The Saint in the Sun (The Saint Series) Page 9

  He turned and went directly to it. The lock was a good one, but like many such installations it was betrayed by the hasp which it secured, which was fastened to the woodwork merely with four screws which offered no resistance to the screwdriver blade of the Saint’s Swiss army pocket-knife. He put the screws in his pocket for future replacement, opened the door, and went in.

  The interior, dimly lighted by the one grimy window, was stuffy with the mingled stalenesses of beer, smoke, and sweat. Gardening tools stood in three corners, and some soiled articles of clothing hung on hooks. A battered kettle and a dirty saucepan sat on the small black stove. There was a dresser with a stained and scarred top on which stood an enamel basin, a chipped cup and saucer, a couple of plates, some cheap flatware, and a can of beans. The only other furniture was an ancient armchair with the stuffing leaking through rents in the upholstery, and an iron bedstead with drab blankets carelessly heaped on a bare gray mattress.

  If what he was looking for was there at all, there were not many places where it could be hidden. The dresser drawers yielded only a disorderly hodge-podge of clothing, canned food, old magazines, patent medicines, pieces of string and wire, and an empty gin bottle. Through the larger splits in the chair his probing fingers touched only springs and cotton batting. The mattress seams showed no signs of having been recently re-sewn. That left only the floor, which he checked board by board, until under the bed, when he moved it away from the wall, he found one that was loose and which came up easily.

  From the hollow underneath he pulled out a stout canvas bag tied with a cord threaded through a row of grommets around the neck. Stencilled on one side were the words:

  PETRIPLAST LTD SLOUGH

  The bag bulged with a load that was half-hard but springy. He loosened the cord, plunged a hand in, and brought it out with a mass of paper money, most of it fives.

  A change in the intensity of light, rather than anything positively seen, made him turn and look up sharply.

  Tom Gull stood in the doorway. It could have been no one else, in a suit that looked as if it had been slept in but with a garish necktie knotted under a clean but threadbare collar. Tom Gull, dressed to go to the races, or to tell Penelope he was going, but already returned home instead. The untidy gray hair and ruddy face matched the impression that Simon had had from a distance, but at closer quarters it could be observed that the tint of cheeks and nose had not been produced by wind and sun without the assistance of internally administered colorants. The bear-like posture was the same, too, but not the speed with which he snatched up a pitchfork that leaned against the nearest wall.

  “Hold it!” the Saint’s voice crackled. “We mustn’t get blood on it!”

  For an instant the man was thrown off his mental stride, and that was sufficient to check him physically. But the fork was still levelled at the Saint’s chest, the tines gleaming wickedly sharp, poised on the whim of the gardener’s powerful arm like an arrow on the string of a drawn bow.

  “Wot you think you’re doing ’ere?”

  “I know all about this,” Simon said urgently, trying to keep his precarious hold on the other’s attention. He threw the bag down on the bed so that the lettering on it was uppermost. “About a year ago this was stolen from the train to High Wycombe—the payroll for the Petriplast branch factory there. I was checking this morning on what robberies there’d been in the neighborhood where a lot of cash disappeared that’d never been found. There was about thirty-two thousand pounds in this. The guard put up a fight, and the men on the train were caught, but not before they’d thrown the bag out of a window. It was believed that they had accomplices waiting beside the line who got away with it and left them to take the rap, though they swore they didn’t. I know what really happened. You were moseying around on your way to the local, and you stumbled over the bag and picked it up.”

  “Put down the rest of it,” Gull growled.

  Simon obeyed, slowly, and went on talking.

  “Why don’t you offer me a deal? Maybe a partnership in your horse-playing business? It’s your only out, unless you want to kill me and bury me in the—”

  Suddenly he realized that his improvisation, playing for time, had led him into a trap of its own. He had said the wrong thing to a man of Gull’s limited but literal mentality. He saw it in the reddish glitter in the gardener’s eyes, a tightening of the mouth, and a tensing of muscles, and knew that in the flick of another thought he would feel the steel in his flesh.

  From behind Gull came a short shrill scream.

  It distracted him just enough, at the very moment when he was starting his lunge, for the Saint to leap in under the pitchfork, deflecting the shaft with his left arm, while his right fist drove like a piston into the man’s solar plexus, doubling him forward to meet the standard left uppercut that followed.

  “Jolly good,” said Penelope. “I’m not the screaming type, honestly, but it was the only way I could think of to help.”

  “It was the one great brainstorm of his life,” Simon said later, at her cottage. “Having picked up all that loot and hidden it, he was faced with the problem of getting to use it. You can’t walk into a bank and open an account with thirty-two thousand in cash without questions being asked. And you can’t even start spending money like a Greek ship-owner, if you’ve been known for years as a slob who only worked hard enough to earn the wherewithal to keep slightly sozzled, without people talking, and pretty soon the cops hear about it. And if you tried to disappear and start somewhere else under another name, they’d soon be looking for you, remembering that you’d been in the vicinity when all that legal tender got lost. He had to find a way to legitimize it, or build a complete set-up to account for how he got it.”

