The Happy Highwayman (The Saint Series)

by Leslie Charteris

  “Yes. Please—I’m in a hurry.”

  “So am I.” The Saint’s voice was innocently persuasive. “Can I give you a lift? I’d like to see Marty again.”

  “I’m afraid he’s ill—”

  This was a lie. The Saint knew it, but the genial persuasion of his smile didn’t alter. Those who knew him best had learned that that peculiarly lazy and aimless smile was the index of a crystallizing determination which was harder to resist than most men’s square-jawed aggression.

  A taxi came conveniently crawling by. He stopped it and opened the door, and he still held her arm.

  “Where to?” he asked as they settled down.

  She leaned her head back and closed her eyes. After a moment she gave him an address. He relayed it to the driver and took out a packet of cigarettes. They rode on for a while in silence, and he studied her thoughtfully without seeming to stare. She had always been pretty in a fair-haired and rather fluffy way, but now for the first time he was aware of a background of character which he hadn’t noticed particularly when he had known her before. Perhaps it had always been there, but he hadn’t observed her closely enough to see it.

  He cast his mind back over the time when they had first met. She was going about with Marty O’Connor then, and apparently they were still together. That indicated some kind of character at least—he wasn’t quite sure what kind. After they had driven a few blocks he reached forward and closed the glass partition to shut them off from the driver.

  “Well darling, do you tell me about it or do I drag it out of you? Is Marty in trouble again?”

  She nodded hesitantly.

  The Saint drew at his cigarette without any visible indications of surprise. When one is a race-course tout, and expert at the three-card trick, and a reputed fixer of horses like Marty O’Connor, one is liable to be in trouble pretty frequently.

  Simon concentrated for a moment on trying to blow a couple of smoke rings. The draught from the open window broke them up, and he said, “Who started it?”

  “Why do you want to know?”

  “Marty did something for me once. If he’s in trouble I’d like to do something for him. I suppose it’s immoral, but I always had a soft spot for that old blackguard. On the level Cora.”

  She looked at him for some seconds before she answered, and then her answer was only made indirectly. She leaned forward and opened the partition again for long enough to change the address he had given the driver to another in the same district.

  “You know the game,” said the Saint appreciatively, and for the first time she looked him full in the eyes.

  “I have to,” she said. “The Luckner Boys have been combing the town for Marty for the last three weeks. And so have the splits.”

  Simon raised his eyebrows without emotion.

  “What did he do? Has he been driving at thirty-one miles an hour in a built-up area, or did he buy a packet of cigarettes after eight o’clock?”

  She looked at him queerly for a moment, then when she laughed there was a sharp note of strain in the sound.

  “The trouble is he knows too much about that bookie who was bashed at Epsom. He’d be the star witness against Luckner if they could get his evidence.”

  “And he doesn’t want to give it?”

  “He doesn’t want to die,” said the girl brutally.

  Simon put his feet up on the spare seat opposite him and smoked placidly. Coincidence was a queer thing, but he had ceased to marvel at its complexities. Once again, through that chance encounter, he found the subject of Lucky Joe Luckner thrust into his mind, and the repetition gave it enough weight to make it stay there. But he was wise enough not to press the girl for any more details during the drive. In the fullness of time he would know all that he wanted to know, and he was prepared to wait. He would see Marty himself.

  The cab stopped outside a dingy house in a squalid street near Paddington Station. Half a dozen grimy guttersnipes were playing raucous football in the road. The windows in the front of the house were clouded with the accumulated dirt of ages.

  Inside the front door, the dark hall was paved with a strip of threadbare linoleum, and Simon felt the slithery gloss of thick dust under his fingertips when he put his hand on the banister as they climbed the stairs to the first floor. His nose wrinkled in response to a faint pervasive odour of ancient cooking.

  A slight frown creased itself into his forehead. To find Marty O’Connor in a place like that, even as a hideout, was a mystery in itself—Marty who had always been such a snappy dresser with a highly developed taste for spring mattresses and Turkey carpets and flash decoration.

