CHAPTER XVIII

PESSIMISM OF MR. TEAL

Morini was the first to recover his equilibrium. He swept a deep bow.

"You're welcome," he said. "Come right in--how did you get in, by the way?"

"The door was open," said Storm. "So, as we meant to pay you a call, we thought we wouldn't put you to the trouble of locking and bolting it."

Teal was inspecting with interest the playing cards and markers that lay on the table.

"What's the game?" he asked inquisitorially, addressing the redoubtable Horring; but that holdup expert was less suave than his confrère.

"I'd like to know the meaning of this intrusion," he broke out heatedly. "I don't know what sort of a country you call this, if a few friends can't get together for a round of cribbage without policemen----"

Teal cut short his protest with one raised reproving hand.

"I shan't argue," he stated mildly. "I suppose _-age_ does enter into it."

He could be subtle on occasions, could Mr. Teal.

Storm wandered over to the loud-speaking telephone and examined it curiously. Eventually he traced the flex which contacted with the telephone plug, and disconnected it. He looked round for the telephone proper, and, locating it, fetched it over and connected it up.

"2 LO seems to have closed down," he remarked. "A pity--I love listening in!"

He looked at Morini with a quizzical smile, as though expecting the obvious rejoinder to come from that quarter; but, if this was his hope, he was disappointed. Then he lifted the receiver and waited with it held to his ear.

"Exchange? ... I've just been called, and I think we've been cut off. Can you tell me where the ring came from? ... What's that? ... Are you stone-cold certain? ... Well, pass me on to Supervisor ... Supervisor? ... I'm Captain Arden of Criminal Investigation Department. I want you to make absolutely certain whether any call has been put through to this number during the last hour...." There was a longer delay, and then he got his answer. "Thanks very much. Good-bye."

He turned his back to the table and lounged against it, his eyes narrowing.

"I'm told," he said, "that this number hasn't been called since this morning. Broadcasting with an ordinary telephone is a joke I'm not going to buy!"

Their dumbfounded faces were his answer. It was as clear as anything ever has been that they were no more able to account for the facts than he was. Even Morini's composure suffered a jar, and the pucker that appeared between his eyebrows indicated that he was endeavouring to reach an explanation.

Storm examined the wall plug, and found two insulated wires running down the wainscot and stretching along the floor in the groove between the ceil and the carpet. They led him halfway round the room and then right-angled round the frame of a door. Trying the handle, Storm found that it was locked.

"I'll have the key, please," he requested.

"We haven't got it." It was Morini who made the disclaimer. In the absence of any acknowledged leader, he automatically answered for all.

"Explain!" Storm rapped back.

Morini shrugged.

"You want a whole lot of help, Captain," he gibed. "I thought you were Mother's Infant Prodigy. If you don't know, I'll tell you that door opens into a flat that's really part of this one, but the dame who lives there's gotten very proper notions about ladyhood, and we poor common folks aren't allowed to go in. She's just the obliging owner who lets us use this room to talk in--there's two entrances, and she keeps her own one private."

"What name?"

"Ask me again, Doc. We've never seen her."

Storm reached to his hip and took out a compact wallet from which he selected a skeleton key of a type appropriate to the make of lock. He was successful at the first attempt, and the door creaked open on unoiled hinges.

"Look after these gay birds, Teal," he ordered, and passed into the other flat.

He found himself in a tastefully furnished sitting-room in the decoration of which the work of a woman's hand was evident. He only stopped to glance behind and under the chesterfield, and then went through the door which faced him. He arrived in a light airy double bedroom, and here again the signs of feminine habitation were not lacking; but this, too, was empty, though he peered under the bed and tentatively prodded the dresses which hung in the wardrobe in quest of a cached fugitive. He moved on to the bathroom, but discovered no one lurking there.

After that futile search he recollected the telephone wire, and went back to trace it. It ran around the sitting-room and disappeared over the sill of a window. Leaning out, he saw that it hitched over a common porcelain insulator--from which it swept off to join the junction of other telephone wires. The result dissatisfied him, and he tracked the wire a second time, and on this journey he found that it was tapped very neatly, the secondary wires running under the carpet out of sight. Without compunction he shifted all the furniture which stood in the way, and rolled back the rugs, disclosing twin threads that crossed the floor. Following them up, he trailed them to a bookcase, and saw that they vanished into a hole trimly bored in the base.

