The Happy Highwayman (The Saint Series) Page 6

  Simon considered the point. “If you ask me,” he replied at length, “I should say sixteen.”

  The elderly gent’s knobbly face seemed to take on a brighter shade of pink. He clutched the lapels of the Saint’s coat, shaking him slightly in a positive passion of anguish.

  “Flogh ghoglusk,” he pleaded, “klngnt hu ughlgstghnd?”

  Simon shook his head. “No,” he said judiciously, “you’re thinking of weevils.”

  The little man bounced about like a rubber doll. His eyes squinted with a kind of frantic despair.

  “Ogmighogho,” he almost screamed, “klngt hu ughglstghnd? Ik ghln ngmnpp skflghko! Klugt hu hgr? Ik wgnt hlg phnihkln hgrm skhlglgl!”

  The Saint sighed. He was by nature a kindly man to those whom the gods had afflicted, but time was passing and he was thinking of Jacqueline Laine.

  “I’m afraid not, dear old bird,” he murmured regretfully. “There used to be one, but it died. Sorry, I’m sure.”

  He patted the elderly gent apologetically upon the shoulder, steered his way around him, and passed on out of ear-shot of the frenzied sputtering noises that continued to honk despairingly through the dusk behind him. Two minutes later he was with Jacqueline.

  Jacqueline Laine was twenty-three; she was tall and slender; she had grey eyes that twinkled and a demoralising mouth. Both of these temptations were in play as she came towards him, but he was still slightly shaken by his recent encounter.

  “Have you got any more village idiots hidden around?” he asked warily, as he took her hands, and she was puzzled.

  “We used to have several, but they’ve all gone into Parliament. Did you want one to take home?”

  “My God, no,” said the Saint fervently. “The one I met at the gate was bad enough. Is he your latest boyfriend?”

  Her brow cleared. “Oh, you mean the old boy with the cleft palate? Isn’t he marvellous? I think he’s got a screw loose or something. He’s been hanging around all day—he keeps ringing the bell and bleating at me. I’d just sent him away for the third time. Did he try to talk to you?”

  “He did sort of wag his adenoids at me,” Simon admitted, “but I don’t think we actually got on to common ground. I felt quite jealous of him for a bit, until I realised that he couldn’t possibly kiss you nearly as well as I can, with that set of teeth.”

  He proceeded to demonstrate this.

  “I’m still in a hopeless muddle,” she said presently. “But I’ll be ready in five minutes. You can be fixing a cocktail while I make myself presentable.”

  In the living-room there was an open trunk in one corner and a half-filled packing case in the middle of the floor. There were scattered heaps of paper around it, and a few partially wrapped and unidentifiable objects on the table. The room had that curiously naked and inhospitable look which a room has when it has been stripped of all those intimately personal odds and ends of junk which make it a home, and only the bare furniture is left.

  The Saint raised his eyebrows. “Hullo,” he said. “Are you moving?”

  “Sort of,” she shrugged. “Moving out, anyway.”

  “Where to?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He realized then that there should have been someone else there, in that room.

  “Isn’t your grandmother here anymore?”

  “She died four weeks ago.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “She was a good soul. But she was terribly old. Do you know she was just ninety-seven?” She held his hand for a moment. “I’ll tell you all about it when I come down. Do you remember where to find the bottles?”

  “Templars and elephants never forget.”

  He blended gin, curaçao, vermouth, and bitters skilfully and with the zeal of an artist, while he waited for her, remembering the old lady whom he had seen so often in that room. Also he remembered the affectionate service Jacqueline had always lavished on her, cheerfully limiting her own enjoyment of life to meet the demands of an unconscious tyrant who would allow no one else to look after her, and wondered if there was any realistic reason to regret the ending of such a long life. She had, he knew, looked after Jacqueline herself in her time, and had brought her up as her own child since she was left an orphan at the age of three, but life must always belong to the young…He thought that for Jacqueline it must be a supreme escape. But he knew that she would never say so.

