It was on one of those golden days in early autumn that Simon Templar drove out to Marlow, that pleasantly placid village on the Thames made famous by Izaak Walton, the first of all fishing pundits, in The Compleat Angler, to take Mrs Penelope Lynch out to lunch. He had met her only a few days before, in London, at a small and highly informal party to celebrate the seventh anniversary of a couple who have no other part in this story, and when he found out where she lived there had been the inevitable comparing of notes on places of interest in the neighborhood.
“Do you know my old pal Giulio Trapani at Skindle’s?” he asked.
“Of course. We often used to go there. But for a smaller place, with more of a country-pub atmosphere, do you know the King’s Arms at Cookham?”
“No, but I’ve been to the Crown, where they have wonderful home-made pasties.”
“Yes, I’ve had them. But one day you must try the steak-and-kidney pie at the King’s Arms. Mrs Baker makes it herself, and it’s the best I know anywhere—if you like steak-and-kidney pie.”
“I love it.” This was a natural opening that could hardly be passed by. “Would you like to show it to me sometime?”
“Don’t make that too definite, or you might find yourself stuck with it.”
“How about next Sunday?”
“That would be perfect. In fact, since I’m a working girl, it’s about the only day.”
He guessed her age at about twenty six, and had learned that she was a widow—her husband had been the export manager of a manufacturing firm in Slough, who had taken an overdose of sleeping pills when he learned that he had lung cancer about six months ago. That was all he knew about her, aside from what his eyes told him, which was that she had short chestnut hair and a short nose, a wide brow, and a wide mouth that smiled very easily, the ingredients combining into a gay gamin look which formed an intriguing counterpoint to her sensuously modelled figure. To a true connoisseur of feminine attractions, which the Saint candidly confessed himself to be, she had an allure that was far more captivating than most conventional forms of pulchritude, and that was rare enough to demand at least a better acquaintance.
She was ready when he arrived, in a tweed skirt and a cardigan over a simple blouse, and sensible suede shoes, and she said, “I’m glad you’re early, because it’ll give us time to walk over instead of driving. That is, if you won’t think that’s too frighteningly hearty. It’s only about four miles.”
“I’m glad to know you’re so healthy,” he grinned. “Most girls these days would think a fellow was an unchivalrous cad if he suggested walking around the block. But it’s such a beautiful day, it’d be a shame not to take advantage of it.”
Her house was near the southern end of the village, a tiled and half-timbered doll’s-house with a walled garden that needed tidying but was still a carnival of color. They walked down a lane to the main road and across the bridge, then took a secondary fork to the end of the flat land, hair-pinned up through Quarry Wood, and then branched off the pavement altogether to follow a well-worn footpath that rambled along the side of the slope around Winter Hill. The leaves which had fallen into a carpet underfoot had left myriad lacy openings in the canopy overhead through which the light came with fragmented brilliance, and the air was delicately perfumed with the damp scents of bark and foliage.
“Thank you for doing this,” she said, after a while during which their flimsy acquaintance had been warming and easing through the exchange of trivialities not worth recording and the sense of companionship in sharing an uncomplicated pleasure. “I can see from your tan that you must be out of doors so much that you don’t have to think about it, but it means a lot to me after being cooped up in an office all week.”
“What sort of work do you do?”
“You’d never guess.”
“Then I won’t try.”
“I’m secretary to a sort of horse-racing tipster. Or a kind of horse-playing service.”
“That’s certainly a bit out of the ordinary. How does it operate?”
“People give this man money to bet with, like an investment, and he sends them dividends from his profits.”
“He really does?”
“Oh, yes. Every month.”
And suddenly, in a flash, the pleasure of the walk was no longer uncomplicated. The air was the same, the loveliness of the leaf-tones and the dappled light were the same, but something else had intruded that was as out of place there as a neon bulb.
“It sounds interesting,” said the Saint cautiously. “Where do you do this?”
“In Maidenhead, which is quite convenient. Much better than having to go into London. And it came along just in time. When my husband died”—he liked the way she didn’t hesitate before the word, or after it, “I was left practically broke, except for the cottage with the usual mortgage. He made a good salary, but we’d had a good time with it and hardly saved anything. And no insurance. It was when he went to take out a policy that they found out he had cancer. I thought I was going to have to sell the cottage and move into a little flat in town and look for a job there, which I’d’ve hated, so this was almost like a miracle.”
“People always will believe in miracles, I suppose.”
“Well, perhaps I’m exaggerating. It wasn’t quite the same as hearing that I’d inherited a couple of million from some distant relative that I’d never heard of.”
“Or winning the Irish Sweep, or one of those fabulous football pools, I guess those are the simplest fantasies that most people who aren’t millionaires have played with at one time or another. What would rank after that? Messing about with an old bureau and finding a secret compartment full of jewels? Stumbling over a suitcase full of cash that some bank robbers had dropped during their getaway? But that wouldn’t be so easy to be dishonest about as you might think, unless you were fairly well-heeled already: somebody might get curious about how you became so rich overnight. No, I suppose some fast scheme to beat the stock market, the casinos, or the bookies, would be the next most popular get-rich-quick gimmick.”
