The Happy Highwayman (The Saint Series) Read online

  She smiled for the first time, rather faintly. “I haven’t had anything to eat for two days,” she said. “And I haven’t had as much to eat as this all at once for a long time.”

  Simon ordered more coffee, and offered her a cigarette. He put his heels up on the top rung of his stool and leaned his elbows on his knees. She told him her name, but for the moment he didn’t answer with his own.

  “Out of a job?” he asked quietly.

  She shook her head. “Not yet.”

  “You aren’t on a diet by any chance, are you?”

  “Yes. A nice rich diet of doughnuts and coffee, mostly.” She smiled rather wearily at his puzzlement. “I work for Oppenheim.”

  “Doesn’t he pay you?”

  “Oh, yes. But maybe you haven’t heard of him. I’m a dressmaker. I work with fifty other girls in an attic in the East End, making hand-made underwear. We work ten hours a day, six days a week, sewing. If you’re clever and fast you can make four pieces in a day. They pay you two shillings apiece. You can buy them in Brampton Road for a pound or more, but that doesn’t do us any good. I made two pounds twelve shillings last week, but I had to pay the rent for my room.”

  It was Simon Templar’s first introduction to the economics of the sweat-shop, and hardened as he was to the ways of chisellers and profiteers, the cold facts as she stated them made him feel slightly sick at his stomach. He realized that he had been too long in ignorance of the existence of such people as Mr Oppenheim.

  “Do you mean to say he gets people to work for him on those terms?” he said incredulously. “And how is it possible to live on two pounds twelve shillings a week?”

  “Oh, there are always girls who’ll do it if they can’t get anything else. I used to get six pounds a week doing the same work in Kensington, but I was ill for a couple of weeks and they used it as an excuse to let me go. I didn’t have any job at all for three months, and two pounds twelve a week is better than nothing. You learn how to live on it. After a while you get used to being hungry, but when you have to buy shoes or pay bills, and the rent piles up for a few weeks, it doesn’t do you any good.”

  “I seem to have heard of your Mr Oppenheim,” said the Saint thoughtfully. “Didn’t he just pay a quarter of a million pounds for a collection of emeralds?”

  Her lips flickered cynically. “That’s the man. I’ve seen them, too. I’ve been working on his daughter’s trousseau because I’ve got more experience of better class work than the other girls, and I’ve been going to the house to fit it. It’s just one of those things that makes you feel like shooting people sometimes.”

  “You’ve been in the house, have you?” he said, even more thoughtfully. “And you’ve seen these emeralds?” He stopped himself, and drew smoke from his cigarette to trickle it thoughtfully back across the counter. When he turned to her again, his dark reckless face held only the same expression of friendly interest that it had held before.

  “Where are you going to sleep tonight?”

  She shrugged.

  “I don’t know. You see, I owe three weeks’ rent now, and they won’t let me in until I pay it. I expect I’ll take a stroll down to the Embankment.”

  “It’s healthy enough, but a bit draughty.” He smiled at her suddenly, with disarming frankness. “Look here, what would you say if I suggested that we wander around to a little place by here where I can get you a room? It’s quiet and clean, and I don’t live there. But I’d like to do something for you. Stay there tonight and meet me for dinner tomorrow, and let’s talk it over.”

  She met him the following evening, and he had to do very little more than keep his ears open to learn everything that he wanted to know.

  “They’re in Oppenheim’s study—on the first floor. His daughter’s room is next door to it, and the walls aren’t very thick. He was showing them to her yesterday afternoon when I was there. He has a big safe in the study, but he doesn’t keep the emeralds in it. I heard him boasting about how clever he was.

  “He said, ‘Anybody who came in looking for the emeralds would naturally think they’d be in the safe, and they’d get to work on it at once. It’d take them a long time to open it, which, would give us plenty of chances to catch them, but anyhow they’d be disappointed. They’d never believe that I had a quarter of a million pounds’ worth of emeralds just tucked away behind a row of books on a shelf. Even the man from the detective agency doesn’t know it—he thinks the safe is what he’s got to look after.’”

