The Saint and Mr. Teal: Formerly Called "Once More the Saint" Read Free Page B

case it’s true. I’ve had it out with Templar before-privately. The plain fact is that he’s in the game with a few highfalutin’ ideas about a justice above the law, and a lot of superfluous energy that he’s got to get rid of somehow. If we put a psychologist on to him,” expounded the detective, who had been reading Freud, “we should be told he’d got an Oedipus Complex. He has to break tke law just because it if the law. If we made it illegal to go to church, he’d be heading a revivalist movement inside the week.”
    The commissioner accepted the exposition with his characteristic sniff.
    “I don’t anticipate that the Home Secretary will approve of that method of curtailing the Saint’s activities,” he said. “Failing the adoption of your interesting scheme, I shall hold you personally responsible for Templar’s behaviour.”
    It was an unsatisfactory day for Mr. Teal from every conceivable angle, for he was in the act of putting on his hat preparatory to leaving Scotland House that night when a report was brought to him which made his baby-blue eyes open wide with sheer incredulous disgust.
    He read the typewritten sheet three times before he had fully absorbed all the implications of it, and then he grabbed the telephone and put through a sulphurous call to the department responsible.
    “Why the devil didn’t you send me this report before?” he demanded.
    “We only received it half an hour ago, sir,” explained the offending clerk. “You know what these country police are.”
    Chief Inspector Claud Eustace Teal slammed back the receiver and kept his opinion of those country police to himself. He knew very well what they were. The jealousy that exists between the provincial C.I.D.‘s and Scotland Yard is familiar to anyone even remotely connected with matters of criminal investigation: on the whole, Teal could have considered himself fortunate in that the provincial office concerned had condescended to communicate with him at all on its own initiative, instead of leaving him to learn the news from a late evening paper.
    He sat on in his tiny office for another hour, staring at the message which had filtered the last ray of sunshine out of his day. It informed him that a certain Mr. Wolseley Lormer had been held up in broad daylight in his office at Southend that afternoon and robbed of close on two thousand pounds by an intruder whom he never even saw. It would not have been a particularly remarkable crime by any standards if the caretaker who discovered the outrage had not also discovered a crude haloed figure chalked on the outer door of Mr. Lormer’s suite. And the one immutable fact which Chief Inspector Teal could add to the information given him was that at the very time when the robbery was committed the Saint was safely locked up in Newhaven police station-and Mr. Teal was talking to him.
    CHAPTER III
ONE of the charms of London, as against those of more up-to-date and scientific cities, is the multitude of queer little unscientific dwellings which may be found by the experienced explorer who wanders a mere hundred yards out of the broad regular thoroughfares and pries into the secrets of dilapidated alleys and unpromising courtyards. At some time in the more recent history of the city there must have been many adventurous souls who felt the urge to escape from the creeping development of modern steam-heated apartments planned with Euclidean exactitude and geometrically barren of all individuality. Wherever a few rooms with an eccentric entrance could be linked up and made comfortable, a home was established which in the days when there came a boom in such places was to repay a staggering percentage to the originality of its creators.
    With his infallible instinct for these things, Simon Templar had unearthed this very type of ideal home within a matter of hours after he returned to London.
    His old stronghold in Upper Berkeley Mews, which he had fitted up years ago with all the