Brighter Buccaneer (17 page)

Major Bellingford Smart had arranged to go to a theatre that evening; but the theatre would still be there the next day. And suitable tenants were becoming considerably harder to find than they had been.

“Certainly I’ll come over at half past ten, if that’ll help you at all, Captain Bourne. What is the address?”

“Number eight-o-one, Belgrade Square,” said the Saint, and rang off happily.

Major Bellingford Smart was punctual if he was nothing else. It was exactly half past ten when he arrived in Belgrade Square, and Simon Templar himself opened the door to him as he came up the steps.

“I’m afraid we’re having a bit of trouble with the lights,” remarked the Saint genially. “The hall light’s just fizzled out. Can you see your way into the sitting-room?”

He had an electric torch in his hand, and with it he lighted Major Bellingford Smart into the nearest room. Bellingford Smart heard him clicking the switch up and down, and cursing under his breath.

“Now this one’s gone on strike, Major. I’m awfully sorry. Will you take the torch and make yourself at home while I go and look at the fuses? There’s a decanter over in the corner- help yourself.”

He bumped into Bellingford Smart in the darkness, recovered his balance, apologised, and thrust his flashlight into the Major’s hand. The door closed behind him.

Major Bellingford Smart turned the beam of the torch around the room in search of a chair-and, possibly, the decanter referred to. In another second he was not thinking of either, for in one corner the circle of light splashed over a safe whose door hung drunkenly open, half separated from its hinges: lowering the beam a trifle, he saw an array of gleaming tools spread out on the floor beside it.

He gasped, and instinctively moved over to investigate. Outside in the hall he heard the crash of a brass tray clattering on the floor, and straightened up with a start. Then heavy feet came pounding along the passage, the door burst open, and the lights were switched on. The hall lights outside were also on-nothing seemed to be the matter with them. For a few moments they dazzled him; and then, when he had blinked the glare out of his eyes, he saw that the doorway was filled by a black-trousered butler, with his coat off, and a footman with his tunic half buttoned. They looked at him, then at the open safe, and then back at him again; and there was no friendliness in their eyes.

“Ho,” said the butler at length, appearing to swell visibly. “So that’s hit. Caught in the very hact, eh?”

“What the devil do you mean?” spluttered Major Bellingford Smart. “I came here at Captain Bourne’s invitation to see Mrs. Bourne —”

“Not ‘alf you didn’t,” said the butler austerely. “There ain’t no Mrs. Bourne ‘ere, and never ‘as been. This is the Countess of Halbury’s ‘ouse, an you don’t ‘ave to tell me what you are.” He turned to the footman. “James, you go hout and fetch a copper, quick. I can look hafter this bloke. Just let ‘im try something!”

He commenced to roll up his right sleeve, with an anticipatory glint in his eye. He was a very large butler, ever so much larger than Major Bellingford Smart, and he looked as if he would like nothing better than a show of violence. Even the best butlers must yearn sometimes for the simple human pleasure of pushing their fists into a face that offends them.

“You’ll be sorry for this,” fumed Major Bellingford Smart impotently. “If this is the Countess of Halbury’s house there must be some mistake —”

“Ho, yes,” said the butler pleasantly. “There his a mistake, and you made it.”

There followed a brief interval of inhospitable silence, until the footman returned with a constable in tow.

“There ‘e is,” announced the footman; but the butler quelled him with a glance.

“Hofficer,” he said majestically, “we ‘ave just caught this person red-‘anded in the hact of burgling the ‘ouse. ‘Er ladyship is at present hout dining with Lady Hexmouth. ‘Earing the sound of footsteps, we thought ‘er ladyship ‘ad returned, halthough James remarked that it was not ‘er ladyship’s custom to let ‘erself hin. Then we ‘eard a crash as if the card tray in the ‘all ‘ad been hupset, and we noticed that the lights were hout, so we came along to see what it was.”

“I can explain everything, officer,” interrupted Major Bellingford Smart. “I was asked to come here to get a Mrs. Bourne’s signature to the lease of a flat —”

“You was, was you?” said the constable, who had ambitions of making his mark in the C.I.D. at some future date. “Well, show me the lease.”

Major Bellingford Smart felt in his pocket, and a sudden wild look came into his eyes. The lease which he had brought with him was gone; but there was something else there-something hard and knobbly.