He stood up and scrutinised the shelves. One row of leather-bound volumes struck him as being rather too good to be true, and he essayed to open the glass-fronted door in order to make a closer study, but found that it was fastened. Once again he had recourse to his wallet, and after a few minutes' work with a small steel instrument he had the case open. He now found that the row of books was simply a range of dummy backs, which he could pull wide like a second door, revealing a small cupboard. Within he brought to light what he had more or less expected--a phone transmitter mounted on a bracket, and a pair of radio headphones. These he removed, and then pushed back the secret door and, after some difficulty, relocked the case over it. The rest would keep; and he left the instruments on a chair and went back into the larger sitting-room, closing the partition door behind him.

"What're we going to do with these people?" he interrogated the detective, and Teal spread out his hands.

"Suspected of conspiracy--Vine Street _pro tem_. We didn't hear much of that broadcast sermon, but we did hear somebody telling 'em to express me to a better world," he added with grim amusement.

Morini's hand went to his hip, and in answer to that movement Teal shifted something in his hand so that the light caught it. He did not seem to have stirred a fraction--his jaw still vacillated mechanically, and his tired eyes showed little sign of animation. But the fact remained that a wicked-looking Webley had flown into his right hand and was even then focused upon the gunman.

To his concealed surprise, Morini smiled, and brought up his hand with nothing in it more lethal than a cigarette-case.

"You're too suspicious, officer," Gat observed. "Shooting you with Captain Arden for a witness would be foolish. No. I was just about to point out that police stations and Flying Squad vans haven't exactly proved to be the real original cat's pyjamas so far, have they?"

Storm conferred aside with the detective.

"Would conspiracy to murder be a sound charge?"

"Granted it only gets two of 'em--you've got special powers, haven't you?"

"I doubt if my special powers'd be superior to a writ of _habeas corpus_" Storm objected.

Teal shrugged.

"It's worth trying," he said. "The only thing is, we'd have to send 'em to Pentonville right away--stations don't seem to hold 'em. Even if we put 'em in stir straight off, I shouldn't bet on their staying put--the Triangle might turn up with an amateur Army Corps and besiege the jail," he added morosely, and Storm laughed.

"Pollyanna--you little ray of sunshine--shut up!"

The Triangle menace was festering to a head, and for all the lightness of his tone he knew it. It was the season for striking swift blows, here, there, and everywhere. From then onwards the gang must be attacked and raided wherever and whenever the dimmest spook of half an opportunity showed its tail. The risk of lowering police prestige still further by giving the Triangle the chance to make yet another daring coup must be taken. The Triangle must be set on the run, and kept there--hazed, harassed and bulldozed into confusion, till they didn't know whether they were coming or going.

Storm telephoned the prison and ordered a van with double escort to be sent immediately. It would take some time to arrive, and he followed the order with a call to Vine Street asking for a dozen men to guard the prisoners meantime. He had seen the microphone attached to the loud speaker. Already the Big Triangle knew of his presence, and he did not put it above the capabilities of that stupendous brain to organise a lightning sortie to rescue their captives before a conveyance could reach Cornwall House.

"Put your hands high over your heads and face along that wall," he commanded the prisoners, and they obeyed without demur.

Their position did not seem to trouble them at all, and this earnest of their confidence in the Apex was somewhat disquieting. Storm and the detective watched them, cat-eyed, until the men from Vine Street arrived. Then the captives were searched, and Storm sat down to smoke a cigarette while he waited for the prison van. It came surprisingly quickly. The prisoners were rushed down the stairs into the street, loaded into the Maria, and three of the Vine Street plain-clothes men crammed in on top of them to reinforce the warders. All the captives were handcuffed together in a string and the end handcuffs were locked over staples on the inside of the van.

"They'll be blistering miracles if they get out of that mess!" said Storm, watching the red tail-light speed down Piccadilly.

After that the other detectives were dismissed, and Storm and Teal returned to make a more thorough search of the inner flat. They stopped en route to look over the assembly room, and it was while they were there that Storm distinctly heard the sound of a door closing in the next flat.

Teal's ears intercepted the dull click at the same time, and the two jumped for the partition door. The sitting-room was empty, but in that cursory glance round Storm saw that the headpieces and transmitter he had left on a chair had vanished. He jerked open the bedroom door and ran through into the bathroom, but there was no one to be seen. And then a second door slammed, and he whipped round with a frown. Almost at once he grasped his mistake.

"Je-rusalem--the hall!" he snapped, and led the way back through the sitting-room.

