The Saint Intervenes (The Saint Series) Read online

  A discreet knock on his door, heralding the end of thought and the beginning of action, was almost a relief. His new secretary entered in answer to his curt summons, and his eyes rested on her slim figure for a moment with unalloyed pleasure—she was a remarkably beautiful girl with natural honey-golden hair and entrancing blue eyes which in Mr Oates’s dreams had been known to gaze with Dietrich-esque yearning upon his unattractive person.

  “Mr Hammel and Mr Costello are here,” she said.

  Mr Oates beamed.

  “Bring them in, my dear.” He rummaged thoughtfully through his pockets and produced a crumpled five-pound note, which he pushed towards her. “And buy yourself some silk stockings when you go out to lunch—just as a little gift from me. You’ve been a good gal. Some night next week, when I’m not working so hard, we might have dinner together, eh?”

  “Thank you, Mr Oates,” she said softly, and left him with a sweet smile which started strange wrigglings within him.

  When they had dinner together he would make her call him Titus, he thought, and rubbed his hands over the romantic prospect. But before that happy night he had much to do, and the entrance of Hammel and Costello brought him back to the stern consideration of how that dinner and many others, with silk stockings and orchids to match, were to be paid for.

  Mr John Hammel was a small rotund gentleman whose rimless spectacles gave him a benign and owlish appearance, like somebody’s very juvenile uncle. Mr Costello was longer and much more cadaverous, and he wore a pencil-line of hair across his upper-lip with a certain undercurrent of self-consciousness which might have made one think that he went about in the constant embarrassing fear of being mistaken for Clark Gable. Actually their resemblance to any such harmless characters was illusory—they were nearly as cunning as Mr Oates himself, and not even a trifle less unscrupulous.

  “Well, boys,” said Mr Oates, breaking the ice jovially, “I found another good thing last night.”

  “Buy or sell?” asked Costello alertly.

  “Buy,” said Mr Oates. “I bought it. As far as I can find out, there are only about a dozen in the world. The issue was corrected the day after it came out.”

  Hammel helped himself to a cigar and frowned puzzledly.

  “What is this?”

  “A German five-pfennig with the “Befreiungstag” overprint inverted and spelt with a ‘P’ instead of a ‘B,’ ” explained Mr Oates. “That’s a stamp you could get a hundred pounds for any day.”

  His guests exchanged tolerant glances. While they lighted their Partagas they allowed Mr Oates to expatiate on the beauties of his acquisition with all the extravagant zeal of the rabid collector, but as soon as the smokes were going Costello recalled the meeting to its agenda.

  “Well,” he said casually, “Midorients are down to 25.”

  “24,” said Mr Oates. “I rang up my brokers just before you came in and told them to sell another block. They’ll be down to 23 or 22 after lunch. We’ve shifted them pretty well.”

  “When do we start buying?” asked Hammel.

  “At 22. And you’ll have to do it quickly. The wires are being sent off at lunch-time tomorrow, and the news will be in the papers before the Exchange closes.”

  Mr Oates paced the floor steadily, marshalling the facts of the situation for an audience which was already conversant with them.

  The Midorient Company owned large and unproductive concessions in Mesopotamia. Many years ago its fields had flowed with seemingly inexhaustible quantities of oil of excellent quality, and the stock had paid its original holders several thousand times over. But suddenly, on account of those abstruse and unpredictable geological causes to which such things are subject, the supply had petered out. Frenzied drilling had failed to produce results. The output had dropped to a paltry few hundred barrels which sufficed to pay dividends of two per cent on the stock—no more, and, as a slight tempering of the wind to the shorn stockholders, no less. The shares had adjusted their market value accordingly. Drilling had continued ever since, without showing any improvement, and indeed the shares had depreciated still further during the past fortnight as a result of persistent rumours that even the small output which had for a long while saved the stock from becoming entirely derelict was drying up—rumours which, as omniscient chroniclers of these events, we are able to trace back to the ingenious agency of Mr Titus Oates.

  That was sufficient to send the moribund stock down to the price at which Messrs Oates, Costello, and Hammel desired to buy it. The boom on which they would make their profit called for more organization, and involved the slight deception on which Mr Oates was basing his gamble.

