“Professionally?”
“It’s quite possible. It starts with a girl I met in Torquay last summer.”
Simon sighed.
“You insist on meeting girls in these outlandish places,” he complained. “Now, if you’d only met her in Gotham, for instance, I should have had a song all ready for you. When you came in, I was just perfecting a little song about a wild woman of Gotham, who made love to young men and then shot ’em—till she started to shoot at a hard-hearted brute, who just grabbed her and walloped her for all he was worth. But don’t let that cramp your style. You were saying?”
“This girl I met in Torquay—”
“Did she think that love ought to be free?”
“My dear Mr Templar—”
“I was recalling,” said the Saint impenitently, “another girl you met in Torquay who thought that love ought to be free. She clung to this view till she chanced to meet you—Oh, send back my bonny to me! But you were telling me about someone else.”
“She has an uncle—”
“Impossible!”
“She has an uncle, and she lives with the uncle, and the uncle has a house at Newton.”
“They have an abbot there, haven’t they?”
“Newton Abbot is the place. The uncle built this house nearly seven years ago. He intended to settle down and spend the rest of his life there—and now a man insists on buying the place.”
“Insists?”
“It comes to something like that. This man—”
“Let’s have it clear, sonny boy. What’s uncle’s name?”
“Sebastian Aldo.”
“Then he must be rich.”
“He’s happy.”
“And Whiskers—the bloke who wants to buy the house?”
“We don’t know his name. He sent his secretary, an oily excrescence called Gilbert Neave.”
The Saint settled deeper in his armchair.
“And the story?” he prompted.
“There’s very little of it—or there was until today. Uncle refused to sell. Neave bid more and more—he went up to twenty thousand pounds, I believe—and he was so insistent that finally Uncle lost his temper and kicked him out.”
“And?”
“Three days later, Uncle was pottering about the garden when his hat flew off. When he picked it up there was a bullet hole through it. A week later he was out in his car and the steering came unstuck. He’d have been killed if he’d been driving fast. A week after that everybody in the house was mysteriously taken ill, and the analysts found arsenic in the milk. A couple of days later, Neave phoned up and asked if Uncle had changed his mind about selling.”
“Uncle Sebastian still give him the razz?”
“Betty says he fused the telephone wires for miles around.”
“Who’s Betty?”
“His niece—the girl I met in Torquay.”
“I see. A lovely young lady named Betty, made such noises when eating spaghetti, it played absolute hell with the maître d’hôtel, and made sensitive waiters quite—er—self-conscious. And when did they bury Uncle?”
Roger Conway was smoothing out the evening paper which he had bought at twelve-thirty.
“Betty told me all this in her letters while we were down at Maidenhead,” he said. “Now you can read the sequel.”
Simon took the paper. Roger indicated the column, but that was hardly necessary. There was one heading that caught the eye—that could not have helped being the first thing to catch the eye of a man like the Saint. For by that single title an inspired sub-editor had made a sensation out of a simple mystery.
“The Policeman with Wings,” said the heading, and the point of the story was that a policeman had called on a certain Mr Sebastian Aldo three days before, a perfectly ordinary and wingless policeman, according to the testimony of the housekeeper who admitted him, but a most unusual policeman according to the testimony of subsequent events. For, after a short interview, Mr Aldo had left his house with the policeman in his car, saying that he would be back to lunch, but neither the policeman nor Mr Aldo had been heard of since, and the police of all the surrounding districts, appealed to, declared that none of their policemen were missing, and certainly none had been sent to see Mr Aldo.
“I observe,” said the Saint thoughtfully, “that Miss Aldo was in Ostend at the time, and has just returned upon hearing of her uncle’s disappearance. So the paper says.”
“She told me she was going to Ostend for a week in August to stay with friends. Have you any ideas?”
“Millions,” said the Saint.
The door opened, and a head came in.
“Lunch narf a minnit,” said the head, and went out again. The Saint rose.
“Millions of ideas, Roger, old dear,” he murmured. “But none of them, at the moment, tells me why anyone should be so absorbingly interested in one particular house at Newton Abbot. On the other hand, if you’d like to sing softly to me while I dress, I may produce something brilliant over the cocktail you will be shaking up while you sing.”
He vanished, and was back again in an amazingly short space of time to collect the Martini which Conway was decanting from the shaker as Orace came in with the soup. The Saint’s speed of dressing was an unending source of envious admiration to his friends.
“We are interested,” said the Saint, holding his glass up to the light, and inspecting it with an appreciative eye, “and we have produced a brilliant idea.”
“What’s that?”
“After lunch, we will go out into the wide world and buy a nice-looking car, and in the car we will travel down to Newton Abbot this very afternoon.”
“Arriving in time to have dinner with Betty.”
“If you insist.”
“Any objections?”
“Only that, knowing you, I feel that for her sake—”
“She’s a nice girl,” said Roger, reminiscently.
“She hasn’t known you long,” said the Saint.
“Cheer-ho!” said Conway.
“Honk, honk!” said the Saint.
They drank.
“Further to mine of even date,” said the Saint, “when we’ve bought this car, we will continue on our way through the wide world, and seek a place where we can buy you a policeman’s uniform. You can grow the wings yourself.”