  “So he just sent himself the money and filled out his own coupons,” Penelope said. “I suppose he picked names and addresses from the phone books in different towns, because it was easier than inventing them.”

  “And then he began producing the rest of the money as winnings. And when he had you address envelopes for the dividends, he just took them home and burned them. The same with those refund letters. The money that should have gone in them would just be produced as more winnings, and gradually he could claim they were all his.”

  “But what about the man who said he really had had his dividends and his money back?”

  “Frightening as it seems, there actually were seven suckers who sent in a hundred pounds of their own money. They were the ones marked with crosses in his private book. He had to keep track of them, and let them be paid, so that there wouldn’t be any complaints that would get him investigated.”

  “How can people be so gullible?”

  “You’ve invented a word. But don’t forget that you went along with the gag for some time before you began to wonder if anything was wrong.”

  “And don’t forget that if I hadn’t decided to do some detecting on my own, since you were being so superior and mysterious, and followed him this afternoon, you’d’ve been stuck on his fork like a hot dog.”

  The Saint shuddered.

  “Let’s say you earned at least half the reward.” He poured two more Peter Dawsons. “Do you think we should go out and celebrate, or just stay here by the fire?”

  NASSAU: THE FAST WOMEN

  “You’re the Saint,” said Cynthia Quillen challengingly. “You kill nasty people, don’t you?”

  “Sometimes,” said Simon Templar tolerantly.

  Over the years, he had learned to speak tolerantly, on occasion, especially such occasions as being challenged at cocktail parties by beautiful women who had absorbed a little too much festive spirit.

  Of course, not all men would have rated Cynthia Quillen as beautiful. She was a blonde who conspicuously refused to conform to the pneumatic cotton-candy type beloved of Hollywood press agents, which looks as if it would melt in your mouth or any other comfortably upholstered place. She had the kind of “good” features that with enough hard wear can become bony, and
the other extensions of her nicely proportioned skeleton were also sufficiently short of adipose padding to entitle a fast assessor to call her skinny. Which is one of those misleading fronts that separate the men from the boys. But Simon Templar had survived long enough to have learned that plenty of slender women were kept that way by a nervous hunger that would have scared Don Juan out of his jockstrap.

  “All right,” she said. “How much would you charge to wash out that nasty sample over in the corner?”

  Simon peered as best he could through an intervening hedge of standing guests, towards the indicated corner, where a rather short well-knit man with a chiseled curly head almost absurdly reminiscent of an ancient Greek statue was absorbed in animated chatter with an even more statuesque brunette.

  The Saint did not have to be an automobile-racing fan to recognize him, for Godfrey Quillen was one of the most highly publicized drivers of that or the preceding season, a newcomer who was reportedly crowding the pros in their ratings.

  “That’s no way to talk about your husband,” he reproved her patiently.

  “I can talk about him any way I like—that phony, conceited, two-timing, chiseling, short-changing, free-boozing—’

  “Hush, darling. You are speaking about God.”

  “ ‘God’ Quillen! You should see the pit crew smirking when they call him that, when he isn’t around!…But I don’t have to waste a good bullet on him. A good subpoena would hurt him just as much. Only I’d never divorce him either, for somebody else to have. The one I’d like you to kill is the Continental indoor sports model with the slippery clutch, who’s warming him up for another qualifying lap. Her name is Teresa Montesino, if you insist on a label on every tombstone.”

  Simon allowed his somewhat obstructed gaze to transfer itself to the exotic pulse-perturber on whom Godfrey Quillen was exerting his highest-octane charm. This was not an unbearably painful shift. The brunette had all the more obvious attractions that Mrs Quillen superficially lacked. She had the intense dark eyes and sensual lips that automatically inspire exploratory ideas, and the corporeal structure which it is always fun to explore. A hopeless cynic might have prognosticated that at some middle-aged future she could be just plain fat, but this was an unhappy conclusion that a less cautious soul did not have to envisage prematurely. At a similar age to Cynthia’s, still safely under thirty, she offered the overwhelming sort of competition that any wife might reasonably have qualms about.

  “You can’t shoot him for having good eyesight,” said the Saint soothingly.

  “I told you, I’d rather keep him. I’ve been doing it for so long that I guess I’ve got to like the habit. How do you think he got to be a big racing driver?”

  “Not by being good at it?”

  “Oh, he’s fairly good—for an amateur jockey who hardly knows how to change a spark plug. But General Motors doesn’t build racing cars and sponsor teams like the European manufacturers. And if they did, they’d hire professionals who came up the hard way—not glamor boys with a rich wife.”

  “Are you a rich wife?”

  “Loaded.” She looked into her glass, and made a grimace. “In more ways than one. But he was what I wanted, and I could afford it, so I let him have fun spending my money. And brother, are those expensive toys! You have no idea what it costs to keep replacing those buggies, besides the care and feeding while they last. Nothing but the best of everything. Oil that Cleopatra should have a facial with, and a new set of tires every—”

  “I know something about it. But most of us throw good money away on one silly plaything or another.”