  Travelling in Mesopotamia at that moment there was an English tourist named Ischolskov, and it is a matter of importance that he was there entirely at Mr Oates’s instigation and expense. During his visit he had contrived to learn the names of the correspondents of the important newspapers and news agencies in that region, and at the appointed time it would be his duty to send off similarly worded cablegrams, signed with the names of these correspondents, which would report to London that the Midorient Company’s engineers had struck oil again—had, in fact, tapped a gigantic gusher of petroleum that would make the first phenomenal output of the Midorient Oil Fields look like the dribbling of a baby on its bib.

  “Let’s see,” said Mr Oates, “this is Tuesday. We buy today and tomorrow morning at 22 or even less. The shares start to go up tomorrow afternoon. They will go up more on Thursday. By Friday morning they ought to be around 45—they might even go to 50. They’ll hang fire there. The first boom will be over, and people will be waiting for more information.”

  “What about the directors?” queried Hammel.

  “They’ll get a wire too, of course, signed by the manager on the spot. And don’t forget I’m a director. Every penny I have is tied up in that company—it’s my company, lock, stock, and barrel. They’ll call a special meeting, and I know exactly what they’re going to do about it. Of course they’ll cable the manager for more details, but I can arrange to see that his reply doesn’t get through to them before Friday lunch.”

  Costello fingered his wispy moustache.

  “And we sell out on Friday morning,” he said.

  Mr Oates nodded emphatically.

  “We do more than sell out. We sell short, and unload twice as much stock as we’re holding. The story’ll get all over England over the week-end, and when the Exchange opens on Monday morning the shares’ll be two a penny. We make our profit both ways.”

  “It’s a big risk,” said Hammel seriously.

  “Well, I’m taking it for you, ain’t I?” said Mr Oates. “All you have to do is to help me to spread the buying and selling about, so it don’t look too much like a one-man deal. I’m standing to take all the knocks. But it can’t go wrong. I’ve used Ischolskov before—I’ve got too much on him for him to try and double-cross me, and besides he’s getting paid plenty. My being on the Midorient board makes it watertight. I’m taken in the same as the rest of ’em, and I’m hit as hard as they are. You’re doing all the buying and selling from now on—there won’t be a single deal in my name that anyone can prove against me. And whatever happens, don’t sell till I give you the wire. I’ll be the first to know when the crash is coming, and we’ll hold out till the last moment.”

  They talked for an hour longer, after which they went out to a belated but celebratory lunch.

  Mr Oates left his office early that afternoon, and therefore he did not even think of the movements of his new secretary when she went home. But if he had been privileged to observe them, he would have been very little wiser, for Mr Oates was one of the numerous people who knew the Saint only by name, and if he had seen the sinewy sunburned man who met her at Piccadilly Circus and bore her off for a cocktail he might have suffered a pang of jealousy, but he would have had no cause for alarm.

  “We must have Bollinger champagne cocktail, Pat,” said the Saint, when they were settled in Oddenino’s.
“The occasion calls for one. There’s a wicked look in your eye that tells me you have some news. Have you sown a few more wild Oates?”

  “Must you?” she protested weakly.

  “Shall we get him an owl?” Simon suggested.

  “What for?” asked Patricia unguardedly.

  “It would be rather nice,” said the Saint reflectively, “to get Titus an owl.”

  Patricia Holm shuddered.

  Over the cocktails and stuffed olives, however, she relented.

  “It’s started,” she said. “Hammel and Costello had a long conference after lunch, but I’d heard enough before they went out.”

  She told him every detail of the discussion that had taken place in Mr Titus Oates’s private office, and Simon Templar smiled approval as he listened. Taken in conjunction with what he already knew, the summaries of various other conversations which she had reported to him, it left him with the whole structure of the conspiracy clearly catalogued in his mind.

  “You must remember to take that microphone out of his office first thing in the morning,” he remarked. “It might spoil things if Titus came across it, and I don’t think you’ll need to listen any more…Here, where did you get that from?”

