The Happy Highwayman (The Saint Series)

by Leslie Charteris

  Corrio took no further part in the routine examinations and questionings which Teal conducted with dogged efficiency, but on the way back to Scotland Yard he pressed his theory again with unusual humility.

  “After all, sir, even if this isn’t one of the Saint’s jobs, whoever did it, they’re quite likely to deal with this chap I’ve got in mind, and we aren’t justified in overlooking it. I know you don’t think much of me, sir,” said Corrio with unwonted candour, “but you must admit that I was right a few days ago when you wouldn’t listen to me, and now I think it’d be only fair to give me another chance.”

  Almost against his will, Teal forced himself to be just.

  “All right,” he said grudgingly. “Where do we find this fence?”

  “If you can be free about a quarter to five this afternoon,” said Corrio, “I’d like you to come along.”

  Simon Templar walked north along Bond Street. He felt at peace with the world. At such times as this he was capable of glowing with a vast and luxurious contentment, the same deep and satisfying tranquillity that might follow a perfect meal eaten in hunger or the drinking of a cool drink at the end of a hot day.

  As usually happened with him, this mood had made its mark on his clothes, and he was a very beautiful and resplendent sight as he sauntered along the sidewalk with the brim of his hat tilted piratically over his eyes, looking like some swashbuckling medieval brigand who had been miraculously transported into the twentieth century and put into modern dress without losing the swagger of a less inhibited age.

  In one hand he carried a brown paper parcel.

  Chief Inspector Teal’s pudgy hand closed on his arm near the corner of Burlington Gardens, and the Saint looked around and recognized him with a delighted and completely innocent smile.

  “Why, hullo there, Claud Eustace,” he murmured. “The very man I’ve been looking for.” He discovered Corrio coming up out of the background, and smiled again. “Hi, Gladys,” he said politely.

  Corrio seized his other arm and worked him swiftly and scientifically into a doorway. There was a gleam of excitement in his dark eyes.

  “It looks as if my theory was right again,” he said to Teal.

  Mr Teal kept his grip of the Saint’s arm. His rather frog-like eyes glared at the Saint angrily, but not with the sort of anger that most people would have expected.

  “You damn fool,” Teal said, rather damn-foolishly. “What did you have to do it for? I told you when you came home that you couldn’t get away with that stuff anymore.”

  “What stuff?” asked the Saint innocently.

  Corrio had grabbed the parcel out of his hand, and he was tearing it open with impatient haste.

  “I think that this is what we’re looking for,” he said.

  The broken string and torn brown paper fluttered to the ground as Corrio ripped them off. When the outer wrappings were gone he was left with a cardboard box. Inside the box there was a layer of crumpled tissue paper.

  Corrio jerked it out and remained staring frozenly at what was finally exposed. There was a fully dressed and very lifelike doll with features that were definitely familiar. Tied around its neck on a piece of ribbon was a ticket on which was printed: “Film Star Series, No. 12: CLARK GABLE. 2/11.”

  An expression of delirious and incredulous relief began to creep over the chubby curves of Teal’s pink face—much the same expression as might have come into the face of a man who, standing close by the crater of a rumbling volcano, had seen it suddenly explode only to throw off a shower of fairy lights and coloured balloons. The corners of his mouth began to twitch, and a deep vibration like the tremor of an approaching earthquake began to quiver over his chest.

  Corrio’s face was black with fury. He tore out the rest of the packing paper and squeezed out every scrap of it between his fingers, snatched the doll out of the box and twisted and shook it to see if anything could have been concealed inside it. Then he flung that down also among the mounting fragments of litter on the ground. He thrust his face forward until it was within six inches of the Saint’s.

  “Where are they?” he snarled savagely.

  “Where are who?” asked the Saint densely.

  “You know damn well what I’m talking about,” Corrio said through his teeth. “What have you done with the stuff you stole from Oppenheim’s last night? Where are the Vanderwoude emeralds?”

