Saint Intervenes (25 page)

“I’m
sorry to hear you’ve lost your job, my dear,” he said
insincerely.
“What was this, mistake you made?”

“I
opened a letter, that’s all. I open all his letters at the
office, of
course, but this one was marked ‘private and con
fidential.’ I came in
rather late that morning, and I was in
such a hurry I didn’t
notice what it said on the envelope. I’d
just finished reading
it when Walter came in, and he was
furious. He threw me out then and
there—it was only yester
day.”

“What
was this letter about?” asked Mr. Kinsall.

“It
was about your father’s will,” she told him; and sud
denly Mr.
Kinsall sat up. “It was from a man who’s been to
see him once or twice
before—I’ve listened at the keyhole when they were talking,” said the girl
shamelessly, “and I
gather that the will which was reported in the
papers wasn’t
the last one your father made. This fellow—he’s a
solicitor—
had got a later one, and Walter was trying to buy it from
him. The
letter I read was from the solicitor, and it said that
he had decided to
accept Walter’s offer of ten thousand
pounds for it.”

Mr.
Willie’s eyes had recovered from their temporary
shrinkage. During the
latter part of her speech they had gone
on beyond normal, and
at the end of it they genuinely
bulged. For a few seconds he was voiceless;
and then he
exploded.

“The
dirty swine!” he gasped.

That was
his immediate and inevitable reaction; but the rest of the news took him longer
to grasp. If Walter was
willing to pay ten thousand pounds for the
will… . Ten
thousand pounds! It was an astounding, a staggering
figure.
To be worth that, it could only mean that huge sums were
at
stake—and Willie could only see one way in which that could have come about.
The second will had disinherited
Walter. It had left all the Kinsall millions
to him, Willie.
And Walter was trying to buy it and destroy it—to cheat
his out of
his just inheritance.

“What’s
this solicitor’s name?” demanded Willie hoarsely.

Patricia
smiled.

“I
thought you’d want that,” she said. “Well, I know his
name and
address; but they’ll cost you money.”

Willie
looked at the clock, gulped, and reached into a
drawer for his
cheque-book.

“How
much?” he asked. “If it’s within reason, I’ll pay it.”

She blew
out a wreath of smoke and studied him calculatingly
for a moment.

“Five
hundred,” she said at length.

Willie stared, choked, and
shuddered. Then, with an ex
pression of
frightful agony on his predatory face, he took up his pen and wrote.

Patricia examined the cheque
and put it away in her hand
bag. Then she
picked up a pencil and drew the note-block
towards her.

Willie
snatched up the sheet and gazed at it tremblingly
for a second. Then he
heaved himself panting out of his
chair and dashed for the hat-stand in
the corner.

“Excuse
me,” he got out. “Must do something about it.
Come and
see me again. Goodbye.”

Riding in
a taxi to the address she had given him, he
barely escaped a
succession of nervous breakdowns every
time a traffic stop or
a slow-moving dray obstructed their
passage. He bounced up and down on the
seat, pulled off
his hat, pulled out his watch, looked at his hat, tried to
put
on his watch,
mopped his brow, craned his head out of the
window,
bounced, sputtered, gasped, and sweated in an
anguish of impatience that brought him to the verge of
delirium. When at last they arrived at the
lodging-house in
Bayswater which was
his destination, he fairly hurled himself
out of the cab, hauled out a handful of silver with clumsy hands, spilt
some of it into the driver’s palm and most of it into the street, stumbled
cursing up the steps, and plunged
into
the bell with a violence which almost drove it solidly
through the wall. While he waited, fuming, he
dragged out
his watch again, dropped
it, tried to grab it, missed, and
kicked
it savagely into the middle of the street with a shrill
squeal of sheer insanity; and then the door opened
and a
maid was inspecting him
curiously.

“Is
Mr. Penwick in?” he blurted.

“I
think so,” said the maid. “Will you come in?”

The invitation was unnecessary.
Breathing like a man who
had just run a mile
without training, Mr. Willie Kinsall
ploughed
past her, and kicked his heels in a torment of
suspense until the door
of the room into which he had been
ushered
opened, and a tall man came in.

It seems
superfluous to explain that this man’s name was
not really Penwick; and Willie Kinsall did
not even stop to consider the point. He did look something like a solicitor of
about forty, which is some indication of what
Simon Tem
plar could achieve with a
black suit, a wing collar and bow
tie,
a pair of gold-rimmed pince-nez, and some powder
brushed into his hair.

Willie
Kinsall did not even pause to frame a diplomatic
line of approach.

“Where,”
he demanded shakily, “is this will, you crook?”

“Mr.
Penwick” raised his grey eyebrows.

“I
don’t think I have—ah—had the pleasure——
”

“My name’s Kinsall,”
said Willie, skipping about like a
grasshopper
on a hot plate. “And I want that will—the will
you’re trying to sell to my dirty swindling
brother. And if I
don’t get it, I’m
going straight to the police!”

The
solicitor put his finger-tips together.

“What
proof have you, Mr.—ah—Kinsall,” he inquired
gently, “of the
existence of this will?”