  “From sowing my wild Oates,” said Patricia angelically, as the waitress departed with a five-pound note on her tray.

  Simon Templar regarded her admiringly.

  “Darling,” he said at length, “there are no limits to your virtues. If you’re as rich as it appears, you can not only buy me some more Bollinger, but you can take me to dinner at the Caprice as well.”

  On the way to the restaurant he bought an Evening Standard and opened it at the table.

  “Midorients closed at 21,” he said. “It looks as if we shall have to name a ward in our Old Age Home for Retired Burglars after Comrade Oates.”

  “How much shall we make if we buy and sell with him?” asked the girl.

  The Saint smiled.

  “I’m afraid we should lose a lot of money,” he said. “You see, Titus isn’t going to sell.”

  She stared at him, mystified, and he closed the menu and laughed at her silently.

  “Did you by any chance hear Titus boasting about a stamp he bought for his collection last night?” he asked, and she nodded. “Well, old darling, I’m the guy who sold it to him. I never thought I should sink to philatelism even in my dotage, but in this case it seemed the best way to work. Titus is already convinced that I’m the greatest stamp-sleuth in captivity, and when he hears about the twopenny blue Mauritius I’ve discovered for him he will be fairly purring through the town. I don’t see any reason why our Mr Oates should go unpunished for his sins and make a fortune out of this low swindle. He collects stamps, but I’ve got an even better hobby. I collect queer friends.” The Saint was lighting a cigarette, and his blue eyes danced over the match. “Now listen carefully while I tell you the next move.”

  Mr Wallington Titus Oates was gloating fruitily over the closing prices on the Friday evening when his telephone bell rang.

  He had reason to gloat. The news story provided by the cablegrams of Mr Ischolskov had been so admirably worded that it had hit the front page of every afternoon edition the previous day and a jumpy market had done the rest. The results exceeded his most optimistic estimates. On the Wednesday night Midorients had closed at 32, and dealings in the street had taken them up to 34. They opened on Thursday morning at 38, and went to 50 before noon. One lunch edition ran a special topical article on fortunes made in oil, the sun shone brilliantly, England declared for 537 for six wickets in the first Test, all the brokers and jobbers felt happy, and Midorients finally went to 61 at the close. Moreover, in the evening paper which Mr Oates was reading there could not be found a breath of suspicion directed against the news which had caused the boom. The Midorient directors had issued a statement declaring that they were awaiting further details, that their manager on the spot was a reliable man not given to hysterical exaggerations, and that for the moment they were satisfied that prosperity had returned to an oilfield which, they pointed out, had merely been suffering a temporary set-back. Mr Oates had had much to do with the wording of the statement himself, and if it erred somewhat on the side of optimism, the error could not by any stretch of imagination have been described as criminal misrepresentation.

  And when Mr Oates picked up his receiver and heard what it had to say, his cup was filled to overflowing.

  “I’ve got you that twopenny blue,” said a voice which he recognized. “It’s a peach! It must be one of the most perfect specimens in existence—and it’ll cost you nine hundred quid!”

  Mr Oates gripped the receiver, and his eyes lighted up with the unearthly fire which illuminates the state of the collector when he sees a coveted trophy within his grasp. It was, in its way, a no less starkly primitive manifestation than the dilating nostrils of a bloodhound on the scent.

  “Where is it?” barked Mr Oates, in the baying voice of the same hound. “When can I see it? Can you bring it over? Have you got it yourself? Where is it?”

  “Well, that’s the snag, Mr Oates,” said the Saint apologetically. “The owner won’t let it go. He won’t even let it out of his safe until it’s paid for. He says he’s got to have a cheque in his pocket before he’ll let me take it away. He’s a crotchety old bird, and I think he’s afraid I might light a cigarette with it or something.”

  Mr Oates fairly quivered with suppressed emotion.

  “Well, where does he live?” he yelped. “I’ll settle him. I’ll go round and see him at once. What’s his name? What’s the address?”

  “His name is Dr Jethero,” Simon answered methodically, “and he lives at 105 Matlock Gardens, Notting Hill. I think you’ll catch him there—I’ve only just left him, and he said nothing about going out.”