  “Oh, them,” said the Saint mildly. “That’s a funny question for you to ask.” He leaned lazily on the wall against which Corrio had forced him, took out his cigarette case, and looked at Teal.

  “As a matter of fact,” he said calmly, “that’s what I wanted to see you about. If you’re particularly interested I think I could show you where they went to.”

  The laugh died away on Teal’s lips, to be replaced by the startled and hurt look of a dog that has been given an unexpected bone and then kicked almost as soon as it has picked it up.

  “So you know something about that job,” he said slowly.

  “I know plenty,” said the Saint. “Let’s take a cab.”

  Templar straightened up off the wall. For a moment Corrio looked as if he would pin him back there, but Teal’s intent interest countermanded the movement without speaking or even looking at him.

  Teal was puzzled and disturbed, but somehow the Saint’s quiet voice and unsmiling eyes told him that there was something there to be taken seriously. He stepped back, and Simon walked past him unhindered and opened the door of a taxi standing by the kerb.

  “Where are we going to?” asked Teal, as they turned into Piccadilly.

  The Saint grinned gently, and settled back in his corner with his cigarette. He ignored the question.

  “Once upon a time,” he said presently, “there was a smart detective. He was very smart because after some years of ordinary detecting he discovered that the main difficulty about the whole business was that you often have to find out who committed a crime, and this is liable to mean a lot of hard work and a good many disappointments.

  “So this guy, being a smart fellow, thought of a much simpler method, which was more or less to persuade the criminals to tell him about it themselves. For instance, suppose a crook got away with a tidy cargo of loot and didn’t want to put it away in the refrigerator for icicles to grow on. He could bring his problem to our smart detective, and our smart detective could think it over and say, ‘Well, Featherstonehaugh, that’s pretty easy. All you do is just go and hide this loot in a dustbin on Greek Street or hang it on a tree in Hyde Park, or something like that, and I’ll do a very smart piece of detecting and find it. Then I’ll collect the reward and we’ll go shares in it.’

  “Usually this was pretty good business for the crook, the regular fences being as miserly as they are, and the detective didn’t starve on it either. But somehow it never seemed to occur to the other detectives to wonder how he did it.”

  He finished speaking as the taxi drew up at a small and dingy hotel near Charing Cross.

  Mr Teal was sitting forward, with his round moon-face looking like a surprised plum-pudding and his eyes fixed sleepily on the Saint’s face.

  “Go on,” he said gruffly.

  Simon shook his head and indicated the door. “We’ll change the scene again. Just be patient.”

  He got out and paid off the driver, and the other two followed him into the hotel. Corrio’s face seemed to have gone paler under its olive tan.

  Simon paused in the lobby and glanced at him.

  “Will you ask for the key, or shall I? It might be better if you asked for it,” he said softly, “because the porter will recognize you. Even if he doesn’t know you by your right name.”

  “I don’t quite know what you’re talking about,” Corrio said coldly, “but if you think you can wriggle out of this with any of your wild stories, you’re wasting your time.” He turned to Teal. “I haven’t got a room here, sir. I just use it sometimes when I’m kept in town late and I can’t get home. It isn’t in my own nam
e, because—well, sir, you understand—I don’t always want everybody to know who I am. This man has got to know about it somehow, and he’s just using it to try to put up some crazy story to save his own skin.”

  “All the same,” said Teal, with surprising gentleness, “I’d like to go up. I want to hear some more of this crazy story.”

  Corrio turned on his heel and went to the desk. The room was on the third floor—an ordinary cheap hotel room with the usual revolting furniture to be found in such places.

  Teal glanced briefly over its salient features as they entered, and looked at the Saint again. “Go on,” he said. “I’m listening.”

  The Saint sat down on the edge of the bed and blew smoke-rings.

  “It would probably have gone on a lot longer.” he said, “if this smart detective hadn’t thought one day what a supremely brilliant idea it would be to combine business with profit. And have the honour of convicting a most notorious and elusive bandit known as the Saint—not forgetting, of course, to collect the usual cash reward in the process.

