The Happy Highwayman (The Saint Series) Page 8

  This was five years before Sam Purdell was Mayor of Elmford, a member of the Elmshire County Council, chairman of the Elmshire Highways and Bridges Committee, chairman of the Elmford Harbour Commissioners, and the subject of an article in the Bulldog entitled in large black capitals: ELMFORD’S AMAZING GRAFTER.

  The Bulldog specialised in articles like that, and the libel actions in which it often became involved were more than paid for by the circulation which they promoted.

  The article left Sam a pained and puzzled man. He couldn’t understand it. These adopted children of his, these citizens whose weal occupied his mind for twenty-four hours a day, were turning around to bite the hand that fed them. And the unkindest cut of all, the blow which struck at the roots of his faith in human gratitude, was that he had only tried to do his best for the city which had been delivered into his care.

  For instance, there was the time when, dragged forth by the energy of one of his rotund daughters, he had climbed laboriously one Sunday afternoon to the top of the range of hills which shelter Elmford on the north. When he had got his wind and started looking round, he realised that from that vantage point there was a view that might have rejoiced the heart of any artist. Sam Purdell was no artist, but he blinked with simple pleasure at the panorama of rolling downs and wooded groves on one side, and the town spread out like a carpet to the edge of the sea on the other, and when he came home again he had a beautiful idea.

  “You know, we’ve got one of the finest views in the country up there on those hills! I never saw it before, and I’ll bet you didn’t either. And why? Because the road don’t go up there, and when you get to my age it ain’t so easy to go scrambling up through those trees and brush.”

  “What about it?” asked Al Eisenfeld, who was even less artistic and certainly more practical.

  “I’ll tell you what,” said Sam, glowing with the ardour of his enthusiasm almost as much as with the after-effects of his unaccustomed exercise. “We ought to build a road up there so people can drive out and see it comfortably. It’d make work for a lot of men, and it wouldn’t cost too much, and everybody could get a lot of free pleasure out of it. It’d be good for the holiday people, too.”

  He elaborated his inspiration with spluttering eagerness, and before he had been talking for ten minutes he had a convert.

  “Now you have got an idea, Sam,” agreed Mr Eisenfeld warmly. “Why don’t you bring it up at the next meeting of the Highways and Bridges Committee?”

  Sam Purdell’s inspiration duly came into being at a cost of 100,000 pounds. The fact that this was considerably more than the original estimate was due to the unforeseen obstinacy of the owner of some of the land involved, who held out for about four times what it was worth. There were rumours that someone acting on inside information had acquired the territory shortly before the project was announced, and had sold it to the County at his own price—rumours which shocked Sam Purdell to the core of his sensitive soul.

  “Did you hear that, Al?” he complained, as soon as these slanderous stories reached his ears. “They say I made twenty thousand pounds out of that road!”

  “You don’t have to worry about that sort of gossip, Sam,” replied Mr Eisenfeld soothingly. “They’re only jealous of you because you’re making a name for yourself. Why, some people are so mean that they’d tell stories like that about their own brother if they thought he was getting ahead of them. I’ll look into it and see if I can find out who started it.”

  Mr Eisenfeld’s looking into it did not stop similar rumours circulating about the 500,000-pound Elmford By-pass, which lopped a ten-mile detour off the coast road where it dipped down in a long U through Elmford, and halved the traffic congestion in the principal streets of the town. What project, Sam Purdell asked, could he possibly have put forward that was more obviously designed to improve the amenities of Elmford? But there were whispers that the Paxolith Construction Company, which had secured the contract for the by-pass, had paid somebody 30,000 pounds to see that their tender was accepted—a tender which was exactly fifty per cent, higher than the one put in by their nearest competitors.

  “Do you know anything about somebody taking thirty thousand quid to put that tender through?” demanded Sam Purdell wrathfully, when he heard about it, and Mr Eisenfeld was shocked.

