The Saint Intervenes (The Saint Series)

by Leslie Charteris

  Willie Kinsall did not even pause to frame a diplomatic line of approach.

  “Where,” he demanded shakily, “is this will, you crook?”

  Mr Penwick raised his grey eyebrows.

  “I don’t think I have—ah—had the pleasure—”

  “My name’s Kinsall,” said Willie, skipping about like a grasshopper on a hot plate. “And I want that will—the will you’re trying to sell to my dirty swindling brother. And if I don’t get it, I’m going straight to the police!”

  The solicitor put his fingertips together.

  “What proof have you, Mr—ah—Kinsall,” he inquired gently, “of the existence of this will?”

  Willie stopped skipping for a moment. And then, with a painful wrench, he flung bluff to the winds. He had no proof, and he knew it.

  “All right,” he said. “I won’t go to the police. I’ll buy it. What do you want?”

  Simon pursed his lips.

  “I doubt,” he said, “whether the will is any longer for sale. Mr Walter’s cheque is already in my bank, and I am only waiting for it to be cleared before handing the document over to him.”

  “Nonsense!” yelped Willie, but he used a much coarser word for it. “Walter hasn’t got it yet. I’ll give you as much as he gave—and you won’t have to return his money. He wouldn’t dare go into court and say what he gave it to you for.”

  The Saint shook his head.

  “I don’t think,” he said virtuously, “that I would break my bargain for less than twenty thousand pounds.”

  “You’re a thief and a crook!” howled Willie.

  “So are you,” answered the temporary Mr Penwick mildly. “By the way, this payment had better be in cash. You can go around to your bank and get it right away. I don’t like to have to insist on this, but Mr Walter said he was coming here in about an hour’s time, and if you’re going to make your offer in an acceptable form—”

  It is only a matter of record that Willie went. It is also on record that he took his departure in a speed and ferment that eclipsed even his arrival, and Simon Templar went to the telephone and called Patricia.

  “You must have done a great job, darling,” he said. “What did you get out of it?”

  “Five hundred pounds,” she told him cheerfully. “I got an open cheque and took it straight over to his bank—I’m just pushing out to buy some clothes, as soon as I’ve washed this paint off my face.”

  “Buy a puce sweater,” said the Saint, “and christen it Willie. I want to keep it for a pet.”

  Rather less than an hour had passed when the front door bell pealed again, and Simon looked out of the window and beheld the form of Walter Kinsall standing outside. He went to let the caller in himself.

  Mr Walter Kinsall was a little taller and heavier than his brother, but the rat-like mould of his features and his small beady eyes were almost the twins of his brother’s. At that point their external resemblance temporarily ended, for Walter’s bearing was not hysterical.

  “Well, Mr Penwick,” he said gloatingly, “has my cheque been cleared?”

  “It ought to be through by now,” said the Saint. “If you’ll wait a moment, I’ll just call the bank and make sure.”

  He did so, while the elder Kinsall rubbed his hands. He paused to reflect, with benevolent satisfaction, what a happy chance it was that his first name, while bearing the same initial as his brother’s, still came first in index sequence, so that this decayed solicitor, searching the telephone directory for putative kin of the late Sir Joseph, had phoned him first. What might have happened had their alphabetical order been different, Walter at that moment hated to think.

  “Your cheque has been cleared,” said the Saint, returning from the telephone, and Walter beamed.

  “Then, Mr Penwick, you have only to hand me the will—”

  Simon knit his brows.

  “The situation is rather difficult,” he began, and suddenly Walter’s face blackened.

  “What the devil do you mean…difficult?” he rasped. “You’ve had your money. Are you trying—”

  “You see,” Simon explained, “your brother has been in to see me.”

  Walter gaped at him apoplectically for a space, and then he took a threatening step forward.

  “You filthy double-crossing—”

  “Wait a minute,” said the Saint. “I think this is Willie coming back.”

  He pushed past the momentarily paralyzed Walter, and went to open the front door again.

  Willie stood on the step, puffing out his lean rat-like cheeks and quivering as if he had just escaped from the paws of a hungry cat. He scrabbled in his pockets, tugged out a thick sheaf of banknotes, and crushed them into the Saint’s hands as they went down the hall.

