The Saint and Mr Teal (Once More the Saint)

He was finishing his third cigarette when a brand-new taxi turned into the square and snailed past the doorway he was watching. It reached the northeast corner, accelerated down the east side and along the south, and resumed its dawdling pace as it turned north again. The Saint bent over a newspaper as it passed him; and when he looked up again the blue in his eyes had the hard glitter of sapphires. Patricia was standing in the doorway; and he knew that Mr. Jones was be­yond all doubt a fast mover.

Simon sat and watched the girl hail the taxi and climb in. The cab picked up speed rapidly; and Simon touched his self-starter and hurled the great silver Hirondel smoothly after it.

The taxi swung away to the north and plunged into the streaming traffic of the Marylebone Road. It had a surprising turn of speed for a vehicle of its type; and the Saint was glad that his car could claim to have the legs of almost anything on the road. More than once it was only the explosive acceleration of its silent hun­dred horsepower that saved him from being jammed in a tangle of slow-moving traffic which would have wrecked his scheme irretrievably. He clung to the taxi's rear number plate like a hungry leech, snaking after it past buses, drays, lorries, private cars of every size and shape under the sun, westwards along the main road and then to the right around the Baker Street crossing, following every twist of his unconscious quarry as faithfully as if he had been merely steering a trailer linked to it by an invisible steel coupling. It was the only possible method of making certain that no minor accident of the route could leave him sandwiched behind while the taxi slipped round a corner and van­ished forever; and the Saint concentrated on it with an ice-cold singleness of purpose that shut every other thought out of! his head, driving with every trick of the road that he knew and an inexorable determination to keep his radiator nailed to a point in space precisely nine inches aft of the taxi's hind quarters.

There was always the risk that his limpet-like attach­ment would attract the attention of the driver of the taxi, but it was a risk that had to be ignored. Fortu­nately it was growing dark rapidly after a dull and rainy afternoon; they raced up the Finchley Road in a swiftly deepening dusk, and as they passed Swiss Cottage Underground the Saint took the first chance of the chase-fell far behind the taxi, switched on his lights, tore after it again, and picked up the red glow­worm eye of its tail light after thirty breathless seconds. That device might have done something to allay any possible suspicions; and the lights of one car look very much like the lights of any other when the distinctive features of its coachwork are hidden behind the diffused rays of a few statutory candlepower.

So far the procession had led him through familiar highways; but a little while after switching on his lights he was practically lost. His bump of locality told him that they were somewhere to the east of the Finchley Road and heading roughly north; but the taxi in front of him whizzed round one corner after another until his bearings were boxed all round the compass, and the names of streets which occasionally flashed past the tail of his eye were unknown to him.

Presently they were running down a broad avenue of large houses set well back from the road, and the taxi ahead was slowing up. In a moment of intuitive understanding, the Saint held his own speed and shot past it: keeping the cab in his driving mirror, he saw it turning in through a pair of gates set in a high garden wall twenty yards behind him.

Simon locked his wheels round the next corner and pulled up dead. In a second he was out of the car and walking quickly back towards the driveway into which the taxi had disappeared.

He strolled quietly past the gates and took in as much of the lie of the land as he could in one searching survey under the slanted brim of his hat. The house was a massively gloomy three-storied edifice in the most pompous Georgian style, reminiscent of a fat archdeacon suffering an attack of liver with rhinocerine fortitude; and the only light visible on that side of it was a pale pink bulb that hung in the drab portico like a forlorn plum in an orchard that the pickers have finished with. The neglected front garden was dappled with the shadows of a few laurel bushes and unkempt flower beds. Of the taxi there was no sign; but a dim nimbus of light was discernible beyond the shrubbery on the right.

The Saint's leisured step eased up gradually and reached a standstill. After all, Mr. Jones was the man he wanted to meet: this appeared to be Mr. Jones's headquarters: and there were no counter-attractions in the way of night life to be seen in that part of Hamp­stead. The main idea suffered no competition; and a shrewd glance up and down the road revealed no other evening prowlers to notice what happened.