Saint Intervenes (12 page)

The other
members of the party were blundering down
towards them through
the fog. The first figure to loom up
was that of Prince Schamyl himself, cursing fluently in an
incomprehensible tongue; and after him came the
form of the Southshire Insurance Company’s private bloodhound. Teal’s
bloodshot eyes glared at that second apparition
insanely
through the murk. Mr. Teal
had suffered much; he was not
feeling
himself, and in the last analysis he was only human.
That is the only explanation this chronicle can
offer for what
he did. For with a kind
of strangled grunt, Chief Inspector Claud Eustace Teal lurched forward and took
hold of the
offensive handlebar
moustaches, one in each determined
hand.
…

“Perhaps
now you’ll tell me how you did it,” said Patricia
Holm.

The Saint
smiled. He had arrived only twenty minutes,
before, fresh as a
daisy, at the hotel in Paris where he had
arranged to meet her;
and he was unpacking.

From a
large suitcase he had taken a small table, which
was a remarkable thing
for him to have even in his frequently
eccentric luggage. He
set it up before her, and placed on it
a velvet-lined wooden
box. The table was somewhat thicker
in the top than most tables of that
size, as if it might have
contained a drawer; but she could not see any
drawer.

“Watch,”
he said.

He touched
a concealed spring somewhere in the side of
the table—and the box
vanished. Because she was watching it
closely, she saw it go: it simply fell
through a trapdoor into
the hollow thickness of the top, and a
perfectly fitted panel
sprang up to fill the gap again. But it was
all done in a split
second; and even when she examined the top of the table
closely it
was hard to see the edges of the trapdoor. She
shook the table, but
nothing rattled. For all that any ordinary
examination could
reveal, the top might have been a solid
block of mahogany.

“It
was just as easy as that,” said the Saint, with the air
of a
conjuror revealing a treasured illusion. “The crown never
even left
the room until I was ready to take it away. Fortu
nately the Prince
hadn’t actually paid for the crown. It was
still insured by Vazey’s themselves, so
the Southshire Insur
ance Company’s cheque
will go direct to them—which saves
me
a certain amount of extra work. All I’ve got to do now is
to finish off
my alibi, and the job’s done.”

“But
Simon,” pleaded the girl, “when Teal grabbed your
moustaches
——
”

“Teal
didn’t grab my moustaches,” said the Saint with
dignity. “Claud
Eustace would never had dreamed of doing
such a thing. I shall never forget the
look on that bird’s face when the moustaches were grabbed, though. It was a
sight I
hope to treasure to my dying
day.”

He had
unpacked more of the contents of his large bag
while he was talking;
and at that moment he was laying out
a pair of imperially curled
moustachios with which was con
nected an impressively pointed black beard.
Patricia’s eyes
suddenly opened wide.

“Good Lord!” she
gasped. “You don’t mean to say you
kidnapped
the Prince and pretended to be
him?”

Simon
Templar shook his head.

“I
always was the Prince of Cherkessia—didn’t you know?”
he said
innocently; and all at once Patricia began to laugh.

V

The Treasure of Turk’s Lane

There was a
morning when Simon Templar looked up from
his newspaper with a
twinkle of unholy meditation in his
blue eyes and a rather thoughtful smile barely touching the
corners of his mouth; and to the privileged
few who shared
all his lawless moods
there was only one deduction to be
drawn
when the Saint looked up from his newspaper in just
that thoughtful and unholy way.

“I
see that Vernon Winlass has bought Turk’s Lane,” he
said.

Mr. Vernon
Winlass was a man who believed in Getting
Things Done. The
manner of doing them did not concern
him much, so long as it remained
strictly within the law; it
was only results which could be seen in bank accounts, share
holdings, income tax returns, and the material
circumstances
of luxurious living, and
with these things Mr. Winlass was
very
greatly and whole-heartedly concerned. This is not to
say that he was more avaricious than any other
business man,
or more unscrupulous
than any other financier. In his phi
losophy,
the weakest went to the wall: the careless, the timid,
the foolish, the simple, the hesitant, paid with
their mis
fortunes for the rewards
that came naturally to those of
sharper
and more aggressive talents. And in setting up that
elementary principle for his only guiding
standard, Mr. Win
lass could
justifiably claim that after all he was only demon
strating himself to be the perfect evolutionary
product of a
civilisation whose
honours and amenities are given only to
people who Get Things Done, whether they are worth doing or not—with the
notable exception of politicians, who, of
course, are exempted by election even from that requirement.

Simon
Templar did not like Mr. Winlass, and would have
considered him a
legitimate victim for his illegitimate talents,
on general principles
that were only loosely connected with one or two things he had heard about Mr.
Winlass’s methods
of Getting Things Done; but although the idea of devoting
some time
and attention to that hard-headed financier sim
mered at the back of
his mind in a pleasant warmth of en
thusiasm, it did not actually boil over
until the end of the
same week, when he happened to be passing
Turk’s Lane on
his return from another business affair.

