"I see," said Teal, very sleepily.
Simon dipped into the local inspector's pocket and calmly borrowed a packet of cigarettes. He lighted one.
"If it's any help to you," he said, "the report of everything that happened in Deever's office is perfectly true. I went to him for some money, and then I went to him for some more. Every time I offered excellent security. I behaved myself like a law-abiding citizen —"
"Why did you call yourself Smith?"
"Why shouldn't I? It's a grand old English name. And I always understood that you could call yourself anything you liked so long as you didn't do it with intent to defraud. Go and tell Deever to prove the fraud. I just had to have some cash to go to the races, I had those Latvian bonds with me, and I thought that if I gave my real name I'd be making all sorts of silly difficulties. That's all there was to it. But did anyone make an honest attempt to find out if there was a fraud?"
"I see," said Teal again — and he really did see.
"They did not," said the Saint in a pained voice. "What happened? I was assaulted. I was abused. I was handcuffed and marched through the streets like a common burglar, followed by shop girls and guttersnipes, snapped by press photographers. I was shoved in a cell for forty-eight hours, and I wasn't even allowed to send for a clean pair of socks. A bunch of flat-footed nincompoops told me when to get up, when to eat, when to take exercise, and when to go to bed again — just as if I'd already been convicted. Deever's story has been published in every paper in the United Kingdom. And d'you know what that means?"
Teal did not answer. And the Saint's forefinger tapped him just where his stomach began to bulge, tapped him debonairly in the rhythm of the Saint's seraphic accents, in a gesture that Teal knew only too well.
"It means that there's one of the swellest legal actions on earth waiting for me to win it — an action for damages for wrongful imprisonment, defamation of character, libel, slander, assault, battery, and the Lord alone knows what not. I wouldn't take a penny less than ten thousand pounds. I may even want more. And do you think James Deever won't come across?"
Chief Inspector Teal had no reply. He knew Deever would pay.