The Saint Intervenes (The Saint Series)

by Leslie Charteris

  It was the interior of the room into which he was shown that began to place an excessive strain on his adaptability. It was without furnishings of any kind, unless the thick kind of mattress in one corner could be called furnishings, and the walls and floor were finished in some extraordinary style of decoration which made them look like quilted upholstery.

  Mr Oates looked about him, and turned puzzledly to his host.

  “Well,” he said, “where’s the stamp?”

  “What stamp?” asked Dr Jethero.

  Mr Oates’s laboriously achieved restraint was wearing thin again.

  “Don’t you understand? I’m Titus Oates. I was whipped from Aldgate to Newgate, and from Newgate to Tyburn. Didn’t you hear what I said?”

  “Yes, yes, yes,” murmured the doctor peaceably. “You’re Titus Oates. You stood in the pillory and they pelted you with rotten eggs.”

  “Well,” said Mr Oates, “what about the stamp?”

  Dr Jethero cleared his throat.

  “Just a minute, Mr Oates. Suppose we go into that presently. Would you mind taking off your coat and shoes?”

  Mr Oates gaped at him.

  “This is going too far,” he protested. “I’m Titus Oates. Everybody knows Titus Oates. You remember—the Popish Plot—”

  “Mr Oates,” said the doctor sternly, “will you take off your coat and shoes?”

  The white-coated attendant was advancing stealthily towards him, and a sudden vague fear seized on the financier. Now he began to see the reason for the man’s extraordinary behaviour. He was not crotchety. He was potty. He was worse—he must be a raving lunatic. Heaven knew what he would be doing next. A wild desire to be away from number 105 Matlock Gardens gripped Mr Oates—a desire that could not even be quelled by the urge to possess a twopenny blue Mauritius in perfect preservation.

  “Never mind,” said Mr Oates liberally. “I’m not really interested. I don’t collect stamps at all. I’m just Titus Oates. Everyone knows me. I’m sure you’ll excuse me—I have an appointment—”

  He was edging towards the door, but Dr Jethero stood in the way.

  “Nobody’s going to hurt you, Mr Oates,” he said, and then he caught the desperate gleam in Mr Oates’s eye, and signed quickly to the attendant.

  Mr Oates was seized suddenly from behind in a deft grip. Overcome with terror, he struggled like a maniac, and he was a big man, but he was helpless in the expert hands that held him. He was tripped and flung to the floor, and pinioned there with practised skill. Through whirling mists of horror he saw the doctor coming towards him with a hypodermic syringe, and he was still yelling feebly about the Popish Plot when the needle stabbed into his arm…

  Dr Jethero went downstairs and rang up a number which he had been given.

  “I’ve got your uncle, Mr Tombs,” he announced. “He gave us a bit of trouble, but he’s quite safe now.”

  Simon Templar, who had found the name of Tombs a convenient alias before, grinned invisibly into the transmitter.

  “That’s splendid. Did he give you a lot of trouble?”

  “He was inclined to be violent, but we managed to give him an injection, and when he wakes up he’ll be in a strait-jacket. He’s really a most interesting case,” said the doctor with professional enthusiasm. “Quite apart from the delusion that he is Titus Oates, he seems to have some extraordinary hallucination about a stamp. Had you noticed that before?”

  “I hadn’t,” said the Saint. “You may be able to find out some more about that. Keep him under observation, doctor, and call me again on Monday morning.”

  He rang off and turned gleefully to Patricia Holm, who was waiting at his elbow.

  “Titus is in safe hands,” he said. “And now I’ve got a call of my own to make.”

  “Who to?” she asked.

  He showed her a scrap of paper on which he had jotted down the words of what appeared to be a telegram.

  Amazing discovery stop have reason to believe boom may be based on genuine possibilities stop do not on any account sell without hearing from me.

