Saint Intervenes (7 page)

Footsteps
sounded along the hall, and the door opened
again. This time it
admitted a grey-bearded man who also
wore a white coat. His keen spectacled
eyes examined the
financier calmly. Mr. Oates mustered all his
self-control.

“I am
Titus Oates,” he said with simple dignity.

The
grey-bearded man nodded.

“You
wanted to see me?” he said; and Mr. Oates recalled
his instructions again.

“Titus
Oates,” he repeated gravely. “I was whipped from
Aldgate to
Newgate, and from Newgate to Tyburn.”

Dr.
Jethero studied him for a moment longer, and glanced
towards the door,
where the white-coated attendant was waiting unobtrusively—Mr. Oates had not
even noticed the oddity
of that.

“Yes,
yes,” he said soothingly. “And you were pilloried in
Palace Yard, weren’t you?”

“That’s
right,” said Mr. Oates eagerly. “And outside the Royal Exchange. They
put me in prison for life, but they let
me out at the
Revolution and gave me my pension back.”

Dr.
Jethero made clucking noises with his tongue.

“I
see. A very unfortunate business. Would you mind com
ing this way, Mr.
Oates?”

He led the
way up the stairs, and Mr. Oates followed him
blissfully. The whole
rigmarole seemed very childish, but if
it pleased Dr. Jethero, Mr. Oates was
prepared to go to any lengths to humour him. The white-coated attendant
followed
Mr. Oates. Dr. Jethero opened the
door of a room on the
second floor,
and stood aside for Mr. Oates to pass in. The
door had a barred grille in its upper panels through which
the interior of the room could be observed from the
outside,
an eccentricity which Mr. Oates was still ready to accept as
being in keeping with the character of his host.

It was the
interior of the room into which he was shown
that began to place
an excessive strain on his adaptability. It
was without
furnishings of any kind, unless the thick kind of
mattress in one corner
could be called furnishings, and the
walls and floor were finished in some
extraordinary style of
decoration which made them look like quilted
upholstery.

Mr. Oates
looked about him, and turned puzzledly to his
host.

“Well,”
he said, “where’s the stamp?”

“What
stamp?” asked Dr. Jethero.

Mr.
Oates’s laboriously achieved restraint was wearing thin
again.

“Don’t
you understand? I’m Titus Oates. I was whipped
from Aldgate to
Newgate, and from Newgate to Tyburn.
Didn’t you hear what I said?”

“Yes,
yes, yes,” murmured the doctor peaceably. “You’re
Titus
Oates. You stood in the pillory and they pelted you
with rotten
eggs.”

“Well,”
said Mr. Oates, “what about the stamp?”

Dr. Jethero
cleared his throat.

“Just
a minute, Mr. Oates. Suppose we go into that pres
ently. Would you mind
taking off your coat and shoes?”

Mr. Oates
gaped at him.

“This
is going too far,” he protested. “I’m Titus Oates.
Everybody
know Titus Oates. You remember—the Popish
Plot——
”

“Mr.
Oates,” said the doctor sternly, “will you take off
your coat
and shoes?”

The
white-coated attendant was advancing stealthily to
wards him, and a
sudden vague fear seized on the financier.
Now he began to see
the reason for the man’s extraordinary
behaviour. He was not
crotchety. He was potty. He was
worse—he must be a raving homicidal lunatic.
Heaven knew
what he would be doing next. A wild desire to be away
from
number 105 Matlock Gardens gripped Mr. Oates—a
desire that could not
even be quelled by the urge to possess
a twopenny blue
Mauritius in perfect preservation.

“Never
mind,” said Mr. Oates liberally. “I’m not really
interested.
I don’t collect stamps at all. I’m just Titus Oates.
Everyone knows me.
I’m sure you’ll excuse me—I have an appointment——
”

He was
edging towards the door, but Dr. Jethero stood in
the way.

“Nobody’s
going to hurt you, Mr. Oates,” he said; and
then he caught the
desperate gleam in Mr. Oates’s eye, and
signed quickly to the
attendant.

Mr. Oates
was seized suddenly from behind in a deft grip.
Overcome with terror,
he struggled like a maniac, and he was
a big man; but he was
helpless in the expert hands that held
him. He was tripped
and flung to the floor, and pinioned
there with practised skill. Through
whirling mists of horror
he saw the doctor coming towards him with a
hypodermic
syringe, and he was still yelling feebly about the Popish
Plot
when the needle stabbed into his arm… .

