Catch the Saint (9 page)

The next morning, just
before noon, a telephone repairman
stood at the door
of the flat of Samuel S. Caffin and pressed the bell button. The spaciousness
of the corridor, with its royal-blue
carpeting and
Georgian wallpaper, gave rich promise of what
the
humble mechanic was to find when he entered the flat itself.

The door soon opened to
him, and a burly man with pimples
and thick black
hair asked him what he wanted.

The repairman, a Cockney,
replied, “Telephone engineer.” He
consulted
a slip of paper. “Mr Caffin?”

“No.”

“Well, is Mr Caffin
‘ere? ‘E’s supposed to know I’m coming.”

The black-haired man
jerked his head as a signal for the repairman to enter, looked up and down the
outside corridor, and
locked the door. They
were standing in an alcove which opened
into
a large living-room. The hand of the eclectic but classically
minded interior decorator was evident in every expensive vista.
There was great emphasis on floor-to-ceiling drapery (with tas
sels), Tiffany lamps, and the white sculptured shapes of
Grecian
nudes.

“Sam,” the
black-haired man called, “he says he’s from the
telephone
company.”

Sam Caffin was sitting at
a desk on the far side of the living-
room, next to a
high window. His sleeves were rolled up above
his
elbows, revealing arms thicker than the waists of some of his
decorator’s female statues. He was a very broad-shouldered, bull-
necked man. His hair was blond, cut short, and his skin ruddy.
When he turned to see what was going on behind him, a pair
of
gold-rimmed spectacles perched on his boxers’ nose looked
laughably incongruous. He was about forty, but his
rounded fea
tures and smooth skin made him seem
younger.

He seemed aware of the
unsuitability of his eyeglasses, and
jerked them off as
he spoke.

“What’s wrong with
the telephone?”

“Didn’t you get the
notice?” the repairman asked. He was un
usually
tall for a Cockney. He too wore glasses, with thick correc
tive lenses that blurred his eyes to the viewer. A
moustache shadowed his upper lip. “They’re supposed to send you a notice
in the post.”

“I never saw
it,” Caffin said. He was brusque, but through im
patience
rather than belligerence. “I can’t keep up with all the
trash that comes in the post.”

“I’m not supposed to
be ‘ere without you getting the notice
first,
sir; I’d best go get it and come back after lunch.”

“I’m having a
business meeting here after lunch,” Caffin said.
“Come
on in and get it over with now, can’t you?”

“I’ve got to change
the junction box. We’re putting in more
modern
equipment. With your permission I’ll go ahead.”

“You’ve got my
permission,” Caffin said irritably.

“Where’s your
telephones, sir?”

“Right here on this
desk; and there’s another one in my bed
room.”

“I’ll begin right
‘ere, sir,” the telephone engineer said.

He shuffled across the
room, taking a route that required a
kind of slalom
among the statues and their fluted pedestals. As
he approached Caffin’s
desk, where Caffin was attempting to
turn
his attention back to his paperwork, he stopped to admire a
small beautiful Vermeer which hung on the wall. At
least it
would have appeared to be a
Vermeer if Vermeer had ever
signed
his work with a small “
AN
”
in the lower right-hand corner.

“Very ‘andsome,
sir,” the repairman said.

Caffin glanced up from
his desk and said, “Thanks.”

“Very ‘andsome
indeed.”

The telephone man shook
his head admiringly, almost backed
into one of the
statues, and proceeded to look for the telephone
box
along the baseboard near Caffin’s feet. Caffin tried to go on
with his business. The repairman got down on his knees to inspect the
junction, which happened to be only about two yards
from
Caffin’s knees. Assuming that either or both men wanted privacy in their work,
the proximity made it impossible. Behind the thick lenses of the spectacles,
the blue eyes of the telephone engineer were hyperalert, and his fingers moved
swiftly to open
his equipment bag, belying the apparent
clumsiness he had
shown in getting himself across the
room. His eyes, peering over
the glasses which helped
to obscure his normal appearance,
measured the angle
of vision that Caffin must have of the tele
phone
junction. He shifted his position so that his body was be
tween Caffin and the black container bolted to the wall
near the
floor. Now the junction container
could be seen by the black-
haired man who had answered
the door, had he cared to look at anything so uninteresting; he had taken a
chair near the entrance
foyer and was perusing a
copy of
Girl Parade
with scholarly in
tensity.

Quickly the telephone
worker got the junction box open, dis
connected the wires that connected it to
the telephone on Caffin’s
desk, and then
proceeded to detach the entire box from the
wall and deftly free it from the other leads.

“See this ‘ere,
sir?” he said to Caffin. “This ‘ole lot of equip
ment was
defective.” He displayed the vari-coloured innards of
the box, disemboweling it to illustrate his
point. “This ‘ere, and ”
this
‘ere. Not worf a ‘apenny. You’d ‘ave ‘ad all kinds of trouble
soon.”

Caffin watched impatiently
as the repairman used a pair of
needlenosed pliers to pull out little wires and
crush small metal,
components.

“Are you supposed to
be mending the bloody thing or smashing it?” he asked. “I can’t do
without my telephone.”

“I was just showin’ you,” the Cockney
said. “This thing ain’t
no use to no
one now anyway. I’ve got a new one ‘ere to slip right
in an’ tyke its place.”

