Saint Intervenes (14 page)

He admitted
afterwards to the Saint that the strain of maintaining what he fondly believed
to be a suitable patois
was making him a trifle light-headed; but Mr.
Vernon Win
lass was far too preoccupied to notice his abberations.

“No,
my dear sir,” said Mr. Winlass, “my shoes don’t
want
mending. But I should like to buy your lovely house.”

The young
man shook his head.

“I
ain’t a-wanting to sell ‘er, sir.”

“Not
for a thousand pounds?” said Mr. Winlass calculatingly
.

“Not
for a thousand pounds, sir.”

“Not
even,” said Mr. Winlass pleadingly, “for two thousand?”

“No,
sir.”

“Not even,” suggested
Mr. Winlass, with an effort which
caused him
acute pain, “if I offered you three thousand?”

The young
man’s head continued to shake.

“I do only just have
bought ‘er, sir. I must do my work somewhere. I wouldn’t want to sell my house,
not if you of
fered me four thousand for
‘er, that I wouldn’t.”

“Five
thousand,” wailed Mr. Winlass, in dogged anguish.

The bidding
rose to seven thousand five hundred before Peter Quentin relieved Mr. Winlass
of further torture and himself of further lingual acrobatics. The cheque was
made
out and
signed on the spot, and in return Peter attached his
signature to a more complicated document which Mr. Win-
lass had ready to produce from his breast pocket;
for Mr. Vernon Winlass believed in Getting Things Done.

“That’s
splendid,” he boomed, when the formalities had
been completed.
“Now then, my dear sir, how soon can you
move out?”

“In
ten minutes,” said Peter Quentin promptly, and he
was as good as his
word.

He met the
Saint in a neighbouring hostelry and exhibited his trophy. Simon Templar took
one look at it, and lifted his
tankard.

“So
perish all the ungodly,” he murmured. “Let us get
round to
the bank before they close.

It was
three days later when he drove down to Hampshire
with Patricia Holm to
supervise the installation of Uncle Dave Roberts in the cottage which had been
prepared for
him. It stood in the street of a village that had only
one
street, a street that was almost an exact replica of Turk’s Lane
set down
in a valley between rolling hills. It had the same oak-beamed cottages, the
same wrought-iron lamps over the
lintels to light the doors by night, the same
rows of tiny
shops clustering face to face with their wares spread out
in unglazed windows; and the thundering main road traffic went past five miles
away and never knew that there was a village
there.

“I
think you’ll be happy here, Uncle Dave,” he said; and
he did not
need an answer in words to complete his reward.

It was a
jubilant return journey for him; and they were in
Guildford before he
recollected that he had backed a very
fast outsider at Newmarket. When he
bought a paper he saw
that that also had come home, and they had to
stop at the
Lion for celebrations.

“There
are good moments in this life of sin, Pat,” he re
marked, as he started
up the car again; and then he saw the
expression on her face, and stared at
her in concern. “What’s
the matter, old darling—has that last Martini
gone to your
head?”

Patricia
swallowed. She had been glancing through the
other pages of the
Evening
News
while he tinkered with the
ignition; and now she folded the sheet
down and handed it
to him.

“Didn’t
you promise Uncle Dave whatever money there was in his house as well as that
cottage?” she asked.

Simon took
the paper and read the item she was pointing to.

TREASURE
TROVE

IN LONDON

EXCAVATION

——————————

Windfall
for Winlass

——————————

The London clay, which has given up many strange secrets
in its
time, yesterday surrendered a treasure which has been in
its keeping
for
300 years.

Ten thousand pounds is the estimated value of a hoard of
gold
coins and antique jewellery discovered by workmen engaged
in de
molishing an old house in Turk’s Lane, Brompton, which is
being razed
to make way for a modern apartment building.

The owner of the property, Mr. Vernon Winlass——

The Saint
had no need to read any more; and as a matter
of fact he did not want to. For several
seconds he was as far
beyond the power of
speech as if he had been born dumb.

And then,
very slowly, the old Saintly smile came back to
his lips.

“Oh,
well, I expect our bank account will stand it,” he said
cheerfully, and turned the car
back again towards Hampshire.

VI

The Sleepless Knight

If a great many newspaper
cuttings and references to news
papers find
their way into these chronicles, it is simply be
cause most of the interesting things that happen find their
way into newspapers, and it is in these ephemeral
sheets that the earnest seeker after unrighteousness will find many clues
to his quest.

Simon Templar read newspapers
only because he found
collected in them the
triumphs and anxieties and sins and
misfortunes and ugly tyrannies which
were going on around
him, as well as the
results of races in which chosen horses
carried samples of his large supply of shirts; not because he
cared anything about the posturing of Transatlantic
fliers or
the flatulence of
international conferences. And it was solely
through reading a newspaper that he became aware of the
existence
of Sir Melvin Flager.

It was an
unpleasant case; and the news item may as well be quoted in full.

