CHAPTER XXVII

MR. TEAL BUTTS IN

The Assistant Commissioner did not leave immediately after Storm had gone. Instead Bill Kennedy and Mr. Teal sat in the Albany talking over many things. And it was when Mr. Kennedy was taking up his gloves preparatory to departure that the telephone bell rang. The Assistant Commissioner took up the receiver.

"Is that Captain Arden?" asked a voice.

"Yes," said Bill, to save trouble.

"I'm speaking from St. George's Hospital. We've got a man here who wants to speak to you urgently. I'm afraid he's dying--they picked him up in Buckingham Gate last night with eight inches of knife in his lungs. He's only just recovered consciousness."

"What's his name?"

"Sands."

Bill Kennedy whistled softly.

"Any idea what he wants to say?"

"Not much. He'll only speak to you personally. But he keeps muttering something about a triangle and a girl."

"I'll be there in eight minutes, laddie," Kennedy stated crisply.

As he replaced the instrument he saw that Teal was struggling off the sofa.

"Never," said Teal solemnly, "never in my life have I missed anything that was going on worth being present at. If you try to make me break that record, sir, I shall resign this morning. Don't say anything about my shoulder, because there's no bones broken--it's just a flesh wound I'd rather be without, but it doesn't mean I'm going to be tied down in a bath-chair."

Bill Kennedy was an excellent judge of time and space. Exactly eight minutes after he had hung up the receiver he was standing beside the death bed of Birdie Sands, that funny, wizened little man. Teal was with him, and they were hidden from the rest of the ward by the screens which in hospitals are placed about the beds of those whose hours are numbered.

The whizzer looked up with a wry smile. He was pale from loss of blood, but in no pain. His breath came in long, slow, wheezing draughts which scarcely stirred his shallow chest. The clear luminosity of the Beyond was in his eyes, and a strange serenity had smoothed out the wrinkles on his pinched face.

"Where's ... Arden?" he asked, faintly.

Bill Kennedy sat down on the bed, Teal remaining erect.

"Captain Arden's gone to look for Miss Hawthorne," said Bill. "He wanted to settle the Triangle alone and we had to promise not to interfere unless he failed. I don't know how he was going to set about it, but he had some plan or other in his head."

Birdie was silent. Then:

"I never met 'im," he whispered. "But they s'y 'e was a good busy. Listen, Kennedy."

Sands raised himself on one elbow. The effort caused him a fit of hoarse coughing, but he shook off Bill's restraining hand impatiently.

"Yer gotta brike yer promise. Not only fer 'is sike. There's the 'Awthorne girl. She's there--in that 'ouse in Buckingham Gate. They'll kill 'er, sure. Or worse.... That Lew's a swine ... blarst 'im. Dunno w'y, but I 'ate Lew ... poison! More'n Morini, even--an' Morini knifed me. Throws knives like a bloke in a circus.... Oh, yer needn't shike yer 'ead. I know.... I'm not much ter look at--not much ter think of--I'm just a cheap crook, an' a little one at that. But I 'ad a sister once.... Joan.... She's married ter Mattock--strite an' proper, swelp me. She's clean. Teal--yer was always an honest dick--get 'er out of the mess--ter make a man 'appy yer won't never see agine?"

"Yes," said Mr. Teal.

Birdie pawed weakly at his throat, then held out a thin hand. Gravely Inspector Teal took it in a firm grip and held it for a moment.

There was a silence. And then Birdie spoke again. Quickly and breathlessly, his voice growing a shade stronger, for the end was very near.

"Get ter that 'ouse. Black 'ouse. Now. Wiv all the flatties yer can lay yer 'ands on. No time ter lose. Arden can't never win--'e don't know what I know. The Triangle's got a card Arden'll never beat. There's a tunnel--another blow-up, an' it's bigger'n Piccadilly! _'Urry!_ ... There's no other w'y ... ter get 'is girl ... out.... Never mind yer promise.... Will yer go?"

Birdie clutched Bill's sleeve earnestly; and, quietly, Bill nodded.

"Yes."

"Then go! Ain't no ... time.... Don't wait fer me--I alw'ys lived alone.... S'pose I can die alone ... I'd rather...." A shrill, feeble cackle of laughter broke eerily from the dry lips. "Oh, yer damned Triangle! I got yer--Birdie, little crook Birdie.... An' I got yer ... smashed yer!... Blarst... yar!" ...

And then the voice fell so low that Bill Kennedy had to lay his ear almost on Birdie's mouth to catch the gasping words.

"Put on the lights.... I'm afraid of ... the dark...." Birdie's hand went groping for Kennedy's fingers. "Joan ... Joan ... Birdie's goin'.... Never was much use to yer ... But yer ... all ... right ... _Joan!_ ... It's cold.... Kiss me...."

"We'll get in through the mews--most of these old houses have back entrances that way," said Teal.

Unostentatiously a cordon had ringed round the gaunt, sinister house in Buckingham Gate, and the mews behind was thronged with armed men whose rubber-soled shoes had made no sound on the cobbles. Bill Kennedy was in charge of the men in Buckingham Gate itself, and Teal was left to direct the opening of the attack.