  “It’s all there, Mr Penwick,” he gasped. “I haven’t been long, have I? Now will you give me—”

  It was at that instant that he entered the room which Simon Templar had rented for the occasion, and saw his brother; and his failure to complete the sentence was understandable.

  For a time there was absolute silence, while the two devoted brothers glared at each other with hideous rigidity. Simon Templar took out his cigarette-case and selected a smoke at luxurious leisure, while Willie stared at Walter with red-hot eyes, and Walter glowered at Willie with specks of foam on his lips.

  Then the Saint stroked the cog of his lighter, and at the slight sound, as if invisible strait-jackets which held them immobile had been conjured away, the two men started towards each other with simultaneous detonations of speech.

  “You slimy twister!” snarled Walter.

  “You greasy shark!” yapped Willie.

  And then, as if this scorching interchange of fraternal compliments made them realize that there was a third party present who had not been included, and who might have felt miserably neglected, they checked their murderous advance towards one another and swung round on him together.

  Epithets seared through their minds and slavered on their jaws—ruder, unkinder, more malignant words than they had ever shaped into connected order in their lives. And then with one accord, they realized that those words could not be spoken yet, and deprived of that outlet, they simmered in a second torrid silence.

  Walter was the first to come out of it. He opened his aching throat and brought forth trembling speech.

  “Penwick,” he said, “whatever that snivelling squirt has given you, I’ll pay twice as much.”

  “I’ll pay three times that,” said Willie feverishly. “Four times—five times—I’ll give you twenty per cent of anything I get out of the estate—”

  “Twenty-five per cent,” Walter shrieked wildly. “Twenty-seven and a half—”

  The Saint raised his hand. “One minute, boys,” he murmured. “Hadn’t you better hear the terms of the will first?”

  “I know them,” barked Walter.

  “So do I,” bellowed Willie. “Thirty per cent—”

  The Saint smiled. He took a large sealed envelope from his breast pocket, and opened it.

  “I may have misled you,” he said, and held up the document for them to read.

  They crowded closer, breathing stertorously, and read:

  I, Joseph Kinsall, hereby give and bequeath everything of which I die possessed, without exception, to the Royal London Hospital, believing that it will be better spent than it would have been by my two worthless sons.

  It was in the late Sir Joseph Kinsall’s own hand, and it was properly signed, sealed, and witnessed.

  Simon folded it up and put it carefully away again, and Willie looked at Walter, and Walter looked at Willie. For the first time in their lives they found themselves absolutely and unanimously in tune. Their two minds had but a single thought. They drew deep breaths, and turned…

  It was unfortunate that neither of them was very athletic. Simon Templar was, and he had promised Mr Penwick that the will should come to no harm.

  THE TALL TIMBER

  The queer thin
gs that have led Simon Templar into the paths of boodle would in themselves form a sizeable volume of curiosities, but in the Saint’s own opinion none of these strange starting-points could ever compare, in sheer intrinsic uniqueness, with the moustache of Mr Sumner Journ.

  Simon Templar’s relations with Chief Inspector Teal were not always unpleasant. On that morning he had met Mr Teal in Old Compton Street and insisted on standing him lunch, and both of them had enjoyed the meal.

  “And yet you’ll probably be trying to arrest me again next week,” said the Saint.

  “I shouldn’t be surprised,” said Mr Teal heavily.

  They stood in the doorway of Wheeler’s, preparing to separate, and Simon was idly scanning the street when the moustache of Mr Sumner Journ hove into view.

  Let it be said at once that it was no ordinarily overgrown moustache, attracting attention by nothing but its mere vulgar size. It was, in fact, the reverse. From a slight distance no moustache was visible at all, and the Saint was looking at Mr Journ simply by accident, as a man standing in the street will sometimes absent-mindedly follow the movements of another. As Mr Journ drew nearer, the moustache was still imperceptible, but there appeared to be a slight shadow on his upper lip, as if it were disfigured by a small mole. And it was not until he was passing a yard away that the really exquisite singularity of the growth dawned upon Simon Templar’s mind.