They walked on for a while in silence.
“What you’re trying to say,” she accused him at last, rather stiffly, “is that you think I’m in something crooked.”
“I don’t say that you’re an accomplice,” he replied calmly. “But I’d want a lot of convincing that some day the police aren’t going to be looking for your boss.”
“That’s what I’ve been afraid of,” she said. “That’s why I made Anne and Hilton promise to introduce us as soon as you came to England, when they happened to mention that they knew you.”
He looked at her admiringly.
“A conniving female!” he said. “And I liked you so much because you never asked any of the usual silly questions about my life as the Saint and so forth.”
“I was afraid if I did you’d be too leery of letting me get you alone.”
“So you had this date all planned before you let me think I thought of it.”
“Worse than that. I might have tried to drag you out on this walk even if it’d been pouring with rain.”
The path had come down again from under the trees to curve inside the bend of the river. Ahead and to one side there were three green mounds that must have been ancient tumuli, and farther off yet the ridge of a railway embankment cut across a marshy stretch of lowland. From the place where Penelope Lynch stopped, pointing through a chance gap in an intervening coppice, could be seen close up against the embankment a wooden shack with a tar-paper roof, a rectangular box perhaps ten feet long which might once have been built to shelter a maintenance crew or their tools, with a door at one end and a single small window in one side. It was occupied Simon realized from a thin wisp of smoke that curled up from a stovepipe projecting through the roof, and as he gazed at it puzzledly, wondering why Penelope was showing it to him, a man came out with a bucket.
He wore a brown pullover and dark trousers loosely tucked into rubber knee-boots. He was broad-shouldered
and a little paunchy, and he moved with the plodding deliberation of a farm laborer rather than a construction worker. At that distance, even the Saint’s keen eyes could not make out much more than that he had plentiful gray hair and a ruddy complexion. He carried the pail a few yards from the hut, emptied it on the ground, and plodded back inside.
“My boss,” Penelope said.
Simon had to hold back the stereotyped “You’re kidding!” because it was perfectly obvious from her expression that she wasn’t. Instead, he said with determined nonchalance, “It’s nice to see a man who hasn’t been spoiled by success, still living the simple life.”
“He used to be our gardener,” Penelope said.
The Saint clung doggedly to his composure.
“Democracy is a wonderful thing,” he remarked, as they resumed their walk. “And you may get a medal from some bleeding-heart committee for being so cheerful about changing places. But not for your story-telling technique. I’ve heard of quite nice girls getting their pretty heads bashed in with blunt instruments because they tantalized someone a lot less than you’ve already done to me.”
“All right,” she said. “If you’ll forgive me for trapping you like this. But I couldn’t think of any other way to do it. It’s such a fantastic story…”
It was.
It began when she told the gardener, whose name was Tom Gull, that she couldn’t afford to keep him on any longer, and that in any case she was going to have to put the house on the market and move away.
This was nothing like casting a faithful old retainer out to starve, for he only came one day a week, and served five other houses within a few miles’ radius on the same basis. She had known nothing else about him except that he had knocked on the door one morning and announced that the garden looked as if it needed attention and he had a day to spare. He was unkempt and unshaven and smelled strongly of beer, but in those days gardeners were as hard to find as any other household help, and after a trial she had let him become a weekly fixture. He was not exactly an artist at his craft, nor did he ever risk injuring himself from over-exertion, but he was better than nothing, and both she and her husband were glad to be relieved of some chores for which neither of them happened to have any inclination.
He took his dismissal phlegmatically, but at the end of the day he came back with a proposition.
“I’ve got something ’ere, ma’m,” he said, extracting a grubby and much-folded piece of paper from his pocket. “It needs correcting my spelling an’ putting in good English, an’ typing out neat an’ proper. I know you’ve got a typewriter, ’cos I’ve ’eard you using it. Do you think you could ’elp me out?”
“Of course, I’ll be glad to,” she said, feeling some kind of obligation because of the employment she had just taken away from him.
“I wouldn’t ask you to do it for nothink,” he said. “You fix it up for me, an’ I’ll give you a bit more work in the garden.”
She had protested that that wasn’t necessary, but after she had done the job she was not so sure.
As deciphered and edited by her, the document finally ran:
YOU CAN BEAT THE BOOKIES!
But not by studying the form book! The professionals who set the handicaps are much better at that than you, and in theory they should make every race end in a dead heat, but how often do they do it?
And not by following “information!” who knows what secret plans have been made for every horse in a race?
The only method which can show a steady profit in the long run is a coldly mechanical mathematical method which will scientifically eliminate the element of chance. In other words, a System.
Now, I know there are dozens of systems on the market, but it should be obvious that none of them can really be any good. If it were, the news would finally get around, and everybody would be using it, and all the bookies would be broke.
But after a lifetime of study I have developed and tested and proved a system which is infallible—which points out winner after winner, week after week, year after year!
Obviously, this system is not for sale. Even if I charged £100 for it, somebody would buy it and turn around and sell copies to 200 other people for £5 each, and I should be left out in the cold.