The constable did not miss the change of expression. He came closer to Major Bellingford Smart.

“Come on, now,” he ordered roughly. “Out with it-whatever it is. And no monkey business.”

Slowly, stupidly, Major Bellingford Smart drew out the hard knobbly object. It was a very small automatic, and looped loosely round it was a diamond and sapphire pendant-one of the least valuable items in the Countess of Albury’s vanished collection. He was still staring at it when the constable grabbed it quickly out of his hand.

“Carrying firearms, eh? And that talk about ‘aving a lease in your pocket-just to get a chance to pull it out and shoot me! You’ve got it coming to you, all right.”

He glanced round the room with a professional air, and saw the open window.

“Came in through there,” he remarked, with some satisfaction at the admiring silence of his audience of butler and footman. “There’d be a lot of dust outside on that sill, wouldn’t there? And look at ‘is trousers.”

The audience bent its awed eyes on Major Bellingford Smart’s nether garments, and the Major also looked down. Clearly marked on each knee was a circular patch of sooty grime which had certainly not been there before the Saint cannoned into him in that very helpful darkness.

On the far side of the square, Simon Templar heard the constable’s whistle shrilling into the night, and drifted on towards the refreshment that waited for him.

1. The New Swindle
   

MR. ALFRED TILLSON (“Broads” Tillson to the trade) was only one of many men who cherished the hope that one day they might be privileged to meet the Saint again. Usually those ambitions included a dark night, a canal, and a length of lead pipe, with various trimmings and decorations according to the whim of the man concerned. But no bliss so unalloyed as that had ever come the way of any of those men; for canals and lengths of lead pipe did not enter into Simon Templar’s own plans for his brilliant future, and on dark nights he walked warily as a matter of habit.

Mr. Alfred Tillson, however, enjoyed the distinction of being a man who did achieve his ambition and meet the Saint for a second time; although the re-encounter did not by any means take place as he would have planned it.

He was a lean grey-haired man with a long horse-like face and the air of a retired churchwarden-an atmosphere which he had created for himself deliberately as an aid to business, and which he had practised for so long that in the end he could not have shaken it off if he had tried. It had become just as much a part of his natural make-up as the faintly ecclesiastical style of dress which he affected; and over the years it had served him well. For Mr. “Broads” Tillson was acknowledged in the trade to be one of the greatest living card manipulators in the world. To see those long tapering fingers of his ruffling through a pack of cards and dealing out hands in which every pip had been considered and placed individually was an education in itself. He could do anything with a pack of cards except make it talk. He could shuffle it once, apparently without looking at it, and in that shuffle sort it out suit by suit and card by card, stack up any sequence he wanted, and put it all together again, with one careless flick of his hands that was too quick for the eye to follow.

If you were in the trade, if you were “regular” and you could induce him to give you a demonstration of his magic, he would invite you to deal out four hands of bridge, write down a list of cards in every hand, shuffle the pack again as much as you cared to, and give it back to him; whereupon he would take one glance at your list, shuffle the pack once himself, and proceed to deal out the four hands again exactly as you had listed them. And if you were unlucky enough to be playing with him in the way of business you could order brand-new packs as often as you cared to pay for them, without inconveniencing him in the least. Mr. Alfred Tillson had never marked a card in his life; and he could play any card game that had ever been invented with equal success.

On the stage he might have made a very comfortable income for himself, but his tastes had never led him that way. Mr. Tillson was partial to travel and sea air; and for many years he had voyaged the Atlantic and Pacific ocean routes, paying himself very satisfactory dividends on every trip, and invariably leaving his victims with the consoling thought that they had at least evaded the wiles of sharpers and lost their money to an honest man.

He might have retired long ago, if he had not had a weakness for beguiling the times between voyages with dissipations of a highly unclerical kind; and as a matter of fact it was to this weakness of his that he owed his first meeting with the Saint.

He had made a very profitable killing on a certain trip which he took to Maderia; but coming back overland from Lisbon a sylph-like blonde detained him too long in Paris, and he woke up one morning to find that he was a full twenty pounds short of his fare to New York. He set out for London with this pressing need of capital absorbing his mind; and it was merely his bad luck that the elegant young man whom he discovered lounging idly over the rail when the cross-Channel boat left Boulogne should have been christened Simon Templar.

