Saint Intervenes (13 page)

“I get
it,” said the Saint quietly. “And in a day or two
you’ll
have a Winlass shoe repair shop next door to you, working for nothing.”

“They
won’t do work like I do,” said Dave Roberts stolidly.
“You
can’t do it, not with these machines. What did the
Good Lord give us
hands for, if it wasn’t that they were the
best tools in the
world? … But I wouldn’t be surprised if
Mr. Winlass tried it.
But I wouldn’t sell my house to him. I
told this fellow he sent to see me: ‘My
compliments to Mr.
Winlass,’ I says, ‘and I
don’t think much of his orders, nor
the
manner of anybody that carries ‘em out. The way you
talk to me,’ I says, ‘isn’t the way to talk to
any self-respecting
man, an’ I
wouldn’t sell you my house, not now after you’ve
threatened me that way,’ I says, ‘not if you offered me seven
thousands pounds.’ An’ I tells him to get out o’
my shop an’
take that message to Mr.
Winlass.”

“I
see,” said the Saint.

Dave
Roberts finished off his sewing and put the shoe
down in its place
among the row of other finished jobs.

“I
ain’t afraid, sir,” he said. “If it’s the Lord’s will that I
go out of
my house, I suppose He knows best. But I don’t want Mr. Winlass to have it, an’
the Lord helps them that
helps themselves.”

The Saint
lighted a cigarette and stared out of the window.

“Uncle
Dave,” he said gently, “would you sell me your
house
?”

He turned
round suddenly, and looked at the old man.
Dave Roberts’s hands
had fallen limply in his lap, and his
eyes were blinking mistily.

“You,
sir?” he said.

“Me,”
said the Saint. “I know you don’t want to go, and I
don’t know
whether it’s the Lord’s will or not, but I know
that you’re going to
have to. And you know it too. Winlass
will find a way to get you out. But I
can get more out of
him than you could. I know you don’t want money, but I
can offer you something even better. I know a village out of London where I
can buy you a house almost exactly like this, and
you can have your
shop and do your work there without anybody troubling you again. I’ll give you
that in exchange, and
however much money there is in this house as
well.”

It was one
of those quixotic impulses that often moved
him, and he uttered
it on the spur of the moment with no
concrete plan of campaign in his mind. He knew that Dave
Roberts would have to go, and that Turk’s Lane must
dis
appear, making room for the
hygienic edifice of mass-produc
tion
cubicles which Mr. Vernon Winlass had planned: he
knew that, whatever he himself might wish, that
individual
little backwater must take the way of all such pleasant
places,
to be superseded by the vast white
cube of Crescent Court,
the communal
sty which the march of progress demands for its armies. But he also knew that
Mr. Vernon Winlass was going to pay more than seven hundred pounds to dear the
ground for it.

When he saw
Patricia Holm and Peter Quentin later that
night, they had no
chance to mistake the light of unlawful
resolution on his
face.

“Brother
Vernon hasn’t bought the whole of Turk’s Lane,” he announced,
“because I’ve got some of it.”

“Whatever
for?” asked Patricia.

“For
an investment,” answered the Saint virtuously. “Cres
cent Court
will be built only by kind permission of Mr.
Simon Templar, and my
permission is going to cost money.”

Peter
Quentin helped himself to another bottle of beer.

“We
believe you,” he
said dryly. “What’s the swindle?”

“You
have a mind like Claud Eustace Teal,” said the
Saint offensively.
“There is no swindle. I am a respectable
real estate
speculator, and if you had any money I’d sue you
for slander. But I
don’t mind telling you that I am rather interested to know what hobby Vernon
Winlass has in his
spare moments. Go out and do some sleuthing for me in the
morning,
Peter, and I’ll let you know some more.”

In
assuming that even such a hard-headed business man as
Mr. Vernon Winlass
must have some simple indulgence,
Simon Templar was not taking a long
chance. Throughout
the ages, iron-gutted captains of industry have diverted
them
selves with rare porcelain, pewter, tram tickets, Venetian
glass,
first editions, second mortgages, second establishments,
dahlias,
stuffed owls, and such-like curios. Mr. Wallington
Titus Oates, of
precious memory, went into slavering rap
tures at the sight of
pieces of perforated paper bearing the
portraits of
repulsive monarchs and the magic words “Postage
Two Pence.” Mr. Vernon Winlass, who
entrenched himself
during business hours
behind a storm battalion of secretaries,
under-secretaries, assistant secretaries, messengers, clerks, man
agers,
and office-boys, put aside all his business and opened
wide his defences at the merest whisper of old prints.

“It’s
just an old thing we came across when we were
clearing out our old
house,” explained the man who had
successfully
penetrated these fortified frontiers—his card in
troduced him as
Captain Tombs, which was an alias out of
which Simon Templar
derived endless amusement “I took it
along to Busby’s to
find out if it was worth anything, and
they seemed to get
quite excited about it. They told me I’d
better show it to
you.”

Mr.
Winlass nodded.

“I
buy a good many prints from Busby’s,” he said smugly.
“If
anything good comes their way, they always want me to see it.”

He took
the picture out of its brown paper wrapping and
looked at it closely
under the light. The glass was cracked
and dirty, and the
frame was falling apart and tied up with
wire; but the result
of his inspection gave him a sudden
shock. The print was a discovery—if he
knew anything at all
about these things, it was worth at least
five hundred pounds.
Mr. Winlass frowned at it disparagingly.

