"Why?" screamed the millionaire. "You — you stand there and ask why? I'll tell you why! Because you've been too clever for once, Mr. Smarty. You said you were going to burgle this house, and you've done it — and now you're going to prison where you belong!"
The Saint leaned back against an armchair, ignoring the handcuffs that Teal was dragging from his pocket.
"Those are harsh words, Comrade," he remarked reproachfully. "Very harsh. In fact, I'm not sure that they wouldn't be actionable. I must ask my lawyer. But would anybody mind telling me what makes you so sure that I did this job?"
"I'll tell you why," Teal spoke. "Last night the guard got tired of working so hard and dozed off for a while." He shot a smoking glance at the wretched private detective who was trying to obliterate himself behind the larger members of the crowd. "When he woke up again, somebody had opened that window, cut the alarms, opened that centre showcase, and taken about twenty thousand pounds' worth of small stuff out of it. And that somebody couldn't resist leaving his signature." He jerked out a piece of Vascoe's own notepaper, on which had been drawn a spidery skeleton figure with an elliptical halo poised at a rakish angle over its round blank head. "You wouldn't recognise it, would you?" Teal jeered sarcastically.
Even so, his voice was louder that it need have been. For in spite of everything, at the back of his mind there was a horrible little doubt. The Saint had tricked him so many times, had led him up the garden path so often and then left him freezing in the snow, that he couldn't make himself believe that anything was certain. And that horrible doubt made his head swim as he saw the Saint's critical eyes rest on the drawing.
"Oh, yes," said the Saint patiently. "I can see what it's meant to be. And now I suppose you'd like me to give an account of my movements last night."
"If you're thinking of putting over another of your patent alibis," Teal said incandescently, "let me tell you before you start that I've already heard how you slipped the man I had watching you — just about the time that this job was done."
Simon nodded.
"You see," he said, "I had a 'phone message that Miss Vascoe wanted to see me very urgently, and I was to meet her at the entrance of the Zoo in Regent's Park."
The girl gasped as everyone suddenly looked at her.