JUDGE
CENSURES TRANSPORT

COMPANY

Driver’s
four hours’ sleep a week

—————————

“MODERN
SLAVERY”

—
Mr. Justice
Goldie.

—————————

SCATHING criticisms of the treatment of drivers by a road
transport
company were made by Mr. Justice Goldie during the trial of Albert Johnson, a
lorry driver, at Guildford Assizes yesterday.

Johnson was charged with manslaughter following the death of a cyclist
whom he knocked down and fatally injured near Albury on
March 28th.

Johnson did not deny that he was driving to the danger of the
public, but
pleaded that his condition was due to circumstances be
yond his control.

Police witnesses gave evidence that the lorry driven by Johnson was
proceeding
in an erratic manner down a fairly wide road at about 30
miles an
hour. There was a cyclist in front of it, travelling in the same
direction,
and a private car coming towards it.

Swerving to make way for the private car, in what the witness de
scribed as “an
unnecessarily exaggerated manner,” the lorry struck the cyclist and caused
fatal injuries.

The police surgeon who subsequently examined Johnson described
him as
being “apparently intoxicated, although there were no signs of alcohol on
his breath.”

“I was not drunk,” said Johnson, giving evidence on his own
behalf.
“I was simply tired out. We are sent out on long journeys and forced
to complete them at an average of over 30 miles an hour, including
stops for
food and rest.

“Most of our work is done at night, but we are frequently compelled
to make long day journeys as
well.

“During the week when the accident occurred, I had only had four
hours’ sleep.

“It is
no good protesting, because the company can always find plenty
of unemployed drivers to take our places.”

Other employees of the Flager Road Transport Company, which
employs Johnson, corroborated
his statement.

“This is nothing more or less than modern slavery,” said Mr.
Justice
Goldie, directing the jury to return a verdict of Not Guilty.

“It is not Johnson, but Sir Melvin Flager, the managing director
of the
company, who ought to be in the dock.

“You have only to put yourselves in the position of having gone for
a week on four hours’ sleep, with the added strain of driving a heavy
truck throughout
that time, to be satisfied that no culpable reckless
ness of Johnson’s was responsible for this
tragedy.

“I would like to see it made a criminal offence for employers to im
pose such inhuman conditions on
their employees.”

—————

Sir Melvin Flager was not
unnaturally displeased by this
judicial
comment; but he might have been infinitely more
perturbed if he had known of the Saint’s interest in the case.

Certain
readers of these chronicles may have reached the
impression that
Simon Templar’s motives were purely selfish
and mercenary, but
they would be doing him an injustice.
Undoubtedly his exploits were
frequently profitable; and the
Saint himself would have been the first to
admit that he was
not a brigand for his health; but there were many times
when
only a very small percentage of his profits remained in his
own
pocket, and many occasions when he embarked on an
episode of
lawlessness with no thought of profit for himself
at all.

The
unpleasantness of Sir Melvin Flager gave him some
hours of quite
altruistic thought and effort.

“Actually,” he said,
“there’s only one completely satisfac
tory
way to deal with a tumour like that. And that is to sink
him in a barrel of oil and light a fire
underneath.”

“The
Law doesn’t allow you to do that,” said Peter Quentin
pensively.

“Very
unfortunately, it doesn’t,” Simon admitted, with
genuine regret. “All the same, I used
to do that sort of thing
without the
sanction of the Law, which is too busy catching
publicans selling a glass of beer after hours to do anything
about serious misdemeanours, anyway… . But I’m
afraid
you’re right, Peter—I’m much
too notorious a character these
days, and Chief Inspector Claud Eustace
Teal isn’t the bosom
pal he was. We shall
have to gang warily; but nevertheless, we shall certainly have to gang.”

Peter
nodded approvingly. Strangely enough, he had once
possessed a thoroughly
respectable reverence for the Law;
but several months of association with
the Saint had worked
irreparable damage on that bourgeois
inhibition.

“You
can count me in,” he said; and the Saint dapped him on the back.

“I knew it without asking
you, you old sinner,” he said
contentedly.
“Keep this next week-end free for me, brother,
if you really feel
that way—and if you want to be specially
helpful
you can push out this afternoon with a false beard tied round your ears and try
and rent a large garage from which yells of pain cannot be heard outside.”

“Is that all?” Peter
asked suspiciously. “What’s your share
going
to be—backing losers at Hurst Park?”

The Saint
shook his head.

“Winners,”
he said firmly. “I always back winners. But
I’m going to busy
myself. I want to get hold of a Gadget. I s
aw it at a motor show
once, but it may take me a couple of d
ays to find out where I can buy
one.”

As a
matter of fact it took him thirty-six hours and ent
ailed a good deal of travelling and
expense. Peter Quentin
found and rented the
garage which the Saint had demanded a
little more quickly; but the task
was easier and he was used
to Simon Templar’s
eccentric commissions.