The reactions of an equally inevitable curiosity made him carry the picture over to the window to read the almost indecipherable scrawl. The ink was rusty with age, the spidery hand angular and old-fashioned, but after some study he was able to make out the words.
To my wife, On this day 16 Aprille did I lodge in ye haufe of one Thomaf Robertf a cobbler and did hyde under hyf herthe in Turkes Lane ye feventy thoufande golde piecef wich I stole of Hyf Grace ye Duke. Finde them if thif letre come to thee and Godes blefsynge, John.
None of the members of Mr Winlass’s staff, some of whom had been with him through ten years of his hard-headed and dignified career, could remember any previous occasion when he had erupted from his office with so much violence. The big limousine which wafted him to Turk’s Lane could not travel fast enough for him: he shuffled from one side of the seat to the other, craning forward to look for impossible gaps in the traffic, and emitting short nasal wuffs of almost canine impatience.
Dave Roberts was not in the little shop when Mr Winlass walked in. A freckle-faced pug-nosed young man wearing the same apron came forward.
“I want to see Mr Roberts,” said Winlass, trembling with excitement, which he was trying not to show.
The freckle-faced youth shook his head.
“You can’t see Mr Roberts,” he said. “He ain’t here.”
“Where can I find him?” barked Winlass.
“You can’t find him,” said the youth phlegmatically. “He don’t want to be found. Want your shoes mended, sir?”
“No, I do not want my shoes mended!” roared Winlass, dancing in his impatience. “I want to see Mr Roberts. Why can’t I find him? Why doesn’t he want to be found? Who the hell are you, anyhow?”
“I do be Mr Roberts’s second cousin, sir,” said Peter Quentin, whose idea of dialects was hazy but convincing. “I do have bought Mr Roberts’s shop, and I’m here now, and Mr Roberts ain’t coming back, sir, that’s who I be.”
Mr Winlass wrenched his features into a jovial beam.
“Oh, you’re Mr Roberts’s cousin, are you?” he said, with gigantic affability. “How splendid! And you’ve bought his beautiful shop. Well, well. Have a cigar, my dear sir, have a cigar.”
The young man took the weed, bit off the wrong end, and stuck it into his mouth with the band on—a series of motions which caused Mr Winlass to shudder to his core. But no one could have deduced that shudder from the smile with which he struck and tendered a match.
“Thank ’ee, sir,” said Peter Quentin. “Now, sir, can I mend thy shoes?”
He admitted afterwards to the Saint that the strain of maintaining what he fondly believed to be a suitable patois was making him a trifle light-headed, but Mr Vernon Winlass was far too preoccupied to notice his aberrations.
“No, my dear sir,” said Mr Winlass, “my shoes don’t want mending. But I should like to buy your lovely house.”
The young man shook his head.
“I ain’t a-wanting to sell ’er, sir.”
“Not for seven thousand pounds?” said Mr Winlass calculatingly.
“Not for seven thousand pounds, sir.”
“Not even,” said Mr Winlass pleadingly, “for eight thousand?”
“No, sir.”
“Not even,” suggested Mr Winlass, with an effort which caused him acute pain, “if I offered you nine thousand?”
The young man’s head continued to shake.
“I do only just have bought ’er, sir. I must do my work somewhere. I wouldn’t want to sell my house, not if you offered me ten thousand for ’er, that I wouldn’t.”
“Eleven thousand,” wailed Mr Winlass, in dogged anguish.
The bidding rose to sixteen thousand five hundred before Peter Quentin relieved Mr Winlass of further torture and himself of further lingual acrobatics. The cheque was made out and signed on the spot, and in return Peter attached his signature to a more complicated document which Mr Winlass had ready to produce from his breast pocket, for Mr Vernon Winlass believed in Getting Things Done.
“That’s splendid,” he boomed, when the formalities had been completed. “Now then, my dear sir, how soon can you move out?”
