“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, constipa
tion, 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 to
morrow, 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 irresist
ibly 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 mis
chief—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 keep
ing 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 any
thing,” 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 million
aire,”
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 to
morrow night.”
He was a
better prophet than he knew, and it took only a
few hours to prove
it.
V
S
IMON
T
EMPLAR
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 phos
phorescent 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.