Caffin snorted as the
telephone engineer tossed the wrecked
junction box aside.
It was now that the engineer hunched as
close as possible over
the wall connections. In his bag was a
slightly
larger box than the one he had just taken from the wall,
very similar in shape and color. Its contents,
however, were not standard issue of the G.P.O. and in fact could serve no
useful purpose at all in improving the operation of Sam Caffin’s tele
phone. The means by which they would cause him to
communi
cate with the world outside
his flat were most efficient, but had
nothing
to do with telephones, and would have been disapproved
of in the extreme by Sam Caffin himself. In fact,
Caffin’s im
mediate reaction, had he
known what was in the new box, would
have
been to bring (or attempt to bring) to a swift, permanent,
and unpleasant end, the career of the man who was
about to in
stall it.

Nevertheless the engineer
went about the substitution as
coolly as a garage mechanic
changing a spark plug. As he
worked, he heard the
footsteps of the man who had been sitting
by
the door come quickly across the room, and a pair of shoes appeared beside him.
He sat back on his heels to look up inquiringly, and his body, though
seemingly relaxed, tensed for instant
action.

“Thinkin’ of learnin’
the business, mate?”

“I’m just
watching,” the other growled.

His dour attitude seemed
to be only the normal manifestation
of his soul; it was
not specifically threatening.

“Lemme show you wot
the bloody fools ‘ave done,” the repair
man
said chattily. “You see this ‘ere?”

Sam Caffin slammed a pen
down on his desk.

“If you’ve got to do that now, could you
do it quieter? What
are you mucking around
there for, Blackie?”

Blackie scratched his
bepimpled face. “Just watching,” he said.

“Well, go watch
something else.”

Blackie grunted and went
back to his picture magazine. Caffin
got up and left
the room. In a minute the new box was attached
to
the wall. The wires to the telephone, however, were still hang
ing loose.

“Mr Caffin?” the
engineer called. “Mr Caffin?”

Caffin reappeared.

“What is it
now?”

“I can’t finish this
job right now. The idiots ‘ave give me some
wrong
fittings. I’ll ‘ave to go back to the depot.”

Caffin swore to himself,
glancing at his watch.

“Can you finish
before two o’clock?”

“Today?” the
repairman mumbled, on his feet now.

“Of course today!” Caffin snapped.
“You sure as hell can’t
leave me
without a telephone until tomorrow.”

The engineer looked
dubious. Caffin reached into his trousers pocket, pulled out some pound notes,
and shoved one out.

“That’s to get it
finished today.”

“Thank you very much,
guv; I’ll do it. But I couldn’t get to
the
depot and back before two o’clock even if I missed me lunch.
I’ll be ‘ere as quick as I can.”

“Wait until after
three-thirty then, but get back here today.”

“You can count on
me, Mr Caffin, sir!”

At three thirty-five the
telephone engineer returned to Caffin’s flat. He was once more admitted by the
black-haired guard. Caffin was not in sight, but the closeness of the air,
dominated by a
thick smell of tobacco smoke, was
evidence that his business
meeting had ended not
long before.

“I’ll ‘ave this done
in ‘arf a mo’,” the engineer said pleasantly.

Blackie showed no
gratitude for the announcement, and went
off
to the other side of the room to stimulate his brain with a copy
of
Frilly Frolics.
The repairman detached the
container he had
left on the wall. Inside, he could
feel the small wire recorder still
running
soundlessly. He shut it off, put it in his bag, and five min
utes later had restored Sam Caffin’s telephone to perfect
working
order.

As he was seen to the door
by the heavy-set watchman, he
said: “Tell Mr
Caffin ta for the quid, and tell him I’ll be drinkin’
to
‘im with it tonight.”

CHAPTER 7

“I can’t believe
it,” Julie Norcombe breathed. “I just can’t be
lieve what Adrian has got mixed up in.”

“It’s quite a
set-up, isn’t it?” Simon admitted.

He had listened to the
recording before bringing it over to
Julie’s flat, so he knew that there was
nothing more to hear but
a monotonous kiss.
He leaned forward and killed the sound with
a touch of one long finger.

“It must mean that
Adrian’s safe, then,” Julie reasoned in momentary rapture.

“It sounds as if
he’s as safe as the crown jewels in the Tower of
London,”
Simon agreed. “He’s so much safer than the average citizen that he could
probably get cut-rate life insurance
…
at
least for the next few weeks.”

The possibly ominous connotations of Simon’s
final phrase
were lost on her. She was too
concerned with the more glaring
facts
of Pargit’s meeting with Caffin in Caffin’s flat.

“But Adrian’s a
prisoner!”
she persisted. “What if they don’t
feed
him well? Or if they don’t get him his stomach pills? He
has a very
nervous stomach. Or if they do terrible things to him
… like beat him, or
…”

Simon raised a soothing
hand.

“My dear,” he
said, “if you were entertaining me as an involun
tary
artist in residence, and I was worth approximately half a
million
pounds to you, would you feed me crusts and beat me
with andirons? No, you certainly would not. You would make me
as comfortable as possible, cater to my
hypochondria, lavish my pet medicines upon me, and feed me all my favourite
dishes. In
short, you’d try to keep
me as happy and calm as possible, so that my hands would be steady and my brain
operating at peak effi
ciency.”