Teal looked at the Saint.
“Well, Templar, how do you explain that?”
“Possibly he went out that door,” Simon answered, nodding toward the roof.
“Where does it go?”
“Claud, must you depend on me for all your information? I’m glad to help whenever, I can, but there are limits. I don’t know where that door goes to because I don’t live here. I only take lessons.”
Teal motioned to the constable to follow him. “Let’s have a look.”
Simon followed the two men out on the roof. If the old lady’s report was accurate, it aroused his curiosity as to where Loudon’s murderers had gone after leaving the studio. There seemed only one way — around the fence which divided the two roofs, and from there to points unknown.
Inspector Teal looked at the single route a man might plausibly take in leaving Loudon’s kitchen roof, and then he looked at the Saint.
“Are you seriously telling me a man going out for beer would climb around that fence?”
“Who can tell about artists? Maybe it’s a short cut to the nearest pub.”
Simon went to the fence and facing the end of it swung around on to the next roof. “See?” he said. “Nothing to it.”
Teal followed in the Saint’s steps, but failed to take into account the much greater expanse of his own belly. As he tried to ease himself after Simon, allowing as little as possible of his capacious anatomy to sag out over empty space, his paunch scooped against the fence and his jacket hung on some splinters. The pickets were quivering and swaying dangerously under that unaccustomed strain, and Simon on one side and the constable on the other each grasped one of the detective’s elbows and eased him to safety on the far side of the fence.
Teal did not make any comment, and Simon considered it tactful under the circumstances not to make any either.
“Wait for us,” Teal said to the policeman. “We’ll have a look over here.”
“Just what is it we’re looking for?” Simon asked.
“I don’t think I need to answer that,” Teal said gruffly.
“I don’t think you could,” Simon said. “I think you’re just scared to go back around that fence, again.”
He strolled across the roof, which was exactly like Loudon’s, except that it was furnished with a folding canvas lounge chair. The next roof was accessible beyond it.
The detective looked at him, his face scrunched into a purpling mask of exasperation, “Saint, I’ve had enough from you.”
“That’s good,” Simon drawled. “So now maybe you’ll stop picking on me.”
“I know you’re up to something,” Teal grumbled, “and this time I’ll see you get what you deserve.”
“A seat in the heavenly choir?” suggested the Saint seraphically.
Teal lumbered over to the half-open door which led from the roof to the inside of the house. The sun was just disappearing behind the chimneypots in the west, and the room — which corresponded in its position to Loudon’s studio — was so dim that it was impossible to see any details of what was inside.
Teal knocked on the door, which swung a little wider open under his knuckles.
“I doubt that he cut down through somebody else’s home even if he did come this way,” said the Saint. “He probably went on to the next roof. If you’d looked over the edge back there, you’d’ve seen a sort of iron ladder, probably meant for a fire escape, running down to the alley.”
Teal knocked again.
“The whole idea of people running around roofs looking for beer is idiotic. I’m going to see if anybody in here heard the noise of you fighting with Loudon.”
Simon gave a martyred sign and did not answer. Neither did the inhabitants — if there were any — of the house at whose back door the detective was knocking.
Teal stepped inside and the Saint followed him and looked around. The place was furnished with all the discomforts of a one-room flat: chairs, tables, washstand, hot plate, bookshelves, divan beds — jumbled together with easels, paints, piles of cotton wadding, and rolls of paper and plastic. The divan beds were opened and appeared to be occupied. No heads were visible, but the sheets were bulging.
Teal knocked on the wall and coughed loudly, but still there was no response. Simon thought he was going to leave then, but the fat detective’s eye fell on an arm which projected stiffly and entirely unnaturally from beneath the sheets on the other side of the first bed. He turned to look at the Saint and received a noncommittal shrug.
“Hullo, there,” Teal said, and now he could not keep a tremor of incipient triumph out of his voice.
It was obvious from the peculiar static quality of the human arm he was addressing that he would be very unlikely ever to receive any answer from its owner. Quickly he stepped forward and whipped away the sheet.
Lying on the bed was a lifesized male dummy dressed in a T-shirt and blue jeans — so realistic that in the very dim light it could easily have been mistaken momentarily for a real person.
“What kind of a game is this?” Teal muttered wrathfully.
He stepped around to the next bed and hauled the sheet off it in the same cavalier fashion.
There were only two important differences between the first figure and the next one he uncovered. The second one was a female. And it was alive.
3
The girl’s face was half covered by a black sleeping mask, and rubber plugs were visible in her ears. She was young and blonde, and she wore thin cotton pajamas, that clung with understandable affection to a distractingly pneumatic torso and what must have been the longest pair of legs in Chelsea.
When she had groped the mask away from her eyes she blinked at Teal in the semi-darkness and screamed.
The detective executed something like a comic dance routine as he stumbled backward to the door, holding both hands palm outward in front of his face as if he could both ward off her piercing squeal and hold it inside the room.
“I’m from Scotland Yard!” he babbled desperately. “There’s no need to be alarmed!”
His swift retreat and the fact that he stopped in the doorway with Simon instead of fleeing in a guilty manner across the rooftop, apparently reassured the girl. She looked more angry than frightened as she tore the plugs from her ears.
“Well?” she said. “What was it? The excuse?”
“I’m... I’m most terribly sorry,” stammered Teal. “Really I had no idea.”
“Is this the way you get your kicks — poking around people’s beds?”
“I’m a police officer. From Scotland Yard.” The girl tilted back her head.
“Ha!” she said derisively. “No wonder the country’s got problems.”
Simon laughed in the background. “And who are you?” she called at him. “Just one of the Inspector’s perennial suspects.” Teal extended his identification card to the girl, who looked at it with total disbelief.
“I’ve seen things like that for sale in joke shops,” she remarked. “So get lost.”
“He really is a police officer,” said the Saint. “Can’t you tell? Look at his feet.”
The girl obligingly leaned to the side of her bed, turned on a lamp, and inspected the inspector’s shoes.
“They’re the right size,” she agreed. “Now what do we all do — go and arrest somebody?”
“My name is Teal...”
“Chief Inspector Claud Eustace Teal,” Simon elaborated brightly. “The pride of Scotland Yard. And I am Simon Templar.”
Teal tried to silence him with a glare that would have stopped a herd of stampeding buffalo in their tracks.