A minute study of the tire tracks showed that, although there were six lock-ups along the west side of the mews, all the cars which had recently passed in and out of the garage had entered and left by one particular door. Teal made a careful examination of the lock, and also tested the resistance to a steady, cautious push.

"One bar across the centre," was his expert verdict.

Then he drew up his men and gave them their instructions. There was an odd furtiveness about the proceedings--the thirty men mustered in the mews might have been conspirators meeting at dead of night to hatch some nefarious plot, instead of burly, stolid plain-clothes men with nothing more sensational about them than the police automatic and truncheons with which they were armed. Even Teal, an unemotional law-enforcing machine, found himself speaking in hushed tones, although their danger lay far more in being seen than in being overheard. Nevertheless, all the men were pressed close up against the garage doors on the west side, to minimise the risk of being observed by anyone who chanced to look out of one of the upper windows.

"... And if any perishing sinner falls over his own feet this time, like one adjective noun did in Billingsgate not so long ago," Mr. Teal concluded, with whole seas of incandescent vitriol bubbling up in his measured delivery, "I promise him he won't only wish he'd never been born--he'll pray that there's no such thing as reincarnation, when I've finished with him!"

With which horrific prognostication Mr. Teal moved off to take up his position.

He glanced round, and made certain that the twelve men whom he had detailed to assist in the breaking in of the door were stationed ready on his heels; and then he took a Smith-Wesson from his hip pocket and thumbed back the hammer.

"Ready?"

The question ripped out in sibilant warning, and a second later things happened.

Teal's revolver thundered, and the heavy bullets shredded the lock completely out of existence. Simultaneously, Central Inspector Teal and his twelve good men and true hurled their total three-quarter ton of bone and brawn against the barred door. And, with one prolonged, rending, splinting crash, the door simply was not....

They burst panting into the garage, and might have come to a check there among the miscellaneous assortment of trucks and cars but for the spectacled man who happened precisely at that moment to be emerging from the secret panel behind the tire cupboard. In an instant he was whisking back, like a startled mouse which has peeped out of its hole and looked straight into the eyes of a hungry cat; but Mr. Teal, moving at a rate of knots which his weight and inertia made to seem positively supernatural, crossed the concrete flooring like a whiff of smoke. He reached out a long arm and grabbed the horn-rimmed gentleman before that blushing violet could obscure himself behind the closing slide.

"Carl, darling," hissed Teal, "why did you leave your happy home? And how's Mr. Nitrogen Trichloride this merry morning?"

Before Mr. Schwesen could utter a suitable reply, Teal had yanked him halfway across the place and smothered him in a stifling bear-hug. And thereafter, while practised hands clicked gyves upon floundering wrists, the eminent Austrian chemist found it necessary to reserve all his energies for the task of avoiding suffocation. It was all over in a trice, and, even as the remainder of the thirty poured in through the broken door, Mr. Schwesen was on his way to the police van which waited in Petty France.

The fat being thoroughly in the fire by now, speed became the order of the day. Headed by Teal, whose injured shoulder was by this time troubling him far more than he would ever have admitted, the constables rushed through the cupboard and down the short tunnel to the cellars. Two men were left to guard the end of the passage, and the rest raced up the stairs.

The hall was deserted.

Moving as silently as they could, the detectives opened each door in turn, finding large volumes of vacancy at every attempt. Two doors only were left for investigation when Teal, issuing his orders in a hoarse whisper, detached half his force to make a round of the upstairs rooms and guard against an escape, similar to the getaway the Triangle had brought off in Billingsgate, by means of an opening into an adjoining house. At the same time, the front door was unbolted without noise, and Bill Kennedy, together with some of those who were watching Buckingham Gate, came in soundlessly.

And then Teal silently turned the handle of the first of the two remaining ground-floor doors. A dark, narrow corridor fronted him, and he signalled for only six men to accompany him. There was no window or light of any sort in the runway, and when they had gone twenty paces the faint light which filtered in from the gloomy hall ceased to be of any assistance. As quietly as he could manage, Teal kindled a match, and found that the passage terminated in a dead end, the only outlet being a low door which opened off on the right.

Teal laid a cautious hand on the knob, and suddenly a tremor ran up his spine, for the handle was turning of itself under his light grasp....

Breathlessly he mouthed his men back out of the passage, and flattened himself against the blind wall so that the opening door would hide him from whoever came out. The oak swung back by inches, nervously, and it was nearly half a minute before it closed again and Teal saw a stocky, crouching shape silhouetted against the nimbus of twilight which came from the hall.

Holding his breath, Teal leapt silently as any pard. His big hand tightened round the man's throat before so much as a whimper could disturb the stillness, and Teal lifted the furtive one bodily from the ground and padded down the corridor with him.

"There's a long, long jail a-waiting--for you--dearie!"

Teal's voice stole to the man's ear drums in a husky pianissimo, and Teal's ungentle fingers forced a scared face round to meet the light.

And then Inspector Teal, that sedate apostle of tranquillity, let out an involuntary gasp of amazement, for the man he carried was Joe Blaythwayt!