  On Mr Sumner Journ’s upper lip, approximately fourteen hairs had been allowed to grow, so close together that the area they occupied could scarcely have been larger than a shirt button. These fourteen hairs had been carefully parted in the middle, and each little clique of seven had been carefully waxed and twisted together so that they stuck out about half an inch from their patron’s face like the horns of a snail. In the whole of Simon Templar’s life, which had encountered a perhaps unusual variety of developments of facial hair, ranging from the handlebar protuberances of the Southshire Insurance Company’s private detective to the fine walrus effect sported by a Miss Gertrude Tinwiddle who contributed the nature notes in The Daily Gazette, he had never seen any example of hair culture in which such passionate devotion to detail, such a concentrated ecstasy or miniaturism, such an unostentatious climax of originality, had simultaneously arrived at concrete consummation.

  Thus did the moustache of Mr Journ enter the Saint’s horizon and pass on, accompanied by Mr Journ, who looked at them rather closely as he went by, and lest any suspicious reader should be starting to get ideas into his head, the historian desires to explain at once that this moustache has nothing more to do with the story, and has been described at such length solely on account of its own remarkable features qua face-hair. But, as we claimed at the beginning, it is an immutable fact that if it had not been for this phenomenal decoration the Saint would hardly have noticed Mr Journ at all, and would thereby have been many thousands of pounds poorer. For, shorn of that incomparable appendage, Mr Journ was quite an ordinary-looking business man, thin, dark, hatchet-faced, well and quietly dressed, and although he was noticeably hard about the eyes and mouth, there was really nothing else about him which would have caused the Saint to stare fascinatedly after him and ejaculate in a hushed voice, “Well, I am a piebald pelican balancing rubber balls on my beak!”

  Wherefore Mr Teal would have had no reason to turn his somnolent gaze back to the Saint with a certain dour and puzzled humour, and to say, “I should have thought he was a fellow you’d be sure to know.”

  “Never set eyes on him in my life,” said the Saint. “Do you know who he is?”

  “His name’s Sumner Journ,” Mr Teal said reluctantly, after a slight pause.

  Simon shook his head.

  “Even that doesn’t ring a bell,” he said. “What does he do? No bloke who cultivated a nose-tickler like that could do anything ordinary.”

  “Sumner Journ doesn’t,” stated the detective flatly.

  He seemed to have realized that he had said too much already, and it was impossible to draw any further information from him. He took his leave rather abruptly, and Simon gazed after his plump departing back with a tiny frown. The only plausible explanation of Teal’s sudden taciturnity was that Mr Journ was engaged in some unlawful or nearly unlawful activities—Teal had had enough trouble with the victims whom the Saint found for himself, without conceiving any ambition to press fresh material into his hands. But if Chief Inspector Teal did not want the Saint to know more about Mr Sumner Journ, that was sufficient reason for the Saint to become abnormally inquisitive, and as a matter of fact, his investigations had not proceeded very far when a minor coincidence brought them up to date without further effort.

  “This might interest you,” said Monty Hayward one evening.

  “This” was a very tastefully prepared booklet, on the cover of which was printed: “Brazilian Timber Bonds: A Gold Mine for the Small Investor.” Simon took it and glanced at it casually, and then he saw something on the first page of the pamphlet which brought him to attention with a delighted start:

  Managing Director

  Sumner Journ, Esq., Associate of the Institute of Timber Planters, Fellow of the International Association of Wood Pulp Producers; formerly Chairman of South American Mineralogical Investments, Ltd., etc., etc.

  “How did you get hold of this, Monty?” he asked.

  “A young fellow in the office gave it to me,” said Monty. “Apparently he was trying to make a bit of money on the side by selling these bonds, but lots of people seem to have heard about ’em. I pinched the book, and told him not to be an ass because he’d probably find himself in clink with the organizers when it blew up, but I thought you might like to have a look at it.”

  “I would,” said the Saint thoughtfully and poured another whisky.

