The Saint Abroad: The Art Collectors/ the Persistent Patriots (23 page)

He tossed the cloth away and slipped into the
driver’s
seat.

“Long enough,” the thin one said.
“If anybody asks, we
just say he’s drunk.”

“Keep his head down until we’re out of
town.”

The car jerked and moved away. Simon kept
track of the turns, and presently recognized Harrow Road as they turned into
and headed west in the bright lights and heavy traffic.
Another amateurish move.

The thin man chuckled, looking at Simon
slumped in the
other corner.

“So much for the Saint. How to lose
your halo in one easy
lesson.”

The hefty one gave a hoarse laugh.

“Right. Jeff’s going to think it’s too
good to be true.”

That name was all Simon needed and had been
waiting for, but he had scarcely hoped to have his answer so soon.

“It is too good to be true,” he said
quietly.

The thin man jumped as if the door handle
had suddenly
spoken to him. The driver jerked his head around and
almost
swerved into the opposite line of traffic. Simon’s right arm swept out
and encircled the thin man’s neck, locking it in a crushing hold.

“Stop!” the thin man croaked.
“Do something!”

They were coming to a red light. The driver was groping
in his jacket pocket, probably for a cosh. At the
same time he
was looking desperately
for some way to turn into a side
street,
but he was hemmed in by cars piling up at the traffic
signal. Simon simply gave the thin man’s neck one
last crack, which it would take a first-class osteopath to unstiffen, let him
topple half conscious and gasping on to the floor,
and
stepped as casually out of the
car as if he had been leaving a
cab.

A policeman on the busy corner gave him a
disapproving
look as he strode across the inner line of traffic to
the side
walk and turned to wave goodbye to the driver.

“Sorry,” Simon said sincerely to
the policeman, “but with traffic the way it is these days it’s almost
quicker to walk.”

Simon caught a taxi back to his car at
Belfort Close. The
time was seven-fifty. He could still make it to Mary Bannerman’s
apartment for his dinner date in less than a quarter
of an hour.

As he drove, theories raced through his head. There was
still no evidence that the girl was knowingly
involved. Her
boyfriend Jeff
Peterson could easily have taken the Liskard
letters without her knowing that he had the slightest interest
in them. Maybe Peterson had engineered the robbery
of her
apartment in order to take her
mind away from the possibility that the letters had had any special importance
to
the thieves. The motive could
involve anything from politics
to
purely commercial considerations. Still, the oddity of the
approach to Liskard, the somehow amateurish
approach to
monetary blackmail and
the lack of demand for money or
concessions of any other kind, left a
great many questions
still to be answered.

One was answered as Simon drove cautiously
to the corner of Mary Bannerman’s block. As he was about to turn,
almost on
the stroke of eight, she came out of the front door
with Jeff Peterson,
holding his arm, wearing a cocktail dress.
Peterson wore a suit
instead of the turtle-necked sweater in
which Simon had seen
him before.

“Going out to celebrate?” the Saint
asked silently.

He pushed down the accelerator of his car and sped past the
intersection. He circled the block and parked. Judging
from their clothes, the happy couple were going to be amusing themselves
rather than indulging in nefarious activities
which would make them worth following. Simon thought he
could
learn much more by a visit to Mary Bannerman’s
apartment while she was out. He walked around to the build
ing’s front door and climbed the stairs to her
flat.

As he made short work of her lock—whose type
he had
noted when he was there before—he thought over her role in the
situation. The fact that she had been leaving with
Peterson did not
prove conclusively that she was in on the
entire plot, but it
seemed to rule out any presumption of her
total innocence. If
she had only decided to stand the Saint up,
she would surely
have left earlier, so as not to risk running into
him as she was
leaving and he was arriving. It seemed ir
refutable that she
had known for some time that Simon
Templar was not going to be able to
keep his date with her,
and that she could safely and openly go out
with Peterson
without any chance of complications.

The lock submitted easily, and Simon stepped
into the
flat. A table lamp had been left on. The bed was still
rumpled,
the teddy bear still in place. The rooms smelled of
the last sweet flurry of female departure:
bubble bath, talcum powder, perfume.

The Saint put Venus out of his mind and tried
to con
centrate on
Mars. The sooner he brought this little war in
which he had become involved to a conclusion, the sooner he
could
be enjoying himself—if not with Mary Bannerman,
with someone like her in all the ways that really counted.

He walked straight to the shelf on which the
girl had
claimed she had left Liskard’s correspondence. There,
where
she had left it, was the white envelope which had fallen to
the floor
when Simon had visited her the previous evening.
In it were keys, just
as she had said, but one was not de
signed for her wardrobes or for any
other domestic strong
hold. It was attached to a metal circle with
“Victoria
571”
stamped into it. Simon recognized it immediately as the
key
to a baggage
locker at Victoria Station.

