted Mr Teal and stopped chewing his cud of tasteless chicle.
There was a silence that pressed down on the four men like a tangible substance. It was as though the air had become a mass of ectoplasm. Hoppy Uniatz broke the suffocating spell by shuffling his feet. It is doubtful if more than a dozen words of the conversation had infiltrated through the bony mass which protected the spongelike organization of nerve endings which served him in lieu of a brain; but the impression was growing on him that Mr Teal was making himself unpleasant.
"What was dat crack again?" he said, his unmusical voice crashing into the silence like a bombshell.
"Yes, Claud," said the Saint gently. "What was it?"
"You heard me the first time," Teal said crunchily. "You're the Z-Man; and if I couldn't prove it I wouldn't have believed it myself. It's something new to know that you've sunk as low as that."
Simon moved across to the mantelpiece and leaned an elegant elbow on it. He pulled hard at his cigarette until the end glowed red; and the smoke stayed down in his lungs. A dim light was breaking in the darkness through which he had been groping his way: he saw in his mind's eye the disarranged knives and forks on Beatrice Avery's table in the Dorchester Grill, and he knew the meaning of that queer zigzag formation. They had shaped the letter z; and it was the sudden sight of this that had caused the girl's terror.
But the light was still not enough… The Saint's eyes switched over to Mr Teal, and their clear blue glinted like the sheen of polar waters under the sun.
"My poor old blundering fathead," he said kindly. "I'm afraid you're off the rails again, for the umpteenth time. I don't know what the hell you're talking about."
"Dat goes for me, too, boss," contributed Mr Uniatz, who had clearly understood every word of the Saint's last terse sentence.
Mr Teal's lips thinned out.
"Oh, you don't know what the hell I'm talking about?" he barked. "Are you going to deny that you were in the Dorchester Grill an hour ago?"
"Why should I deny it? I lunched there."
"And you spoke to Miss Beatrice Avery?"
"We had a few brief words, yes. Of course I suppose that was very wicked of me, because we hadn't been introduced—"
"You took a package from her."
"No."
"You deny taking a package from her?" shouted Mr Teal.
"I do. She thrust the package into my hand and breezed off before I could even examine it—"
Teal's face turned a shade redder.
"You're not going to save yourself by quibbling like that," he snarled. "It's no good, Templar. You can try it on the jury. You're under arrest."
He took his right hand out of his pocket for the first time in that interview; and a pair of handcuffs clinked in it.
Simon glanced at them without moving.
"Hadn't you better think again, old dear?" he suggested quietly. "I don't know why I should go out of my way to save your hide, but I suppose I'm funny that way. Perhaps it's because life wouldn't be the same if you got chucked out of Scotland Yard on your ear and couldn't bring your tummy round to see me any more. Perhaps it's because I object to being marched into Piccadilly with bracelets over my wrists. But somehow or other I've got to save you from yourself."
"You don't have to worry—"
"But I do, Claud. I can't help it. it'd keep me awake at night, thinking of you sleeping out in the cold gutters with no one to even buy you a piece of spearmint. And it's all so obvious. The whole trouble is that you're jumping to too many conclusions. Just because I'm the Saint, and you never found any other criminals, you think I must be all of them. Then you hear of some guy called the Z-Man, so you think I must be him too. Well, who the hell is this Z-Man, and why haven't I heard of him before?"
Chief Inspector Teal bit on his gum in a supercharged effort of self-control that threatened to boil over at any moment. It was only by straining his will power to the limit that he succeeded in recovering the pose of mountainous boredom that he usually struggled in vain to maintain in the Saint's maddeningly nonchalant presence.
"I don't know what you hope to gain by all this, Templar, but you're wasting your breath," he said, shifting his lump of worn-out spearmint from one side of his mouth to the other. "I'm acting on facts that even you can't get away from. You may as well know that Sergeant Barrow was in the Dorchester at the time."
"Keeping a fatherly eye on me?"
"No; he was looking for someone else that we're interested in. But that's neither here nor there. Barrow happened to sec Miss Avery, and for reasons which I'm not going to explain he kept his eye on her."
"I only hope his thoughts were pure," said the Saint piously.
"Barrow saw you take a package from Miss Avery, and immediately afterwards he saw her leave the restaurant," continued Mr Teal coldly. "He accosted her in the foyer—"
"Disgusting, I call it," said the Saint. "What these policemen get away with—"
"He showed her his authority—"
"She must have been thrilled," murmured Simon.