  “Dicky Tremayne’s in Paris, and he’ll send it for me,” said the Saint. “A copy goes to Albert Costello and John Hammel tonight—I just want to make sure that they follow Titus down the drain. By the way, we shall clear about twenty thousand if Midorients are still at 61 when they open again tomorrow morning.”

  “But are you sure Jethero won’t get into any trouble?” she said.

  Simon Templar nodded.

  “Somehow I feel that Titus will prefer to keep his mouth shut after I’ve had a little chat with him on Monday,” he said, and it is a matter of history that he was absolutely right.

  THE NEWDICK HELICOPTER

  A WORD…

  “…there was my short story The Newdick Helicopter, which centered on the fact that nobody when I wrote it had yet made a true helicopter work. (They had only gotten as far as autogyros, which are not quite the same thing.) Now helicopters are as common as moths once were, and my story, in which a character accidentally invented them, is as unreadable as Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon unless you read the date first.”

  —Leslie Charteris (1965)

  “I’m afraid,” said Patricia Holm soberly, “you’ll be getting into trouble again soon.”

  Simon Templar grinned, and opened another bottle of beer. He poured it out with a steady hand, unshaken by the future predicted for him.

  “You may be right, darling,” he admitted. “Trouble is one of the things that sort of happen to me, like other people have colds.”

  “I’ve often heard you complaining about it,” said the girl sceptically.

  The Saint shook his head.

  “You wrong me,” he said. “Posterity will know me as a maligned, misunderstood, ill-used victim of a cruel fate. I have tried to be good. Instinctive righteousness glows from me like an inward light. But nobody gives it a chance. What do you suggest?”

  “You might go into business.”

  “I know. Something safe and respectable, like manufacturing woollen combinations for elderly ladies with lorgnettes. We might throw in a pair of lorgnettes with every suit. You could knit them, and I’d do the fitting—the fitting of the lorgnettes, of course.” Simon raised his glass and drank deeply. “It’s an attractive idea, old darling, but all these schemes involve laying out a lot of capital on which you have to wait such a hell of a long time for a return. Besides, there can’t be much of a profit in it. On a rough estimate, the amount of wool required to circumnavigate a fifty-four inch bust—”

  Monty Hayward, who was also present, took out a tobacco-pouch and began to fill his pipe.

  “I had some capital once,” he said reminiscently, “but it didn’t do me much good.”

  “How much can you lend me?” asked the Saint hopefully.

  Monty brushed stray ends of tobacco from his lap and tested the draught through his handiwork cautiously.

  “I haven’t got it anymore, but I don’t think I’d lend it to you if I had,” he said kindly. “Anyway, the point doesn’t arise, because a fellow called Oscar Newdick has got it. Didn’t I ever tell you about that?”

  The Saint moved his head negatively, and settled deeper into his chair.

  “It doesn’t sound like you, Monty. D’you mean to say you were hornswoggled?”

  Monty nodded.

  “I suppose you might call it that. It happened about six years ago, when I was a bit younger and not quite so wise. It wasn’t a bad swindle on the whole, though.” He struck a match and puffed meditatively. “This fellow Newdick was a bloke I met on the train coming down from the office. He used to get into the same compartment with me three or four times a week, and naturally we took to passing the time of day—you know the way one does. He was an aeronautical engineer and a bit of an inventor, apparently. He was experimenting with autogyros, and he had a little one-horse factory near Walton where he was building them. He used to talk a lot of technical stuff about them to m
e, and I talked technical stuff about make-up and dummies to him—I don’t suppose either of us understood half of what the other was talking about, so we got on famously.”

  With his pipe drawing satisfactorily, Monty possessed himself of the beer-opener and executed a neat flanking movement towards the source of supply.