  “That’s a wicked idea, Sam,” he protested. “We don’t have any graft in England, like they have in America. I wouldn’t mind betting that the Eternity Paving Company started that story themselves, just because they didn’t get the contract. I told you they couldn’t be trusted and that’s why I told you, you ought to use your influence to see that the job went to the Paxolith people.”

  And there was the awkward moment when the auditor for the Harbour Commissioners announced that the firm of Purfeld’s Ltd., which among its other activities acted as official auctioneers to the Harbour Commissioners, had not paid over to the Commissioners one penny of the harbour dues which it had collected for them in this capacity for nearly three years. For the directors of the firm of Purfeld’s Ltd. were Al Eisenfeld and Sam Purdell.

  “That auditor’s just trying to show how smart he is, Sam,” explained Mr Eisenfeld. “None of the Commissioners ever brought it up about our owing that money, did they? Why, I’ve heard that they didn’t want it brought up at all. It was a sort of tactful way of making you a present, in appreciation of all you’ve done for the town.”

  “But you told me you’d see to paying over those dues, Al.”

  “I know. But I had the tip not to do anything about it. They didn’t want you to know, in case you felt insulted. If you take my advice, Sam, you’ll show you appreciate their thoughtfulness by just letting the matter drop and not saying any more about it.”

  There were other cases, each of which brought Sam Purdell a little nearer to the brink of bitter disillusion. Sometimes he said that it was only the unshaken loyalty of his family which stopped him from resigning his thankless labours and leaving Elmford to wallow in its own ungrateful slime. But most of all it was the loyalty and encouragement of Mr Eisenfeld.

  Mr Eisenfeld was a suave sleek man with none of Sam Purdell’s rubicund and open-faced geniality, but he had a cheerful courage in such trying moments which was always ready to renew Sam’s faith in human nature. Sam consulted his partner in all his problems, assimilated his arguments so completely that he usually ended up by believing he had invented them himself, and took his advice on everything connected with his official duties with the same childlike trust as he had always taken it in their joint business deals.

  This cheerful courage shone with all its old unfailing luminosity when Sam Purdell thrust the offending copy of the Bulldog under Mr Eisenfeld’s aggrieved and incredulous eyes.

  “I’ll show you what you do with that sort of trash, Sam,” said Mr Eisenfeld magnificently. “You just take it like this—”

  He was going on to say that you tore it up, scattering the fragments disdainfully to the four winds, but as he started to perform this heroic gesture his eye was arrested by the concluding paragraph, which he had not read far enough to reach.

  “Well, how do you take it?” asked the Mayor peevishly.

  Mr Eisenfeld said nothing for a second, and Sam Purdell peered tiptoe over his shoulder to find out what he was looking at.

  “Oh, that!” he said irritably. “I don’t know what that means. Do you know what it means, Al?”

  The last paragraph of the article ran:

  “The congenital apathy of the majority of voters and ratepayers is the thing which makes it possible for such abuses to go on. But there must be some indignant but helpless ratepayers in Elmford who might be pardoned for wishing that the Saint would pay a visit to their town.”

  “What Saint are they talking about?” asked the Mayor. “I thought all the Saints were dead.”

  “This one isn’t,” said Mr Eisenfeld, but for a moment the significance of the name continued to elude him. He had an idea that he had heard it before
and that it should have meant something definite to him. “I think he was a crook who pulled off some big swindle a little while ago. No, I remember now. Wasn’t he a sort of freelance reformer who thought he could catch people who were too smart to break the Law…”

  He began to recall further details, and then as his memory improved he closed the subject abruptly. There were incidents among the stories that came filtering back into his recollection which gave him a vague discomfort in the pit of his stomach. It was ridiculous, of course, a cheap journalistic glorification of a common criminal, and yet, for some reason, certain stories which he remembered once having read in the newspapers made him feel that he would be happier if the Saint’s visit to Elmford remained a theoretical proposition.

