They lunched at Basingstoke, but it was before lunch that the incident happened which turned Teddy Everest’s inexhaustible fund of reminiscence into a channel that was to make all the difference in the world to the Saint—and others.
Patricia and Simon had settled themselves in the lounge of the hotel where they pulled up, and Everest had proceeded alone into the bar to supervise the production of cocktails—Teddy Everest was something of a connoisseur in these matters. And in the bar he met a man.
“It’s extraordinary how people crop up,” he remarked, when he returned. “I’ve just seen a bloke who reminded me of a real O. Henry yarn.”
And later, over the table, he told the yarn.
“I don’t think I bored you with the details of my last job,” he said. “As a matter of fact, this is the only interesting thing about it. There’s a gold mine somewhere in South Africa that was keeping me pretty busy last year—it was going down steadily, and I was sent out to try and find a spark more life in it. Now, it happened that I’d come across that very mine the year before, and heard all about it, and I was rather bored with the job. Everyone on the spot knew that the mine was a dud, and it seemed to me that I was just going to waste my time. Still, the pay was good, and I couldn’t afford to turn my nose up at it. I’d got into jolly low water over my last holiday, to tell you the truth, and I wasn’t sorry to have something to do—even if it was boring. It was on the train to Marseilles, where I caught my boat, that I met this guy—he on his way to a luxurious week at Antibes, rot him! We got talking, and it turned out that he knew a bit about the game. I remember telling him about my dud mine, and asking him if he held any shares, because I said a rag-and-bone man might give him a price for them. He hadn’t any shares, which rather spoils the story.”
“Because the mine wasn’t a dud,” murmured Simon, and Everest nodded.
“It was anything but. Certainly the old borings were worked out, but I struck a new vein all on my own, and those shares are going up to the sky when my report’s been passed. I gave Hallin the tip just now—I felt he deserved it.”
The Saint sat still.
It was Patricia Holm who put the question.
“Did you say ‘Hallin?’” she asked.
“That’s right.” Everest was scraping at his pipe with a penknife. “Miles Hallin—the racing chappie.”
Patricia looked across at the Saint, but the overflow she was expecting did not take place.
“Dear me!” said the Saint, quite mildly.
They were sitting over coffee in the lounge when Hallin passed through. Simon recognised him at once—before he waved to Everest.
“One of the world’s lucky men, I believe,” Everest said, as the clamour of Hallin’s car died away outside.
“So I hear,” said the Saint.
And once again Patricia looked at him, remembering his discourse of a few days before. It was a characteristic of the Saint that no idea ever slipped out of his mind, once it had arrived there; any riddle that occurred to him tormented him until he had solved it. Anything that was as wrong as Miles Hallin, to his peculiar mind, was a perpetual irritation to him, much as a note out of tune on a piano would be a perpetual irritation to a musician: he had to look round it and into it and scratch it and finger it and jigger about with it until he’d got it into line with the rest of the scheme of things, and it gave him no peace until it was settled.
Yet he said nothing more about Miles Hallin that day. Still he knew nothing. Afterwards—
But those are the bare facts of the beginning of the story.
They are told as the Saint himself would tell them, simply put forward for what they are worth. Afterwards, in the light of the knowledge to which he came he could have fitted them together much more coherently, much more comprehensively, but that would not have been his way. He would have told the story as it happened.
“And the longer I live,” he would have said, “the more I’m convinced that there’s no end to anything in my life. Or in anyone else’s, probably. If you trace the most ordinary things back to their source, you find they have the queerest beginnings. It’s just one huge fantastic game of consequences. You decide to walk home instead of taking a taxi, one night, and ten years later a man commits suicide. And if you had taken the taxi, perhaps ten years later the same man might have been a millionaire. Your father stayed at one hotel instead of another, in the same town, and at the age of fifty you become Prime Minister. If he had stayed at the other hotel you would probably have ended your life in prison…Take this very story. If we hadn’t lunched at Basingstoke that day, or if we’d never gone to that house-party, or if I hadn’t once gone out without a handkerchief, or even if I’d never gone to Kuala Lumpur—leave out the same flukes in the lives of the other people involved. Well, I’ve given up trying to decide exactly in what year, way back in the dim and distant past, it was decided that two men would have to die to make this story.”