  “So they have a private detective on the job, have they?” said the Saint.

  “Yes. A man from Ingerbeck’s goes in at seven every evening and stays till the servants are up in the morning. The butler’s a pretty tough-looking customer himself, so I suppose Oppenheim thinks the house is safe enough in his hands in the day time…Why do you want to know all this?”

  She looked at him with an unexpected clearness of understanding.

  “Is that what you meant when you said you’d like to do something about me? Did you think you could do it if you got hold of those emeralds?”

  The Saint lighted a cigarette with a steady and unhurried hand, and then his blue eyes came back to her face for a moment before he answered with a very quiet and calculating directness.

  “That was more or less my idea,” he said calmly.

  She was neither shocked nor frightened. She studied him with a sober and matter-of-fact attention as if they were discussing where she might find another job, but a restrained intenseness with which he thought he could sympathize came into her voice.

  “I couldn’t call anybody a criminal who did that,” she said. “He really deserves to lose them. I believe I’d be capable of robbing him myself if I knew how to go about it. Have you ever done anything like that before?”

  “I have had a certain amount of experience,” Simon admitted mildly. “You may have read about me. I’m called the Saint.”

  “You? You’re pulling my leg.” She stared at him, and the amused disbelief in her face changed slowly into a weakening incredulity. “But you might be. I saw a photograph once…Oh, if you only were! I’d help you to do it—I wouldn’t care what it cost.”

  “You can help me by telling me everything you can remember about Oppenheim’s household and how it works.”

  She had been there several times, and there were many useful things she’d remembered, which his skilful questioning helped to bring out. They went down into the back of his mind and stayed there while he talked about other things. The supremely simple, obvious, and impeccable solution came to him a full two hours later, when they were dancing on a small packed floor off Shaftesbury Avenue.

  He took her back to their table as the three-piece orchestra expired, lighted a cigarette, and announced serenely, “It’s easy. I know just how Mr Oppenheim is going to lose his emeralds.”

  “How?”

  “They have a man in from Ingerbeck’s at night, don’t they? And he has the run of the place while everybody else is asleep. They give him breakfast in the morning when the servants get up, and then he takes a cigar and goes home. Well, the same thing can happen just once more. The guy from Ingerbeck’s comes in, stays the night, and goes home. Not the usual guy, because he’s sick or been run over by a truck or something. Some other guy. And when this other guy goes home, he can pull emeralds out of every pocket.”

  Her mouth opened a little. “You mean you’d do that?”

  “Sure. Apart from the fact that I don’t like your Mr Oppenheim, it seems to me that with a quarter of a million’s worth of emeralds, one could do a whole lot of amusing things which Oppenheim would never dream of. To a bloke with my imagination—”

  “But when would you do it?”

  He looked at his watch mechanically.

  “Eventually—why not now? Or at least this evening.” He was almost mad enough to consider it, but he restrained himself. “But I’m afraid it might be asking for trouble. It’ll probably take me a day or two to find out a few more things to
get organized to keep him out of the way on the night I want to go in. I should think you could call it a date for Friday.”

  She nodded with a queer childish gravity.

  “I believe you’d do it. You sound very sure of everything. But what would you do with the emeralds after you got them?”

  “I expect we could trade them in for a couple of hot dogs—maybe more.”

  “You couldn’t sell them.”

  “There are ways and means.”

  “You couldn’t sell stones like that. I’m sure you couldn’t. Everything in a famous collection like that would be much too well known. If you took them into a dealer he’d recognize them at once, and then you’d be arrested.”

  The Saint smiled. It has never been concealed from the lynx-eyed student of these chronicles that Simon Templar had his own very human weaknesses, and one of these was a deplorable lack of resistance to the temptation to display his unique knowledge of the devious ways of crime, like a peddler spreading his wares in the marketplace, before a suitably impressed and admiring audience.