  “Dr Jethero—105—Matlock—Gardens—Notting—Hill,” repeated Mr Oates, reaching for a message pad and scribbling frantically.

  “By the way,” said the Saint. “I said he was crotchety, but you may think he’s just potty. He’s got some sort of a bee in his bonnet about people trying to get in and steal his stamp, and he told me that if you want to call and see him you’ve got to give a password.”

  “A password?” bleated Mr Oates.

  “Yes. I told him that everybody knew Titus Oates, but apparently that wasn’t good enough for him. If you go there you’ve got to say, ‘I was whipped from Aldgate to Newgate, and from Newgate to Tyburn.’ Can you remember that?”

  “Of course,” said Mr Oates indignantly. “I know all about that. Titus Oates was an ancestor of mine. Come and see me in the morning, my dear boy—I’ll have a present waiting for you. Good-bye.”

  Mr Oates slammed back the receiver and leapt up as if unleashed. Dithering with ecstasy and excitement, he stuffed his note of the address into his pocket, grabbed a cheque-book, and dashed out into the night.

  The taxi ride to his destination seemed interminable, and when he got there he was in such a state of expectant rapture that he flung the driver a pound note and scurried up the steps without waiting for change. The house was one of those unwieldly Victorian edifices with which the west of London is encumbered against all hopes of modern development, and in the dim street lighting he did not even notice that all the windows were barred, nor would he have been likely to speculate upon the reason for that peculiar feature if he had noticed it.

  The door was opened by a white-coated man, and Mr Oates almost bowled him over as he dashed past him into the hall.

  “I want Dr Jethero,” he bayed. “I’m Titus Oates!”

  The man closed the door and looked at him curiously.

  “Mr Titus Oates, sir?”

  “Yes!” roared the financier impatiently. “Titus Oates. Tell him I was whipped from Aldgate to Newgate, and from Newgate to Tyburn. And hurry up!”

  The man nodded perfunctorily, and edged past him at a cautious distance of which Mr Oates was too wrought up to see the implications.
/>   “Yes, sir. Will you wait in here a moment, sir?”

  Mr Oates was ushered into a barely furnished distempered room and left there. With an effort he fussed himself down to a superficial calm—he was Titus Oates, a power in the City, and he must conduct himself accordingly. Dr Jethero might misunderstand a blundering excitement. If he was crotchety, and perhaps even potty, he must be handled with tact. Mr Oates strode up and down the room, working off his overflow of excitement. There was a faint characteristic flavour of iodoform in the air, but Mr Oates did not even notice that.

  Footsteps sounded along the hall, and the door opened again. This time it admitted a grey-bearded man who also wore a white coat. His keen spectacled eyes examined the financier calmly. Mr Oates mustered all his self-control.

  “I am Titus Oates,” he said with simple dignity.

  The grey-bearded man nodded.

  “You wanted to see me?” he said, and Mr Oates recalled his instructions again.

  “Titus Oates,” he repeated gravely. “I was whipped from Aldgate to Newgate, and from Newgate to Tyburn.”

  Dr Jethero studied him for a moment longer, and glanced towards the door, where the white-coated attendant was waiting unobtrusively—Mr Oates had not even noticed the oddity of that.

  “Yes, yes,” he said soothingly. “And you were pilloried in Palace Yard, weren’t you?”

  “That’s right,” said Mr Oates eagerly. “And outside the Royal Exchange. They put me in prison for life, but they let me out at the Revolution and gave me my pension back.”

  Dr Jethero made clucking noises with his tongue.

  “I see. A very unfortunate business. Would you mind coming this way, Mr Oates?”

  He led the way up the stairs, and Mr Oates followed him blissfully. The whole rigmarole seemed very childish, but if it pleased Dr Jethero, Mr Oates was prepared to go to any lengths to humour him. The white-coated attendant followed Mr Oates. Dr Jethero opened the door of a room on the second floor and stood aside for Mr Oates to pass in. The door had a barred grille in its upper panels through which the interior of the room could be observed from the outside, an eccentricity which Mr Oates was still ready to accept as being in keeping with the character of his host.