  The girl opened a door and they went into the living-room of the flat. The furniture there was in keeping with what anyone would have expected from a preliminary survey of the building—cheap, shoddy, and shabby—but Simon noticed that unlike the rest of the place, it appeared to be clean.

  Cora pulled off her hat. “Hullo, Marty,” she called. “I brought a friend to see you.”

  Marty O’Connor appeared in the doorway of the bedroom. He was in his shirt sleeves, a shirt open at the neck, and he kept one hand behind him. He stared at the Saint blankly, and then his comely face broke into a slow grin.

  “Well, for—Where did you come from, guv’nor?”

  The Saint chuckled. Marty brought his right hand from behind him and pocketed his life-preserver, and they shook hands.

  “I wouldn’t have believed you could get any uglier, Marty, but you made it.”

  Marty hauled him towards a chair and sat him down. He looked a little less well-fed than he had been when the Saint saw him last, and there seemed to be a trace of hollowness in his unshaven cheeks. The feckless twinkle in his faded eyes was the same as that by which Simon had first been beguiled from his antipathy to the ordinary run of race-course sharps.

  “It’s good to see you again, Mr Templar. It’s a long time since we had a drop o’ beer together.” O’Connor dusted the table with his handkerchief and sat on it. He turned round. “Cora! See if there’s any o’ that wallop left…Well, I’m blowed! “He looked at the Saint again, beaming with a simple pleasure that had temporarily wiped away the furtive defensiveness with which he had emerged from the bedroom.

  “Where’ve you been all this time?”

  “Here and there,” said the Saint vaguely. “I cover a good deal of ground. Have you been looking after yourself?”

  “Not so badly.”

  The girl came back into the room, bearing a bottle and three cheap glasses.

  “It’s all right, Marty,” she said. “I told him.”

  O’Connor scratched his head, and for a moment his heavy face sank into its mask of dour suspicion. And then he grinned rather ruefully, like an unrepentant urchin.

  “Well, you know how it is, Saint,” he said apologetically.

  Simon shook his head. “That’s just what I don’t quite know.”

  Marty tipped beer into the three glasses, and passed one of them over. He sat down again.

  “Well…” He picked a half-smoked cigarette out of the ash-tray and relighted it. “You know how Cora always used to go on at me about how she would never go out with me without wondering when some busybody would tap me on the shoulder an’ say, ‘Mr O’Connor, would you mind taking a walk with me down to the station?’”

  “Well, she nagged me so much I thought it was better to go honest, than be nagged to death. I expect she always was right, anyhow. So I got a job with a fellow who was starting up as a bookie on his own, and made up my mind to go straight an’ keep out of trouble from then on. An’ then he goes an’ gets himself bashed by the Luckner Boys. Did you read about it in the papers?”

  “I’ve heard of it.”

  “I did one or two jobs for Luckner once, helping the wrong horses to lose—you know when. I never liked him, but it was just business. You know I nearly poked him in the eye lotsa times when he’d try to make Cora go out with him.”

  “He never did any har
m,” said the girl lightly.

  “And that wasn’t for want of tryin’,” growled O’Connor. “I never saw anyone make such a rush for a girl as he did for Cora. Why, he told her once he’d have my brains bashed out an’ marry her himself if she’d say the word.”

  Marty laughed in his throat, but the sound was without humour. “You can trust Luckner as far as you’d trust a snake. I told this bloke I was workin’ for that he couldn’t fight the Luckner Boys an’ he’d better pay up an’ put it down to expenses, but he wouldn’t listen. ‘I’m not payin’ any blackmail to those hooligans,’ he says.

  “So they gave him all they had—coshes an’ razors and everything. I saw ’em do it. If I talked to those busies who’re looking for me, I bet they’d touch their hats to me every time they saw me for the rest o’ my life.”

  ‘‘That might be useful if you were making a fresh start, Marty,” said the Saint speculatively.

  The other grinned slowly. “I’d be makin’ my fresh start under a slab of marble. I would not lift a finger for Lucky if they were going to string him up tomorrow, but I think a lot o’ my own health. You saw what happened to Romaro after he identified Luckner?