  “Not very far from here, in Bond Street,” he said, “there’s a little bar where you can find the biggest fence in England any evening between six and eight o’clock. He’ll take anything you like to offer him across the table, and pay top prices for it. You could sell him the Crown Jewels if you had them. If I borrow Oppenheim’s emeralds on Friday night I’ll be rid of them by dinner time Saturday. And then we’ll meet for a celebration and see where you’d like to go for a holiday.”

  He was in high spirits when he took her home much later to the lodging house where he had found her a room the night before. There was one virtue in the indulgence of his favourite vice; talking over the details of a coup which he was freshly planning in his mind helped him to crystallize and elaborate his own ideas, gave him a charge of confidence, and optimistic energy from which the final strokes of action sprung as swiftly and accurately as bullets out of a gun.

  When he said good night to her he felt as serene and exhilarated in spirit as if the Vanderwoude emeralds were already his own. He was in such good spirits that he had walked a block from the lodging house before he remembered that he had left her without trying to induce her to take some money for her immediate needs, and without making any arrangement to meet her again.

  He turned and walked back. Coincidence, an accident of time involving only a matter of seconds, had made incredible differences to his life before. This, he realized later, was only another of those occasions when an overworked guardian angel seemed to play with the clock to save him from disaster.

  The dimly lighted desert of the hall was surrounded by dense oases of potted palms, and one of these obstructions was in a direct line from the front door, so that anyone who entered quietly might easily remain unnoticed until he had circumnavigated this clump of shrubbery.

  The Saint, who from the ingrained habit of years of dangerous living moved silently without conscious effort, was just preparing to step around this divinely inspired decoration when he heard someone speaking in the hall and caught the sound of a name which stopped him dead in his tracks. The name was Corrio.

  Simon stood securely hidden behind the fronds of imported vegetation, and listened for as long as he dared to some of the most interesting lines of dialogue which he had ever overheard.

  When he had heard enough, he slipped out again as quietly as he had come in, and went home without disturbing Janice Dixon. He would get in touch with her the next day: for the moment he had something much more urgent to occupy his mind.

  It is possible that even Inspector Corrio’s smugness might have been shaken if he had known about this episode of unpremeditated eavesdropping, but this unpleasant knowledge was hidden from him. His elastic self-esteem had taken no time at all to recover from the effects of Teal’s reprimand. And when Mr Teal happened to meet him on a certain Friday afternoon he looked as offensively sleek and self-satisfied as he had always been. It was beyond Teal’s limits of self-denial to let the occasion go by without making the use of it to which he felt he was entitled.

  “I believe Oppenheim has still got his emeralds,” he remarked, with a certain feline joviality.

  Inspector Corrio’s glossy surface was unscratched.

  “Don’t be surprised if he doesn’t keep them much longer,” he said. “And don’t blame me if the Saint gets away with it. I gave you the tip once, and you wouldn’t listen.”

  “Yes, you gave me the tip,” Teal agreed benevolently. “When are you going out to Hollywood to play Sherlock Holmes?”

  “Maybe it won’t be so long now,” Corrio said darkly. “Paragon Pictures are pretty interested in me—apparently one of their executives happened to see me playing the lead in our last show at the Ponders End Playhouse, and they want me to take a screen test.”

  Mr Teal grinned evilly.

  “You’re too late,” he said. “They’ve already made a picture of Little Women.”

  He had reason to regret some of his jibes the next morning, when news came in that every single one of Mr Oppenheim’s emeralds had been removed from its hiding place and taken out of the house, quietly, and without any fuss, in the pockets of a detective of whom the Ingerbeck agency had never heard.

  They had, they said, been instructed by telephone that afternoon to discontinue the service, and the required written confirmation had arrived a few hours later, written on Mr Oppenheim’s own flowery letterhead and signed with what they firmly believed to be his signature. Nobody had been more surprised and indignant than they were when Mr Oppenheim, on the verge of an apoplectic fit, had rung up Mr Ingerbeck himself and demanded to know how many more crooks they had on their payroll and what the “blank blank” they proposed to do about it.

