The Saint in Action Read Free Page A

told him impressively. “He’s expecting me.”
    The policeman studied him suspiciously for a moment; but the Saint was very impressive. He looked like a man whom a chief inspector might have been expecting. He might equally well have been expected by a prime minister, a film actress or a man who trained budgereegahs to play the trombone; but the constable was not a sufficiently profound thinker to take this universal view. He turned and led the way into the house, and Simon followed him. They went through the hall, which had the empty and sanitary and freshly painted air common to all houses which have been recently converted into flats, and through the half-open door of a ground-floor flat a strip of curl-papered female goggled at them morbidly as they went by. At the top of the empty and sanitary and freshly painted stairs the door of another flat was ajar, with another policeman standing beside it.
    “Someone to see the inspector,” said the first policeman and, having discharged his duty, went downstairs again to resume his vigil.
    The second policeman opened the door, and they went into the hall of the flat. Almost opposite the entrance was the open door of the living room; and as the Saint reached it he saw four men moving about. There was a man fiddling with a camera on a tripod near the door, and across the room another man was poring over the furniture with a bottle of grey powder and a camel-hair brush and a magnifying glass. A tall, thin, melancholy-looking man with a large notebook stood a little way apart, sucking the end of a pencil; and the man with the bowler hat and the figure like an inverted egg whom Simon had seen from his car was peering over his shoulder at what had been written down.
    It was on the last of these men that the Saint’s eyes rested as he entered the room. He remained indifferent to the other stares that swivelled round to greet him with bovine curiosity, waiting until the bowler hat tilted towards him. And as it did so a warm and friendly smile established itself on the Saint’s face.
    “What ho, Claud Eustace,” he said affably.
    The china-blue eyes under the brim of the bowler hat grew larger and rounder as they assimilated the shock of identification. In them even a man with the firmest intentions of believing nothing but good of his fellow men would have found it hard to discern any of that spontaneous cordiality and cheer with which a well-mannered wanderer in the great wilderness of life should have returned the greeting of a brother voyager. To be precise they looked as if their owner had just discovered that he was in the act of absent-mindedly swallowing a live toad.
    A rich tint of sun-kissed plum mantled the face below the eyes; and the man seemed to quiver a little, like a volcano seeking for some means of self-expression. After one or two awful seconds he found it.
    “What the hell are you doing here?” blared Chief Inspector Claud Eustace Teal.
    III
    It must be admitted in Mr Teal’s defence that he was not normally a man who blared or whose eyes tended to perform strange antics. Left to himself he would have been a placid and even-tempered soul, with all the sluggish equanimity appropriate to his girth; and as a matter of fact he had, during his earlier years with the Criminal Investigation Department, developed a pose of exaggerated sleepiness and perpetual boredom of which he was extremely proud. It was the advent of the Saint on Mr Teal’s halcyon horizon which had changed all that and made the detective an embittered and an apoplectic man.
    Not that there was one single crime on the record, one microscopic molecule of a misdemeanour, for which Chief Inspector Teal could have taken official action against the Saint. That was a great deal of the trouble, and the realization of it did nothing to brighten the skies above the detective’s well-worn and carefully laundered bowler. But it sometimes seemed to Mr Teal that all the griefs and misfortunes that had