“In ten minutes,” said Peter Quentin promptly, and he was as good as his word.
He met the Saint in a neighbouring hostelry and exhibited his trophy. Simon Templar took one look at it, and lifted his tankard.
“So perish all the ungodly,” he murmured. “Let us get it to the bank before they close.”
It was three days later when he drove down to Hampshire with Patricia Holm to supervise the installation of Uncle Dave Roberts in the cottage which had been prepared for him. It stood in the street of a village that had only one street, a street that was almost an exact replica of Turk’s Lane set down in a valley between rolling hills. It had the same oak-beamed cottages, the same wrought-iron lamps over the lintels to light the doors by night, the same rows of tiny shops clustering face to face with their wares spread out in unglazed windows, and the thundering main road traffic went past five miles away and never knew that there was a village there.
“I think you’ll be happy here, Uncle Dave,” he said, and he did not need an answer in words to complete his reward.
It was a jubilant return journey for him, and they were in Guildford before he recollected that he had backed a very fast outsider at Newmarket. When he bought a paper he saw that that also had come home, and they had to stop at the Lion for celebrations.
“There are good moments in this life of sin, Pat,” he remarked, as he started up the car again, and then he saw the expression on her face, and stared at her in concern. “What’s the matter, old darling—has that last Dry Sack gone to your head?”
Patricia swallowed. She had been glancing through the other pages of The Evening Standard while he tinkered with the ignition, and now she folded the sheet down and handed it to him.
“Didn’t you promise Uncle Dave whatever money there was in his house as well as that cottage?” she asked.
Simon took the paper and read the item she was pointing to.
TREASURE TROVE IN LONDON EXCAVATION WINDFALL FOR WINLASS
The London clay, which has given up many strange secrets in its time, yesterday surrendered a treasure which has been in its keeping for 300 years.
Twenty thousand pounds is the estimated value of a hoard of gold coins and antique jewellery discovered by workmen engaged in demolishing an old house in Turk’s Lane, Brompton, which is being razed to make way for a modern apartment building.
The owner of the property, Mr Vernon Winlass—
The Saint had no need to read any more, and as a matter of fact he did not want to. For several seconds he was as far beyond the power of speech as if he had been born dumb.
And then, very slowly, the old Saintly smile came back to his lips.
“Oh, well, I expect our bank account will stand it,” he said cheerfully, and turned the car back again towards Hampshire.
THE SLEEPLESS KNIGHT
INTRODUCTION
Quite naturally, it seems to me, concurrently with the broadening conception of poetic justice which we were just discussing, there has been a shifting of the Saint’s chief interest from common crime towards deeper waters.
That is not to say that the time-honoured themes of embezzlement, drug trafficking, blackmail, burglary, and the Blunt Instrument no longer amuse him. Far from it. But there is a measurable waning of the naïve exuberance which once found such simple villainies the completely satisfying and unsurpassable objectives of a buccaneer’s attention. He has come to be aware of large issues, of a lurking background of bigger and beastlier dragons.
This story deals with what you might call a transitional or intermediate size of dragon, and may therefore be read just as beneficially by students of evolution as by missionaries, bartenders, grocers, actuaries, and manufacturers of patent corset fastenings—a most happy state of affairs, in my opinion.
—Leslie Charteris (1939
)
If a great many newspaper clippings and references to newspapers find their way into these chronicles, it is simply because most of the interesting things that happen find their way into newspapers, and it is in these ephemeral sheets that the earnest seeker after unrighteousness will find many clues to his quest.
Simon Templar read newspapers only because he found collected in them the triumphs and anxieties and sins and misfortunes and ugly tyrannies which were going on around him, as well as the results of races in which chosen horses carried samples of his large supply of shirts, not because he cared anything about the posturing of Trans-Atlantic fliers or the flatulence of international conferences. And it was solely through reading a newspaper that he became aware of the existence of Sir Melvin Flager.