“A
fairly good specimen of a rather common plate,” he said carelessly.
“I should think it would fetch about ten
pounds.”

Captain
Tombs looked surprised.

“Is
that all?” he grumbled. “The fellow at Busby’s told me I ought to get
anything from three hundred up for it.”

“Ah-hum,”
said Mr. Winlass dubiously. He peered at the print again, and raised his eyes
from it in an elaborate ren
dering of delight. “By Jove,” he exclaimed, “I
believe you’re
right. Tricky things, these
prints. If you hadn’t told me that, I might have missed it altogether. But it
looks as if—if it is
a genuine… .
Well!” said Mr. Winlass expansively, “I al
most think I’ll take a chance on it. How about two
hundred
and fifty?”

“But
the fellow at Busby’s——
”

“Yes,
yes,” said Mr. Winlass testily. “But these are not
good times
for selling this sort of thing. People haven’t got
the money to spend.
Besides, if you wanted to get a price
like that, you’d have to get the
picture cleaned up—get experts to certify it—all kinds of things like that.
And they all
cost money. And when you’d done them all, it mightn’t
prove
to be worth anything. I’m offering to take a gamble on it and
save you a
lot of trouble and expense.”

Captain
Tombs hesitated; and Mr. Winlass pulled out a cheque-book and unscrewed his
fountain-pen.

“Come,
now,” he urged genially. “I believe in Getting Things Done. Make up
your mind, my dear chap. Suppose
we split it at two-seventy-five—or two
hundred and
eighty——
”

“Make
it two hundred and eighty-five,” said Captain
Tombs reluctantly,
“and I suppose I’d better let it go.”

Mr.
Winlass signed the cheque with the nearest approach to glee that he would ever
be able to achieve while parting
with money in any quantity; and he knew that
he was getting
the print for half its value. When Captain Tombs had
gone, he
set it up against the inkwell and fairly gloated over
it. A moment later he
picked up a heavy paperknife and at
tacked it with every evidence of
ferocity.

But the
scowl of pained indignation which darkened his
brow was directed
solely against the cracked glass and the
dilapidated frame.
The picture was his new-born babe, his
latest ewe lamb; and
it was almost inevitable that he should rise against the vandal disfigurement
of its shabby trappings
as a fond mother would rise in wrath against
the throwing
of mud pies at her beloved offspring. With the horrible
cradle
that had sheltered it stripped away and cast into the
wastebasket, he set
up the print again and gloated over it
from every angle.
After a long time he turned it over to stow
it safely in an
envelope—and it was when he did this that he
noticed the writing on
the back.

The
reactions of an equally inevitable curiosity made him
carry the picture over
to the window to read the almost in
decipherable scrawl. The ink was rusty
with age, the spidery
hand angular and old-fashioned, but after
some study he was
able
to make out the words.

To my wife, On this day 16 Aprille did I lodge in
ye houfe
of one Thomaf Robertf a cobler and did hyde
under hyf herthe in
Turkes Lane ye feventy thoufande
golde piecef wich I
stole of Hyf Grace ye Duke. Finde
them if thif letre
come to thee and Godes blefsynge,
John.

None of the
members of Mr. Winlass’s staff, some of
whom had been with
him through ten years of his hard-
headed and dignified career, could
remember any previous
occasion when he had erupted from his office
with so much
violence. The big limousine which wafted him to Turk’s
Lane could
not travel fast enough for him: he shuffled from
one side of the seat
to the other, craning forward to look
for impossible gaps in the traffic, and
emitting short nasal
wuffs of almost canine impatience.

Dave
Roberts was not in the little shop when Mr. Winlass
walked in. A
freckle-faced pug-nosed young man wearing the
same apron came
forward.

“I
want to see Mr. Roberts,” said Winlass, trembling with
excitement,
which he was trying not to show.

The
freckle-faced youth shook his head.

“You
can’t see Mr. Roberts,” he said. “He ain’t here.”

“Where
can I find him?” barked Winlass.

“You
can’t find him,” said the youth phlegmatically. “He
don’t want
to be found. Want your shoes mended, sir?”

“No.
I do not want my shoes mended!” roared Winlass, dancing in his impatience.
“I want to see Mr. Roberts. Why
can’t I find him? Why don’t he want to
be found? Who the
hell are you, anyhow?”

“I do
be Mr. Roberts’s second cousin, sir,” said Peter
Quentin, whose idea of
dialects was hazy but convincing. “I
do have bought Mr.
Roberts’s shop, and I’m here now, and
Mr. Roberts ain’t coming back, sir,
that’s who I be.”

Mr. Winlass
wrenched his features into a jovial beam.

“Oh,
you’re Mr. Roberts’s cousin, are you?” he said, with
gigantic affability. “How
splendid! And you’ve bought his
beautiful
shop. Well, well. Have a cigar, my dear sir, have
a cigar.”

The young man took the weed,
bit off the wrong end, and
stuck it into his
mouth with the band on—a series of mo
tions
which caused Mr. Winlass to shudder to his core. But
no one could have deduced that shudder from the
smile with
which he struck and
tendered a match.

“Thank
‘ee, sir,” said Peter Quentin, “Now, sir, can I
mend thy
shoes?”