  “So he used a very good-looking young damsel—you ought to meet her sometime, Claud, she really is a peach—having some idea that the Saint would never run away very fast from a pretty face. In which he was damn right…She had a very well-planned hard-luck story, too, and the whole act was most professionally staged. It had all the ingredients that a good psychologist would bet on to make the Saint feel that stealing Oppenheim’s emeralds was the one thing he had left glaringly undone in an otherwise complete life.

  “Even the spade-work of the job had already been put in, so that she could practically tell the Saint how to pinch the jewels. So that our smart detective must have thought he was sitting pretty, with a sucker all primed to do the dirty work for him and take the rap if anything went wrong—besides being still there to take the rap when the smart detective made his arrest and earned the reward if everything went right.”

  Simon smiled dreamily at a particularly repulsive print on the wall for a moment.

  “Unfortunately I happened to drop in on this girl one time when she wasn’t expecting me, and I heard her phoning a guy named Corrio to tell him I was well and truly hooked,” he said. “On account of having read in the Bulldog some talk by a guy of the same name about what he was going to do to me, I was naturally interested.”

  Corrio started forward. “Look here, you—”

  “Wait a minute.” Mr Teal held him back with an unexpectedly powerful arm. “I want the rest of it. Did you do the job, Saint?”

  Simon shook his head sadly. It was at that point that his narrative departed, for the very first time, from the channels of pure veracity in which it had begun its course—but Mr Teal was not to know this.

  “Would I be such a sap, Claud?” he asked reproachfully. “I knew I could probably get away with the actual robbery, because Corrio would want me to. But as soon as it was over, knowing in advance who’d done it, he’d be chasing round to catch me and recover the emeralds. So I told the girl I’d thought it all over and decided I was too busy.”

  The Saint sighed, as if he was still regretting a painful sacrifice. “The rest is pure theory. But this girl gave me a cloak room ticket from Victoria Station this morning and asked me if I’d collect a package this afternoon and take it along to an address on Bond Street. I didn’t do it because I had an idea what would happen, but my guess would be that if somebody went along and claimed the parcel they’d find the emeralds in it.

  “Not all the emeralds, probably because that’d be too risky if I got curious and opened it, but some of them. The rest are probably here—I’ve been looking around since we’ve been here, and I think there’s some new and rather amateurish stitching in the upholstery of that chair. I could do something with that reward myself.”

  Corrio barred his way as he got off the table.

  “You stay where you are,” he grated. “If you’re trying to get away with some smart frame-up—”

  “Just to make sure,” said the Saint, “I fixed a dictagraph under the table yesterday. Let’s see if it has anything to say.”

  Teal watched him soberly as he prepared to play back the record. In Chief Inspector Teal’s mind was the memory of a number of things which he had heard Corrio say, which fitted into the picture which the Saint offered him much too vividly to be easily denied. Then the dictagraph began to play. And Teal felt a faint shiver run up his spine at the uncannily accurate reproduction of Corrio’s voice.

  “Smart work, Leo…I bet these must be worth every penny of the price on them.”

  The other voice was unfamiliar.

  “Hell, it was easy. The layout was just like you said. But how’re you goin’ to fix it on the other chap?”

  “That’s simple. The girl gets him to fetch a parcel from Victoria and take it where I tell her to tell him. When he gets there, I’m waiting for him.”

  “You’re not goin’ to risk givin’ him all that stuff?”

  “Oh, don’t be so wet. There’ll only be just enough to frame him. Once he’s caught, it’ll be easy enough to plant the rest somewhere and find it.”

  Corrio’s eyes were wide and staring.

  “It’s a plant!” he screamed hysterically. “That’s a record of the scene I played in the film test I made yesterday.”

  Simon smiled politely, cutting open the upholstery of the armchair and fishing about for a leather pouch containing about two hundred thousand pounds’ worth of emeralds which should certainly be there unless somebody else had found them since he chose that ideal hiding-place for his loot.

