Prelude for War (26 page)

He stood rather stiffly and
sluggishly, holding his sedate
black derby over his navel.

Simon lifted his shoulders
in regret.

“There are times when
you have an almost suburban
smugness,” he said
deploringly. “Never mind. You’ll ex
cuse
me if I go on with mine, won’t you? Sit down, Claud.
Take
off your boots and make yourself at home. Why
should
these little things come between us?”

Teal sank heavily into a
chair.

“I suppose you were up
late last night,” he said ponder
ously. “Is that
why you’re having breakfast so late this
morning?”

“I don’t know.”
The Saint punctured his second egg.
“That wouldn’t
be a bad excuse; but why should I make
excuses?”
The Saint waved his fork oratorically. “One of
the many troubles of
this cockeyed age is the glorification of
false
virtues. The bank clerk gets up early because he has to.
And consequently dozens of fortunate people who
don’t
need to get up early drag
themselves out of bed at insani
tary
hours because it makes them feel as virtuous as a bank
clerk. Instead of aspiring towards freedom and
emancipa
tion, we make a virtue of
assuming unnecessary restrictions.
A
man spends his life working to the position where he
doesn’t have to get to the office at nine o’clock,
and then he
boasts that he still gets
up at seven-thirty every morning.
Well,
then, what was he working for? Why didn’t he save
his energy and remain a clerk? You might build an
indict
ment of all our accepted values
on that. Poor men nibble a
crust of
bread because that’s all they’ve got, and millionaires
go on a diet of dry crusts and soda water——
”

“What were you doing
last night?” asked the detective
implacably.

Simon looked shocked.

“Really, Claud! Have
you no discretion? Or have you
by any chance become a
gossip writer?”

“I just want to know
where you were last night,” Teal
said immovably.
“I know you’ve got one of your usual
alibis,
but I’d like to hear it. And then perhaps you’ll tell me
why you did it.”

“Did what?”

“You know what I’m
talking about.”

“I wish I did. It
sounds so intriguing.”

“What were you doing
last night?”

Simon buttered a slice of
toast.

“So far as I recollect, I spent a
classically blameless eve
ning. An archbishop
could have followed in my footsteps
without
getting a single speck of mud on his reverend gait
ers. Preceded by massed choirs in white surplices,
and mar
shalled by a fatigue party from
the Salvation Army——
”

“Let me tell you some
of the things you did,” Teal inter
rupted
stolidly. “You dined at the Berkeley with Lady
Valerie
Woodchester. She left at about half-past ten, and
you
went to the Cafe Royal. You got back here towards twelve-fifteen, and at five
minutes past one you went out again. Your friends Quentin and Uniatz were with
you, and
you were careful to see that you
weren’t followed. At
twenty-five minutes past
two Miss Holm left here in another
of your cars, and
she was also very careful to see that she
wasn’t
followed. At four-thirty this morning you came in
alone. I want to know
what you were doing between one-five
and
four-thirty.”

“What a man you are,
Claud!” said the Saint with admiration. “Nothing is hidden from you.
Your house must be
full of little birds.”

“It’s my business to
know what people like you are
doing.”

“You know,” said
the Saint in an injured tone, “I believe
you
must have been having me watched. I don’t call that
very
friendly of you. Have you lost your old faith in me ?”

“What were you doing
between one-five and four-thirty
this morning?” Teal
repeated tigerishly.

The Saint stirred his
coffee with an air of shy discomfort.

“I really didn’t want
you to know about that,” he con
fessed. “You
see, much as I love you, you’re always the pro
fessional
policeman, and you have to take such a morbidly
legal
view of things. The fact is, Peter and Hoppy and I
decided
that we didn’t feel tired so we pushed off to a little
club
we wot of where they haven’t any respect for the
licensing
laws, and we stayed there hardening our arteries and talking to loose women
until nearly dawn.”

“What’s the name of
this club?”

“That’s just what I
can’t tell you, Claud. You see my
point. If you knew
where it was you’d feel you had to do
something about
closing it down, because any place in Lon
don
where one might have a good time always has to be
closed
down. And that would be a pity, because it’s quite
a
cheery little spot now, and these places always become so
dismal when they get infested with disguised policemen
snooping about for evidence and leaving the smell of Life
buoy soap in their wake——
”

“All right,”
Teal said with frightful restraint. “That’s
your
story. And now suppose you tell me about those men
you
painted red, white and blue and left outside Luker’s
house.”

The Saint put down his
coffee cup. He wore the incredu
lous and appalled
expression of a Presbyterian elder who
has
been accused of operating an illicit still.

“Painted?”
he said hollowly.

“Yes.”

“Red, white and
blue?”

“Yes.”

“Outside Luker’s
house?”

“Yes.”

“Who were these
men?”

“You know as well as
I do. Their names are Bravache,
Pietri and Dumaire.”

The Saint shook his head
with great concern.

“Somebody must have
been pulling your leg, Claud,” he said. “I simply can’t imagine
myself doing a thing like that,
even after a night at the
place where I was. Did anybody
see
me paint them and leave them outside Luker’s house?
Do
they
say I painted them?”