I dare not even disclose the names of the horses indicated by the System, because after studying them for a while someone else might be clever enough to deduce the method by which they were found. And in any case, if people all over the country were backing these horses and telling their friends, the prices would come down until they all started at odds on, and there would be nothing in it for anybody.
What I will do is operate the System myself for a limited number of clients who will invest in units of £100 with me, to be staked entirely at my discretion, from which I Guarantee to pay monthly dividends of £5 per unit.
Where else can you buy such an income at such a price?
Don’t delay! Send me your Cash today!
TOM GULL
116 WATKINS STREET, MAIDENHEAD, BERKS
The Saint read it as it appeared in print, on a page torn from The Sportsman’s Guide which she gave him, and was profoundly awed.
“I’ve seen some fancy boob-bait in my time,” he said, “but this is about the most preposterous pitch I think I’ve ever come across. Don’t tell me that anyone actually falls for it.”
“They’ve been doing it ever since the first advertisement came out.”
It was she who had found the one-room office and furnished it, on Gull’s insistence that the service was worth a good week’s pay and that he would have to get someone to do it in any case.
“Ain’t no use me going to see the agents,” he said. “The way I look an’ the way I talk, they wouldn’t want to rent me anythink. An’ I don’t know wot you oughter ’ave in an office to run this job proper. But I can pay for it.” He dug into his trousers and brought out a fistful of crumpled currency.
“’Ere—take this, an’ let me know if you need any more. I got a bit put away, wot I bin saving up till I was ready to start this business.”
“If your system is so perfect, why don’t you just work it for your own benefit?” she argued.
“Because it needs plenty o’ capital, more ’n I could save up,” he said seriously. “You got to ’ave reserves to see you through the losing runs, but if you keep going you can’t ’elp winning in the end. So I got to ’ave share’olders, just like Woolworth’s.”
When the office was ready and the first advertisements had been placed, he had worked up to his culminating offer.
“I got to ’ave someone in the office answering letters an’ all that. I wouldn’t be much good at that meself, an’ besides I better ’ang on to me gardening jobs till I see ’ow many share’olders I get. An’ after that I’ll ’ave to be going to the races or the betting shops every day, making the bets.”
“But suppose you didn’t get any answers?”
“Then we pack up an’ go ’ome. That’s my little gamble. But we’ll worry about that when it ’appens. I know you got to find a job, an’ if you ain’t too proud to take my money I’d be much obliged if you’d give it a try.”
She had finally consented, not without a guilty feeling that she was helping him to throw away the last of his life’s savings, but justifying herself with the thought that since he was stubbornly determined to go through with it she might as well take the job as let anyone else have it. She never dreamed that there would be such a response as she found herself coping with.
In the first week, five of the coupons which concluded the advertisement were returned, each accompanied by £100 in cash. In the second week there were ten, and Tom Gull went with her to a bank and opened an account. In the third week she banked £1600, and Mr Gull showed up with a shave and a clean shirt and announced that he was going to begin working his System. The following Friday, after she had banked another £1400 for that week, he came in smelling more strongly of liquor and pulling packages of five-pound notes from
every pocket.
“Not a bad start,” he said. “Now we got to do somethink about paying them dividends.”
He turned down her suggestion of writing checks, on the grounds that since their investments had been made in cash they were entitled to dividends in the same form, and that some people in such circumstances as he had been in himself not long ago might have difficulty in cashing a check. He had her address envelopes to all the subscribers, in which he would put the fivers they were entitled to, and which he would take to the post office himself.
“Not that I don’t trust you,” he said. “But if I post ’em meself, if there’s ever any question, I can swear that everyone’s bin paid.”
So it had gone on ever since, with new investors enrolling at a rate of between twelve and twenty a week, besides additional £100 units sent in by presumably satisfied earlier subscribers. And each week Mr Gull (as she was now used to calling him) displayed thick wads of winnings he also allowed her to bank, except for what had to be set aside once a month for the payment of dividends, and the thousand pounds which he carried for “operating capital.”
When she suggested that it would be safer for him to open credit accounts with bookmakers, he shook his head.
“Them chaps are all in league,” he said darkly. “They’d soon catch on to wot I was doing, an’ then they’d all close my accounts. They might even put me in ’ospital to get even. I make my bets on the courses, picking different bookies every time, or sometimes on the tote, or goin’ around the betting shops in London—there’s ’undreds of ’em to choose from, so nobody ’as a chance to get to know me.”
The names and addresses of the subscribers were kept in a card index in the office, and also in a loose-leaf pocket address book which he bought himself and brought in twice a week for her to enter the latest additions. Against each of the names in this private list he made cryptic marks of his own. Altogether, there were now more than 200 members of this extraordinary syndicate, and a total of almost £30,000 had been invested. At which point Mr Gull told her to stop the advertisements, and the flow of funds abruptly dried up. “He told me it was as much as he could handle,” Penelope said, “and if he had to make his bets any bigger he wouldn’t be able to spread them around inconspicuously.”
The Saint in the Sun (The Saint Series) Page 7
