Follow the Saint (26 page)

She made a face at him and
stood up.

“What
are you going to do tonight ?”

“I
called Claud Eustace this morning and made a date to take him out to
dinner—maybe he’ll know about something
exciting that’s going
on. And it’s time we were on our way
too. Are you ready, Hoppy?”

The
rudimentary assortment of features which constituted
the hairless or front
elevation of Hoppy Uniatz’s head
emerged lingeringly from behind the bottle of
Caledonian
dew with which he had been making another of his indomit
able
attempts to assuage the chronic aridity of his gullet.

“Sure,
boss,” he said agreeably. “Ain’t I always ready?
Where do we
meet, dis dame we gotta bump off?”

The Saint
sighed.

“You’ll
find out,” he said. “Let’s go.”

Mr Uniatz
trotted placidly after him. In Mr Uniatz’s mind, a delicate organ which he had
to be careful not to overwork,
there was room for none of the manifestations of philosophi
cal indignation with which Simon Templar was
sometimes
troubled. By the time it
had found space for the ever-present
problems
of quenching an insatiable thirst and finding a sufficient supply of lawfully
bumpable targets to keep the rust from forming in the barrel of his Betsy, it
really had
room for only one other
idea. And that other permanently
comforting
and omnipresent notion was composed entirely
of the faith and devotion with which he clung to the intel
lectual pre-eminence of the Saint. The Saint, Mr
Uniatz had long since realized, with almost religious awe, could Think.
To Mr Uniatz, a man whose rare experiments with
Thought
had always given him a dull
pain under the hat, this discovery
had
simplified life to the point where Paradise itself would have had few
advantages to offer, except possibly rivers
flowing with Scotch whisky. He simply did what he was
told, and everything came out all right. Anything
the Saint said was okay with him.

It is a
lamentable fact that Chief-Inspector Claud Eustace
Teal had no such faith to buoy him up. Mr
Teal’s views were
almost diametrically the
reverse of those which gave so much
consolation
to Mr Uniatz. To Mr Teal, the Saint was a
perennial harbinger of woe, an everlasting time-bomb
planted under his official chair—with the only
difference that
when ordinary bombs
blew up they were at least over and
done
with, whereas the Saint was a bomb with the supernatural and unfair ability to
blow up whenever it wanted to without in any way impairing its capacity for
future explosions. He had accepted the Saint’s invitation to dinner with
an uneasy and actually unjustified suspicion that
there was
probably a catch in it, as there had been in most of his previ
ous encounters with the Saint; and there was a
gleam of
something like smugness in
his sleepy eyes as he settled more
firmly
behind his desk at Scotland Yard and shook his head
with every conventional symptom of regret.

“I’m
sorry, Saint,” he said. “I ought to have phoned you,
but I’ve
been so busy. I’m going to have to ask you to fix
another evening. We had a bank holdup at
Staines today, and
I’ve got to go down there
and take over.”

Simon’s
brows began to rise by an infinitesimal hopeful
fraction.

“A
bank holdup, Claud? How much did they get away
with?”

“About
fifteen thousand pounds,” Teal said grudgingly. “You ought to know.
It was in the evening papers.”

“I do
seem to remember seeing something about it tucked
away somewhere,”
Simon said thoughtfully. “What do you
know?”

The
detective’s mouth closed and tightened up. It was as
if he was already
regretting having said so much, even though
the information was
broadcast on the streets for anyone with
a spare penny to read.
But he had seen that tentatively
optimistic flicker of the Saint’s mocking
eyes too often in the
past to ever be able to see it again without a
queasy hollow
feeling in the pit of his ample stomach. He reacted to it
with
a brusqueness that sprang from a long train of memories of
other occasions when crime had
been in the news and boodle
in the wind, and
Simon Templar had greeted both promises
with the same incorrigibly hopeful glimmer of mischief in
his
eyes, and that warning had presaged one more nightmare chapter in the
apparently endless sequence that had made the
name
of the Saint the most dreaded word in the vocabulary
of the underworld and the source of more grey
hairs in
Chief-Inspector Teal’s
dwindling crop than any one man
had a
right to inflict on a conscientious officer of the law.

“If I
knew all about it I shouldn’t have to go to Staines,”
he said
conclusively. “I’m sorry, but I can’t tell you where to
go and
pick up the money.”

“Maybe
I could run you down,” Simon began temptingly.
“Hoppy and I are
all on our own this evening, and we were
just looking for something
useful to do. My car’s outside,
and it needs some exercise. Besides, I feel clever tonight. All
my genius for sleuthing and deduction——
”

“I’m
sorry,” Teal repeated. “There’s a police car waiting
for me already. I’ll have to
get along as well as I can without
you.”
He stood up, and held out his hand. A sensitive man
might almost have thought that he was in a hurry to
avoid
an argument. “Give me a
ring one day next week, will you?
I’ll
be able to tell you all about it then.”

Simon
Templar stood on the Embankment outside
Scotland Yard and
lighted a cigarette with elaborately
elegant restraint.

“And
that, Hoppy,” he explained, “is what is technically
known as
the Bum’s Rush.”

He gazed
resentfully at the dingy panorama which is the
total of everything that generations of
London architects and
County Councils have
been able to make out of their river
frontages.

