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.
PART 2: THE INVISIBLE MILLIONAIRE
I
THE GIRL'S eyes caught Simon Templar as he entered the room, ducking his head instinctively to pass under the low lintel of the door; and they followed him steadily across to the bar. They were blue eyes with long lashes, and the face to which they belonged was pretty without any distinctive feature, crowned with curly yellow hair. And besides anything else, the eyes held an indefinable hint of strain.
Simon knew all this without looking directly at her. But he had singled her out at once from the double handful of riverside weekenders who crowded the small bar-room as the most probable writer of the letter which he still carried in his pocket—the letter which had brought him out to the Bell that Sunday evening on what anyone with a less incorrigibly optimistic flair for adventure would have branded from the start as a fool's errand. She was the only girl in the place who seemed to be unattached; there was no positive reason why the writer of that letter should have been unattached, but it seemed likely that she would be. Also she was the best looker in a by no means repulsive crowd; and that was simply no clue at all except to Simon Templar's own unshakeable faith in his guardian angel, who had never thrown any other kind of damsel i
n distress into his buccaneering path.
But she was still looking at him. And even though he couldn't help knowing that women often looked at him with more than ordinary interest, it was not usually done quite so fixedly. His hopes rose a notch, tentatively; but it was her turn to make the next move. He had done all that had been asked of him when he walked in there punctually on the stroke of eight.
He leaned on the counter, with his wide shoulders seeming to take up half the length of the bar, and ordered a pint of beer for himself and a bottle of Vat 69 for Hoppy Uniatz, who trailed up thirstily at his heels. With the tankard in his hands, he waited for one of those inevitable moments when all the customers had paused for breath at the same time.
"Anyone leave a message for me ?" he asked.
His voice was quiet and casual, but just clear enough for everyone in the room to hear. Whoever had sent for him, unless it was merely some pointless practical joker, should need no more confirmation than that.... He hoped it would be the girl with the blue troubled eyes. He had a weakness for girls with eyes of that shade, the same colour as his own.
The barman shook his head.
"No, sir. I haven't had any messages."
Simon went on gazing at him reflectively, and the barman misinterpreted his expression. His mouth broadened and said: "That's all right, sir, I'd know if there was anything for you."
Simon's fine brows lifted puzzledly.
"I've seen your picture often enough, sir. I suppose you could call me one of your fans. You're the Saint, aren't you ?"
The Saint smiled slowly.
"You don't look frightened."
"I never had the chance to be a rich racketeer, like the people you're always getting after. Gosh, though, I've had a kick out of some of the things you've done to 'em! And the way you're always putting it over on the police—I'll bet they'd give anything for an excuse to lock you up. . . ."
Simon was aware that the general buzz of conversation, after starting to pick up again, had died a second time and was staying dead. His spine itched with the feel of stares fastening on his back. And at the same time the barman became feverishly conscious of the audience which had been captured by his runaway enthusiasm. He began to stammer, turned red, and plunged confusedly away to obliterate himself in some unnecessary fussing over the shelves of bottles behind him.
The Saint grinned with his eyes only, and turned tranquilly round to lean his back against the bar and face the room.
The collected stares hastily unpinned themselves and the voices got going again; but Simon was as oblivious of those events as he would have been if the rubber-necking had continued. At that moment his mind was capable of absorbing only one fearful and calamitous realization. He had turned to see whether the girl with the fair curly hair and the blue eyes had also been listening, and whether she needed any more encouragement to announce herself. And the girl was gone.
She must have got up and gone out even in the short time that the barman had been talking. The Saint's glance swept on to identify the other faces in the room—faces that he had noted and automatically catalogued as he came in. They were all the same, but her face was not one of them. There was an empty glass beside her chair, and the chair itself was already being taken by a dark slender girl who had just entered.
Interest lighted the Saint's eyes again as he saw her, awakened instantly as he appreciated the subtle perfection of the sculptured cascade of her brown hair, crystallized as he approved the contours of her slim yet mature figure revealed by a simple flowered cotton dress. Then he saw her face for the first time, and held his tankard a shade tighter. Here, indeed, was something to call beautiful, something on which the word could be used without hesitation even under his most dispassionate scrutiny. She was like—"Peaches in autumn," he said to himself, seeing the fresh bloom of her cheeks against the russet shades of her hair. She raised her head with a smile, and his blood sang carillons. Perhaps after all...
And then he saw that she was smiling and speaking to an ordinarily good-looking young man in a striped blazer who stood possessively over her; and inward laughter overtook him before he could feel the sourness of disappointment.
He loosened one elbow from the bar to run a hand through his dark hair, and his eyes twinkled at Mr Uniatz.
"Oh, well, Hoppy," he said. "It looks as if we can still be taken for a ride, even at our age."