  “Well, one day this fellow Newdick asked me if I’d like to drop over and have a look at his autogyros, so the following Saturday afternoon I hadn’t anything particular to do and I took a run out to his aerodrome to see how he was getting along. All he had there was a couple of corrugated-iron sheds and a small field which he used to take off from and land at, but he really had got a helicopter effect which he said he’d made himself. He told me all about it and how it worked, which was double-Dutch to me, and then he asked if I’d like to go up in it. So I said ‘Thank you very much, I should simply hate to go up in it.’ You know what these things look like—an ordinary aeroplane with the wings taken off and just a sort of large fan business to hold you up in the air—I never have thought they looked particularly safe even when they’re properly made, and I certainly didn’t feel like risking my neck in this home-made version that he’d rigged up out of old bits of wood and angle iron. However, he was so insistent about it and seemed so upset when I refused that eventually I thought I’d better gratify the old boy and just keep on praying that the damn thing wouldn’t fall to pieces before we got down again.”

  The Saint sighed.

  “So that’s what happened to your face,” he remarked, in a tone of profound relief. “If you only knew how that had been bothering me—”

  “My mother did that,” said Monty proudly. “No—we didn’t crash. In fact, I had a really interesting flight. Either it must have been a very good machine, or he was a very good flier, because he made it do almost everything except answer questions. I don’t know if you’ve ever been up in one of these autogyros—I’ve never been up in any other make, but this one was certainly everything that he claimed for it. It went up exactly like going up in a lift, and came down the same way. I never have known anything about the mechanics of these things, but after having a ride in this bus of his I couldn’t help feeling that the Air Age had arrived—I mean, anyone with a reasonable-sized lawn could have kept one of ’em and gone tootling off for week-ends in it.”

  “And therefore,” said the Saint reproachfully, “when he asked you if you’d like to invest some money in a company he was forming to turn out these machines and sell them at about twenty pounds a time, you hauled out your cheque-book and asked him how much he wanted.”

  Monty chuckled good-humouredly.

  “That’s about it. The details don’t really matter, but the fact is that about three weeks later I’d bought about five thousand quid’s worth of shares.”

  “What was the catch?” Simon asked, and Monty shrugged.

  “Well, the catch was simply that this helicopter wasn’t his invention at all. He had really built it himself, apparently, but it was copied line for line from one of the existing makes. There wasn’t a thing in it that he’d invented. Therefore the design wasn’t his, and he hadn’t any right at all to manufacture it. So the company couldn’t function. Of course, he didn’t put it exactly like that. He told me that he’d ‘discovered’ that his designs ‘overlapped’ the existing patents—he swore that it was absolutely a coincidence, and nearly wept all over my office because his heart was broken because he’d found out that all his research work had already been done before. I said I didn’t believe a word of it, but that wasn’t any help towards getting my money back. I hadn’t any evidence against him that I could have brought into a court of law. Of course he’d told me that his design was patented and protected in every way, but he hadn’t put any of that in writing, and when he came and told me the whole thing was smashed he denied it. He said he told me he was getting the design patented. I did see a solicitor about it afterwards, but he told me I hadn’t a chance of proving a deliberate fraud. Newdick would probably have been ticked off in court for taking my money without reasonable precautions, but that wouldn’t have brought any of it back.”

  “It was a private company, I suppose,” said the Saint.

  Monty nodded.

  “If it had been a public one, with shares on the open market, it would have been a different matter,” he said.

  “What happened to the money?”

  “Newdick had spent it—or he said he had. He told me he’d paid off all the old debts that had run up while he was experimenting, and spent the rest on some manufacturing plant and machinery for the company. He did give me about six or seven hundred back, and told me he’d work like hell to produce another invention that would really be original so he could pay me back the rest, but that was the last I heard of him. He’s probably caught several other mugs with the same game since then.” Monty grinned philosophically, looked at the clock, and got up. “Well, I must be getting along. I’ll look in and see you on Saturday—if you haven’t been arrested and shoved in clink before then.”

  He departed after another bottle of beer had been lowered, and when he had gone Patricia Holm viewed the Saint doubtfully. She had not missed the quiet attention with which he had followed Monty Hayward’s narrative, and she had known Simon Templar a long time. The Saint had a fresh cigarette slanting from the corner of his mouth, his hands were in his pockets, and he was smiling at her with a seraphic innocence which was belied by every facet of the twinkling tang of mockery in his blue eyes.