  “And Godfrey is my bauble-boy. Thanks. I like your subtle touch, Saint. So you’ll understand that if I feel like protecting my investment from that high-compression step-mother of Romulus and Remus—”

  “Foster mother,” Simon corrected her gently. “That is, if you’re talking about the famous she-wolf. Well, it seems to me that all you’d have to do is yank the checkbook out from under him.”

  Cynthia Quillen exchanged her empty glass for a full one from the well-stocked tray of a hospitably roving waiter, with the dexterity of a veteran at such functions.

  “You’re not being very bright,” she said peevishly. “If I did that, he’d sulk for weeks, and so what would that give me? You don’t know what a brilliant sulker he is. Why make complications, when the obvious and effective answer is staring you in the face? Just exterminate the menace with the un-sealed-beam headlights. I’d pay quite a lot for it.”

  The Saint permitted himself one of his sometimes well-concealed sighs. This was a hell of a way to start a visit to Nassau, where he had gone only to take in that sub-tropical island’s annual Speed Week—perhaps pleasantly leavened by the social festivities that considerately coincided therewith. He had enough friends in the Bahamas to be assured of all the incidental entertainment he wanted, and although the days when he himself had burned up a few tires under a certain cream-and-red Hirondel were now approaching the realms of reminiscence if not legend, he could still feel some of the old vibrations in the blood stream awakened by the smell of Castrol and the roar of beautifully tuned engines and the sight of sleek-wheeled monsters crowding each other through dizzying chicanes. But invitations to murder were even farther than those old road-racing days from anything he expected to be actively involved in on that trip.

  “You’re kidding, of course—I hope,” he said, and had an uncomfortable presentiment of her answer before he heard it.

  “Try me with a blank check and a good ball-point pen.”

  He shook his head.

  “You can’t take it with you, but don’t throw it away. If Teresa is what you think, you could buy her off for much less than you could hire me.”

  Mrs Quillen scowled with increasing alcoholic frustration at the fresh drink which she had already half finished.

  “You won’t take me seriously,” she complained. “If I have to do it myself, and I swing for it, I hope you’ll be sorry. You could’ve got me out of that predicament. If you even only made love to her yourself, and took her away from him, which I’m sure you could do easily—”

  “Now you’re making sense,” said the Saint, grasping the straw gratefully. “Why don’t you introduce me?”

  Before she could say anything else, he had taken her enthusiastically by the arm and was steering her through the throng with a firmness that was within an ounce of the closest that good manners could come to violence.

  “Well,” Cynthia said, almost breathlessly. “If it isn’t my ever-loving husband. And the lovable Miss Montesino. Meet my new friend, Mr Templar.”

  “I was hoping I’d meet you, Mr Templar,” Godfrey Quillen said, with an almost professionally fervent handshake and a wide smile of white teeth. “Sometimes I’ve almost wondered if you were real—my very favorite character!”

  “Mine, too,” said Teresa Montesino, with a softer and even warmer touch.

  “That’s wonderful, darling,” Cynthia said, looking directly at her. “Because you just won him. Godfrey and I are late already for a dull old dinner party of respectably married couples.”

  Her spouse consulted his wrist watch with rather elaborate nonchalance.

  “Why, so we are, sweetheart. How terribly tedious. Will you excuse us, Teresa? And Mr Templar—” He insisted on another, even heartier handshake. “Come and see us messing about in the pits tomorrow. You might give us some new ideas. I’d like to talk to you…”

  His wife practically dragged him away, amiably protesting. She could do this convincingly, for they were almost the same height, though he had a well-knit breadth that made you think of him as a bigger man when you remembered him alone.

  “Well, it was nice knowing him,” Simon remarked, following the rest of the exit with his eyes. “Now the next time I meet some other road-racing buffs, I’ll really be able to impress them with reminiscences of my great pal, Godfrey Quillen.”

  “Are you so unhappy to be stuck with me?” asked Teresa.


  She had enough Mediterranean accent to give her voice a fascinatingly different intonation, but not enough to attract too much attention or to become quickly tiresome.

  “By no means,” said the Saint, and gave her another thorough inspection at this more convenient range. “I mean, am I stuck? If so, I have a sensational idea. Let’s throw a dinner party of our own—for disreputably unmarried couples. And just to be sure we don’t insult anybody, let’s not invite anyone else.”

  “I must try not to wonder if you are insulting me, Simon. And if only I did not already have a date—”

  “I’m sorry. I should have known that anyone as fabulous as you—”

  “I should not have the embarrassment of breaking it,” she concluded serenely, as if he had not interrupted. “Will you excuse me for a minute, to telephone?”

  That was the beginning of an evening which he would remember for a long time. Not that he was likely to forget the important details of any adventure, but an evening with Teresa Montesino was quite an experience in its own right.

  For all the tourist traffic that flows through it, Nassau is a very small town on a very, very small island, so that it has no secret dispensaries of ambrosial food and/or Dionysian entertainment known only to a fortunate élite. It takes a very large community to sustain a hideaway so famous that it is a privilege to be permitted to discover it. Simon could offer her nothing that she could not have found for herself by reading a few advertisements, and out of that selection she had already covered plenty of ground in other company. But nothing about the places they went to was new to him either, except what her presence contributed.