  The impostor had arrived at the house at the usual hour in the evening, explained that the regular man had been taken ill, and presented the necessary papers to accredit himself. He had been left all night in the study, and let out at breakfast time according to the usual custom. When he went out he was worth a quarter of a million pounds as he stood up. He was, according to the butler’s rather hazy description, a tallish man with horn-rimmed glasses and a thick crop of red hair.

  “That red hair and glasses is all nonsense,” said Corrio, who was in Chief Inspector Teal’s office when the news came in. “Just an ordinary wig and a pair of frames from any optician’s. It was the Saint all right—you can see his style right through it. What did I tell you?”

  “What the devil do you think you can tell me?” Teal roared back at him. Then he subdued himself. “Anyway, you’re crazy. The Saint’s out of business.”

  Corrio shrugged.

  “Would you like me to take the case, sir?”

  “What, you?” Mr Teal disrobed a wafer of chewing gum with the same distaste with which he might have undressed Inspector Corrio. “I’ll take the case myself.” He glowered at Corrio thoughtfully for a moment. “Well, if you know so much about it you can come along with me. And we’ll see how clever you are.”

  It was a silent journey, for Teal was too full of a vague sort of wrath to speak, and Corrio seemed quite content to sit in a corner and finger his silky moustache with an infuriatingly tranquil air of being quite well satisfied with the forthcoming opportunity of demonstrating his own brilliance.

  In the house they found a scene of magnificent confusion. There was the butler, who seemed to be getting blamed for having admitted the thief. There was a representative of Ingerbeck’s whose temper appeared to be fraying rapidly under the flood of wild accusations which Oppenheim was flinging at him. There was a very suave and imperturbable official of the insurance company which had covered the jewels.

  And there was Mr Oppenheim himself, a short, fat, yellow-faced man, dancing about like an agitated marionette, shaking his fists in an ecstasy of rage, screaming at the top of his voice, and accusing everybody in sight of crimes and perversions which would have been worth at least five hundred years at Dartmoor if they could h
ave been proved.

  Teal and Corrio had to listen while he unburdened his soul again from the beginning.

  “And now what you think?” he wound up. “These dirty crooks, this insurance company, they say they don’t pay anything. They say they repudiate the policy. Just because I tried to keep the emeralds where they couldn’t be found, instead of leaving them in a safe that anyone can open.”

  “The thing is,” explained the official of the insurance company, with his own professional brand of unruffled unctuousness, “that Mr Oppenheim has failed to observe the conditions of the policy. It was issued on the express understanding that if the emeralds were to be kept in the house, they were to be kept in this safe and guarded by a detective from some recognized agency. Neither of these stipulations have been complied with, and in the circumstances—!”

  “It’s a dirty swindle!” shrieked Oppenheim. “What do I care about your insurance company? I will cancel all my policies. I’ll buy up your insurance company and throw you out in the street to starve. I’ll offer my own reward for the emeralds. I will pay a hundred—I mean five thousand pounds to the man who brings back my jewels!”

  “Have you put that in writing yet?” asked Inspector Corrio quickly.

  “No. But I’ll do so at once. Bah! I will show these dirty double-crossing crooks.”

  He whipped out his fountain pen and scurried over to the desk.

  “Here, wait a minute,” said Teal, but Oppenheim paid no attention to him. Teal turned to Corrio. “I suppose you have to be sure of the reward before you start showing us how clever you are,” he said nastily.

  “No, sir. But we have to consider the theory that the robbery might have been committed with that in mind. Emeralds like those would be difficult to dispose of profitably. I can only think of one fence in London who’d handle a package of stuff like that.”

  “Then why don’t you pull him in?” snapped Teal unanswerably.

  “Because I’ve never had enough evidence. But I’ll take up that angle this afternoon.”