“Nobody
loves us,” he said gloomily. “Patricia forsakes
us to be a
dutiful niece to a palsied aunt, thereby leaving us
exposed to every kind
of temptation. We try to surround
ourselves with holiness by dining with
a detective, and he’s too busy to keep the date. We offer to help him and array
ourselves on the side of law and order, and he gives us the
tax-collector’s
welcome. His evil mind distrusts our im
maculate motives. He
is so full of suspicion and uncharitable-
ness that he thinks
our only idea is to catch up with his bank
holder-uppers before
he does and relieve them of their loot
for our own benefit.
He practically throws us out on our ear,
and abandons us to
any wicked schemes we can cook up.
What are we going to do about
it?”

“I
dunno, boss.” Mr Uniatz shifted from one foot to the
other,
grimacing with the heroic effort of trying to extract a
constructive
suggestion from the gummy interior of his
skull. He hit upon
one at last, with the trepidant amazement of another Newton grasping the law of
gravity. “Maybe we
could go some place an’ get a drink,”
he suggested breath
lessly.

Simon grinned at him and took
him by the arm.

“For
once in your life,” he said, “I believe you’ve had an
inspiration.
Let us go to a pub and drown our sorrows.”

On the way he bought another
evening paper and turned wistfully to the story of the bank holdup; but it gave
him very little more than Teal had told him. The bank was a
branch of the City & Continental, which
handled the ac
counts of two
important factories on the outskirts of the
town. That morning the routine consignment of cash in
silver and small notes had been brought down from
London
in a guarded van to meet the weekly payrolls of the two
plants; and after it had been placed in the
strong-room
the van and the guards had
departed as usual, although
the
factory messengers would not call for it until the
afternoon. There was no particular secrecy about
the arrangements, and the possibility of a holdup of the bank
itself had apparently never been taken seriously.
During the
lunch hour the local
police, acting on an anonymous tele
phone call, had sent a hurried squad
to the bank in time to
interrupt the holdup;
but the bandits had shot their way out, wounding two constables in the process;
and approximately
fifteen thousand
pounds’ worth of untraceable small change
had vanished with them. Their car had been found aban
doned only a few blocks from the bank premises,
and there
the trail ended; and the
Saint knew that it was likely to stay
ended
there for all the clues contained in the printed story.
England was a small country, but it contained
plenty of
room for two unidentified
bank robbers to hide in.

Simon
refolded the newspaper and dumped it resignedly
on the bar; and as he
did so it lay in such a way that the head
lines summarizing the
epochal utterance of Mr Ebenezer
Hogsbotham stared up at him with a complacent prominence
that added insult to injury.

The Saint
stared malevolently back at them; and in the mood which circumstances had
helped to thrust upon him
their effect had an almost fateful inevitability. No other man
on earth would have taken them in just that way;
but there
never had been another man
in history so harebrained as the
Saint could be when his rebellious
instincts boiled over. The
idea that was
being born to him grew momentarily in depth
and richness. He put down his glass, and went to the telephone booth to
consult the directory. The action was rather like the mental tossing of a coin.
And it came down heads.
Mr Hogsbotham
was on the telephone. And accordingly, decisively, his address was in the book.
…

The fact
seemed to leave no further excuse for hesitation.
Simon went back to the
bar, and his head sang carols with
the blitheness of his own insanity.

“Put
that poison away, Hoppy,” he said. “We’re going
places.”

Mr Uniatz
gulped obediently, and looked up with a con
tented beam.

“Dijja
t’ink of sump’n to do, boss?” he asked eagerly.

The Saint
nodded. His smile was extravagantly radiant.

“I
did. We’re going to burgle the house of Hogsbotham.”

II

I
T WAS
one of
those lunatic ideas that any inmate of an asylum might have conceived, but only
Simon Templar
could be relied on to carry solemnly into execution. He
didn’t
waste any more time on pondering over it, or even stop to
consider
any of its legal aspects. He drove his huge cream
and red Hirondel
snarling over the roads to Chertsey at an
average speed that was
a crime in itself, and which would
probably have given a nervous
breakdown to any passenger less impregnably phlegmatic than Mr Uniatz; but he
brought
it intact
to the end of the trip without any elaborations on his original idea or any
attempt to produce them. He was simply
on
his way to effect an unlawful entry into the domicile of
Mr Hogsbotham, and there to do something or other
that
would annoy Mr Hogsbotham greatly
and at the same time relieve his own mood of general annoyance; but what that
something would be rested entirely with the
inspiration of
the moment. The only
thing he was sure about was that the
inspiration
would be forthcoming.

The telephone directory had
told him that Mr Hogsbotham
lived at
Chertsey. It also located Mr Hogsbotham’s home on
Greenleaf Road, which Simon found to be a narrow
turning
off Chertsey Lane running
towards the river on the far side of
the town. He drove the Hirondel
into a field a hundred yards
beyond the
turning and left it under the broad shadow of a
clump of elms, and returned
to Greenleaf Road on foot. And
there the
telephone directory’s information became vague.
Following the ancient custom by which the Englishman
strives to preserve the sanctity of his castle from
strange
visitors by refusing to give
it a street number, hiding it
instead
under a name like ‘Mon Repos’, ‘Sea View’, ‘The Birches’, ‘Dunrovin’,
‘Jusweetu’, and other similar whimsies
the
demesne of Mr Hogsbotham was apparently known
simply as ‘The Snuggery’. Which might have conveyed vol
umes to a postman schooled in tracking
self-effacing citizens
to their lairs,
but wasn’t the hell of a lot of help to any layman who was trying to find the
place for the first time on a dark night.