This is exactly the point at which Simon Templar would have paused to make his philosophical reflection.
And then he would have told how, on the following Saturday evening, the posters of The Evening Record caught his eye, and something made him buy a copy of the paper, and he went home to tell Patricia that Miles Hallin had crashed again at Brooklands, and Miles Hallin had escaped again with hardly a scratch, but his passenger, Teddy Everest, had been burnt to death before the whole crowd.
3
“You see,” Nigel Perry explained simply, “Moyna’s people are frightfully poor.”
“Yeah,” said the Saint.
“And Miles is such a damned good chap.”
“Yeah,” said the Saint.
“It makes it awfully difficult.”
“Yeah,” said the Saint.
They lay stretched out in arm-chairs, masked by clouds of cigarette smoke, in the bed-sitting-room which was Nigel Perry’s only home. And Perry, bronzed and clear-eyed from ten days’ tramping in Spain, was unburdening himself of his problem.
“You haven’t seen Moyna yet, have you?” said the Saint.
“Well, hang it, I’ve only been back a few hours! But she’ll be in later—she’s got to have dinner with an aunt, or something, and she’ll get away as soon as she can.”
“What d’you think of your chances?”
Perry ran brown fingers through his hair.
“I’m blowed if I know, Templar,” he said ruefully. “I—I’ve tried to keep clear of the subject lately. There’s such a lot to think about. If only I’d got some real money…”
“D’you think a girl like Moyna cares a hoot about that?”
“Oh, I know! But that’s all very fine. Any sensible girl is going to care about money sooner or later. She’s got every right to. And if she’s nice enough to think money doesn’t matter—well, a chap can’t take advantage of that…You know, that’s where Miles has been so white. That money he paid over to me as my brother’s share in the mine—he’s really done his best to help me to make it grow. ‘If it’s a matter of ‘£. s. d.,’ he said, ‘I’d like you to start all square.’”
“Did he?” said the Saint.
Perry nodded.
“I believe he worked like a Trojan. Pestered all his friends to try and find me a cast-iron investment paying about two hundred per cent. And he found one, too—at least, we thought so. Funnily enough, it was another gold mine—only this time it was in South Africa…”
“Hell!” said the Saint.
“What d’you mean?”
“Hell,” said the Saint. “When was this—last week?”
The youngster looked at him puzzledly.
“Oh, no. That was over a year ago…But the shares didn’t jump as they were supposed to. They’ve just gone slowly down. Not very much, but they’ve gone down. I held on, though. Miles was absolutely certain his information couldn’t be wrong. And now he’s just heard that it was wrong—there was a letter waiting for me…”
“He’s offered to buy the shares off y
ou, and make up your loss.”
Perry stared.
“How did you know?”
“I know everything,” said the Saint.
He sprang to his feet suddenly. There was an ecstatic expression on his face that made
Perry wonder if perhaps the beer…
Perry rose slowly, and the Saint’s hand fell on his shoulder. “Moyna’s coming tonight, isn’t she?”
“I told you…”
“I’ll tell you more. You’re going to propose, my lad.”
“What?”
“Propose,” drawled the Saint, “If you’ve never done it before, I’ll give you a rapid lesson now. You take her little hand in yours, and you say, huskily, you say: ‘Moyna, d’you think we could do it?’ ‘Do what?’ she says. ‘Get fixed,’ says you. ‘Fixed?’ she says. ‘How?’ ‘Keep the party clean,’ says you. ‘Moyna,’ you say, crrrushing her to your booosom—that’s a shade north of your cummerbund—’Moyna, I laaaaaaave you!’…That will be two guineas. You can post me a cheque in the morning—as the actress used to say. She was a perfect lady…So long!”