It was an unpleasant case, and the news item may as well be quoted in full.
JUDGE CENSURES TRANSPORT COMPANY
Driver’s Four Hours’ Sleep a Week
“MODERN SLAVERY”—Mr Justice Goldie.
Scathing criticisms of the treatment of drivers by a road transport company were made by Mr Justice Goldie during the trial of Albert Johnson, a lorry driver, at Guildford Assizes yesterday.
Johnson was charged with manslaughter following the death of a cyclist whom he knocked down and fatally injured near Albury on March 28th.
Johnson did not deny that he was driving to the danger of the public, but pleaded that his condition was due to circumstances beyond his control.
Police witnesses gave evidence that the lorry driven by Johnson was proceeding in an erratic manner down a fairly wide road at about 30 miles an hour. There was a cyclist in front of it, travelling in the same direction, and a private car coming towards it.
Swerving to make way for the private car, in what the witness described as “an unnecessarily exaggerated manner,” the lorry struck the cyclist and caused fatal injuries.
The police surgeon who subsequently examined Johnson described him as being “apparently intoxicated, although there were no signs of alcohol on his breath.
“I was not drunk,” said Johnson, giving evidence on his own behalf. “I was simply tired out. We are sent out on long journeys and forced to complete them at an average speed of over 30 miles an hour including stops for food and rest.
“Most of our work is done at night, but we are frequently compelled to make long day journeys as well.
“During the week when the accident occurred, I had only had four hours’ sleep.
“It is no good protesting, because the company can always find plenty of unemployed drivers to take our places.”
Other employees of the Flager Road Transport Company, which employs Johnson, corroborated his statement.
“This is nothing more or less than modern slavery,” said Mr Justice Goldie, directing the jury to return a verdict of Not Guilty.
“It is not Johnson, but Sir Melvin Flager, the managing director of the company, who ought to be in the dock.
“You have only to put yourselves in the position of having gone for a week on four hours’ sleep, with the added strain of driving a heavy lorry throughout that time, to be satisfied that no culpable recklessness of Johnson’s was responsible for this tragedy.
“I would like to see it made a criminal offence for employers to impose such inhuman conditions on their employees.”
Sir Melvin Flager was not unnaturally displeased by this judicial comment, but he might have been infinitely more perturbed if he had known of the Saint’s interest in the case.
Certain readers of these chronicles may have reached the impression that Simon Templar’s motives were purely selfish and mercenary, but they would be doing him an injustice. Undoubtedly his exploits were frequently profitable, and the Saint himself would have been the first to admit that he was not a brigand for his health, but there were many times when only a very small percentage of his profits remained in his own pocket, and many occasions when he embarked on an episode of lawlessness with no thought of profit for himself at all.
The unpleasantness of Sir Melvin Flager gave him some hours of quite altruistic thought and effort.
“Actually,” he said, “there’s only one completely satisfactory way to deal with a tumour like that. And that is to sink him in a barrel of oil and light a fire underneath.”
“The Law doesn’t allow you to do that,” said Peter Quentin pensively.
“Very unfortunately, it does not,” Simon admitted, with genuine regret. “All the same, I used to do that sort of thing without the sanction of the Law, which is too busy catching publicans selling a glass of beer after hours to do anything about serious misdemeanours, anyway…But I’m afraid you’re right, Peter—I’m much too notorious a character these days, and Chief Inspector Claud Eustace Teal isn’t the bosom pal he was. We shall have to gang warily, but nevertheless, we shall certainly have to gang.”
Peter nodded approvingly. Strangely enough, he had once possessed a thoroughly respectable reverence for the Law, but several months of association with the Saint had worked irreparable damage on that bourgeois inhibition.
“You can count me in,” he said, and the Saint clapped him on the back.
