Brighter Buccaneer (16 page)

“It’s rather difficult to say exactly what is the matter with Bellingford Smart. He seems to be one of these sneaking swine who gets pleasure out of taking advantage of their position in petty ways. As far as his tenants are concerned, he keeps to the letter of his leases and makes himself as nasty as possible within those limits. There are lots of ways a landlord can make life unbearable for you if he wants to, as you probably know. The people he likes to get into his flats are lonely widows and elderly spinisters-they’re easy meat for him.”

“But I don’t see what good that does him,” said the Saint puzzledly. “He’s only getting himself a bad name —”

“I had one of his late tenants in here the other day-she told me that she’d just paid him five hundred pounds to release her. She couldn’t stand it any longer, and she couldn’t get out any other way. If he does that often, I suppose it must pay him.”

“But he’s making it more and more difficult to let his flats, isn’t he?”

The exquisite young man shrugged.

“All the agencies know him-we refuse to handle his stuff at all, and we aren’t the only ones. But there are plenty of prospective tenants who’ve never heard of him. He advertises his flats and lets them himself whenever he can, and then the tenants don’t find out their mistake till it’s too late. It must seem amazing to you that anything like that can go on in this neighbourhood; but his petty persecutions are all quite legal, and nobody seems to be able to do anything about it.”

“I see,” said the Saint softly.

The solution of the mystery, now that he knew it, struck him as being one of the most original, and at the same time one of the meanest and most contemptible, forms of blackmail that he had ever heard of; and the fact that it skulked along under the cover of the law made it twice as sickening. He had no doubt that it was all true-even the worthiest of estate agents are not in the habit of turning down commissions without the strongest possible grounds, and Major Bellingford Smart’s nastiness appeared to be common knowledge in the profession. There were some forms of unpleasantness that filled the Saint with an utter loathing, and the meanness of Major Bellingford Smart was one of them. Simon had an entirely immoral respect for the wholehearted criminal who gambled his liberty on the success of his enterprises, but a livelihood that was gained principally by bullying and swindling fat-headed old women turned his stomach.

“He has quite a lot of property around here,” the exquisite young man was informing him. “He buys up houses and converts them into flats. You’ll see what sort of a man he is when I tell you that while his conversions are being carried out it’s his habit to hire a room in the neighbourhood from which he can overlook the site, and he prowls around there at odd times with a pair of field-glasses to see if he can catch his workmen slacking. Once he saw a couple of men having a cup of tea in the afternoon, and went around and fired them on the spot.”

“Isn’t there anything he doesn’t sink to?” asked the Saint.

“I can’t think of it,” said the exquisite young man slanderously. “A few months ago he had a porter at 17, David Square who’d stayed with him eleven years-I can’t think why. The porter’s wife acted as a sort of housekeeper, and their daughter was employed in the Major’s own flat as a maid. You can imagine what a man like that must be like to work for, and this daughter soon found she couldn’t stick it. She tried to give notice, and Smart told her that if she left him her father and mother would be fired out into the street-the porter was an old man of well over sixty. The girl tried to stay on, but at last she had to run away. The first the porter and his wife knew about it was when Smart sent for them and gave them a month’s notice. And at the end of the month they duly were fired out, with Smart still owing them three weeks’ wages which they tried for weeks to get out of him until the son of one of the tenants went round and saw Smart and damned well made him pay up under the threat of putting his own solicitors on the job. The porter died shortly afterwards. I expect it all sounds incredible, but it’s quite true.”

Simon departed with a sheaf of Orders to View which he destroyed as soon as he got outside, and walked round very thoughtfully in the direction of David Square. And the more he thought of it, the more poisonous and utterly septic the personality of Major Bellingford Smart loomed in his consciousness. It occurred to the Saint, with a certain honest regret, that the calls of his own breezy buccaneering had lately taken his thoughts too far from that unlawful justice which had once made his name a terror more salutary than the Law to those who sinned secretly in tortuous ways that the Law could not touch. And it was very pleasant to think that the old life was still open to him …

With those thoughts he sauntered up the steps of No. 17, where he was stopped by a uniformed porter who looked more like a prison warder-which, as a matter of fact, he had once been.