And the Saint snatched up his hat. He was half-way to the door when Perry caught him.
“What’s the idea, Templar?”
Simon turned, smiling.
“Well, you don’t want me on the scene while you shoot your speech, do you?”
“You don’t have to go yet.”
“Oh, yes, I do.”
“Where?”
“I’m going to find Miles!”
“But you’ve never met him.”
“I haven’t. But I’m going to!”
Perry blocked the doorway.
“Look here, Templar,” he said, “you can’t get away with this. There’s a lot of things I want to know first. Hang it—if I didn’t know you pretty well, I’d say you’d gone clean off your rocker.”
“Would you?” said the Saint gently.
He had been looking at Perry all the time, and he had been smiling all the time, but all at once the younger man saw something leap into the Saint’s gaze that had not been there before—something like a flash of naked steel.
“Then,” said the Saint very gently, “what would you say if I told you I was going to kill Miles Hallin?”
Perry fell back a pace.
“You’re crazy!” he whispered.
“Sure,” said the Saint. “But not so crazy as Miles Hallin must have been when he killed a friend of mine the other day.”
“Miles killed a friend of yours? What in God’s name d’you mean?”
“Oh, for the love of Pete!”
With a shrug, the Saint turned back into the room. He sat on the edge of a table, but his poise was as restless as his perch. The last thing that anyone could have imagined was that he meant to stay sitting there.
“Listen, and I’ll tell you a joke,” he said. “I’m full of jokes these days…Once upon a time there was a man who could not die. Joke.”
“I wish to Heaven you’d say what you mean!”
“If I did, you wouldn’t believe me.”
“Not if it was about Miles.”
“Quite! And it is about Miles. So we’d have a first-class row—and what good would that do? As it is, we’re getting damned near it. So why not let it go?”
“You’ve made suggestions—”
“Of course I have,” agreed the Saint wearily. “And now I’m going to make some more. Lose your temper if you must, Nigel, old dear, but promise me two things first: promise you’ll hang on to those shares, and propose to Moyna tonight. She’ll accept—I guarantee it. With lots of love and kisses, yours faithfully.”
The youngster’s jaw tightened.
“I think you’re raving,” he said. “But we’re going to have this out. What have you got to say about Miles?”
The Saint’s sigh was as full of patience and long-suffering as the Saint could make it. He really was trying to be patient, but he knew that he hadn’t a hope of convincing Nigel Perry. And to the Saint it was all so plain. He wasn’t a bit surprised at the sudden blossoming of the story: it had happened in the way these things always happened, in the way he subconsciously expected them to happen. He had taken the blossoming in his stride; it was all infinitely past and over to him—so infinitely past and over that he had ceased to think about coincidences. And he sighed.
“I’ve got nothing to say about Miles.”
“You were saying—”
“Forget it, old dear. Now, will you do what I asked you to do about Moyna?”
“That’s my business. Why should you want to dictate to me about it?”
“And as for those shares,” continued the Saint calmly, “will you…”
“For the last time,” said Perry grimly, “will you explain yourself?”
Simon looked at him over a cigarette and a lighted match, and then through a trailing streamer of smoke, and Simon shrugged.
“Right!” he said. “I will. But don’t forget that we agreed it was a waste of time. You won’t believe me. You’re the sort that wouldn’t. I respect you for it, but it makes you a damned fool all the same.”
“Go ahead.”
“Do you remember that fellow who was killed at Brooklands yesterday, driving with Miles Hallin?”
“I’ve read about it.”
“He was a friend of mine. Over a year ago he told Miles Hallin about some dud shares. You bought them. Under a week ago he met Hallin again and told him the shares weren’t so dud. Now Hallin’s going to take the shares back off you. He killed poor old Teddy because Teddy knew the story—and Teddy was great on telling his stories. If Hallin had known that the man he saw with Teddy knew you, I should probably have had my funeral first. Miles is such a damned good chap. ‘If it’s a matter of £s.d.,’ he’d have said, ‘I’d like me to start all square.’”