Willie stopped skipping for a
moment. And then, with a
painful wrench, he
flung bluff to the winds. He had no
proof,
and he knew it.

“All
right,” he said. “I won’t go to the police. I’ll buy it
What do
you want?”

Simon pursed his lips.

“I
doubt,” he said, “whether the will is any longer for
sale. Mr.
Walter’s cheque is already in my bank, and I am
only waiting for it
to be cleared before handing the document
over to him.”

“Nonsense!”
yelped Willie, but he used a much coarser
word for it.
“Walter hasn’t got it yet. I’ll give you as much
as he gave—and you
won’t have to return his money. He
wouldn’t dare go into court and say
what he gave it to you for.”

The Saint
shook his head.

“I
don’t think,” he said virtuously, “that I would break my
bargain for
less than twenty thousand pounds.”

“You’re
a thief and a crook!” howled Willie.

“So
are you,” answered the temporary Mr. Penwick mildly.
“By
the way, this payment had better be in cash. You can go
round to
your bank and get it right away. I don’t like to have
to insist on this, but
Mr. Walter said he was coming round
in about an hour’s time, and if you’re
going to make your
offer in an acceptable form——
”

It is only
a matter of record that Willie went. It is also on
record that he took his departure in a
speed and ferment that
eclipsed even his
arrival; and Simon Templar went to the tele
phone and called Patricia.

“You
must have done a great job, darling,” he said.
“What did you
get out of it?”

“Five hundred
pounds,” she told him cheerfully. “I got an open cheque and took it
straight round to his bank—I’m just
pushing
out to buy some clothes, as soon as I’ve washed this
paint off my face.”

“Buy a
puce jumper,” said the Saint, “and christen it
Willie. I
want to keep it for a pet.”

Rather
less than an hour had passed when the front door
bell pealed again;
and Simon looked out of the window and
beheld the form of
Walter Kinsall standing outside. He went
to let the caller in
himself.

Mr.
Walter Kinsall was a little taller and heavier than his
brother,
but the rat-like mould of his features and his small
beady eyes were almost
the twins of his brother’s. At that
point their external resemblance
temporarily ended, for Wal
ter’s bearing was not hysterical.

“Well,
Mr. Penwick,” he said gloatingly, “has my cheque been cleared?”

“It
ought to be through by now,” said the Saint. “If you’ll
wait a
moment, I’ll just phone up the bank and make sure.”

He did so,
while the elder Kinsall rubbed his hands. He
paused to reflect,
with benevolent satisfaction, what a happy
chance it was that his
first name, while bearing the same
initial as his brother’s, still came
first in index sequence, so
that this decayed solicitor, searching the
telephone directory
for putative kin of the late Sir Joseph, had rung him up
first. What might have happened had their alphabetical order been
different,
Walter at that moment hated to think.

“Your cheque has been
cleared,” said the Saint, returning
from
the telephone; and Walter beamed.

“Then,
Mr. Penwick, you have only to hand me the
will——
”

Simon knit
his brows.

“The
situation is rather difficult,” he began; and suddenly
Walter’s face blackened.

“What
the devil do you mean—difficult?” he rasped.
“You’ve had your
money. Are you trying——
”

“You
see,” Simon explained, “your brother has been in
to see
me.”

Walter
gaped at him apoplectically for a space; and then
he took a threatening step forward.

“You
filthy double-crossing——
”

“Wait
a minute,” said the Saint. “I think this is Willie
coming back.”

He pushed
past the momentarily paralysed Walter, and
went to open the front door again. Willie
stood on the step,
puffing out his lean
rat-like cheeks and quivering as if he had
just escaped from the paws of a hungry cat. He scrabbled
in his pockets, tugged out a thick sheaf of
banknotes, and
crushed them into the
Saint’s hands as they went down the
hall.

“It’s
all there, Mr. Penwick,” he gasped. “I haven’t been
long, have
I? Now will you give me——
”

It was at
that instant that he entered the room which
Simon Templar had
rented for the occasion, and saw his
brother; and his failure to complete
the sentence was under
standable.

For a time
there was absolute silence, while the two de
voted brothers glared
at each other with hideous rigidity. Simon Templar took out his cigarette case
and selected a
smoke at luxurious leisure, while Willie stared at Walter
with
red-hot eyes, and Walter glowered at Willie with specks
of foam on
his lips. Then the Saint stroked the cog of his
lighter; and at the
slight sound, as if invisible strait-jackets which held them immobile had been
conjured away, the two
men started towards each other with
simultaneous detonations of speech.

“You
slimy twister!” snarled Walter.

“You
greasy shark!” yapped Willie.

And then,
as if this scorching interchange of fraternal com
pliments made them
realise that there was a third party
present who had not been included, and
who might have felt
miserably neglected, they checked their murderous advance
towards one
another and swung round on him together.

Epithets
seared through their minds and slavered on their jaws—ruder, unkinder, more
malignant words than they had
ever shaped into connected order in their
lives. And then,
with one accord, they realised that those words could not
be
spoken yet; and deprived of that outlet, they simmered in a
second
torrid silence.