“I knew it without asking you, you old sinner,” he said contentedly. “Keep this next week-end free for me, brother, if you really feel that way—and if you want to be specially helpful you can push out this afternoon with a false beard tied round your ears and try to rent a large garage from which yells of pain cannot be heard outside.”
“Is that all?” Peter asked suspiciously. “What’s your share going to be—backing losers at Hurst Park?”
The Saint shook his head.
“Winners,” he said firmly. “I always back winners. But I’m going to be busy myself. I want to get hold of a gadget. I saw it at a motor show once, but it may take me a couple of days to find out where I can buy one.”
As a matter of fact it took him thirty-six hours and entailed a good deal of travelling and expense. Peter Quentin found and rented the garage which the Saint had demanded a little more quickly, but the task was easier and he was used to Simon Templar’s eccentric commissions.
“I’m getting so expert at this sort of thing, I believe I could find you a three-humped camel overnight if you wanted it,” Peter said modestly, when he returned to announce success.
Simon grinned.
The mechanical details of his scheme were not completed until the Friday afternoon, but he added every hour and penny spent to the private account which he had with Sir Melvin Flager, of which that slave-driving knight was blissfully in ignorance.
It is barely possible that there may survive a handful of simple unsophisticated souls who would assume that since Mr Justice Goldie’s candid criticisms had been pronounced in open court and printed in every newspaper of importance, Sir Melvin Flager had been hiding his head in shame, shunned by his erstwhile friends and treated with deferential contempt even by his second footman. To these unfledged innocents we extend our kindly sympathy, and merely point out that nothing of the sort had happened. Sir Melvin Flager, of course, did not move in the very Highest Society, for an uncle of his on his mother’s side still kept and served in a fried-fish shop near the Elephant and Castle, but the society in which he did move did not ostracize him. Once the first statement-seeking swarm of reporters had been dispersed, he wined and dined and diverted himself and ran his business exactly the same as he had done before, for the business and social worlds have always found it remarkably easy to forgive the trespasses of a man whose prices and entertainments are respectively cheaper and better than others.
On that Friday night Sir Melvin Flager entertained a small party to dinner, and took them on to a revue afterwards. Conscience had never troubled him personally, and his guests were perfectly happy to see a good show without worrying about such sordid trifles as how the money that paid for their seats was earned. His well-laden lorries roared through the night with red-eyed men at the wheel to add to his fortune, and Sir Me
lvin Flager sat in his well-upholstered seat and roared with carefree laughter at the antics of the comedian, forgetting all about his business until nearly the end of the first act, when a programme girl handed him a sealed envelope. Flager slit it open and read the note.
One of our lorries has had another accident. Two killed. Afraid it may be bad for us if this comes out so soon after the last one. May be able to square it, but must see you first. Will wait in your car during the interval.
It was in his business manager’s handwriting, and it was signed with his business manager’s name.
Sir Melvin Flager tore the note into small pieces and dumped it in the ashtray before him. There was a certain forced quality about his laughter for the next five minutes, and as soon as the curtain came down he excused himself to his guests and walked down the line of cars parked in a side street adjoining the theatre. He found his own limousine, and peered in at the back.
“You there, Nyson?” he growled.
“Yes, sir.”
Flager grunted, and opened the door. It was rather dark inside the car, and he could only just make out the shape of the man who sat there.
“I’ll fire every damned driver I’ve got tomorrow,” he swore, as he climbed in. “What the devil do they think I put them on the road for—to go to sleep? This may be serious.”
“You’ve no idea how serious it’s going to be, brother,” said the man beside him.
But the voice was not the voice of Mr Nyson, and the mode of address was not that which Sir Melvin Flager encouraged from his executives. For a moment the managing director of the Flager Road Transport Company did not move, and then he leaned sideways to stare more closely at his companion. His eyes were growing accustomed to the dark, but the movement did not help him at all, for with a sudden shock of fear he saw that the man’s features were completely covered by a thin gauzy veil which stretched from his hat-brim down to his coat collar.
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