  “I know Lucky, an’ I know the Boys have orders what to do about anyone who turns up as a witness against him. So Cora an’ me move in here where we hope nobody’ll ever look for us, an’ I haven’t been outside the door since. It’s not been easy, with no money coming in—but we’re still alive.”

  The Saint’s blue eyes travelled slowly over the room again; took in the dingy carpet worn down almost to its backing, the wobble of the rickety table on which Marty was perched, the hideous upholstery of the gimcrack chairs.

  “l suppose it would be difficult,” he said.

  Marty nodded. “Still we’ve had a bit o’ luck,” he said. “I got a job the other day. We were just wonderin’ what we were goin’ to do next, and I remembered a pal o’ mine back in Ireland who used to have a small stable with four or five leppers in training. He hasn’t got so much money either, but he wrote back he could give me a job to see me through for a bit if I could get there.

  “Cora went round an’ borrowed the money—she had to be pretty careful ’cause they’re lookin’ for her, too, knowin’ she’d probably lead ’em back to me. She went out to buy our tickets today—I suppose that’s when you met her. So if I can get clear without bein’ stopped we ought to get along all right.”

  Simon didn’t laugh, although for a moment the idea of Marty O’Connor, who had done well for himself in his time and spent his money as liberally as anyone else of his kind, currying horses for fifteen shillings a week was humorous enough. But he looked round the apartment again, and his gaze came to rest on the face of the girl Cora with a certain understanding.

  He knew now what subconscious intuition had made him revise his casual opinion of her, even in those brief minutes in the taxi. Stranger things had happened in that unpredictable substratum of civilization in which he had spent half his life.

  “It’s a pity you can’t take some cash with you and buy a share in this stable,” he said. He knew before he started to elaborate the suggestion into an offer that it would be refused.

  Later on in the evening he had an even better idea, and he talked for half an hour before he was able to induce Marty to accept it. What argument it was that finally turned the scale he would have found it hard to remember, but once the Saint was on the trail of an inspiration he had a gift of persuasiveness that would have sold a line of rubber boots to a colony of boa-constrictors.

  Lucky Joe Luckner, a free man on bail recuperating from the ordeal of the police court proceedings in his luxurious house in Hampstead, was still satisfied with his good luck in spite of the quiet and inconspicuous man who loafed on the opposite side of the street all day and followed him at a discreet distance whenever he went out.

  Luckner had no intention of jumping his bail. He had never been a fugitive—he couldn’t imagine himself in the part. Quite confidently, he was waiting for an acquittal at his trial which would leave him a free man without a single legal stain on his character, and if his lawyer did not quite share this sublime confidence he had to admit that Luckner’s previous brushes with the law lent some support to it.

  “Bet they can’t even send me down for seven days,” he declared boastfully, to his personal bodyguard.

  The saturnine Mr Toscelli agreed encouragingly, which was one of his lighter duties. Lucky Joe rewarded him with a slap on the back and a cigar. Few men are offended by hearing their boasts enthusiastically echoed, and Luckner was known to be more than ordinarily vulnerable.

  He was a short thickset man with a dark and fleshy kind of good looks. His extravagances were of a type that ran to loud check shirts, yellow spats, strangely hued hats, and large diamonds. He imagined that these outward evidences of good taste and prosperity were the secret of his hypnotic power over women. This hypnotic power was one of his more whimsical fantasies, but his associates had found it healthier to accept it with tactful solemnity.

  He boasted that he had never failed to conquer any woman whom he desired to possess, and he had a convenient faculty for forgetting the many exceptions which tended to disprove the rule. But apart from this one playful weakness he was about as sentimental as a scorpion, and the Saint estimated the probabilities with some care before he approached Lucky Joe in person.

  If he had been cautious he would never have gone at all, but Simon Templar was a confirmed believer in direct action, and he knew exactly the strength of his hand.