Mr Uniatz blinked at him. Even in isolation, the face that Nature had planted on top of Mr Uniatz's bull neck could never have been mistaken for that of a matinee idol with an inclination towards intellectual pursuits and the cultivation of the soul; but when viewed in exaggerating contrast with the tanned piratical chiselling of the Saint's features it had a grotesqueness that was sometimes completely shattering to those who beheld it for the first time. To compare it with the face of a gorilla which had been in violent contact with a variety of blunt instruments during its formative years would be risking the justifiable resentment of any gorilla which had been in violent contact with a variety of blunt instruments during its formative years. The best that can be said of it is that it contained in mauled and primitive form all the usual organs of sight, smell, hearing, and ingestion, and prayerfully let it go at that. And yet it must also be said that Simon Templar had come to regard it with a fondness which even its mother could scarcely have shared. He watched it with good-humoured patience, waiting for it to answer,
"I dunno, boss," said Mr Uniatz.
He had not thought over the point very deeply. Simon knew this, because when Mr Uniatz was thinking his face screwed itself into even more frightful contortions than were stamped on it in repose. Thinking of any kind was an activity which caused Mr Uniatz excruciating pain. On this occasion he had clearly escaped much suffering because his mind—if such a word can be used without blasphemy in connection with any of Mr Uniatz's cerebral processes—had been elsewhere.
"Something is bothering you, Hoppy," said the Saint. "Don't keep it to yourself, or your head will start aching."
"Boss," said Mr Uniatz gratefully, "do I have to drink dis wit' de paper on ?"
He held up the parcel he was nursing.
Simon looked at him blankly for a moment, and then felt weak in the middle.
"Of course not," he said. "They only wrapped it up because they thought we were going to take it home. They haven't got to know you yet, that's all."
An expression of sublime relief spread over Mr Uniatz's homely countenance as he pawed off the wrapping paper from the bottle of Vat 69. He pulled out the cork, placed the neck of the bottle in his mouth, and tilted his head back. The soothing fluid flowed in a cooling stream down his asbestos gullet. All his anxieties were at rest.
For the Saint, Consolation was not quite so easy. He finished his tankard and pushed it across the bar for a refill. While he was waiting for it to come back, he pulled out of his pocket and read over again the note that had brought him there. It was on a plain sheet of good notepaper, with no address.
Dear Saint,
I'm not going to write a long letter, because if you aren't going to believe me it won't make any difference how many pages I write.
I'm only writing to you at all because I'm utterly desperate.
How can I put it in the baldest possible way ? I'm being forced into making myself an accomplice in one of the most gigantic frauds that can ever have been attempted, and I can't go to the police for the same reason that I'm being forced to help.
There you are. It's no use writing any more. If you can be at the Bell at Hurley at eight o'clock on Sunday evening I'll see you and tell you everything. If I can only talk to you for half an hour, I know I can make you believe me.
Please, for God's sake, at least let me talk to you.
My name is
NORA PRESCOTT
Nothing there to encourage too many hopes in the imagination of any one whose mail was as regularly cluttered with crank letters as the Saint's; and yet the handwriting looked neat and sensib
le, and the brief blunt phrasing had somehow carried more conviction than a ream of protestations. All the rest had been hunch—that supernatural affinity for the dark trail of ungodliness which had pitchforked him into the middle of more brews of mischief than any four other freebooters of his day.
And for once the hunch had been wrong. If only it hadn't been for that humdrumly handsome excrescence in the striped blazer. . .
Simon looked up again for another tantalizing eyeful of the dark slender girl.
He was just in time to get a parting glimpse of her back as she made her way to the door, with the striped blazer hovering over her like a motherly hen. Then she was gone; and everyone else in the bar suddenly looked nondescript and obnoxious.
The Saint sighed.
He took a deep draught of his beer, and turned back to Hoppy Uniatz. The neck of the bottle was still firmly clamped in Hoppy's mouth, and there was no evidence to show that it had ever been detached therefrom since it was first inserted. His Adam's apple throbbed up and down with the regularity of a slow pulse. The angle of the bottle indicated that at least a pint of its contents had already reached his interior.
Simon gazed at him with reverence.
"You know, Hoppy," he remarked, "when you die we shan't even have to embalm you. We'll just put you straight into a glass case, and you'll keep for years."
The other customers had finally returned to their own business, except for a few who were innocently watching for Mr Uniatz to stiffen and fall backwards; and the talkative young barman edged up again with a show of wiping off the bar.
"Nothing much here to interest you tonight, sir, is there ?" he began chattily.
"There was," said the Saint ruefully. "But she went home."
"You mean the dark young lady, sir?"
"Who else?"
The man nodded knowingly.
"You ought to come here more often, sir. I've often seen her in here alone. Miss Rosemary Chase, that is. Her father's Mr Marvin Chase, the millionaire. He just took the New Manor for the season. Had a nasty motor accident only a week ago . . ."
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