Leslie Charteris - Follow the Saint

His headache lasted through a lunch which Orace indignantly served even later than he had served breakfast, but it brought forth very little to justify itself. He had gone over the facts at his disposal until he was sick of them, and they fitted together with a complete and sharply focused deductive picture that Sherlock Holmes himself could not have improved on, without a hiatus or a loose end anywhere — only the picture merely showed a plump rabbit-faced man slinking off with fifteen thousand pounds in a bag, and neglected to show where he went with it. Which was the one detail in which Simon Templar was most urgently interested. He was always on the side of the angels, he told himself, but he had to remember that sanctity had its own overhead to meet.

Verdean showed no improvement in the afternoon. Towards five o'clock the Saint had a flash of inspiration, and put in a long-distance call to a friend in Wolverhampton.

"Dr Turner won't be back till tomorrow morning, and I'm afraid I don't know how to reach him," said the voice at the other end of the wire; and the flash flickered and died out at the sound. "But I can give you Dr Young's number—"

"I am not having a baby," said the Saint coldly, and hung up.

He leaned back in his chair and said, quietly and intensely: "God damn."

"You should complain," said Patricia. "You Mormon."

She had entered the study from the hall, and closed the door again behind her. The Saint looked up from under mildly interrogative brows.

"I knew you adored me," he said, "but you have an original line of endearing epithets. What's the origin of this one?"

"Blonde," she said, "and voluptuous in a careful way. Mushy lips and the-old-baloney eyes. I'll bet she wears black lace undies and cuddles like a kitten. She hasn't brought the baby with her, but she's probably got a picture of it."

The Saint straightened.

"Not Angela?" he ventured breathlessly.

"I'm not so intimate with her," said Patricia primly. "But she gave the name of Miss Lindsay. You ought to recognize your own past when it catches up with you."

Simon stood up slowly. He glanced at the closed section of the bookcase, beyond which was the secret room where Hoppy Uniatz was still keeping watch over Mr Verdean and a case of Vat 69; and his eyes were suddenly filled with an unholy peace.

"I do not recognize her, darling, now I think about it," he said. "This is the one who had the twins." He gripped her arm, and his smile wavered over her in a flicker of ghostly excitement. "I ought to have known that she'd catch up with me. And I think this is the break I've been waiting for all day…"

He went into the living-room with a new quickness in his step and a new exhilaration sliding along his nerves. Now that this new angle had developed, he was amazed that he had not been expecting it from the beginning. He had considered every other likely eventuality, but not this one; and yet this was the most obvious one of all. Kaskin and Dolf knew who he was, and some of his addresses were to be found in various directories that were at the disposal of anyone who could read: it was not seriously plausible that after the night before they would decide to give up their loot and go away and forget about it, and once they had made up their minds to attempt a comeback it could only have been a matter of time before they looked for him in Weybridge. The only thing he might not have anticipated was that they would send Angela Lindsay in to open the interview. That was a twist which showed a degree of circumspection that made Simon Templar greet her with more than ordinary watchfulness.

"Angela, darling!" he murmured with an air of pleased surprise. "I never thought I should see you in these rural parts. When did you decide to study bird life in the suburbs?"

"It came over me suddenly, last night," she said. "I began to realize that I'd missed something."

His eyes were quizzically sympathetic.

"You shouldn't be too discouraged. I don't think you missed it by more than a couple of inches."

"Perhaps not. But a miss is—"

"I know. As good as in the bush."

"Exactly."

He smiled at her, and offered the cigarette box. She took one, and he gave her a light. His movements and his tone of voice were almost glisteningly smooth with exaggerated elegance. He was enjoying his act immensely.

"A drink?" he suggested; but she shook her head.

"It mightn't be very good for me, so I won't risk it. Besides, I want to try and make a good impression."

He was studying her more critically than he had been able to the night before, and it seemed to him that Patricia's description of her was a little less than absolutely fair. She had one of those modern streamlined figures that look boyish until they are examined closely, when they prove to have the same fundamental curves that grandma used to have. Her mouth and eyes were effective enough, even if the effect was deplorable from a moral standpoint. And although it was true that even a comparatively unworldly observer would scarcely have hesitated for a moment over placing her in her correct category, it was also very definitely true that if all the other members of that category had looked like her, Mr Ebenezer Hogsbotham would have found himself burning a very solitary candle in a jubilantly naughty world.

The Saint went on looking at her with amiable amusement at the imaginative vistas opened up by the train of thought. He said: "You must have made quite an impression on Comrade Verdean. And you drank champagne with him at Brighton."

She put her cigarette to her lips and drew lightly at it while she gazed at him for a second or two in silence. Her face was perfectly composed, but her eyes were fractionally narrowed.

"I'll give you that one," she said at length. "We've been wondering just how much you really knew. Would you care to tell me the rest, or would that be asking too much?"

"Why, of course," said the Saint obligingly. "If you're interested. It isn't as if I'd be telling you anything you don't know already."

He sat down and stretched out his long legs. He looked at the ceiling. He was bluffing, but he felt sure enough of his ground.

"Kaskin and Dolf picked up Verdean on his holiday at Eastbourne," he said. "Kaskin can make himself easy to like when he wants to — it's his stock in trade. They threw you in for an added attraction. Verdean fell for it all. He was having a swell time with a bunch of good fellows. And you were fairly swooning into his manly arms. It made him feel grand, and a little bit dizzy. He had to live up to it. Kaskin was a sporty gent, and Verdean was ready to show that he was a sporty gent too. They got him to backing horses, and he always backed winners. Money poured into his lap. He felt even grander. It went to his head — where it was meant to go. He left his boardinghouse, and pranced off to Brighton with you on a wild and gorgeous jag."

Simon reached for a cigarette.

"Then, the setback," he went on. "You had expensive tastes, and you expected him to go on being a good fellow and a sporty gent. But that looked easy. There was always money in the geegees, with Kaskin's expert assistance. So he thought. Only something went haywire. The certainties didn't win. But the next one would always get it back. Verdean began to plunge. He got wilder and wilder as he lost more and more. And he couldn't stop. He was infatuated with you, scared stiff of losing you. He lost more money than he had of his own. He started embezzling a little, maybe. Anyway, he was in the cart. He owed more money than he could hope to pay. Then Kaskin and Dolf started to get tough. They told him how he could pay off his debt, and make a profit as well. There was plenty of money in the bank every week, and it would be very easy to stage a holdup and get away with it if he was co-operating. Kaskin and Dolf would do the job and take all the risk, and all he had to do was to give them the layout and make everything easy for them. He'd never be suspected himself, and he'd get his cut afterwards. But if he didn't string along — well, someone might have to tell the head office about him. Verdean knew well enough what happens to bank managers who get into debt, particularly over gambling. He could either play ball or go down the drain. So he said he'd play ball. Am I right?"