  He read the booklet through at his leisure, later, and felt tempted to send Monty Hayward a complimentary case of Old Curio on the strength of it, for the glow of contentment and goodwill towards men which spreads over the rabid entomologist who digs a new kind of beetle out of a log is as the frosts of Siberia to the glow which warms the heart of the professional buccaneer who uncovers a new swindle.

  For the stock-in-trade of Mr Sumner Journ was Trees.

  It may be true, as the poet bleats, that Only God Can Make a Tree, but it is also true that only a man capable of growing such a moustache as lurked coyly beneath the sheltering schnozzola of Mr Sumner Journ could have invented such an enticing method of making God’s creation pay gigantic dividends.

  The exposition started off with a picture of some small particles of matter collected in a tea-cup, and it was explained that these were the seeds of pinus palustris, or the long-leaved pine. “Obviously,” said the writer, “even a child must know that these can only be worth a matter of pennies.” There followed an artistic photograph of some full-grown pines rearing towards the sky. “Just as obviously,” said the writer, “everyone must see that these trees must have some value worth mentioning; probably a value that would run into pounds.” The actual value, it was explained, did indeed run into pounds; in fact, the value of the trees illustrated would be three pounds or more. Furthermore, declared the writer, whereas in Florida these trees took forty-five years to reach maturity, In the exceptional climate of the Brazilian mountains they attained their full growth in about ten years. The one great drain on timber profits hitherto had been the cost of transport, but this the Brazilian Timber Company had triumphantly eliminated by purchasing their ground along the banks of the Parana River (inset photograph of large river) which by the force of its current would convey all logs thrown into it to the coast at no cost at all.

  Investors were accordingly implored, in their own interests, to gather together at least thirty pounds and purchase with it a Brazilian Timber Bond—which could be arranged, if necessary, by instalments. On buying this bond, they would become the virtual owners of an acre of ground in this territory, and the seeds of trees would be planted in it without further charge. It was asserted that twenty-five trees c
ould easily grow on this acre, which when cut down at maturity would provide one hundred cords of wood. Taking the price of wood at three pounds a cord, it was therefore obvious that in about ten years’ time this acre would be worth three hundred pounds—“truly,” said the prospectus, “a golden return on such a modest investment.” The theme was developed at great length with no little literary skill, even going so far as to suggest that on the figures quoted, the investor who bought one thirty-pound bond every year for ten years would in the eleventh year commence to draw an annuity of three hundred pounds per annum for ever, since as soon as the trees had been felled in the first acre it could be planted out again.

  “Well, have you bought your Brazilian Timber Bond?” asked Monty Hayward a day or two later.

  Simon grinned and looked out of the window—he was down at the country house in Surrey which he had recently bought for a week-end retreat.

  “I’ve got two acres here,” he murmured. “We might look around for somebody to give us sixty quid to plant some more trees in it.”

  “The really brilliant part of it,” said Monty, filling his pipe, “is that this bloke proposes to pay out all the profit in a lump in ten years’ time, but until then he doesn’t undertake to pay anything. So if he’s been working this stunt for four years now, as it says in the book, he’s still got another five years clear to go on selling his bonds before any of the bondholders has a right to come around and say, ‘Oi, what about my three hundred quid?’ Unless some nosey parker makes a special trip into the middle of Brazil and comes back and says there aren’t any pine trees growing in those parts, or he’s seen the concession and it’s just a large swamp with a few blades of grass and a lot of mosquitoes buzzing about, I don’t see how he can help getting away with a fortune if he finds enough mugs.”

  The Saint lighted a cigarette.

  “There’s nothing to stop him taking it in,” he remarked gently, “but he’s still got to get away with it.”

  Mr Sumner Journ would have seen nothing novel in the qualification. Since the first day when he began those practical surveys of the sucker birth-rate, the problem of finally getting away with it, accompanied by his moustache and his plunder, had never been entirely absent from his thoughts, although he had taken considerable pains to steer a course which would keep him outside the reach of the Law. But the collapse of South American Mineralogical Investments, Ltd., had brought him within unpleasantly close range of danger, and about the ultimate fate of Brazilian Timber Bonds he had no illusions.