Leslie Charteris - Follow the Saint

He crouched in the shadow of a bush with his gun raised, and said in a much more carrying voice: "I bet I can shoot my initials on the face of the first guy who sticks his nose outside."

The lights went out a second time; and there was a considerable silence. The house might have been empty of life. Behind him, Simon heard an engine whine into life, drop back to a subdued purr as the starter disconnected. He backed towards the car, his eyes raking the house frontage relentlessly, until he could step on to the running-board.

"Okay, Hoppy," he said.

The black sedan slid forward. Another shot whacked out behind as he opened the door and tumbled into the front seat, but it was yards wide of usefulness. The headlights sprang into brilliance as they lurched through an opening ahead and skidded round in the lane beyond. For the first time in several overcrowded minutes, the Saint had leisure to get out his cigarette case. The flame of his lighter painted jubilantly mephistophelian highlights on his face.

"Let's pick up our own car," he said. "Then we'll take our prize home and find out what we've won."

He found out sooner than that. He only had to fish out Mr Verdean's wallet to find a half-dozen engraved cards that answered a whole tumult of questions with staggering simplicity. They said:

Mr Robert Verdean

Branch Manager

City & Continental Bank Ltd

Staines

Patricia Holm put two lumps of sugar in her coffee and stirred it.

"Well, that's your story," she said coldly. "So I suppose you're sticking to it. But what were you doing there in the first place?"

"I told you," said the Saint. "We were looking for Hogsbotham."

"Why should you be looking for him?"

"Because he annoyed me. You remember. And we had to do something to pass the evening."

"You could have gone to a movie."

"What, and seen a picture about gangsters? You know what a demoralizing influence these pictures have. It might have put ideas into my head."

"Of course," she said. "You didn't have any ideas about Hogsbotham."

"Nothing very definite," he admitted. "We might have just wedged his mouth open and poured him full of gin, and then pushed him in the stage door of a leg show, or something like that. Anyway, it didn't come to anything. We got into the wrong house, as you may have gathered. The bloke who told us the way said 'the fourth house', but it was too dark to see houses. I was counting entrances; but I didn't discover until afterwards that Verdean's place has one of those U-shaped drives, with an in and out gate, so I counted him twice. Hogsbotham's sty must have been the next house on. Verdean's house is called 'The Shutters', but the paint was so bad that I easily took it for "The Snuggery'. After I'd made the mistake and got in there, I was more or less a pawn on the chessboard of chance. There was obviously something about Verdean that wanted investigating, and the way things panned out it didn't look healthy to investigate him on the spot. So we just had to bring him away with us."

"You didn't have to hit him so hard that he'd get concussion and lose his memory."

Simon rubbed his chin.

"There's certainly something in that, darling. But it was all very difficult. It was too dark for me to see just what I was doing, and I was in rather a rush. However, it does turn out to be a bit of a snag."

He had discovered the calamity the night before, after he had unloaded Verdean at his country house at Weybridge — he had chosen that secluded lair as a destination partly because it was only about five.miles from Chertsey, partly because it had more elaborate facilities for concealing captives than his London apartment. The bank manager had taken an alarmingly long time to recover consciousness; and when he eventually came back to life it was only to vomit and moan unintelligibly. In between retchings his eyes wandered over his surroundings with a vacant stare into which even the use of his own name and the reminders of the plight from which he had been extracted could not bring a single flicker of response. Simon had dosed him with calomel and sedatives and put him to bed, hoping that he would be back to normal in the morning; but he had awakened in very little better condition, clutching his head painfully and mumbling nothing but listless uncomprehending replies to any question he was asked.

He was still in bed, giving no trouble but serving absolutely no useful purpose as a source of information; and the Saint gazed out of the window at the morning sunlight lancing through the birch and pine glade outside and frowned ruefully over the consummate irony of the impasse.

"I might have known there'd be something like this waiting for me when you phoned me to come down for breakfast," said Patricia stoically. "How soon are you expecting Teal?".The Saint chuckled.

"He'll probably be sizzling in much sooner than we want him — a tangle like this wouldn't be complete without good old Claud Eustace. But we'll worry about that when it happens. Meanwhile, we've got one consolation. Comrade Verdean seems to be one of those birds who stuff everything in their pockets until the stitches begin to burst. I've been going over his collection of junk again, and it tells quite a story when you put it together."

Half of the breakfast table was taken up with the potpourri of relics which he had extracted from various parts of the bank manager's clothing, now sorted out into neat piles. Simon waved a spoon at them.

"Look them over for yourself, Pat. Nearest to you, you've got a couple of interesting souvenirs. Hotel bills. One of 'em is where Mr Robert Verdean stayed in a modest semiboardinghouse at Eastbourne for the first ten days of July. The other one follows straight on for the next five days; only it's from a swank sin-palace at Brighton, and covers the sojourn of a Mr and Mrs Jones who seem to have consumed a large amount of champagne during their stay. If you had a low mind like mine, you might begin to jump to a few conclusions about Comrade Verdean's last vocation."

"I could get ideas."

"Then the feminine handkerchief — a pretty little sentimental souvenir, but rather compromising."

Patricia picked it up and sniffed it.

"Night of Sin," she said with a slight grimace.

"Is that what it's called? I wouldn't know. But I do know that it's the same smell that the blonde floozie brought in with her last night. Her name is Angela Lindsay; and she has quite a reputation in the trade for having made suckers out of a lot of guys who should have been smarter than Comrade Verdean."

She nodded.

"What about the big stack of letters. Are they love-letters?"

"Not exactly. They're bookmaker's accounts. And the little book on top of them isn't a heart-throb diary — it's a betting diary. The name on all of 'em is Joseph Mackintyre. And you'll remember from an old adventure of ours that Comrade Mackintyre has what you might call an elastic conscience about his bookmaking. The story is all there, figured down to pennies. Verdean seems to have started on the sixth of July, and he went off with a bang. By the middle of the month he must have wondered why he ever bothered to work in a bank. I'm not surprised he had champagne every night at Brighton — it was all free. But the luck started to change after that. He had fewer and fewer winners, and he went on plunging more and more heavily. The last entry in the diary, a fortnight ago, left him nearly five thousand pounds in the red. Your first name doesn't have to be Sherlock to put all those notes together and make a tune."

Patricia's sweet face was solemn with thought.

"Those two men," she said. "Dolf and Kaskin. You knew them. What's their racket?"

"Morrie was one of Snake Canning's sparetime boys once. He's dangerous. Quite a sadist, in his nasty little way. You could hire him for anything up to murder, at a price; but he really enjoys his work. Kaskin has more brains, though. He's more versatile. Confidence work, the old badger game, living off women, protection rackets — he's had a dab at all of them. He's worked around racetracks quite a bit, too, doping horses and intimidating jockeys and bookmakers and so forth, which makes him an easy link with Mackintyre. His last stretch was for manslaughter. But bank robbery is quite a fancy flight even for him. He must have been getting ideas."