And having got there, he stopped, with his brain starting work again, overwhelmed by the utter futility of what he was doing.
There was nothing sensational to be seen outside. The road presented the ordinary aspect of a minor thoroughfare in the Shepherd Market area at that time of day. There was an empty car parked on the other side of the road, a man walking by with a brief-bag, two women laden down with parcels puttering in the opposite direction, an errand-boy delivering goods from a tricycle. The commonplace affairs of the district were proceeding uninterrupted, the peace of the neighbourhood was unbroken by so much as a glimpse of any sinister figure with a smoking gun scooting off on the conventional getaway. Teal's dizzy gaze turned back to his subordinate. "Did you see him?" he rasped.
"Only his back," said Pryke helplessly. "But I haven't the faintest idea which way he went." Teal strode across to the errand-boy.
"Did you see a man come rushing out of that building just now?" he barked: and the lad looked at him blankly. "Wot sort of man, mister?"
"I don't know," said Teal, with a feeling that he was introducing himself as the most majestic lunatic in creation. "He'd have been running hell for leather-you must have noticed him"
The boy shook his head.
"I ain't seen nobody running abaht, not till you come aht yerself, mister. Wot's the matter-'as 'e pinched something?"
Mr. Teal did not enlighten him. Breathing heavily, he rejoined Junior Inspector Pryke.
"We'd better get back upstairs and see what's happened," he said shortly.
But he knew only too well what had happened. The murder of Johnny Anworth had been repeated, in a different guise, under his very nose-and that after he had pleaded so energetically for a chance to guard against it. He did not like to think what ecstatic sarabands of derision must have been dancing themselves silly under the smug exterior of Desmond Pryke. He clumped up the stairs and across the landing again in a dumb paroxysm of futile wrath, and went back into the flat.
And there he halted again, one step inside the room, with his eyes bulging out of their sockets and the last tattered remnants of his traditional pose of sleepiness falling off him like autumn leaves from a tree, staring at what he saw as if he felt that the final vestiges of sanity were reeling away from his overheated mind.
II the body of Sunny Jim Fasson was no longer there. That was the brain-staggering fact which Chief Inspector Teal had to assimilate. It had simply ceased to exist. For all the immediate evidence which Teal's reddening gaze could pick up to the contrary, Sunny Jim Fasson might never have lived there, might never have been interviewed there, and might never have been shot there. The ultimate abysses of interplanetary space could not have been more innocent of any part of Sunny Jim Fasson than that shabby one-room flatlet as Teal saw it then. There could hardly have been much less trace of Sunny Jim if he had never been born.
And instead of that, there was someone else sitting in the chair where the bullet had hit Sunny Jim-a man whose mere recollection was enough to raise Chief Inspector Teal's blood-pressure to apoplectic heights, a man whose appearance on that spot, at that precise catastrophic moment, turned what might have been an ordinary baffling mystery into something that made Mr. Teal's voice fail him absolutely for several seconds.
"Stand up, Saint," he got out at last, in a choking gurgle. "I want you!"
The man peeled himself nonchalantly up from the armchair, and managed to convey the impression that he was merely following a course which he had chosen for himself long ago, rather than that he was obeying an order. And Mr. Teal glowered at him unblinkingly over every inch of that leisured rise.
To anyone unfamiliar with the dim beginnings and cumulative ramifications of the feud between those two (if anyone so benighted can be imagined to exist in the civilised world) Mr. Teal's glower might justifiably have seemed to lack much of the god-like impartiality which ought to smooth the features of a conscientious detective. It was a glower that had no connection with any detached survey of a situation, any abstract weighing of clues and conundrums. It was, to describe it economically, the kind of glower on which eggs can be fried. It was as calorifically biased and unfriendly as a glower can be.
The Saint didn't seem to notice it. He came upright, a lean wide-shouldered figure in a light grey suit which had a swashbuckling elegance that nothing Inspector Pryke wore would ever have, and met the detective's torrid glare with cool and quizzical blue eyes.
"Hullo, Claud," he murmured. "What are you doing here?"
The detective looked up at him dourly-Teal was not nearly so short as his increasing middle-aged girth made him appear, but he had to look up when the Saint stood beside him.
"I want to know what you're doing here," he retorted.
"I came to pay a call on Sunny Jim," said the Saint calmly.
"But he doesn't seem to be here-or did you get here first and knock him off?"
There were times when Mr. Teal could exercise an almost superhuman restraint.
"I'm hoping to find out who got here first," he said grimly. "Sunny Jim has been murdered."
The Saint raised one eyebrow.
"It sounds awfully exciting," he remarked; and his bantering eyes wandered over to Pryke. "Is this the bloke who did it?"
"This is Junior Inspector Pryke, of C Division," said Mr. Teal formally; and the Saint registered ingenuous surprise.
"Is it really?" he murmured. "I didn't know they'd put trousers on the Women Police."
Chief Inspector Teal swallowed hastily; and it is a regrettable fact that a fraction of the inclement ferocity faded momentarily out of his glare. There was no lawful or official reason whatsoever for this tempering of his displeasure, but it was the very first time in his life that he had seen any excuse for the Saint's peculiar sense of humour. He masticated his gum silently for a couple of seconds that gave him time to recover the attitude of mountainous boredom which he was always praying for strength to maintain in the Saint's presence. But his relief was only temporary.
"I suppose you're going to tell me you came to see Fasson just to ask him what he thought about the weather," he said.
"Certainly not," said the Saint blandly. "I wouldn't try to deceive you, Claud. I blew in to see if he knew anything about some diamond bracelets that a bird called Peabody lost this afternoon. I might have pointed out to him that Peabody is very upset about losing those jools. I might have tried to show him the error of his ways, and done my best to persuade him that they ought to be sent back. Or something. But I can't say that I thought of shooting him."
"How did you know he was shot?" Teal cut in.
"My dear fathead, I don't. I merely said that I didn't think of shooting him. Was he shot?"
Teal hesitated for a moment, studying him with that deceptively bovine gaze.
"Yes, he was shot."
"When?"
"Just now."
The bantering blue eyes had an impish twinkle.
"You must have been doing some fast detecting," said the Saint. "Or did somebody tell you?"
Mr. Teal frowned at him, shifting his gum from tooth to tooth till he got it lodged behind his wisdoms. His sluggish glance travelled once again over that keen sunburned face, handsome as Lucifer and lighted with an indescribable glimmer of devil-may-care mockery; and he wondered if there would ever be any peace for him so long as he was in the employment of the Law and that amazing buccaneer was on the other side.
For Simon Templar was the incalculable outlaw for whom the routines of criminal investigation had no precedents. He belonged to no water-tight classification, followed no rules but his own, fitted into no definite category in the official scheme of things. He was the Saint: a creation of his own, comparable to nothing but himself. From time to time, desperate creatures of that nebulously frontiered stratosphere commonly called "the Underworld" had gone forth vowing unprintable revenge, and had come back empty-handed-when they came back at all. Many times, Chief Inspector Claud Eustace Teal had thought that all his ambitions would be fulfilled if he could see the Saint safely locked away behind the bars of Larkstone Prison-and yet some of his most spectacular coups could never have been made without the Saint's assistance. And in spite of all the wrath that had been directed on him from these diametrically antagonistic quarters, the Saint had still gone on, a terror to the underworld and a thorn in the side of Scotland Yard, a gay crusader in modern dress who returned from his lawless raids with more booty than any adventurer had ever found before him.