Besides the door into the bedroom there was another which he had missed, masked behind a heavy curtain. He flung it open and entered a tiled lobby furnished only with a hat-stand and an occasional table. Opening the farther door, he found himself in the corridor, and sprinted for the stairs.

He overtook nobody in his headlong descent, and he saw nobody he recognised in the street. The porter's cubicle at the entrance was empty, and while Storm stroked his chin in perplexity that worthy toiler came across the road singing a little tune.

"I run out of fags," he replied to Storm's brisk query. "I just went over to a slot machine up the street. No, not five minutes ago--shortly after all those men came out."

"Have you seen any other guys come out or go in?" asked Storm, and the man shook his head.

Kit climbed the stairs again with a frown, and found Teal ruminating torpidly in the bedroom. The detective was dangling a flimsy article of feminine underwear in one of his vast paws.

"This is embroidered 'J.S.'," he said. "Sounds like my old friend Joan to me."

Storm scowled.

"D'you know we're a couple of dyed-in-the-wool mutts?" he demanded. "I'm willing to bet the Big Triangle was lying doggo in the vestibule all the time I was making that first search--I never spotted the hall. And when I went back to the big room he must have padded back and listened to everything we said.... _God's Glory!_"

The oath cracked out like the lash of a stock-whip, and Teal's eyes opened wide at the sibilant intensity of it.

Storm had picked up a brass candlestick, and he smashed it into the glass front of one of the compartments of the bookcase. He wrenched Open the dummy line of books, and then stepped back with his lips lifting from his white teeth.

The headphones and mouthpiece were back in their places, connected up.

"Great Thor in hell!" he breathed.

In an instant he was back to the outer sitting-room. He grabbed up the telephone and gave a number even as Teal, moving with astonishing speed, arrived behind him.

"Hullo," snapped Arden. "_Hullo_ ... Pentonville? ... How long have you been on duty? ... Right. Then what time did you get my order for the prison van? ... I see." Storm's voice suddenly became gentle. "You're absolutely certain no call could have come through and been taken by someone else? ... Oh--about half an hour ago.... Arden, Central Office, five-double-seven--you poor fish. Why not think of asking before? ... Well, get me the Governor.... My dear good soul, I don't care if he's asleep--I don't care if he'll be furious--I don't care if he's dying! _Get--me--the--Governor_.... Thank you."

A lengthy pause, and then a querulous growl:

"Yes?"

"Colonel Dayne?"

The affirmative was unprintable.

"I called you up about half an hour ago and ordered your van to Cornwall House. A van came, but apparently it was a fake. I want you to send a man down to your garage and find out if your van is there."

Storm got his answer in about ten minutes, and then he set down the receiver and whistled musically, strolling up and down the room. The expression on his face made it unnecessary for Mr. Teal to ask any questions.

The Triangle had scored again, right under their noses. The fake van must have been waiting for just such an emergency, and the Apex had had all the odds in his favour--he had heard Storm and Teal come, heard their plans, and was already tapped in on the telephone to waylay their message and send a totally different one along to his confederates. The luck of the game had been his down to the last milligramme.

"The only consolation is that the Press won't hear about our wiped eyes," said Teal gloomily, and Storm stopped whistling to grin.

"Don't bet on it," he recommended. "The Triangle might mail a graphic account to all the News Agencies. If I were the Apex, and I'd scooped the kitty like that with a pair of deuces, I'll say I'd sing about it!"

It took a lot to upset Storm. The inevitable cigarette lofted heavenwards between his smiling lips, his hands were deep in his pockets--that boyish enthusiasm, which nothing could damp, shone in his eyes. It was an attribute of his which, delightful in the ordinary way, could be incredibly aggravating in moments of stress, and Inspector Teal glared at him moodily.

_Zzzzzzing! ... Zzzzzzing-zing! ..._

Through the other flat the hall bell jingled shrilly.

"One rings!" said Storm brightly. "Teal, be a good boy and come greet the visitor!"

He went through to answer the door, Teal following. As he flung it wide the corridor light outside showed up a stumpy, rotund form surmounted by a chubby pink face which split in a jovial beam as it recognised the two men who stood in the hall surveying it.

Teal reached out a languid arm and took the newcomer by the wrist, drawing him inside and kicking the door shut behind him.

"Come right in, Uncle Joe," said Mr. Teal with savage cordiality. "Come right in and open your sweet heart to old Uncle Claud Eustace. He wants to hear a little fairy tale about loud-speaking telephones!"