  “I only hope you’ll be able to prove it, Gladys,” he murmured, and watched Teal grasp Corrio’s arm with purposeful efficiency.

  THE WICKED COUSIN

  There was a girl called Jacqueline Laine whom Simon Templar remembered suddenly, as one does sometimes remember people, with a sense of startling familiarity and a kind of guilty amazement that he should have allowed her to slip out of his mind for so long.

  This was on one of the rare occasions when he was not thinking about business. Simon Templar’s business had an unfortunate habit of falling into categories which gave many people good reason to wonder what right he had to the nickname of the Saint by which he was far more widely known than he was by his baptismal titles, but “business” was the polite name he gave it.

  It is true that these buccaneering raids of his which had earned him the sub-title of “The Robin Hood of Modern Crime” were invariably undertaken against the property, and occasionally the persons, of citizens who by no stretch of imagination could have been called desirable, but the Law took no official cognizance of such small details. The Law, in the Saint’s opinion, was a stodgy and elephantine institution which was chiefly justified in its existence by the pleasantly musical explosive noises which it made when he broke it.

  He picked up the telephone. “Hullo, Jacqueline,” he said when she answered. “Do you know who this is?”

  “I know,” she said. “It’s Julius Caesar.”

  “You have a marvellous memory. Do you still eat?”

  “Whenever I’m thirsty. Do you?”

  “I nibble a crumb now and then. Come out with me tonight and see if we can still take it.”

  “Simon, I’d love to, but I’m in the most frantic muddle—”

  “So is the rest of the world, darling. But it’s two years since I’ve seen you, and that’s about seven hundred and thirty days too long. Don’t you realize that I’ve been all the way around the world, surviving all manner of perils and slaying large numbers of ferocious dragons, just to get back in time to take you out to dinner tonight?”

  “I know, but—Oh, well. It would be so thrilling to see you. Come around about seven, and I’ll try to get a bit straightened out before then.”

  “I’ll be there,” said the Saint.

  Half an hour later he drove his great cream and red car westwards out of London. Somewhere beyond Bagshot he turned off to the right and began to
wander through narrow winding lanes in which the feverish main-road traffic which he had just left was very quickly forgotten. He found his way with the certainty of vivid remembrance, and he was fully ten minutes early when he pulled the car into the roadside before the gate of Jacqueline Laine’s house.

  He climbed out and started towards the gate, lighting a cigarette as he went, and as he approached it he perceived that somebody else was approaching the same gate from the opposite side. Changing his course a little to the left so that the departing guest would have room to pass him, the Saint observed that he was a small and elderly gent arrayed in clothes so shapeless and ill-fitting that they gave his figure a comical air of having been loosely and inaccurately strung together from a selection of stuffed bags of cloth. He wore a discoloured Panama hat of weird and wonderful architecture, and carried an incongruous green umbrella, furled, but still flapping in a bedraggled and forlorn sort of way, under his left arm; his face was rubicund and bulbous like his body, looking as if it had been carelessly slapped together out of a few odd lumps of pink modelling clay.

  As Simon moved to the left, the elderly gent duplicated the manoeuvre. Simon turned his feet and swerved politely to the right. The elderly gent did exactly the same, as if he were Simon’s own reflection in a distorting mirror. Simon stopped altogether, and decided to economize energy by letting the elderly gent make the next move in the ballet.

  Whereupon he discovered that the game of undignified dodging in which he had just prepared to surrender his part was caused by some dimly discernible ambition of the elderly gent’s to hold converse with him. Standing in front of him and blinking short-sightedly upwards from his lower altitude to the Saint’s six foot two, with his mouth hanging vacantly open like an inverted U and three long yellow teeth hanging down like stalactites from the top, the elderly gent tapped him on the chest and said, very earnestly and distinctly, “Hig fwmgn glugl phnihkln hgrm skheglgl?”

  “I beg your pardon?” said the Saint vaguely.

  “Hig fwmgn,” repeated the elderly gent, “glugl phnihkln hgrm skhlglgl?”