“And
you never knew who he was ?”
“Never
in me life, strike me dead——
”
“How
do you get the rest of your money ?”
“He
just makes a date to meet me somewhere an’ hands it
over.”
“And
you don’t even know where he lives ?”
“So
help me, I don’t. All I got is a phone number where I
can ring him.”
“What
is this number?”
“Berkeley
3100.”
Simon
studied him calculatingly. The story had at least a
possibility of truth,
and the way McGuire told it it sounded convincing. But the Saint didn’t let any
premature cameraderie
soften his implacably dissecting gaze.
He said:
“What sort of a guy is he?”
“A
tall thin foreign-looking bloke wiv a black beard.”
It still
sounded possible. Whatever Mr Osbett’s normal
appearance might be,
and whatever kind of racket he might
be in, he might easily be anxious not
to have his identity known by such dubiously efficient subordinates as Red
McGuire.
“And
exactly how,” said the Saint, “did your foreign-
looking
bloke know that I had any miracles in the house ?”
“I
dunno——
”
Patricia
Holm came back into the room with a curling-
iron that glowed dull
red.
Simon
turned and reached for it.
“You’re
just in time, darling,” he murmured. “Comrade McGuire’s memory is
going back on him again.”
Comrade
McGuire gaped at the hot iron, and licked his
lips.
“I
found that out meself, guv’nor,” he said hurriedly. “I was goin’ to
tell yer ——
”
“How
did you find out?”
“I
heard somethink on the telephone.”
The Saint’s eyes
narrowed.
“Where?”
“In
the fust house I went to—somewhere near Victoria
Station. That was
where I was told to go fust an’ swop over the tea. I
got in all right,
but the bloke was there in the bed
room. I could hear ‘im tossing about
in bed. I was standin’
outside the door, wondering if I should jump
in an’ cosh
him, when the telephone rang. I listened to wot he said,
an’
all of a sudding I guessed it was about some tea, an’ then
once he
called you ‘Saint’, an’ I knew who he must be
talkin’ to. So I got
out again an’ phoned the guvnor an’ told
him about it; an’ he
ses, go ahead an’ do the same thing
here.”
Simon
thought back over his conversation with Mr Teal;
and belief grew upon
him. No liar could have invented that
story, for it hung on the fact of a
telephone call which
nobody else besides Teal and Patricia and himself could have
known about.
He could
see how the mind of Mr Osbett would have
worked on it. Mr
Osbett would already know that someone
had interrupted the
attempt to recover the package of tea
from Chief Inspector Teal on his way
home, that that someone had arrived in a car, and that he had presumably
driven Teal the rest of the way after the rescue. If someone was
phoning Teal later about a
packet of tea, the remainder of the
sequence
of accidents would only have taken a moment to
reconstruct… . And when the Saint thought about it, he.
would have given a fair percentage of his fifteen
hundred
pounds for a glimpse of Mr
Osbett’s face when he learned
into
what new hands the packet of tea had fallen.
He still
looked at Red McGuire.
“How
would you like to split this packet of tea with me?”
he asked
casually.
McGuire
blinked at him.
“Blimey,
guv’nor, wot would I do wiv arf a packet of
tea?”
Simon did
not try to enlighten him. The answer was
enough to consolidate the conclusion he
had already reached.
Red McGuire really
didn’t know what it was all about—that was also becoming credible. After all,
any intelligent em
ployer would know
that Red McGuire was not a man who could be safely led into temptation.
The Saint
had something else to think about. His own
brief introductory
anonymity was over, and henceforward
all the attentions of the ungodly would
be lavished on him
self—while he was still without one single solid target
to
shoot back at.
He sank
into a chair and blew the rest of his cigarette into
a meditative chain of
smoke rings; and then he crushed the butt into an ashtray and looked at McGuire
again.
“What
happens to your fifty-quid-a-week job if you go
back to stir,
Red?” he inquired deliberately.
The thug
chewed his teeth.
“I
s’pose it’s all over with, guv’nor.”
“How
would you like to phone your boss now—for me?”
Fear
swelled in McGuire’s eyes again as the Saint’s mean
ing wore its way
relentlessly into his understanding. His mouth opened once or twice without
producing any sound.
“Yer
carn’t arsk me to do that!” he got out at last. “If he knew I’d
double-crorst ‘im—he said——
”
Simon rose
with a shrug.
“Just
as you like,” he said carelessly. “But one of us is going to use the
telephone, and I don’t care which it is. If I
ring up Vine Street
and tell ‘em to come over and fetch you
away, I should think
you’d get about ten years, with a record
like yours. Still,
they say it’s a healthy life, with no worries
“Wait
a minute,” McGuire said chokily. “What do you do
if I make
this call?”
“I’ll
give you a hundred quid in cash; and I’ll guarantee
that when I’m through
with your boss he won’t be able to do any of those things he promised.”
McGuire was
no mathematician, but he could do simple
arithmetic. He gulped
something out of his throat.
“Okay,”
he grunted. “It’s a bet.”
Simon
summed him up for a moment longer, and then
hauled his chair over
to within reach of the table where the telephone stood. He picked up the
microphone and prodded
his forefinger into the first perforation of
the dial.
“All
you’re going to do,” he said, as he went on spelling
out BER
3100, “is tell the big bearded chief that you’ve been
through
this place with a fine comb, and the only tea-leaf in it is yourself. Do you
get it ? No Saint, no tea—no soap….