  She came down punctually in the five minutes which she had promised. She had changed her dress and put a comb through her hair, and with that seemed to have achieved more than any other woman could have shown for an hour’s fiddling in front of a mirror.

  “You should have been in pictures,” said the Saint, and he meant it.

  “Maybe I shall,” she said. “I’ll have to do something to earn a living now.”

  “Is it as bad as that?”

  She nodded. “But I can’t complain. I never had to work for anything before. Why shouldn’t I start? Other people have to.”

  “Is that why you’re moving out?”

  “The house isn’t mine.”

  “But didn’t the old girl leave you anything?”

  “She left me some letters.”

  The Saint almost spilt his drink. She sat down heavily on the edge of the table.

  “She left you some letters? After you’d practically been a slave to her since you got out of school? What did she do with the rest of the property—leave it to a home for stray cats?”

  “No, she left it to Harry.”

  “Who?”

  “Her grandson.”

  “I didn’t know you had any brothers.”

  “I haven’t. Harry Westler is my cousin. He’s—well, as a matter of fact he’s a sort of black sheep. He’s a gambler, and he was in prison for forging a cheque. Nobody else in the family would have anything to do with him, and if you believe what they used to say about him they were probably quite right, but Granny always had a soft spot for him. She never believed he could do anything wrong—he was just a mischievous boy to her. Well, you know how old she was…”

  “And she left everything to him?”

  “Practically everything. I’ll show you.”

  She went to a drawer of the writing table and brought him a typewritten sheet. He saw that it was a copy of a will, and turned to the details of the bequests.

  To my dear granddaughter Jacqueline Laine, who has taken care of me so thoughtfully and unselfishly for four years, One Hundred Pounds and my letters from Sidney Farlance, knowing that she will find them of more value than anything else I could leave her.

  To my cook, Eliza Jefferson, and my chauffeur, Albert Gordon, One Hundred Pounds each, for their loyal service.

  The remainder of my estate, after these deductions, including my house and other personal belongings, to my dear grandson Harry Westler, hoping that it will help him to make the success of life of which I have always believed him capable.

  Simon folded the sheet and dropped it on the table from his fingertips as if it were infected.

  “Suffering Judas,” he said helplessly. “After all you did for her—to pension you off on the same scale as the cook and the chauffeur! And what about Harry—doesn’t he propose to do anything about it?”

  “Why should he? The will’s perfectly clear.”

  “Why shouldn’t he? Just because the old crow went off her trolley in the last few days of senile decay is no reason why he shouldn’t do something to put it right. There must have been enough for both of you.”

  “Not so much. They found that Granny had been living on her capital for years. There was only about four thousand pounds—and the house.”

  “What of it? He could spare half.”

  Jacqueline smiled—a rather tired little smile.

  “You haven’t met Harry. He’s—difficult…He’s been here, of course. The agents already have his instructions to sell the house and the furniture. He gave me a week to get out, and the week is up the day after tomorrow. I couldn’t possibl
y ask him for anything.”

  Simon lighted a cigarette as if it tasted of bad eggs, and scowled malevolently about the room.

  “The skunk! And so you get chucked out into the wide world with nothing but a hundred quid.”

  “And the letters,” she said ruefully.

  “What the hell are these letters?”

  “They’re love letters,” she said, and the Saint looked as if he would explode.

  “Love letters?” he repeated in an awful voice.

  “Yes. Granny had a great romance when she was a girl. Her parents wouldn’t let her get any further with it, because the boy hadn’t any money and his family wasn’t good enough. He went abroad with one of those heroic young ideas of making a fortune in South America and coming back in a gold-plated carriage to claim her. He died of fever somewhere in Brazil very soon after, but he wrote her three letters—two from British Guiana and one from Colombia.

  “Oh, I know them by heart—I used to have to read them aloud to Granny almost every night, after her eyes got too bad for her to be able to read them herself. They’re just the ordinary simple sort of thing that you’d expect in the circumstances but to Granny they were the most precious thing she had. I suppose she had some funny old idea in her head that they’d be just as precious to me.”

