Leslie Charteris: Catch the Saint

The time seems to have come when Simon Templar cannot plausibly go on being contemporary, or else too many literary detectives smarter than Chief Inspector Teal are going to be deducing his present age from the internal evidence of several stories in the Saga that were highly topical at the time they first appeared, and in which the Saint was irrevocably linked with certain historic dates and events. And awkward questions are bound to be asked about how, in 1975 or later still, he retains the same exuberance and agility that he displayed forty and more years ago.

The only alternative to taking him into the realms of science fiction for a miraculous rejuvenation, if the demand for more stories about him continues, is to delve into his past for hitherto untold adventures of his earlier years — which, indeed, some loyal followers maintain were his best.

This, then, is the first experiment of that kind. Although the stories in this book are brand new, they are not set in 1975, the year of first publication, but must be regarded as having taken place before the world war of 1939. Any “dated” details in them that may be spotted by today-conscious readers are therefore strictly intentional.

LC

Every weekday morning at precisely ten o’clock, Mrs Evelyn Teasbury backed her shiny black Rolls Royce from its green-doored garage in Upper Berkeley Mews and embarked on her rounds of London and environs.

Simon Templar, that aficionado of the unexpected, that master of the unpredictable, never followed any such set routine. But he also lived in Upper Berkeley Mews, and in the course of the years since Mrs Teasbury’s husband had died, he had often observed the old lady’s departures. Hatted and gloved, impeccable in spite of reduced circumstances, she would back her well-preserved but ancient Rolls (obviously a major feature of her late husband’s estate) into the street, leave it running while she closed the gleaming green garage door, and drive smoothly and slowly away. Her clothing and the car never changed, year after year, as Mrs Teasbury stiffly but gracefully mounted the stairs of her seventies. The garage door got a fresh coat of paint every spring, and Mrs Teasbury’s hair became whiter and whiter; otherwise her contribution to the appearance and activities of the neighbourhood was inconspicuous but immutable.

It was therefore a big surprise to Simon Templar when he set out one morning in his own new, growling, incredibly expensive Hirondel and overtook Mrs Teasbury as she left her modest flat on foot. He had never seen her walk any farther than the garage before. He came to a stop alongside the slowly moving figure and hailed her with a cheerful “Good morning!”

They had often exchanged just about that many words apiece, and Mrs Teasbury, like all females, had been taken with Simon’s dashing good looks and open pleasantness.

“Good morning,” she said quietly, with a nod, and started to move on towards the corner.

“Would you like a ride?” Simon asked. “In fact, I insist.”

He had recognised the dignified struggle between acceptance and rejection which had flashed across her wrinkled face. He was out of the car opening the door for her before she could reply.

“I’m very grateful to you,” she breathed as he pulled away from the kerb. “Walking is a bit of a struggle for me these days.”

“Is your car under the weather?” he asked.

He could immediately sense the tension that gripped his passenger.

“It’s gone,” she said. “I had to sell it.”

There was something in the wording and the way she spoke that made him realise that she was admitting a personal catastrophe and not just a timely business transaction. She desperately wanted to tell him, or someone, more about it; she wanted to be questioned.

“You had to?” he asked. “I hope nothing is wrong.”

It was normal, in the course of inflation and political fluctuation, that a person in reduced circumstances living on a non-growing income might find her circumstances getting more and more reduced. But Mrs Teasbury immediately confessed something more drastic:

“Yes,” she said. “Wrong is definitely the word. I have been wronged. I have been taken advantage of and lied to and cheated. So I’ve been forced to sell my car in order to pay my bills.” She hesitated, and Simon waited, driving slowly with no particular destination in mind. Mrs Teasbury had probably just come as close to crying as she would ever come in front of a relative stranger. “I’m not sure why I’m telling you this, except that I’ve heard some wild tales about what you’ve done to criminals, and I feel that what has been done to me is a crime.”

“What happened exactly?” Simon asked.

“I’m not asking for help. What’s done is done. If you would please drop me off at an underground station that would take me to High Holborn I’d be most grateful. I have to go begging to my banker.”

Simon continued driving nowhere.

“I realise you’re not asking for anything,” he said. “But I’d like to know what happened.”

“I was given very bad advice, to say the least,” she said. “A certain so-called art expert whose name I now detest advised me several years ago to sell some paintings my husband and I had bought. This was after my husband had died, and I needed to make some good investments. This art dealer told me that what I had would never be worth much. He arranged for me to sell my paintings through him for next to nothing, and to put money into several paintings that he assured me would go up in value. ‘Skyrocket’ was the word he used. This all happened over a period of years. I bought the most recent painting from him just last year.”

“I can imagine the rest,” Simon said. “The art treasures you bought turned out to...”

“To be rubbish,” the old lady interrupted. “And I read in the paper a few days ago that one of the paintings I had sold to this individual for eight hundred pounds had gone at auction for nineteen thousand pounds. And this is only nine years after I sold it.”

“Of course if you accuse your dealer of cheating you he’ll apologise profusely and say he can’t be right all the time.

“Exactly,” Mrs Teasbury snapped. “That is exactly what he did say. But he deliberately took advantage. He talked me into believing that art works were the best investment I could make, and that his advice was the best I could follow. Over the years, he has underpaid me for the paintings I owned and vastly overcharged me for the paintings he sold me. Now I have nothing. It’s my own fault. I should have gone about it all quite differently.”

“Would you mind telling me your art dealer’s name?” Simon asked very quietly.

She told him, and it was a name that was only vaguely familiar to him. She immediately added, “But there’s nothing to be done. My solicitor, who was gracious enough to advise me without collecting his fee, has told me I have no legal recourse.”

Simon Templar thought, but did not say, as he headed towards Kingsway, that where legal recourse left off was usually where his own endeavours began. As most guardians of the law knew, however inconsequential their posts and their locations throughout the world, Simon Templar was not exactly their comrade on the paths of licitness. While Mrs Evelyn Teasbury knew him as a handsome young man always dashing to and from his house at odd hours of the day and night, to those who dealt with him directly he was a renegade whose methods simply ignored the existence of conventional statutes which did more to protect the criminal than the criminal’s prey. Yet his results were of a kind that could as a rule be heartily (though perhaps secretly) applauded by the police, the clergy, and other traditional sentinels of righteousness. Perhaps it was this invariable element of justice in Simon Templar’s extra-legal deeds, and the fact that the beneficiaries of his forays were usually the weak and defenceless, that had earned him his nickname, “the Saint.”