And I don’t want to
frighten you or anything like that, Red,
but I just want you
to remember that if you try to say any
more than that, I’ve
still got you here, and we can easily warm up the curling-tongs again.”
“Don’t
yer think I know wot’s good for me?” retorted
the other sourly.
The Saint
nodded warily, and heard the ring of the call in
the receiver. It was
answered almost at once, in a sharp
cultured voice with a slight foreign
intonation.
“Yes?
Who is that?”
Simon put
the mouthpiece to McGuire’s lips.
“McGuire
calling,” said the burglar thickly.
“Well?”
“No
luck, guv’nor. It ain’t here. The Saint’s out, so I had
plenty of
time. I couldn’t ‘ve helped findin’ it if it’d been here.”
There was a
long pause.
“All
right,” said the voice curtly. “Go home and wait for
further
orders. I’ll call you tomorrow.”
The line
went down with a click.
“And
I wouldn’t mind betting,” said the Saint, as he put
the
telephone back, “that that’s the easiest hundred quid you
ever
earned.”
“Well,
yer got wot yer wanted, didn’t yer?” he snarled. “Come on an’ take
orf these ruddy bracelets an’ let me go.”
The Saint
shook his head.
“Not
quite so fast, brother,” he said. “You might think of
calling up your boss again and
having another chat with him
before you went
to bed, and I’d hate him to get worried at
this hour of the night. You stay right where you are and get
some
of that beauty sleep which you need so badly, because
after what I’m going to do tomorrow your boss may be looking for you with
a gun!”
VII
E
ARLY RISING
had never
been one of the Saint’s favourite
virtues, but there were times when
business looked
more important than leisure. It was eleven o’clock the
next
morning—an hour at which he was usually beginning to
think
drowsily about breakfast—when he sauntered into the
apothecarium of Mr
Henry Osbett.
In honour
of the occasion, he had put on his newest and
most beautiful suit,
a creation in pearl-grey fresco over which
his tailor had shed
tears of ecstasy in the fitting room; his
piratically tilted hat was unbelievably
spotless; his tie would
have humbled the
gaudiest hues of dawn. He had also put
on,
at less expense, a vacuous expression and an inanely
chirpy grin that completed the job of typing him
to the
point where his uncle, the gouty duke, loomed almost visible
in his background.
The
shifty-eyed young assistant who came to the counter
might have been
pardoned for keeling over backwards at
the spectacle; but he
only recoiled half a step and uttered a
perfunctory “Yes,
sir?”
He looked
nervous and preoccupied. Simon wondered
whether this
nervousness and preoccupation might have had some connection with a stout and
agitated-looking man who
had entered the shop a few yards ahead of the Saint himself.
Simon’s brightly vacant eyes took in the
essential items of the
topography
without appearing to notice anything—the
counter with its showcases and displays of patent pills and liver salts,
the glazed compartment at one end where presumably prescriptions were
dispensed, the dark doorway at
the
other end which must have led to the intimate fastnesses
of the establishment. Nowhere was the stout man
visible;
therefore, unless he had
dissolved into thin air, or disguised
himself
as a bottle of bunion cure, he must have passed through that one doorway.…
The prospects began to look
even more
promising than the Saint had expected… .
“This
jolly old tea, old boy,” bleated the Saint, producing
a package
from his pocket. “A friend of mine—chappie
named Teal, y’know,
great detective and all that sort of
thing—bought it off you last night and
then he wouldn’t risk
taking it. He was goin’ to throw it down the
drain; but I said
to him ‘Why waste a perfectly good half-dollar, what?’ I
said.
‘I’ll bet they’ll change it for a cake of soap, or something,’ I said. I’ll
take it in and change it myself,’ I told him.
That’s right, isn’t
it? You will change it, won’t you?”
The
shifty-eyed youth was a bad actor. His face had gone
white, then red, and
finally compromised by remaining
blotchy. He gaped at the packet as if he was really starting to
believe that there were miracles in Miracle Tea.
“We—we
should be glad to change it for you, sir,” he
gibbered.
“Fine!”
chortled the Saint. “That’s just what I told jolly
old Teal.
You take the tea, and give me a nice box of soap. I
expect Teal can use
that, but I’m dashed if I know what he
could do with tea——
”
He was
talking to a vanishing audience. The youth, with a
spluttered
“Excuse me, sir,” had grabbed the package off
the counter
and was already making a dive for the doorway
at the far end; and
the imbecile grin melted out of the Saint’s face like a wax mould from a
casting of hot bronze.
One
skeleton instant after the assistant had disappeared, he was over the counter
with the swift silence of a cat.
But even if
he had made any noise, it is doubtful whether
the other would have
noticed it. The shifty-eyed youth was
so drunk with excitement that his
brain had for the time
being practically ceased to function. If it
hadn’t he might have stopped to wonder why Mr Teal should have handed the tea
to a third party; or why the third party, being so
obviously a member of
the idle rich, should have even
bothered about exchanging it for a box of
soap. He might
have asked himself a great many inconvenient questions;
but he
didn’t. Perhaps the peculiarly fatuous and guileless
character which the
Saint had adopted for the interview had
something to do with
that egregious oversight—at least, that
was what Simon
Templar had hoped for… . And it is at
least certain that the
young man went blundering up the
stairs without a backward glance, while the
Saint glided like
a ghost into the gloomy passage-way at the foot of the
stairs. , . .