  “She must have been screwy,” said the Saint. Jacqueline came up and put a hand over his mouth.

  “She was very good to me when I was a kid,” she said.

  “I know, but—” Simon flung up his arms hopelessly. And then, almost reluctantly, he began to laugh. “But it does mean that I’ve just come back in time. And we’ll have so much fun tonight that you won’t even think about it for a minute. We’ll just be old friends on a lark.”

  Probably he made good his boast, for Simon Templar brought to the solemn business of enjoying himself the same gay zest and inspired impetuosity which he brought to his battles with the technicalities of the Law. But if he followed her into the living-room of the house again much later, for a nightcap, the desolate scene of interrupted packing, and the copy of the will still lying on the table where he had put it down, brought the thoughts with which he had been subconsciously playing throughout the evening back into the forefront of his mind.

  “Are you going to let Harry get away with it?” he asked her, with a sudden characteristic directness.

  The girl shrugged. “What else can I do?”

  “I have an idea,” said the Saint, and his blue eyes danced with an unholy delight which she had never seen in them before.

  Mr Westler was not a man whose contacts with the Law had conspired to make him particularly happy about any of its workings, and therefore when he saw that the card which was brought to him in his hotel bore in its bottom left-hand corner the name of a firm with the word “Solicitors” underneath it, he suffered an immediate hollow twinge in the base of his stomach for which he could scarcely be blamed. A moment’s reflection, however, reminded him that another card with a similar inscription had recently been the forerunner of an extremely welcome windfall, and with this reassuring thought he told the page boy to bring the visitor into his presence.

  Mr Tombs, of Tombs, Tombs, and Tombs, as the card introduced him, was a tall lean man with neatly brushed white hair, bushy white eyebrows, a pair of gold-rimmed and drooping pince-nez on the end of a broad black ribbon, and an engagingly avuncular manner which rapidly completed the task of restoring Harry Westler’s momentarily shaken confidence. He came to the point with professional efficiency combined with professional pomposity.

  “I have come to see you in connection with the estate of the…ah…late Mrs Laine. I understand that you are her heir.”

  “That’s right,” said Mr Westler.

  He was a dark, flashily dressed man with small greedy eyes and a face rather reminiscent of that of a sick horse.

  “Splendid.” The lawyer placed his fingertips on his knees and leaned forward, peering benevolently over the rims of his glasses. “Now I for my part am representing the Sesame Mining Development Corporation.”

  He said this more or less as if he were announcing himself as the personal herald of Jehovah, but Mr Westler’s mind ran in practical channels.

  “Did my grandmother have shares in the company?” he asked quickly.

  “Ah…ah…no. That is…ah…no. Not exactly. But I understand that she was in possession of a letter or document which my clients regard as extremely valuable.”

  “A letter?”

  “Exactly. But perhaps I had better give you an outline of the situation. Your grandmother was, in her youth, greatly…ah…enamoured of a certain Sidney Farlance. Perhaps at some time or other you have heard her speak of him.”

  “Yes.”

  “For various reasons her parents refused to give their consent to the alliance, but the young people for their part refused to take no for an answer, and Farlance went abroad with the intention of making his fortune in foreign parts and returning in due course to claim his bride. In this ambition he was unhappily frustrated by his…ah…premature decease in Brazil. But it appears that during his travels in British Guiana he did become the owner of a mining concession in a certain inaccessible area of territory. British Guiana, as you are doubtless aware,” continued Mr Tombs in his dry pedagogic voice, “is traditionally reputed to be the source of the legend of El Dorado, the Gilded King, who was said to cover himself with pure gold and to wash it from him in the waters of a sacred lake called Manoa—”

  “Never mind all that baloney,” said Harry Westler, who was not interested in history or mythology. “Tell me about his concession.”