  He drove out to Hampstead on a pleasant sunny day and sauntered up the steps of Luckner’s house under the critical eyes of one or two disapproving neighbours who observed him from their windows. The Saint could see no good reason why they should be disapproving, for he felt very contented with himself that morning and considered that he was more than ordinarily beautiful and definitely an ornament to the scenery. He realized that the knowledge that Lucky Joe Luckner was at home must have cast a certain amount of cloud over the tranquillity of the other residents of that respectable neighbourhood.

  Perhaps they had some good reason to fear that a man with that loose and rather buccaneering stride and that rather reckless cut of face was only another manifestation of the underworld invasion which had disturbed the amenities of their peaceful purlieus, and in a way they were right, but the Saint didn’t care. With his hands in his pockets and his spotless white panama tilted jauntily over one eye, he stood at the top of the steps and leaned his elbow patiently against the bell.

  Presently the door opened to exhibit a blue chin and a flat fish-like stare which Simon easily identified as being more deserving of the neighbourhood’s disapproval than himself. The door stayed open just far enough for that, and the stare absorbed him with the expressionlessness of a dead cod.

  “Hullo, body,” murmured the Saint affably. “When did they dig you up?”

  The stare darkened, without taking on any more expression.

  “Wotcher want?” it asked flatly.

  “I want to see Lucky Joe.”

  “He ain’t here.”

  “Tell him it’s about Marty O’Connor,” said the Saint gently. “And tell Joe he doesn’t know how lucky he is.”

  The man looked at him for a moment longer and then closed the door suddenly. Simon lighted a cigarette and waited imperturbably. The door opened again.

  “Come in.”

  Simon went in. The man who had let him in stayed behind him, with his back to the door. Another blue-chinned individual in the hall looked at him with the same flat fish-like stare and indicated a door on the right.

  The Saint wandered on into the room. Another man of similarly taciturn habits and lack of facial expression sat on the arm of a chair by the window, thoughtfully picking his teeth. Luckner sat on the settee, in his shirt sleeves, with his feet on a low table. He took the cigar out of his mouth and looked at the Saint reflectively.

  Simon came to a halt in fro
nt of him and touched two fingers to the brim of his hat in a lazy and ironical salute. He smiled, with a faint twinkle in his blue eyes.

  Luckner glowered at him uncertainly. “Well—what is it?”

  The Saint put his cigarette to his lips. “I just dropped in,” he said. “I wondered if you were as handsome in the flesh as the stories I’ve read about you made you out to be. I’m afraid they exaggerated, Joe…However, I also heard you’d be interested in any news about Marty O’Connor.”

  “Where is he?”

  Simon’s smile widened by a vague seraphic fraction.

  “That’s my secret.”

  Luckner took his feet off the table and got up slowly until he faced the Saint. He was six inches shorter than Simon, but he thrust his face up as close as he could under the Saint’s nose.

  “Where is he?”

  “It’s just possible,” said the Saint, in his slow soft voice, without a shift of his eyes, “that you’ve got some mistaken ideas about what I am and what I’ve come here for. If you had an idea, for instance, that your face was so dazzlingly lovely that I’d swoon into your arms as soon as I saw it, or that I’d tell you anything before I was ready to tell it—well, we’d better go back to the beginning and start again.”

  Luckner glared at him silently for a second, and then he said in a very level tone, “Who the hell are you?”

  “I am the Saint.”

  The man on the arm of the chair took the toothpick out of his mouth and forgot to close his mouth behind it. The man by the door sucked in his breath with a sharp hiss like a squirt of escaping steam. Only Luckner displayed no active expression of emotion, but his face went a shade lighter in colour and froze into wooden restraint.

  Simon allowed the announcement to sink into the brains of his audience at its own good leisure, while he let the smoke of his cigarette trickle through his lips to curl in a faintly mocking feather before Luckner’s stony eyes. There was something so serene, something so strong and quietly dangerous about him which coupled with his almost apologetic self-introduction was like the revelation of an unsheathed sword, that none of the men made any move towards him. He looked at Luckner unruffledly, with those very clear and faintly bantering blue eyes.