"Coming quietly?" he asked.
The feeler went out, gruffly noncommital; and Simon smiled.
"You're expecting me to ask why," he drawled, "but I refuse to do anything that's expected of me. Besides, I know."
"How do you know?"
"My spies are everywhere. Sit down, Claud. That's a collapsible chair we bought specially for you, and the cigars in that box explode when you light them. Oh, and would you mind taking off your hat?—it doesn't go with the wallpaper."
Teal removed his bowler with savage tenderness. He realised that he was going to have an uphill fight to keep the promise he had made to himself. There was the faintest thickening in his lethargic voice as he repeated his question.
"How do you know what I want you for?"
"My dear soul, how else could I have known except by being with you when you first conceived the idea of wanting me?" answered the Saint blandly.
"So you're going to admit it really was you I was talking to at Regent's Park?"
"Between ourselves—it was."
"Got some underground way out of here, haven't you?"
"The place is a rabbit-warren."
"And where's Perrigo?"
"He's playing bunny."
Teal twiddled a button, and his eyelids lowered. The leading tentacles of a nasty cold sensation were starting to weave clammily up his spine. It was something akin to the sensation experienced by a man who, in the prelude to a nightmare, has been cavorting happily about in the middle of a bridge over a fathomless abyss, and who suddenly discovers that the bridge has turned into a thin slab of toffee and the temperature is rising.
Something was springing a leak. He hadn't the ghost of a presentiment of what the leak was going to be, but the symptoms of its approach were bristling all over the situation like the quills on a porcupine.
"You helped Perrigo to escape at Regent's Park, didn't you?" He tried to make his voice sleepier and more bored than it had ever been before, but the strain clipped minute snippets off the ends of the syllables. "You're admitting that you caused a wilful breach of the peace by discharging firearms in a public thoroughfare, and you obstructed and assaulted the police in the execution of their duty, and that you became an accessory to wilful murder?"
"Between these four walls," said the Saint, "and in these trousers, I cannot tell a lie."
"Very well." Teal's knuckles whitened over the brim of his hat. "Templar, I arrest you——"
"Oh, no," said the Saint. "Oh, no, Claud, you don't."
The detective tautened up as if he had received a blow. But Simon Templar wasn't even looking at him. He was selecting a cigarette from a box on the centre table. He flicked it into the air and caught it between his lips, with his hands complacently outspread. "My only parlour trick," he remarked, changing the subject.
Teal spoke through his teeth.
"And why?" he flared.
"Only one I ever learnt," explained the Saint naively.
"Why don't I arrest you?"
Simon ranged himself side-saddle on the table. He stroked the cog of an automatic lighter and put his cigarette in the flame.
"Because, Claud, what I say to you now, between these four walls and in these trousers, and what I'd say in the witness-box, are two things so totally different you'd hardly believe they came from the same rosebud mouth."
Teal snorted.
"Perjury, eh? I thought something cleverer than that was coming from you, Saint."
"You needn't be disappointed."
"Got a speech that you think'll let you out?"
"I have, Claud. I've got a peach of a speech. Put me in the dock, and I'll lie like a newspaper proprietor. Any idea what that means?"
The detective shrugged.
"That's your affair," he grunted. "If you want to be run for perjury as well as other things, I'm afraid I can't stop you."
Simon leaned forward, his left hand on his hip and his right hand on his knee. The deep-blue danger lights were glinting more brightly than ever in his eyes, and there was fight in every line of him. A back-to-the-wall, buccaneering fight, rollicking out to damn the odds.
"Claud, did you think you'd got me at last?"
"I did. And I still think so."
"Thought that the great day had dawned when my name was coming out of the Unfinished Business ledger, and you were going to sleep nights?"
"I did."
"That's too bad, Claud," said the Saint.
Teal pursed his lips tolerantly, but there were pinpoints of red luminance darting about in his gaze.
"I'm still waiting to hear why," he said flatly.
Simon stood up.
"O.K.," he said, and a new indefinable timbre of menace was pulsing into his easy drawl. "I'll tell you why. You asked for a showdown. I'll tell you what you've been thinking. There was a feather you wanted for that hat of yours: you tried all manner of ways to get it, but it wasn't having you. You were too dumb. And then you thought you'd got it. Tonight was your big night. You were going to collect the Saint on the most footling break he ever made. I've got away with everything from murder downwards under your bloodshot eyes, but you were going to run me for stealing fourpence out of the Bank of England."
"That's not what I said."
"It goes for what you meant. You get what you asked for, Claud. Thought I was the World's Wet Smack, did you? Figured that I was so busy crashing the mountains that I'd never have time to put a tab on all the molehills? Well, you asked for something. Now would you like to know what I've really been doing tonight?"
"I'll hear it."
"I've been entertaining a dozen friends, and I'll give you from now till Kingdom Come to prove it's a lie!"
The detective glared.
"D'you think I was born yesterday?" he yelped.
"I don't know," said the Saint lazily. "Maybe you weren't born at all. Maybe you were just dug up. What's that got to do with it?"
Teal choked. His restraint split into small pieces, and the winds of his wrath began to twitch the bits out of his grasp, one by one.
"What's the idea?" he demanded heatedly; and the Saint smiled.
"Only the usual alibi, old corpuscle. Like it?"
"Alibi?" Teal rent the words with sadistic violence. "Oh, yes, you've got an alibi! Six men saw you at Regent's Park alone, but you've got twelve men to give you an alibi. And where was this alibi?"
"In the house that communicates with this one by the secret passage you wot of."
"You aren't going to change your mind about that passage?"
"Why should I? It may be eccentric, but there's nothing in the Statute Book to say it's illegal."
"And that's the alibi you're going to try and put over on me?"
"It's more," said the Saint comfortably. "It's the alibi that's going to dish you."
"Is it?"
Simon dropped his cigarette into an ashtray and put his hands in his pockets. He stood in front of the detective, six feet two inches of hair-trigger disorder—with a smile.
"Claud," he said, "you're missing the opportunity of a lifetime. I'm letting you in on the ground floor. Out of the kindness of my heart I'm presenting you with a low-down on the organisation of a master criminal that hundreds would give their ears to get. I'm not doing it without expense to myself, either. I'm giving away my labyrinth of secret passages, which means that if I want to be troublesome again I shall have to look for a new headquarters. I'm showing you the works of my emergency alibi, guaranteed to rescue anyone from any predicament: there are four lords, a knight and three officers of field rank in it—they've taken me years to collect, and now I shall have to fossick around for a new bunch. But what are trifles like that between friends? Now be sensible, Claud. It becomes increasingly evident that some one is impersonating me."