  Mr Tombs pressed his lips with a pained expression, but he went on.

  “At the time it did not appear that gold could be profitably obtained from this district, and the claim was abandoned and forgotten. Modern engineering methods, however, have recently revealed deposits of almost fabulous value in the district, and my clients have obtained a concession to work it over a very large area of ground. Subsequent investigations into their title, meanwhile, have brought out the existence of this small…uh…prior concession granted to Sidney Farlance, which is situated almost in the centre of my client’s territory and in a position which…ah…exploratory drillings have shown to be one of the richest areas in the district.”

  Mr Westler digested the information, and in place of the first sinking vacuum which had afflicted his stomach when he saw the word “solicitor” on his visitor’s card, a sudden and ecstatic awe localized itself in the same place and began to cramp his lungs as if he had accidentally swallowed a rubber balloon with his breakfast and it was being rapidly inflated by some supernatural agency.

  “You mean my grandmother owned this concession?”

  “That is what…ah…my clients are endeavouring to discover. Farlance himself, of course, left no heirs, and we have been unable to trace any surviving members of his family. In the course of inquiries, however, we did learn of his…ah…romantic interest in your grandmother, and we have every reason to believe that in the circumstances he would naturally have made her the beneficiary of any such asset, however problematical its value may have seemed at the time.”

  “And you want to buy it out—is that it?”

  “Ah…yes. That is…ah…provided that our deductions are correct and the title can be established. I may say that my clients would be prepared to pay very liberally—”

  “They’d have to,” said Mr Westler briskly. “How much are they good for?”

  The lawyer raised his hands deprecatingly.

  “You need have no alarm, my dear Mr Westler. The actual figure, would, of course, be a matter for negotiation, but it would doubtless run close to a million pounds. But first of all, you understand we must trace the actual concession papers which will be sufficient to establish your right to negotiate. Now it seems that in view of the relationship between Farlance and your grandmother, she would probably have treasured his letters as most women do, even though she la
ter married someone else, particularly if there was a document of that sort among them. People don’t usually throw things like that away. In that case you will doubtless have inherited these letters along with her other personal property. Possibly you have not yet had an occasion to peruse them, but if you would do so as soon as possible—”

  One of Harry Westler’s few Napoleonic qualities was a remarkable capacity for quick and constructive thinking.

  “Certainly I have the letters,” he said, “but I haven’t gone through them yet. My lawyer has them at present, and he’s in Edinburgh today. He’ll be back tomorrow morning, and I’ll get hold of them at once. Come and see me again tomorrow afternoon and I expect I’ll have some news for you.”

  “Tomorrow afternoon, Mr Westler? Certainly. I think that will be convenient. Ah…certainly.” The lawyer stood up, took off his pince-nez, polished them, and revolved them like a windmill on the end of their ribbon. “This has indeed been a most happy meeting, my dear sir. And may I say that I hope that tomorrow afternoon it will be even happier?”

  “You can go on saying that right up till the time we start talking prices,” said Harry.

  The door had scarcely closed behind Mr Tombs when Mr Westler was on the telephone to his cousin. He suppressed a sigh of relief when he heard her voice, and announced as casually as he could his intention of coming down to see her.

  “I think we ought to have another talk—I was terribly upset by the shock of Granny’s death when I saw you the other day, and I’m afraid I wasn’t quite myself, but I’ll make all the apologies you like when I get there,” he said in an unfamiliarly gentle voice which cost him a great effort to achieve, and was grabbing his hat before the telephone was properly back on its bracket.

  He made a call at the bank on his way, and sat in the hired car which carried him out into the country as if its cushions had been upholstered with hot spikes. The exact words of that portion of the Will which referred to the letters drummed through his memory with a staggering significance. “My letters from Sidney Farlance, knowing that she will find them of more value than anything else I could leave her.” The visit of Mr Tombs had made him understand them perfectly. His grandmother had known what was in them, but did Jacqueline know? His heart almost stopped beating with anxiety.