“By God, Templar…”
“Hush!…Deducing back from that joke to the joke about another gold mine…”
Perry stepped forward, with a flaming face.
“It’s a lie!”
“Sure it is. We agreed about that before I started, if you recall the dialogue…Where was I? Oh, yes. Deducing back from that joke…”
“I’d like Miles to hear some of this,” Perry said through his teeth.
“So would I,” murmured the Saint. “I told you I wanted to find him. If you see him first, you may tell him all about it. Give him my address.” The Saint yawned. “Now may I go, sweetheart?”
He stood up, his cigarette tilted up in the corner of his mouth and his hands in his pockets, and Perry stood aside.
“You’re welcome to go,” Perry said. “And if you ever try to come back I’ll have you thrown out.”
Simon nodded.
“I’ll remember that when I feel in need of some exercise,” he remarked. And then he smiled. For a moment he gripped the boy’s arm.
“Don’t forget about Moyna,” he said.
Then he crossed the landing and went down the stairs, and Nigel Perry, silent in the doorway, watched him go.
The Saint went down slowly. He was really sorry about it all, though he had known it was inevitable. At least, he had made it inevitable. He was aware that he asked for most of the trouble that came to him—in many ways. But that couldn’t be helped. In the end—
He was on the last flight when a man who was running up from the hall nearly cannoned into him.
“Sorry,” said the man.
“Not at all,” said the Saint politely.
And then he recognised the man, and stopped him with a hand on his sleeve.
“How’s the trade in death?” murmured the Saint.
Miles Hallin turned, staring, and then he suddenly knew where he had seen the Saint before. For an instant the recognition flared in his eyes, then his face became a mask of indignation.
“What the devil do you mean?” he demanded.
Simon sighed. He always seemed to have something to sigh about in those days.
“I’m g
etting so tired of that question,” he sighed. “Why don’t you try it on Nigel? Perhaps he doesn’t have so much of it as I do.”
He turned, and continued on his way. As he opened the front door he heard Hallin resuming his ascent at a less boisterous speed, and smiled gently to himself.
It was late, and the street outside was dark and practically deserted. But in front of the house stood an immense shining two-seater that could only have belonged to Miles Hallin.
For a space of seconds the Saint regarded it, fingering his chin, at first thoughtfully, and then with a secret devil of merriment puckering the corners of his eyes.
Then he went down the steps.
He found the tool-box in a moment. And then, with loving care, he proceeded to remove the nuts that secured the offside front wheel…
Two minutes later, with the wheel-brace stowed away again as he had found it, and the nuts in his pocket, he was sauntering leisurely homewards, humming to the stars.
4
The Saint was in his bath when Inspector Teal arrived in Upper Berkeley Mews the next morning, but he presented himself in a few moments arrayed in a superb pair of crepe-de-Chine pyjamas and a dressing-gown that would have made the rainbow look like something left over from a sale of second-hand mourning.
Mr. Teal eyed him with awe.
“Where did you hire that outfit?” he inquired.
Simon took a cigarette.
“Have you come here to exchange genial back-chat,” he murmured, “or is it business? I have an awful suspicion that it’s business.”
“It is business,” said Mr. Teal.
“Sorry,” said the Saint, “my office hours are twelve noon to midday.”
Teal shifted his gum across to the east side of his mouth.
“What’s your grouse against Hallin?” he asked.
“Hallin? Who’s Hallin? Two aitches.”
“Miles Hallin’s car was wrecked last night,” said Teal deliberately.
The Saint raised his eyebrows.
“Really? Was he drunk, or did he lend the divisional surgeon a fiver?”
“The offside front wheel of his car came off when he was driving down Park Lane,” said Teal patiently. “He was driving pretty fast, and he swerved into a taxi. He ought to have been killed.”
Featuring the Saint (The Saint Series) Page 17
