"I don't know. Who are all these people? I don't want to see anyone. My head's splitting. I want to go to sleep."
His eyes closed under painfully wrinkled brows.
Simon let his wrist fall. He took out the thermometer, read it, and sidled back to the door. Patricia was standing there.
"No change?" she said; and the Saint shrugged.
"His temperature's practically normal, but his pulse is high. God alone knows how long it may take him to get his memory back. He could stay like this for a week; or it might even be years. You never can tell… I'm beginning to think I may have been a bit too hasty with my rescuing-hero act. I ought to have let Kaskin and Dolf work him over a bit longer, and heard what he had to tell them before I butted in."
Patricia shook her head.
"You know you couldn't have done that."
"I know." The Saint made a wryly philosophic face. "That's the worst of trying to be a buccaneer with a better nature. But it would have saved the hell of a lot of trouble, just the same. As it is, even if he does recover his memory, we're going to have to do something exciting ourselves to make him open up. Now, if we could only swat him on the head in the opposite direction and knock his memory back again—"
He broke off abruptly, his eyes fixed intently on a corner of the room; but Patricia knew that he was not seeing it. She looked at him with an involuntary tightening in her chest. Her ears had not been quick enough to catch the first swish of tyres on the gravel drive which had cut off what he was saying, but she was able to hear the car outside coming to a stop.
The Saint did not move. He seemed to be waiting, like a watchdog holding its bark while it tried to identify a stray sound that had pricked its ears. In another moment she knew what he had been waiting for.
The unmistakable limping steps of Orace, Simon Templar's oldest and most devoted retainer, came through the hall from the direction of the kitchen and paused outside the study.
"It's that there detective agyne, sir," he said in a fierce whisper. "I seen 'im fru the winder. Shall I chuck 'im aht?"
"No, let him in," said the Saint quietly. "But give me a couple of seconds first."
He drew Patricia quickly out of the secret cell, and closed the study door. His lips were flirting with the wraith of a Saintly smile, and only Patricia would have seen the steel in his blue eyes.
"What a prophet you are, darling," he said.
He swung the open strip of bookcase back into place. It closed silently, on delicately balanced hinges, filling the aperture in the wall without a visible crack. He moved one of the shelves to lock it. Then he closed a drawer of his desk which had been left open, and there was the faint click of another lock taking hold. Only then did he open the door to the hall — and left it open. And with that, a master lock, electrically operated, took control. Even with the knowledge of the other two operations, nothing short of pickaxes and dynamite could open the secret room when the study door was open; and one of the Saint's best bets was that no one who was searching the house would be likely to make a point of shutting it.
He emerged into the hall just as Chief Inspector Teal's official boots stomped wrathfully over the threshold. The detective saw him as soon as he appeared, and the heightened colour in his chubby face flared up with the perilous surge of his blood pressure. He took a lurching step forward with one quivering forefinger thrust out ahead of him like a spear.
"You Saint!" he bellowed. "I want you!"
The Saint smiled at him, carefree and incredibly debonair.
"Why, hullo, Claud, old gumboil," he murmured genially. "You seem to be excited about something. Come in and tell me all about it."
VI
Simon Templar had never actually been followed into his living-room by an irate mastodon; but if that remarkable experience was ever to befall him in the future, he would have had an excellent standard with which to compare it.
The imitation, as rendered by Chief Inspector Claud Eustace Teal, was an impressive performance, but it seemed to leave the Saint singularly unconcerned. He waved towards one armchair and deposited himself in another, reaching for cigarette box and ashtray.
"Make yourself at home," he invited affably. "Things have been pretty dull lately, as I said last night. What can I do to help you?"
Mr Teal gritted his teeth over a lump of chewing gum with a barbarity which suggested that he found it an inferior substitute for the Saint's jugular vein. Why he should have followed the Saint at all in the first place was a belated question that was doing nothing to improve his temper. He could find no more satisfactory explanation than that the Saint had simply turned and calmly led the way, and he could hardly be expect to go on talking to an empty hall. But in the act of following, he felt that he had already lost a subtle point. It was one of those smoothly infuriating tricks of the Saint to put him at a disadvantage which never failed to lash Mr Teal's unstable temper to the point where he felt as if he were being garrotted with his own collar.
And on this occasion, out of all others, he must control himself. He had no need to get angry. He held all the aces. He had everything that he had prayed for in the long sections of his career that had been consecrated to the heartbreaking task of trying to lay the Saint by the heels. He must not make any mistakes. He must not let himself be baited into any more of those unbelievable indiscretions that had wrecked such opportunities in the past, and that made him sweat all over as soon as he had escaped from the Saint's maddening presence. He told, himself so, over and over again, clinging to all the tatters of his self restraint with the doggedness of a drowning man. He glared at the Saint with an effort of impassivity that made the muscles of his face ache.
"You can help me by taking a trip to the police station with me," he said. "Before you go any further, it's my duty to warn you that you're under arrest. And I've got all the evidence I need to keep you there!"
"Of course you have, Claud," said the Saint soothingly. "Haven't you had it every time you've arrested me? But now that you've got that off your chest, would it be frightfully tactless if I asked you what I'm supposed to have done?"
"Last night," Teal said, grinding his words out under fearful compression, "a Mr Robert Verdean, the manager of the City and Continental Bank's branch at Staines, was visited at his home in Chertsey by two men. They tied up his servant in the kitchen, and went on to find him in the living-room. The maid's description of them makes them sound like the two men who held up the same bank that morning. They went into the living-room and turned on the radio."
"How very odd," said the Saint. "I suppose they were trying to console Comrade Verdean for having his bank robbed. But what has that got to do with me? Or do you think I was one of them?"
"Shortly afterwards," Teal went on, ignoring the interruption, "two other men entered the kitchen with handkerchiefs tied over their faces. One of them was about your height and build. The maid heard this one address the other one as 'Hoppy'."
Simon nodded perfunctorily.
"Yes," he said; and then his eyebrows rose. "My God, Claud, that's funny! Of course, you're thinking—"
"That American gangster who follows you around is called Hoppy, isn't he?"
"If you're referring to Mr Uniatz," said the Saint stiffly, "he is sometimes called that. But he hasn't got any copyright in the name."
The detective took a fresh nutcracker purchase on his gum.
"Perhaps he hasn't. But the tall one went into the living-room. The radio was switched off and on and off again, and then it stayed off. So the maid heard quite a bit of the conversation. She heard people talking about the Saint."
"That's one of the penalties of fame," said the Saint sadly. "People are always talking about me, in the weirdest places. It's quite embarrassing sometimes. But do go on telling me about it."