Simon glanced down at his brown hands, and in his mind was a vivid memory of Beatrice Avery's look of unutterable loathing. Teal's voice contained that very look, transmuted into sound. His pulses, which up to that moment had been ticking over as steadily as clockwork, throbbed a shade faster.
"Is there something the matter with me?" he asked curiously. "Have I suddenly taken on a resemblance to Boris Karloff, or is it only a touch of leprosy?"
"You're the Z-Man," retorted Mr Teal and stopped chewing his cud of tasteless chicle.
There was a silence that pressed down on the four men like a tangible substance. It was as though the air had become a mass of ectoplasm. Hoppy Uniatz broke the suffocating spell by shuffling his feet. It is doubtful if more than a dozen words of the conversation had infiltrated through the bony mass which protected the spongelike organization of nerve endings which served him in lieu of a brain; but the impression was growing on him that Mr Teal was making himself unpleasant.
"What was dat crack again?" he said, his unmusical voice crashing into the silence like a bombshell.
"Yes, Claud," said the Saint gently. "What was it?"
"You heard me the first time," Teal said crunchily. "You're the Z-Man; and if I couldn't prove it I wouldn't have believed it myself. It's something new to know that you've sunk as low as that."
Simon moved across to the mantelpiece and leaned an elegant elbow on it. He pulled hard at his cigarette until the end glowed red; and the smoke stayed down in his lungs. A dim light was breaking in the darkness through which he had been groping his way: he saw in his mind's eye the disarranged knives and forks on Beatrice Avery's table in the Dorchester Grill, and he knew the meaning of that queer zigzag formation. They had shaped the letter z; and it was the sudden sight of this that had caused the girl's terror.
But the light was still not enough… The Saint's eyes switched over to Mr Teal, and their clear blue glinted like the sheen of polar waters under the sun.
"My poor old blundering fathead," he said kindly. "I'm afraid you're off the rails again, for the umpteenth time. I don't know what the hell you're talking about."