Roger stared.
“Uniform!” he repeated feebly. “Wings?”
“As a Policeman with Wings,” said the Saint comfortably, “I think you’d be a distinct hit. That’s part of my brilliant idea.”
And the Saint grinned, hands on hips, tall and fresh and immaculate in grey. His dark hair was at its sleekest perfection, his clear blue eyes danced, his brown face was alight with an absurdly boyish and hell-for-leather enthusiasm.
The Saint in those days had moods in which he was unwontedly sober. He was then nearly twenty-eight, and in those twenty-eight years of his life he had seen more than most men would see in eighty years, and done more than they would have done in a hundred and eighty. And yet he had not fulfilled himself. He was then only upon the threshold of his destiny, but it seemed sometimes that he glimpsed wider visions through the opening door ahead. But this was not so much a dulling of his impetuous energy as the acquiring of a more solid foundation for it. He remained the Saint—the flippant dandy with the heart of a crusader, a fighter who laughed as he fought, the reckless, smiling swashbuckler, the inspired and beloved leader of men, the man born with the sound of trumpets in his ears. And the others followed him.
He was impatient through that lunch, but he made the meal. And after it he lighted a cigarette and set it canting up between smiling lips, and leapt to his feet as if he could contain himself no longer.
“Let’s go!” cried the Saint.
He clapped Roger Conway on the shoulder, and so they went out arm in arm. Roger Conway would have followed in the same spirit if the Saint had announced that their objective was the Senate Home, Timbuctoo. And so they went.
&nbs
p; 2
If Simon Templar had been a failure, he would have been spoken of pityingly as a man born out of his time. The truth was that in all the fields of modern endeavour—except the crazy driving of high-powered cars, the suicidal stunting of aeroplanes, and the slick handling of boxing gloves—the Saint was cheerfully useless. Golf bored him. He played tennis with vigour and shameless inefficiency, erratically scrambling through weeks of rabbitry to occasional flashes of a positively Tilden-esque maestria. He was always ready to make his duck or bowl his wides in any cricket game that happened to be going, and his prowess at baseball, on an expedition which he once made to America, brought tears to the eyes of all beholders.
But put a fencing foil in Simon Templar’s hand; throw him into dangerous swimming water; invite him to slither up a tree or the side of a house; set him on the wildest horse that ever bucked; ask him to throw a knife into a visiting card or shoot the three leaves out of an ace of clubs at twenty paces; suggest that he couldn’t put an arrow through a greengage held between your finger and thumb at the same range—and then you’d see something to tell your grandchildren.
Of course he was born out of his time. He ought to have lived in any age but the present—any age in which his uncanny flair for all such mediaeval accomplishments would have brought him to the front of his fellows.
And yet you didn’t notice the anachronism, because he wasn’t a failure. He made for himself a world fit for himself to live in.
It is truly said that adventures are to the adventurous. Simon had about him that indefinable atmosphere of romance and adventurousness which is given to some favoured men in every age, and it attracted adventure as inevitably as a magnet attracts iron filings.
But it will be left for future generations to decide how much of the adventure which he found was made by himself. For adventure can only be born of the conflict of two adventurous men: the greatest adventurer would be baffled if he came into conflict with a dullard, and a dullard would find no adventure in meeting the greatest adventurer that ever stepped. The Saint found that seeds of adventure were everywhere around him. It was the Saint himself who saw the budding of the seed before anyone else would have noticed it, and who brought the thing to a full flowering glory with the loving care of a fanatic.
With a typical genius the Saint had already touched the story of the Policeman with Wings.
“A mug,” said the Saint kindly, as he pushed the Desurio towards Devonshire with the speedometer needle off the map, “a mug, such as yourself, for instance, my beautiful,” said the Saint kindly, “wouldn’t have thought of anything like that.”
“He wouldn’t,” agreed Roger fervently, as the Saint shot the Desurio between two cars with the width of a matchbox to spare on either side.
“A mug,” said the Saint kindly, “would have thought that it was quite sufficient either (a) to remove Betty to the comparative safety of his maiden aunt’s home at Stratford—Upon the Avon—or (b) to entrench ourselves in Uncle’s house at Newton and prepare to hold the place against the enemy.”
“A mug such as myself would have thought that,” confessed Roger, humbly.
The Saint paused for a moment to slide contemptuously past a Packard that was crawling along at sixty.
“But that mug’s scheme,” said the Saint, “wouldn’t get us any forrader. I grant you that if we watched vigilantly and shot straight we might very well frustrate the invading efforts of the enemy for as long as we stayed in residence—which, if Betty is all you say she is, might keep us busy for weeks. But we still shouldn’t know who is the power behind Mr Neave—if it isn’t Mr Neave himself.”
“Whereas you suggest—”
“That we carry the war into the enemy’s camp. Consider the position of the power behind Mr Neave, whom we’ll call Whiskers for short. Consider the position of Whiskers. There he’s been and gone and thought out the charming scheme of abducting people by means of a fake policeman—a notable idea. No one ever suspects a policeman. I’ll bet that the fake policeman simply said they’d arrested a man whom they suspected of having something to do with the doping of the milk, and would Mr Aldo come over to the station and see if the accused looked like Neave. And Uncle was removed without any of the fuss and bother you have when you kidnap people by force.”