  “You know what I told you,” she said.

  He laughed.

  “About getting into trouble? My darling, when will you stop thinking these wicked thoughts? I’m taking your advice to heart. Maybe there is something to be said for going into business. I think I should look rather fetching in a silk hat and a pair of white spats with pearl buttons, and you’ve no idea how I could liven up a directors’ meeting if I set my mind to it.”

  Patricia was not convinced.

  She was even less convinced when the Saint went out the next morning. From his extensive wardrobe he had selected one of his most elegant suits, a creation in light-hued saxony of the softest and most expensive weave—a garment which could by no possible chance have been worn by a man who had to devote his day to honest toil. His tie was dashing, his silk socks would have made a Communist’s righteous indignation swell to bursting point, and over his right eye he had tilted a brand new Panama which would have made one wonder whether the strange shapeless headgear of the same breed worn by old gents whilst pottering around their gardens could conceivably be any relation whatsoever of such a superbly stylish lid. Moreover he had taken out the car which was the pride of his stable—the new cream and red Hirondel which was in itself the hallmark of a man who could afford to pay five thousand pounds for a car and thereafter watch a gallon of petrol blown into smoke every three or four miles.

  “Where’s the funeral?” she asked, and the Saint smiled blandly.

  “I’m a young sportsman with far more money than sense, and I’m sure Comrade Newdick will be pleased to see me,” he said, and kissed her.

  Mr Oscar Newdick was pleased to see him—Simon Templar would have been vastly surprised if he hadn’t been. That aura of idle affluence which the Saint could put on as easily as he put on a coat was one of his most priceless accessories, and it was never worn for any honest purpose.

  But this Mr Oscar Newdick did not know. To him, the arrival of such a person was like an answer to prayer. Monty Hayward’s guess at Mr Newdick’s activities since collecting five thousand pounds from him was fairly accurate, but only fairly. Mr Newdick had not caught several other mugs, but only three, and one of them had only been induced to invest a paltry three hundred pounds. The helicopter racket had been failing in its dividends, and the past year had not shown a single pennyworth of profit. Mr Newdick did not believe in accumulating pennies; when he made a touch, it had to be a big one, and he was prepared to wait for it—the paltry three-hundred-pound
investor had been an error of judgment, a young man who had grossly misled him with fabulous accounts of wealthy uncles, which when the time came to make the touch had been discovered to be the purest fiction—but recently the periods of waiting had exceeded all reasonable limits. Mr Newdick had travelled literally thousands of miles on the more prosperous suburban lines in search of victims—the fellow-passenger technique really was his own invention, and he practised it to perfection—but many moons had passed since he brought a prospective investor home from his many voyages.

  When Simon Templar arrived, in fact, Mr Newdick was gazing mournfully over the litter of spars and fabric and machinery in one of his corrugated-iron sheds, endeavouring to estimate its value in the junk market. The time had come, he was beginning to feel, when that particular stock-in-trade had paid the last percentage that could be squeezed out of it; it had rewarded him handsomely for his initial investment, but now it was obsolete. The best solution appeared to be to turn it in and concentrate his varied talents on some other subject. A fat insurance policy, of course, followed by a well-organized fire, would have been more profitable, but a recent sensational arson trial and the consequent publicity given to such schemes made him wary of taking that way out. And he was engrossed in these uninspiring meditations when the bell in his “office” rang and manna fell from heaven.

  Mr Oscar Newdick, it must be acknowledged, did not instantly recognize it as manna. At first he thought it could only be the rate collector, or another summons for his unpaid electric light bill. He tiptoed to a grimy window which looked out on the road, with intent to escape rapidly across the adjacent fields if his surmise proved correct, and it was thus that he saw the imposing automobile which stood outside.