  “We’ve got lots of other more important things to think about, Sam,” he said, pushing the Bulldog into the waste-basket. “Look here—about that monument of yours on the Riviera…”

  This Riviera was not the unimportant one in the south of France, but Elmford’s latest and most ambitious public work. It was to be the crowning achievement in Sam Purdell’s long list of benevolences towards his beloved citizens.

  A whole mile of property on the sea front had been acquired by the Council and converted into a pleasure park which was to rival anything of its kind ever attempted in England. At one end of it a beautiful casino had been erected where visitors to Elmford might gorge themselves with food, listen to concert parties, deafen themselves with three orchestras, and dance in tightly wedged ecstasy until their feet gave way. There would be tennis courts, badminton courts, deck tennis courts, clock golf, putting courses, and soda fountains. There would be a children’s playground staffed with trained attendants, where infants could be left to bawl their heads off under the most expert and scientific supervision while their elders enjoyed the adult attractions of the place or herded on to the beach to blister and steam themselves into blissful imitations of the well-boiled prawn. There would be an amusement fair in which the populace could be shaken to pieces on roller coasters, whirled off revolving discs, thrown about in barrels, skittered over the falls, and generally enjoy all the other forms of discomfort which help to make the modern seeker after relaxation so contemptuous of the unimaginative makeshift tortures which less enlightened souls had to get along with in medieval days. It would, in fact, be a place where the visitor to the seaside might do much to divert his thoughts from the tedious proximity of the sea.

  And in the centre of this Elysian esplanade there was to be a monument to the man whose unquenchable devotion to the community had presented it with this last and most grandiose adornment.

  Sam Purdell had been modestly diffident about the monument, but Mr Eisenfeld had insisted on it.

  “You ought to accept it, Sam,” he had said. “The town owes it to you. Why, you’ve been working for them all these years, and if you passed on tomorrow,” said Mr Eisenfeld, with his voice quivering at the mere thought of such a calamity, “what would there be to show for all you’ve done?”

  “There’s that road over the downs,” said Sam deprecatingly, “the Elmford By-pass, the new pier, the new Municipal Hospital, the new—”

  “That’s nothing,” said Mr Eisenfeld largely. “Why, not one of those things even has your name on it. Ten years after you die, how many people’ll remember that they were your ideas? You let them go ahead with that monument.”

  The monument had been duly designed—a sort of square tapering tower sixty feet high, crowned by an eagle with outspread wings, on the base of which was to be a marble plaque on which the beneficence and public-spiritedness of Samuel Purdell would be recorded for all time. It was about the details of the construction of this monument that Mr Eisenfeld wanted to give his views to the Mayor.

  “I was talking to a friend of mine who’s a builder about it, Sam,” he explained. “He says that, that architect’s just talking through his hat. The way it’s being built up now, all hollow inside, it won’t stand up for ten years. It ought to be solid concrete right through.”

  “That’ll take an awful lot of concrete, Al,” Sam objected dubiously, casting an eye over the plans.

  “Well, what if it does? A few hundred pounds more or less won’t make much difference, and if the job’s worth doing at all it’s worth doing properly. Why, if you let that thing stay hollow and after ten years or so it began to fall down, think what people from other places would say.”

  “What would they say?” asked Mr Purdell obtusely.

  His adviser shuddered.

  “They’d say this was such a cheap place that we couldn’t even afford to put up a decent monument to our Mayor. And suppose it fell down when there were people all round it? Why, it might fall down on some poor little innocent children…”

  The Mayor thought it over.

  “All right,” he said at length. “I’ll have to make the Council see it that way, if they’ve made up their minds to give me a monument at all. But I don’t deserve it, really I don’t.”

  Simon Templar would have agreed that the Mayor had done nothing to deserve any more elaborate monument than a neat tombstone in some quiet worm cafeteria. But at that moment his knowledge of Elmford’s politics was not so complete as it was shortly to become.