“You suggest that we run a policeman of our own?”
“Obviously. Think of the publicity. A few days after the abduction of Uncle, the niece also disappears with a mysterious policeman. I’m afraid that’ll make Betty out to be rather a dim bulb, but we can’t help that. The fact remains that Whiskers, in his secret lair, will read of the leaf that’s been taken out of his book, will wonder who’s got onto his game, and will promptly arm himself to the teeth and set out to find and strafe us.”
“And we help him by leaving a trail of clues leading straight into a trap.”
The Saint sighed.
“You’re getting on—as the actress said to the bishop,” he murmured. “This brain of yours is becoming absolutely phenomenal. Now go ahead and invent the details of this trap we’re going to lead Whiskers into, because I’ve thought enough for one day, and I’m tired.”
And the Saint languidly settled down to concentrate on the business of annihilating space; what time Roger Conway, after a few prayers, closed his eyes and proceeded with the train of thought which the Saint had initiated.
They broke the journey at Shaftesbury for liquid nourishment, and when they came out Roger approached the car unhappily. But he was always tactful.
“Shall I take a turn at the wheel?” he ventured.
“I’m not tired,” said the Saint breezily.
“You said just now you were too tired to think.”
“I don’t think when I’m driving,” said the Saint.
Roger would have liked to say that he could very well believe it, but he thought of the retort too late.
They covered the next eighty-five miles in a shade under two hours, and ran up the drive of the house to which Roger pointed the way as the clocks were striking seven-thirty.
“It occurs to me,” said Simon, as he applied the brakes, “that we ought to have sent a wire to announce ourselves. Does the girl know you’re in England at all?”
Roger shook his head.
“I hadn’t told her we were back.”
The Saint climbed out and stretched himself, and they walked up to the house together.
A face watched them from a ground-floor window, and before they had reached the steps the window was flung up and a voice spoke sharply and suspiciously.
“I’m sorry—Miss Aldo is out.”
The Saint stopped.
“Where’s she gone?”
“She was going to the police station.”
Simon groaned.
“Not with a policeman?” he protested.
“Yes, she went with a policeman,” said the woman. “But this one was all right. Miss Aldo rang up the police station to make sure. They’ve found Mr Aldo.”
“Is he alive?” asked Roger.
“Yes, he’s alive.”
The Saint was staring up intently into the sky, revolving slowly on his heels, as though following a nail in the clouds.
“Somehow,” he said gently, “that’s more than I can believe.”
Conway said, “She telephoned to the station—”
“Yes,” said the Saint, “she telephoned.”
By that time he had turned right round.
“Which,” he said, “is exactly what any strategist would expect an intelligent girl to do, in the circumstances. ”
“But—”
The Saint’s arm went out suddenly like a sign-post.
“The telephone wire goes over those fields. And the line’s cut by that group of trees over there, unless I’m mistaken. A man sitting there with an instrument—”
“My—hat!” snapped Roger, with surprising restraint.
But Simon was already on his way back to the car.
“How long ago did she leave?” he flung at the now frightened housekeeper.
“Not five minutes ago, sir, when I was just starting to serve dinner. She took her car—”
“Which way?”
The woman pointed.
The Saint let in the clutch as Roger swung into the place beside him.
“What’s the betting, Roger?” he crisped. “If they’d gone towards Exeter, we’d have seen them. Therefore—”
“They’ve gone towards Bovey Tracey—unless they turned off towards Ashburton—”
The Saint stopped the car again so abruptly that Roger was almost lifted out of his seat.
“You can drive this car. You know the district backwards, and I don’t. Take any chance you like, and never mind the damage. I’ll bet they’ve gone towards Ashburton and Two Bridges. You can disappear on Dartmoor as well as anywhere in England.”
Conway was behind the wheel by the time Simon had reached the other side of the car. He was moving off as the Saint leapt for the running-board.
And then the Saint was lighting two cigarettes with perfect calm—one for Roger and one for himself.
“Nice of Whiskers,” said the Saint, with that irresponsible optimism which nothing could ever damp. “He’s done all the work for us, provided the policeman and everything. When I think of the money I spent on that outfit of yours—”
“If we catch him,” said Conway, hunched intently over the steering wheel, “you’ll be able to talk.”
“We’ll catch him,” said the Saint.
If Simon Templar was a reckless driver, Roger could match him when the occasion arose. And, more valuable even than mere speed, Roger knew every inch of the road blindfolded. He sent the Desurio literally leaping over the macadam, cornering on two wheels without losing control for an instant, and cleaving a path through the other traffic without regard for anyone’s nerves, but nerves were things which the Saint only knew by name.
“It’s extraordinary how things happen to us,” drawled the Saint coolly, as the Desurio grazed out of what looked to be the certainty of a head-on collision. “Perpetual melodrama—that’s what we live in. Why will nobody let me live the quiet life I yearn for?”
Enter the Saint (The Saint Series) Page 11