"She refused to say anything, and Barrow rang me up," went on Teal, his self-control gradually slipping and his voice taking on its old familiar blare. "I got hold of these warrants, but I went to Miss Avery's flat first. She denied knowing anything about the Z-Man, but I'd been expecting that. What I did make her admit was that the package she handed you contained a large sum of money."
"Ten thousand pounds," said the Saint lazily. "I counted it."
Teal glowered at him, popeyed.
"I want that package—"
"Sorry, old dear," said the Saint regretfully. "I haven't got it."
"You haven't got it!" brayed Mr Teal.
"Calm yourself, sweetheart," drawled the Saint. "Much as I hate parting with perfectly good boodle when it's pushed right into my hand, I realized that a mistake had been made. Always the perfect gentleman, I immediately took steps to correct the error. On my way home I stopped at a District Messenger office and bunged the package back to Miss Avery, with contents intact. So you see, Claud, old thing, you'll have to tear those warrants up and go back to the assistant commissioner and let him flay you alive. And now that that's all cleared up, what about a smoke and a drink?"
He flicked open his cigarette case with one hand and indicated the whisky decanter with the other. Hoppy Uniatz, aware of the decanter's presence for the first time, moved mechanically towards it, licking his dry lips. Mr Teal, who had been unravelling his tonsils from his epiglottis, lumbered forward like a migrating volcano.
"You're not getting away like that this time, Templar," he said thickly. "You're coming with me! We've been after the Z-Man for a long time, and now we've got him. Are you coming quietly?"
"About as quietly as a brass band," answered the Saint succinctly. "But you needn't blow your whistles and bring in a troop of rozzers. I'm not going to pull a gun on you or start any roughhouse. I know it's a serious thing to interfere with an officer of the law in the execution of his duty — even when he's a mahogany-headed dope with barnacles all over his brain like you are. You say you're armed to the molars with warrants, or else I'd just bounce you out on your fat stomach and call it a day." His blue eyes rested on Mr Teal like twinkling icicles. "So instead of that I'll give you a chance to save your bacon. Before you commit the unmitigated asininity of arresting me and thereby get yourself slung out of a perfectly good job don't you think you'd better take the one obvious step?"
Nothing was obvious to Mr Teal except that he had got Simon Templar where he wanted him at last. But there was a mocking, buccaneering challenge in the Saint's voice that could not go unanswered.
"What obvious step?" he asked scorchingly. "I've got all the evidence I need—"
"I'm sorry; I forgot for the moment that you're only a detective," Simon apologized. "Let me put it into simple words. My answer to you is that Miss Avery gave me the ten thousand quid by mistake, and I rectified the mistake by immediately sending the money back to her. She's bound to have received it by now — and I know she's on the telephone. Since she seems to be the only important witness against me wouldn't it be rather a good idea to make quite certain that all this beautiful evidence of yours is really in the bag?"
He indicated his own instrument and his meaning was clear enough. But Chief Inspector Teal merely grunted and opened the handcuffs.
"That's an old one, isn't it?" he said contemptuously. "While I'm fooling about with the telephone you make your getaway. I'm surprised that you should suggest such a whiskery—"
He was interrupted by the shrill ringing of the twin bells of the telephone, and the Saint automatically reached for the instrument.
"No, you don't!" barked Mr Teal. "I'll take it."
Simon couldn't help smiling, for the detective was doing the very thing he had just been sneering at. But the Saint had no desire to make a getaway. He had a hunch that he knew where that call was coming from.
"Hullo!" said Mr Teal in a carefully controlled, Saintly voice.
"Is that Mr Simon Templar?"
"Yes," replied Mr Teal untruthfully; and he experienced a sudden awful feeling as though somebody had removed his stomach in one piece, leaving a wide open space; for the voice at the other end of the wire belonged unmistakably to Beatrice Avery. Mr Teal went to the movies often enough to know that.
"I owe you a humble apology, Mr Templar, for making such a stupid mistake," said Beatrice Avery, and Mr Teal heard the words through a kind of infernal tantara, in which the assistant commissioner's eloquent sniff was the most easily recognizable sound. "Thank you a thousand times for sending the money back so promptly. It was all a silly joke. Please forgive me."