  When he saw Molly Provost slip the little automatic out of her bag he thought that the bullet was destined for the Mayor, and in theory he approved. He had an engaging callousness about the value of political lives which, if it became universal, would make democracy an enchantingly simple business. But there were two policemen talking on the other side of the road, and the life of a good-looking girl struck him as being a matter for more serious consideration. He felt that if she was really determined to purge the corruption of Elmford’s politics by shooting the Mayor in the duodenum, she should at least be persuaded to do it on some other occasion when she would have a better chance of getting away with it. Wherefore the Saint moved very quickly, so that his lean brown hand closed over hers before she could pull the trigger.

  It was such a small gun that the Saint’s hand easily covered it, and he held the gun and her hand together in an iron grip with the gun turned downwards, smiling as if he was just greeting an old acquaintance, until Purdell and Eisenfeld had got into Sam’s car and driven away.

  “Have you got a licence to shoot mayors?” he inquired severely.

  She had a small pale face, brown frightened eyes, red-rimmed. She was nicely dressed, in that her clothes had been well chosen, but he noticed that her hat was pulled on anyhow, and there were straggling ends in the dark hair under it. He realised that she had an elusive beauty, and that she had left home that morning without a thought of making the most of it.

  Then he felt her arm go limp, and took the gun out of her unresisting hand. He put it away in his pocket.

  “Come for a walk,” he said.

  She shrugged dully.

  “All right.”

  He took her arm and led her round the corner, out of sight of the Mayor’s house, where he opened the door of a parked car. She got in resignedly. As he let in the clutch and the car slipped away under the pull of a smoothly whispering engine, she buried her face in her hands and sobbed silently.

  The Saint let her have it out. He drove on thoughtfully, with a cigarette clipped between his lips, down towards the sea. Outside the best hotel on the front he stopped the car and opened the door on her side to let her out.

  She dabbed her eyes and straightened her hat mechanically. As she looked round and realised where they were, she stopped with one foot on the running-board.

  “Why have you brought me here?” she asked stupidly.

  “For a drink,” said the Saint calmly. “If you feel like drinking. I do.”

  She looked at him with the fear and puzzlement still in her eyes.

  “I’m all right,” she said steadily. “You can take me straight to the police station. We might as well get it over.”

  He shook his head.

  “Do you really
want to go to a police station?” he drawled. “I’m not so fond of them myself, and usually they aren’t very fond of me. Besides, they don’t sell drinks.”

  Suddenly she realised that the smile with which he was looking down at her wasn’t a bit like the grimly triumphant smile which a detective should have worn. Nor, when she looked at him more closely, was there anything else about him that quite matched her idea of what a detective would be like. It grieves the chronicler to record that her first impression was that he was too good-looking, but that was how she saw him. His tanned face was cut in a mould of rather reckless humour which didn’t seem to fit in at all with the stodgy and prosaic backgrounds of the Law. He was tall, and he looked strong—her right hand still ached from the grip of his fingers—but it was a supple kind of strength that had no connection with mere bulk. Also he wore his clothes with a gay and careless kind of elegance which no sober police chief would have approved. The twinkle in his eyes was wholly friendly.

  “Do you mean you didn’t arrest me just now?” she asked uncertainly.

  “I never arrested anybody in my life,” said the Saint. “In fact, when they shoot politicians I usually give them medals. Come on in and let’s talk.”

  Over a couple of Manhattans he explained himself further.

  “My dear, I think it was an excellent scheme on general principles, but the execution wasn’t so good. When you’ve had as much experience in bumping people off as I have, you’ll know that it’s no time to do it when a couple of flatties are parked on the other side of the road. I suppose you realise that they would have got you just about ten seconds after you created a vacancy for a new mayor?”

  She was still staring at him rather blankly.

  “I wasn’t trying to do anything to the Mayor,” she said. “It was Al Eisenfeld I was going to shoot, and I wouldn’t have cared if they had caught me afterwards.”

  The Saint frowned.