“Can you tell me anything about this flat that’s to let here?” Simon inquired, and the man’s manner changed.

“You’d better see Major Bellingford Smart, sir. Will you step this way?”

Simon was led round to an extraordinary gloomy and untidy office on the ground floor, where a man who was writing at a desk littered with dust-smothered papers rose and nodded to him.

“You want to see the flat, Mr.-er —”

“Bourne,” supplied the Saint. “Captain Bourne.”

“Well, Captain Bourne,” said the Major dubiously, “I hardly know whether it would be likely to suit you. As a matter of fact —”

“It doesn’t have to suit me,” said the Saint expansively. “I’m inquiring about it for my mother. She’s a widow, you know, and she isn’t very strong. Can’t go walking around London all day looking at flats. I have to go back to India myself at the end of the week, and I very much wanted to see the old lady fixed up before I sailed.”

“Ah,” said the Major, more enthusiastically, “that alters the situation. I was going to say that this flat would be quite ideal for an old lady living alone.”

Simon was astounded once again at the proven simplicity of womankind. Major Bellingford Smart’s transparent sliminess fairly assaulted him with nausea. He was a man of about forty-five, with black hair, closely set eyes, and a certain stiff-necked poise to his head that gave him a slightly sinister appearance when he moved. It seemed almost unbelievable that anyone could ever have been taken in by such an obvious excrescence; but the fact remained that many victims had undoubtedly fallen into his net.

“Would you like to see it?” suggested the Major.

Simon registered a mental biographical note that Bellingford Smart’s military rank must have been won well out of sight of the firing line. If that Major had ever gone into action he would certainly have perished from a mysterious bullet in the back-such accidents have happened to unpopular officers before.

The Saint said that he would like to see the fiat, and Bellingford Smart personally escorted him up to it. It was not at all a bad flat, with good large rooms overlooking the green oasis of the square; and Simon was unable to find fault with it. This was nice for him; for he would have offered no criticism even if the roof had been leaking and the wainscoting had been perforated with rat-holes till it looked like a colander.

“I believe this is the very thing I’ve been looking for,” he said; and Major Bellingford Smart lathered his hands with invisible soap.

“I’m sure Mrs. Bourne would be very comfortable here,” he said greasily. “I do everything I can to make my tenants feel thoroughly at home. I’m on the premises myself all day, and if she wanted any help I’d always be delighted to give it. The rent is as moderate as I can make it-only three hundred and fifty per annum.”

Simon nodded.

“That seems quite reasonable,” he said. “I’ll tell my mother about it and see what she says.”

“I’ll show her round myself at any time she likes to call,” said Bellingford Smart cordially. “I don’t want to hurry you in any way,” he added, as they were going down in the lift, “but for your own sake I ought to mention that I’ve already shown another lady the flat today, and I’m expecting to hear her decision in a day or two.”

At any other time that hoary old bait would have evoked nothing more than one of the Saint’s most silent raspberries; but that morning he felt very polite. His face assumed the correct expression of thinly veiled alarm which attacks the veteran house-hunter’s features when he visualizes his prize being snatched away from under his nose.

“I’ll let you know definitely some time this evening,” he said.

The Saint’s patience and caution could be infinite when he felt that way; but there were other times when he felt that to pass over the iron whilst it was hot was a crime that would lie heavily on his conscience, and this was one of them. His sense of the poetry of buccaneering demanded that the retribution which he had devised for Major Bellingford Smart should strike swiftly; and he spent that afternoon on a tour of various shipping offices with no other idea in his mind. The Countess of Albury’s diamonds crawled in second by several lengths. It meant taking risks of which in a less indignant mood he would never have been guilty; for Simon Templar had made it a rule in life never to attack without knowing every inch of the ground and the precise density of every tuft of grass behind which he might want to take cover; but the strafing of Major Bellingford Smart was a duty that could not be delayed for that.