Mr Teal unwrapped a
springboard of spearmint with
wearily deliberate fingers,
as if he were undressing himself
for bed after a hard day.
He had already spent a bad hour
in dire anticipation of
this interview and his forebodings had not been disappointed. But he had to go
through with
it. For an hour he had been preparing
himself, wrestling with his soul, facing in prospect all the gibes and banter
and infuriating mockery that he knew he would have to
endure, drilling himself to the fulfilment of the vow that
he would be calm, that he would be rocklike and masterful,
that for this one lone historic occasion he would not let
the Saint get under his skin and cut the suspenders of his
self-control, as the Saint had done with fateful facility so
often in the past; and the soul of Claud Eustace Teal had
emerged tried and tempered from the annealing fires. Or nearly. He
would triumph in the ordeal even though blood oozed from his pores.

“No,” he said.
“Nobody saw you do it. The men don’t
say
it was you. They say they don’t know who it was. But I know it was you!”

“Do you ?” At
that moment the Saint was as sleek as a
seal.
“What makes you think so?”

“I know it because
Luker was one of the guests at that
country-house fire
that you were meddling in, where John
Kennet was killed;
and I should think of you in connection
with
anything that happened to Luker now. Besides that,
two
of these men are Frenchmen. When I saw you at that
place
where Ralph Windlay was murdered, you read me two
cuttings
from French newspapers and talked about some
thing
called the Sons of France. Red, white and blue are the
French
national colours. Painting those men like that and
leaving
them outside Luker’s doorstep is just the sort of
thing
I’d expect of you. There’s one connecting link all
the
way through, and you’re it!”

Simon regarded him like a
spot on the carpet.

“And that’s your
evidence, is it?”

Teal swallowed, but he
nodded stubbornly.

“That’s it.”

“That’s the
collection of barefaced balderdash that’s
supposed
to authorize you to take me into custody and lug
me
off to Vine Street. That’s the immortal excretion of the
best brains of Scotland Yard. Or have I misjudged you,
Claud ? Have you taken a pill and woken up to find you’ve
got a genius for publicity? You’ll certainly get a bale of it
over this. Let’s go on with it. What will the charge be?
Wait a minute, I can see it all—‘That he did feloniously and with
malice aforethought assault the complainants with an unlawful instrument, to
wit, a paintbrush——’ “

“Did I say that
?” asked Mr Teal.

It was quite a moment for
Mr Teal. For the first time
that he could remember he
stopped the Saint short.

The Saint looked at him in
wary surmise. A hundred
disjointed ideas rocketed
through his head, but they all
arrived by devious paths at
the same mark. And that was so
mething compared with which a seven-headed
dragon
pirouetting on its tail would have
been a perfectly common
place
phenomenon.

“Do you mean,”
he said foggily, “that you didn’t come
here
to arrest me?”

“You ought to know
enough about the law to know that
I can’t do anything
if these men won’t make a complaint.”

Simon felt a trifle
lightheaded.

“You didn’t come here
to congratulate me by any
chance?”

“No.”

“And you didn’t come
here for breakfast.”

“No.”

“Well, what the devil
did you come for?”

“I thought you might
like to tell me something about it,”
Teal
said woodenly. “What is all this about, and what has
Luker got to do with it?”

The Saint reached for a
cigarette.

“Quite apart from the
fact that I don’t see why I should
be supposed to
know, haven’t you thought of asking him ?”

“I have asked him. He
said he’d never seen these men
before; and they say
they’ve never heard of him.”

The Saint lighted his
cigarette. He leaned back in his
chair and stretched out
his legs under the table.

“Then it certainly
does look very mysterious,” he said,
but
his blue eyes were quiet and searching.

Chief Inspector Teal turned
his venerable bowler on his
blue-serge knees. He had
got his spearmint nicely into con
dition now—a plastic
nugget, malleable and yet resistant,
still flavorous,
crisp without being crumbly, glutinous with
out
adhesion, obedient to the capricious patterning of his
mobile
tongue working in conjunction with the clockwork
reciprocation
of his teeth, polymorphous, ductile. It was
a
great comfort to him. He would have been lost without
it.
What he had to do was not easy.

“I know,” he
said. “That’s why I came to see you. I
thought
you might be able to give me a lead.”

The Saint stared at him for
several moments in a silence
of gull-winged eyebrows
and wide absorbent eyes, while
that cataclysmic statement
sank through the diverse layers of his comprehension.

“Well, I will be a
cynocephalic mandrill scratching my
blue bottom on the
ramparts of Timbuctoo,” he said finally.
“Or
am I one already? I thought I’d seen every kind and
sample
of human nerve in my time, but this is the last
immortal
syllable. You treat me as a suspicious character;
you
habitually accuse me of every crime that’s committed
in
England that you’re too thickheaded to solve; you
threaten
me three times a week with penal servitude and
bodily
violence; you persecute me at every conceivable
opportunity;
you disturb my slumbers and hound me at my
own
breakfast table; and then you have the unmitigated
gall
to sit there, with your great waistcoat full of stomach,
and ask me to help you!”