Leslie Charteris - The Brighter Buccaneer

"Only that my right sock is wearing a bit thin at the heel," answered the Saint. "D'you think someone could beetle along to my hotel and dig out a new pair?"

He was locked in a cell to be brought before the magistrate on the following Monday. It was Simon Templar's third experience of that, but he enjoyed it no more than the first time.

During Sunday he had one consoltation. He was able to divert himself with thoughts of what he could do with about ten thousand pounds.

Monday morning brought a visitor to Manchester in the portly shape of Chief Inspector Claud Eustace Teal, who automatically came north at the news of the sensational arrest. which had been the front-page splash of every newspaper in the kingdom. But the expert witness who came with him caused a much greater sensation. He examined the contents of the two envelopes, and scratched his head.

"Is this a joke?" he demanded. "Every one of these bonds is perfectly genuine. There isn't a forgery among them."

The local inspector's eyes popped half-way out of his head.

"Are you sure?" he blurted.

"Of course I'm sure," snapped the disgusted expert. "Any fool can see that with half an eye. Did I have to give up a perfectly good day's golf to tell you that?"

Chief Inspector Teal was not interested in the expert's golf. He sat on a bench and held his head in his hands. He was not quite certain how it had been worked, but he knew there was something very wrong somewhere.

Presently he looked up.

"And Deever struck him in the office — that isn't denied?"

"No, sir," admitted the local inspector. "Mr. Deever said —"

"And you marched Templar through the streets in broad daylight, handcuffed to a constable?"

"Yes, sir. Knowing what I did about him —"

"I'd better see the Saint," said Teal. "If I'm not mistaken, someone's going to be sorry they knew so much."

He was shown into Simon's cell, and the Saint rose languidly to greet him.

"Hullo, Claud," he murmured. "I'm glad you've arrived. A gang of these local half-wits in funny hats —

"Never mind that," said Teal bluntly. "Tell me what you're getting out of this."

Simon pondered.

"I shouldn't accept anything less than ten thousand pounds," he said finally.

The light in Chief Inspector Teal's understanding strengthened slowly. He turned to the local inspector, who had accompanied him.

"By the way," he said, "I suppose you never found that man from Huddersfield, or whoever it was that blew the gaff?"

"No, sir. We've made inquiries at all the hotels, but he seems to have disappeared. I've got a sort of description of him — a fairly tall broad-shouldered man with a beard —"

"I see," said Teal, very sleepily.

Simon dipped into the local inspector's pocket and calmly borrowed a packet of cigarettes. He lighted one.

"If it's any help to you," he said, "the report of everything that happened in Deever's office is perfectly true. I went to him for some money, and then I went to him for some more. Every time I offered excellent security. I behaved myself like a law-abiding citizen —"

"Why did you call yourself Smith?"

"Why shouldn't I? It's a grand old English name. And I always understood that you could call yourself anything you liked so long as you didn't do it with intent to defraud. Go and tell Deever to prove the fraud. I just had to have some cash to go to the races, I had those Latvian bonds with me, and I thought that if I gave my real name I'd be making all sorts of silly difficulties. That's all there was to it. But did anyone make an honest attempt to find out if there was a fraud?"

"I see," said Teal again — and he really did see.

"They did not," said the Saint in a pained voice. "What happened? I was assaulted. I was abused. I was handcuffed and marched through the streets like a common burglar, followed by shop girls and guttersnipes, snapped by press photographers. I was shoved in a cell for forty-eight hours, and I wasn't even allowed to send for a clean pair of socks. A bunch of flat-footed nincompoops told me when to get up, when to eat, when to take exercise, and when to go to bed again — just as if I'd already been convicted. Deever's story has been published in every paper in the United Kingdom. And d'you know what that means?"

Teal did not answer. And the Saint's forefinger tapped him just where his stomach began to bulge, tapped him debonairly in the rhythm of the Saint's seraphic accents, in a gesture that Teal knew only too well.

"It means that there's one of the swellest legal actions on earth waiting for me to win it — an action for damages for wrongful imprisonment, defamation of character, libel, slander, assault, battery, and the Lord alone knows what not. I wouldn't take a penny less than ten thousand pounds. I may even want more. And do you think James Deever won't come across?"

Chief Inspector Teal had no reply. He knew Deever would pay.

The frog-like voice of Sir Joseph Whipplethwaite boomed. He was speaking from the annual dinner of the British Badminton Society. "Badminton is an excellent means of acquiring and retaining that fitness of body which is so necessary to all of us in these strenuous times. We politicians have to keep fit, the same as everyone else. And many of us — as I do myself — retain that fitness by playing badminton.

"Badminton," he boomed, "is a game which pre-eminently requires physical fitness — a thing which we politicians also require. I myself could scarcely be expected to carry out my work at the Ministry of International Trade if I were not physically fit. And badminton is the game by which I keep myself fit to carry out my duties as a politician. Of course I shall never play as well as you people do; but we politicians can only try to do our best in the intervals between our other duties." There was a static hum.

"Badminton," boomed the frog-like voice tirelessly, "is a game which makes you fit and keeps you fit; and we politicians —"

Simon Templar groaned aloud, and hurled himself at the radio somewhat hysterically. At odd times during the past year he had accidentally switched on to Sir Joseph Whipplethwaite speaking at the annual dinners of the North British Lacrosse League, the British Bowling Association, the Southern Chess Congress, the International Ice Skating Association, the Royal Toxophilite Society, and the British Squash Racquets Association; and he could have recited Sir Joseph Whipplethwaite's speech from memory, with all its infinite variations.

In that mellow oak-beamed country pub, where he had gone to spend a restful week-end, the reminder of that appalling politician was more than he could bear.

"It's positively incredible," he muttered to himself, returning limply to his beer. "I'll swear that if you put that into a story as an illustration of the depths of imbecility that can be reached by a man who's considered fit to govern this purblind country, you'd simply raise a shriek of derisive laughter. And yet you've heard it with your own ears — half a dozen times. You've heard him playing every game under the sun in his after-dinner speeches, and mixing it fifty-fifty with his godlike status as a politician. And that — that — that blathering oaf is a member of His Majesty's Cabinet and one of the men on whom the British Empire's fate depends. O God, O Montreal!"

Words failed him, and he buried his face wrathfully in his tankard.

But he was not destined to forget Sir Joseph Whipplethwaite that week-end or ever again; for early on the Monday morning a portly man with a round red face and an unrepentant bowler hat walked into the hotel, and Simon recognized him with some astonishment.

"Claud Eustace himself, by the Great White Spat of Professor Clarence Skinner!" he cried. "What brings my little ray of sunshine here?"