Before he left Mary Bannerman’s flat he made
a system
atic
search of her property and found that her teddy bear
seemed to be stuffed with nothing more interesting than
cotton, that she had a talent for eliciting
torrid letters from
men other than Thomas Liskard, and that she did,
indeed,
seem to be a bit short in the fur
and jewel department for such a successful girl with so many rich friends.

Unfortunately, there was no evidence of any
interest in
Thomas Liskard on her part, or on that of her pen pals.
The
Saint was going to have to make another trip through the
cold foggy
night.

8

The trip to Victoria Station and back to
Mary Bannerman’s
flat could have taken considerably less time if the Saint
had
not decided to have a peaceful dinner on the way. At Victoria
he went
directly to the baggage lockers—banks of large metal
doors along one wall
of a corridor—and found number 571. The key he had brought with him opened it,
and there inside
was one large brown leather suitcase. Without hesitation
he
took the bag, closed the locker, and walked like any busy and
purposeful
citizen out into the street.

He doubted that any of Mary’s associates
were keeping
watch over the locker, but it was quite possible that one
of
Chief Inspector Teal’s minions had been assigned to keep
watch
over the Saint. For that reason he took a devious course
away from
the station area, making quite certain that nobody
was following him.
Then he parked three blocks from the
apartment house where Mary Bannerman
lived, left his car,
and walked the rest of the way carrying the suitcase. As he
had anticipated, the door of her flat was still
unlocked, as he
had left it, and she
had not come home. He went inside,
latched
the door behind him, and put the suitcase on the bed.

The bag was not locked. Simon flipped the
catches and
opened the lid. There in a thick wrapping of mink and
silver
fox was a
modest Ali Baba’s treasure of jeweled trinkets of
all shapes and sizes. Whatever Mary Bannerman had done to
deserve all that, she apparently had done very
well. The
Saint’s experienced eye told
him that the quality of the
whole lot
was quite high, and a closer inspection confirmed.
that all of it appeared to be her own. Her name
was sewn on
to the linings of the
coats and her initials were engraved on
much of the jewelry.

But much more interesting to Simon was the
fact that
what he had most hoped to find was not there. The
suitcase
contained only jewels and furs: there were no letters
from
Thomas Liskard.

Still, things were looking up. He had a
lever and he had a
place to apply its pressure—or would have, as soon as
Mary
Bannerman came home. Simon poured himself a glass of
Benedictine from the
well-stocked liquor cabinet, left the
lights
and furniture as they had been before he came, and
went into the sleeping alcove and drew the
concealing cur
tains tightly
together. Then, with the suitcase opened beside
him, and a selection of glossy magazines to pass the time, he
propped
himself up on the bed next to the teddy bear and
sipped his Benedictine and waited.

About an hour later Mary Bannerman came home.
To Simon’s surprise, Jeff Peterson did not come in with her.
There were
no voices to be heard through the closed curtains,
and only one set of footsteps. She moved
about her living
room humming dance music to
herself, completely unsuspecting of the surprise that waited in her bed. She
ran some
water in the kitchen, then,
unzipping the back of her black
cocktail
dress with one hand she threw open the curtains that
hid her sleeping alcove with the other.

Her reaction to the tableau of Saint,
suitcase and teddy
bear was worthy of a Mack Sennett classic. She froze,
stopped
unzipping, opened her mouth, and she seemed to have dif
ficulty
keeping her eyes in their sockets.

“Ho, ho, ho,” said the Saint.
“Won’t you sit on Father
Christmas’s knee? He’s brought you some
lovely toys.”

Mary Bannerman at first seemed more likely
to collapse
than
to sit on anybody’s knee, but the first shock wore off. She closed her mouth
and removed a trembling hand from
the zipper
on her dress.

“Speechless?” Simon asked.

She tried not to see the suitcase of jewels
and furs.

“What are you doing here?” she
managed to say.

“Keeping our dinner date.” He
looked at his watch.
“You’re a little late. Three and a half
hours, to be exact.”

“I
…
couldn’t
make it.”

Simon swung his legs off the bed and stood
up. His tone
became more brittle.

“You thought I couldn’t make it, more
likely.”

She shook her head feebly. Then she seemed to
pull her
thoughts together a little and realized she had a right
to take
the offensive.

“What are you doing here?”

Simon waved a hand at the suitcase.

“I not only steal from the rich and give to the poor, I re
turn stolen property to lovely young girls
…
in
return for
small favors, of course.”

She could no longer keep herself from
looking at the con
tents of the suitcase. Her brief spell of bravado was
past.
Her face looked frightened and young, and she seemed to be on the verge
of tears. She sat on the edge of the bed as if her
legs would no longer
hold her up.

“What are you going to do?” she
asked tremulously.

“First, I’ll listen.”

“To what?”

“To glamorous Mary Bannerman’s true life
story
…
of
how she lost her baubles and found them
again.”

She sighed.

“All right. I ran into debt. I needed
money, so I invented
the robbery to collect insurance money.”

“Reasonable enough. And then?”

“I couldn’t keep the things here, of
course, or tell anybody
else, so I checked them at Victoria
Station.”