Turk’s Lane
is, or was, a narrow cul-de-sac of small two-
storey cottages. That description is more
or less as bald and
unimaginative as
anything a hard-headed financier would
have
found to say about it. In actual fact it was one of those curious relics of the
past which may sometimes be discovered
in
London, submerged among tall modern buildings and
ordered squares as if a new century had grown up
around it
without noticing its
existence any more than was necessary to
avoid treading on it. The passer-by who wandered into that dark lane at
night might have fancied himself magically
transported back over two centuries. He would have seen the low ceilings
and tiny leaded windows of oak-beamed houses, the wrought-iron lamps glowing
above the lintels of the narrow doors, the worn cobblestones gleaming
underfoot, the
naphtha flares
flickering on a riot of foodstuffs spread out in
unglazed shop fronts; and he might have thought himself
spirited away into the market street of a village
that had survived there unaltered from the days when Kensington was a
hamlet three miles from London and there was a real
Knights’
Bridge across the Serpentine
where it now flows through
sanitary
drainpipes to the Thames.

Mr. Winlass
did not think any of these things; but he saw
something far more
interesting to himself, which was that
Turk’s Lane stood at
the back of a short row of shabby early
Victorian houses,
which were for sale. He also saw that the
whole of Turk’s Lane—except
for the two end houses, which
were the freehold property of the
occupants—was likewise for
sale, and that the block comprised of these
two principal
properties totalled an area of about three-quarters of an
acre,
which is quite a small garden in the country, but which would
allow
plenty of space to erect a block of modern apartments
with running hot and
cold water in every room for the
tenancy of fifty more sophisticated and
highly civilised Lon
doners. He also saw that this projected
building would have
an impressive frontage on a most respectable road in a
con
venient situation which the westward trend of expansion was
annually
raising in value; and he bought the row of shabby early Victorian houses and
the whole of Turk’s Lane except
the two end cottages, and called in his
architects.

Those two
cottages which had not been included in the
purchase were the
difficulty.

“If
you don’t get those two places the site’s useless,” Mr.
Winlass
was told. “You can’t build a block of flats like you’re
proposing
to put up with two old cottages in the middle.”

“Leave
it to me,” said Mr. Winlass. “I’ll Get It Done.”

Strolling
into Turk’s Lane on this day when the ripeness
of Mr. Winlass for
the slaughter was finally made plain to
him, Simon Templar
learned how it was getting done.

It was not
by any means the Saint’s first visit to the pic
turesque little alley.
He had an open affection for it, as he
had for all such
pathetic rearguards of the forlorn fight
against dull
mechanical modernity; and he had at least one
friend who lived
there.

Dave
Roberts was a cobbler. He was an old grey-haired
man with gentle grey
eyes, known to every inhabitant of
Turk’s Lane as “Uncle Dave,”
who had plied his trade there
since the oldest of them could remember, as
his father and
grandfather had done before him. It might almost be said
that he
was
Turk’s Lane, so wholly did he belong to the
forgotten days that
were preserved there. The march of
progress to which Mr. Vernon Winlass belonged had passed
him by. He sat in his tiny shop and mended the
boots and
shoes of the neighbourhood
for microscopical old-world prices;
he
had a happy smile and a kind word for everyone; and
with those simple
things, unlike Mr. Vernon Winlass, his
philosophy
began and ended and was well content. To such
pioneers as Mr. Winlass he
was, of course, a dull reactionary
and a
stupid bumpkin; but to the Saint he was one of the
few and dwindling relics of happier and cleaner
days, and
many pairs of Simon’s own expensive shoes had gone to his
door out of that queer affection rather than
because they
needed repairing.

Simon smoked a cigarette under
the low beamed ceiling in
the smell of
leather and wax, while Dave Roberts wielded
his awl under a flickering gas-jet and told him of the things
that were happening in Turk’s Lane.

“Ay,
sir, Tom Unwin over the road, he’s going. Mr. Winlass put him out o’ business.
Did you see that new shop next
to Tom’s? Mr. Winlass started that up, soon
as he’d got the
tenants out. Sold exactly the same things as Tom had in
his
shop for a quarter the price—practically give ‘em away, he
did.
‘Course, he lost money all the time, but he can afford
to. Tom ain’t hardly done a bit o’
business since then. ‘Well,’
Tom says to
himself, ‘if this goes on for another couple o’ months I’ll be broke,’ so in
the end he sells out to Mr. Win-
lass
an’ glad to do it. I suppose I’ll be the next, but Mr.
Winlass won’t get me out if I can help it.”

The Saint
looked across the lane at the garish makeshift
shop front next door
to Tom Unwin’s store, and back again
to the gentle old man straining his
eyes under the feeble
light.

“So he’s been after you,
has he?” he said.
“Ay, he’s been
after me. One of his men come in my shop the other day. ‘Your place is worth
five hundred pounds,’ he says. ‘We’ll give you seven hundred to get out at
once, an’ M
r. Winlass is being very
generous with you,’ he says. Well,
I
told him I didn’t want to get out. I been here, man an’
boy, for seventy years now, an’ I wasn’t going to
get out to
suit him. ‘You realise,’
he says, ‘your obstinacy is holding up
an
important an’ valuable piece of building?’—‘Begging your
pardon, sir,’ I says, ‘you’re holdin’ me up from
mending these
shoes.’—‘Very well,’
this chap says, ‘if you’re so stupid you
can refuse two hundred pounds more than your place is
worth, you’re going to be glad to take two hundred
less be
fore you’re much older, if you
don’t come to your senses
quick,’ he
says, ‘and them’s Mr. Winlass’s orders,’ he says.”