"That's the collection of barefaced balderdash that's supposed to authorize you to take me into custody and lug me off to Vine Street. That's the immortal excretion of the best brains of Scotland Yard. Or have I misjudged you, Claud? Have you taken a pill and woken up to find you've got a genius for publicity? You'll certainly get a bale of it over this. Let's go on with it. What will the charge be? Wait a minute, I can see it all — 'That he did feloniously and with malice aforethought assault the complainants with an unlawful instrument, to wit, a paintbrush—' "
"Did I say that?" asked Mr Teal.
It was quite a moment for Mr Teal. For the first time that he could remember he stopped the Saint short.
The Saint looked at him in wary surmise. A hundred disjointed ideas rocketed through his head, but they all arrived by devious paths at the same mark. And that was something compared with which a seven-headed dragon pirouetting on its tail would have been a perfectly commonplace phenomenon.
"Do you mean," he said foggily, "that you didn't come here to arrest me?"
"You ought to know enough about the law to know that I can't do anything if these men won't make a complaint."
Simon felt a trifle lightheaded.
"You didn't come here to congratulate me by any chance?"
"No."
"And you didn't come here for breakfast."