Simon was not looking for trouble on that trip, but he was never averse to having his expenses paid; and when Mr. Tillson hinted that it was distressingly difficult to find any congenial way of passing the time on cross-Channel journeys, he knew what to expect. They played casino, and Simon won fifteen pounds in the first half-hour.

“A bit slow, don’t you think?” observed the benevolent Mr. Tillson, as he shuffled the cards at this point and called for another brace of whiskies. “Shall we double the stakes?”

This was what Simon had been waiting for-and that gift of waiting for the psychological moment was one which he always employed on such occasions. Fifteen pounds was a small fish in his net, but who was he to criticise what a beneficent Providence cast kindly into his lap?

“Certainly, brother,” he murmured. “Treble ‘em if you like. I’ll be with you again in a sec-I’ve just got to see a man about a small borzoi.”

He faded away towards a convenient place; and that was the last Mr. Tillson saw of him. It was one of Mr. Tillson’s saddest experiences; and three years later it was still as fresh in his memory as it had been the day after it happened. “Happy” Fred Jorman, that most versatile of small-time confidence men, whose round face creased up into such innumerable wrinkles of joy when he smiled, heard that “Broads” Tillson was in London, called on him on that third anniversary, and had to listen to the tale. They had worked together on one coup several years ago, but since then their ways had lain apart.

“That reminds me of a beggar I met this spring,” said Happy Fred, not to be outdone in anecdote-and the ecclesiastical-looking Mr. Tillson hoped that “beggar” was the word he used. “I met him in the Alexandra-he seemed interested in horses, and he looked so lovely and innocent. When I told him about the special job I’d got for Newmarket that afternoon —”

This was one of Happy Fred’s favourite stories, and much telling of it had tended to standardize the wording.

There was a certain prelude of this kind of conversation and general reminiscence before Happy Fred broached the real reason for his call.

“Between ourselves, Broads, things aren’t going too well in my business. There’s too many stories in the newspapers these days to tell the suckers how it’s done. Things have got so bad that one or two of the boys have had to go on the legit just to keep themselves alive.”

“The circumstances are somewhat similar with me, Fred,” confessed Mr. Tillson, regretfully. “The Atlantic liners are half empty, and those gentlemen who are travelling don’t seem to have the same surplus of lucre for the purposes of-um- recreation as they used to.”

Happy Fred nodded.

“Well, that’s how it struck me, Broads,” he said. “And what with one thing and another, I said to myself, ‘Fred,’ I said, ‘the old tricks are played out, and you’d better admit it. Fred,” I said, ‘you’ve got to keep up with the times or go under. And what’s wanted these days,’ I said to myself, ‘is a New Swindle.’ “

Mr. Tillson raised his episcopal eyebrows.

“And have you succeeded in devising this-um-novel system of remunerative equivocation?”

“I have invented a new swindle, if that’s what you mean,” said Happy Fred. “At least, it’s new enough for me. And the beauty of it is that you don’t have to do anything criminal- anyway, not that anyone’s ever going to know about. It’s all quite straight and above-board, and whatever happens you can’t get pinched for trying it, if you’re clever enough about the way you work it.”

“Have you made any practical experiments with this new method?” inquired Mr. Tillson.

“I haven’t,” said Happy Fred lugubriously. “And the trouble is that I can’t. Here am I carrying this wonderful idea about with me, and I can’t use it. That’s why I’ve come to you. What I need, Broads, is a partner who won’t double-cross me, who’s clever with his hands and hasn’t got any kind of police record. That’s why I can’t do it myself. The bloke who does this has got to be a respectable bloke that nobody can say anything against. And that’s where you come in. I’ve been worrying about it for weeks, thinking of all the good money there is waiting for me to pick up, and wondering who I could find to come in with me that I could trust. And then just last night somebody told me that you were back; and I said to myself, ‘Fred,’ I said, ‘Broads Tillson is the very man you want. He’s the man who’ll give you a square deal, and won’t go and blow your idea about.’ So I made up my mind to come and see you and see what you felt about it. I’m willing to give you my idea, Broads, and put up the capital-I’ve got a bit of money saved up-if you’ll count me in fifty-fifty.”