Nevertheless, he did take certain elementary precautions, as a result of which three well-dressed and subtly dependable-looking men gathered in the apartment of one of their number and slaked their thirsts with beer which the Saint had provided. This was at six o’clock.

The apartment was rented by Peter Quentin; and the other two were Roger Conway and Monty Hayward, who had been summoned by urgent telephone calls by a man whom they had not seen for many months.

“It seems years since I called out the Old Guard, souls,” said the Saint, glancing at Roger and Monty. “But this is one evening when your little Simon has need of you.”

“What’s it all about?” asked Monty expectantly; and Simon drained his glass and told them as briefly as he could about the leprousness of Major Bellingford Smart.

“But,” said the Saint, “I am about to afflict him with much sorrow; and that’s where you stiffs come in. We are going to settle down to a bridge party. Peter, your janitor saw me come in, and at about a quarter to ten we shall send for him and bribe him to go out and buy us some more ice-which will give him another chance to observe that I’m still here. But as soon as he’s brought the ice, which I’m afraid I shall have to leave you toughs to use, I shall hop nimbly out of the window on to the roofs below, descend smartly to the area at the back, proceed thence to the street, and go about my business, returning in about an hour by the same route. As soon as I’m in, we shall ring for the janitor again and demand further supplies of Scotch. He will reply that it’s past closing time, and there will be some argument in which I shall play a prominent part- thereby establishing the fact that we have been together the whole jolly evening. And so we shall. We shall have been playing bridge steadily all the while, and there will be four markers all filled up with the identical scores to prove it-in addition to your solemn oaths. Do you get me?”

“What is this?” asked Roger Conway. “An alibi?”

“No more and no less, old dear,” answered the Saint seraphically. “I spent this afternoon wading through passenger lists, and discovered that there actually is a Captain Bourne sailing on the Otranto from Tilbury at seven o’clock tonight, which saved me the trouble and expense of booking a passage in that name myself. So when Major Bellingford Smart tries to put over his story it will indubitably receive the polite ha-ha. You soaks are just here in case the episode comes to the ears of Claud Eustace Teal and he tries to work me into it.”

Roger Conway shrugged rather ruefully..

“You’re on, of course,” he said. “But I wish there was more action in it.”

Simon looked at him with a smile; for those two had shared many adventures in the old days, as also more recently had Monty Hayward; and he knew that both men sometimes looked back a trifle wistfully on those days out of the respectable surroundings that had subsequently engulfed them.

“Perhaps we may work together again before we die, Roger,” he said.

Monty Hayward had another suggestion.

“What are you going to do to Bellingford Smart? Couldn’t we all go after him and tar and feather him, or something?”

“I don’t think so,” said the Saint carefully. “You see, that would be against the Law, and these days I’m developing quite an agile technique for clobbering the ungodly by strictly legal means.”

His method in this case was not so unimpeachably legal as it might have been; but the Saint had a superb breadth of vision that was superior to such trivial details. At half past six the most unpopular landlord in London received a telephone call.

“Is that Mr. Shark?” asked the Saint innocently.

“This is Major Bellingford Smart speaking,” admitted the landlord, shaking the receiver at his end, which did not seem to be working very well. In any case, he was rather particular about being given his full appellation. “Who is that?”

“This is Captain Bourne. You remember I saw your flat this morning? … Well, I’ve had urgent orders to get back as quickly as possible, and I’ve had to change my plans. I’m catching the Otranto at midnight.”

“Are you really?” said Major Bellingford Smart.

“I’ve told my mother all about the flat, and she seems to think it would suit her down to the ground. She’s decided to take it on my recommendation; so if it’s still available —”

“Oh, yes, the flat is still available,” said Major Bellingford Smart eagerly. “If Mrs. Bourne could call any time tomorrow —”

“I rather wanted to see her settled before I left,” said the Saint. “Naturally my time’s rather limited, having to pack up in a rush like this, and I’m afraid I’ve several engagements to get through. I don’t know if you could possibly call here about half past ten-you could bring the lease with you, so that I could go through it-and my mother would sign it tonight.”