Dr.
Jethero went downstairs and rang up a number which
he had been given.

“I’ve
got your uncle, Mr. Tombs,” he announced. “He
gave us a
bit of trouble, but he’s quite safe now.”

Simon
Templar, who had found the name of Tombs a
convenient alias
before, grinned invisibly into the transmitter.

“That’s
splendid. Did he give you a lot of trouble?”

“He
was inclined to be violent, but we managed to give
him an injection, and
when he wakes up he’ll be in a strait-
jacket. He’s really a most interesting
case,” said the doctor
with professional enthusiasm. “Quite
apart from the delusion
that he is Titus Oates, he seems to have some
extraor
dinary hallucination about a stamp. Had you noticed that be
fore?”

“I
hadn’t,” said the Saint. “You may be able to find out
some more
about that. Keep him under observation, doctor,
and call me again on
Monday morning.”

He rang
off and turned gleefully to Patricia Holm, who
was waiting at his
elbow.

“Titus
is in safe hands,” he said. “And now I’ve got a
call of my
own to make.”

“Who
to?” she asked.

He showed
her a scrap of paper on which he had jotted
down the words of
what appeared to be a telegram.

Amazing discovery stop have reason to believe
boom may
be based on genuine possibilities stop do
not on any account
sell without hearing from me.

“Dicky
Tremayne’s in Paris, and he’ll send it for me,”
said the Saint.
“A copy goes to Abe Costello and Jules Hammel tonight—I just want to make
sure that they follow Titus
down the drain. By the way, we shall clear
about twenty
thousand if Midorients are still at 61 when they open
again
tomorrow morning.”

“But
are you sure Jethero won’t get into trouble?” she
said.

Simon
Templar nodded.

“Somehow
I feel that Titus will prefer to keep his mouth
shut after I’ve had a
little chat with him on Monday,” he said; and it is a matter of history
that he was absolutely
right.

Ill

The Newdick Helicopter

“I’m
afraid,” said Patricia Holm soberly, “you’ll be getting
into
trouble again soon.”

Simon
Templar grinned, and opened another bottle of
beer. He poured it
out with a steady hand, unshaken by the
future predicted for
him.

“You
may be right, darling,” he admitted. “Trouble is one
of the
things that sort of happen to me, like other people
have colds.”

“I’ve
often heard you complaining about it,” said the girl
sceptically.

The Saint
shook his head.

“You
wrong me,” he said. “Posterity will know me as a
maligned,
misunderstood, ill-used victim of a cruel fate. I
have tried to be
good. Instinctive righteousness glows from
me like
an
inward light. But nobody gives it a chance. What
do you suggest?”

“You
might go into business.”

“I
know. Something safe and respectable, like manufactur
ing woollen
combinations for elderly ladies and lorgnettes.
We might throw in a
pair of lorgnettes with every suit. You
could knit them, and
I’d do the fitting—the fitting of the
lorgnettes, of course.” Simon
raised his glass and drank
deeply. “It’s an attractive idea, old
darling, but all these
schemes involve laying out a lot of capital
on which you have
to wait such a hell of a long time for a return. Besides,
there
can’t be much of a profit in it. On a rough estimate, the
amount of
wool required to circumnavigate a fifty-four inch
bust ——
”

Monty
Hayward, who was also present, took out a tobacco-pouch and began to fill his
pipe.

“I had
some capital once,” he said reminiscently, “but it
didn’t do
me much good.”

“How
much can you lend me?” asked the Saint hopefully.

Monty
brushed stray ends of tobacco from his lap and
tested the draught
through his handiwork cautiously.

“I
haven’t got it any more, but I don’t think I’d lend it to
you if I
had,” he said kindly. “Anyway, the point doesn’t
arise,
because a fellow called Oscar Newdick has got it.
Didn’t I ever tell you
about that?”

The Saint
moved his head negatively, and settled deeper
into his chair.

“It
doesn’t sound like you, Monty. D’you mean to say you
were hornswoggled
?”

Monty
nodded.

“I
suppose you might call it that. It happened about six years ago, when I was a
bit younger and not quite so wise.
It wasn’t a bad swindle on the whole,
though.” He struck a
match and puffed meditatively. “This
fellow Newdick was a
bloke I met on the train coming down from the
office. He
used to get into the same compartment with me three or
four
times a week, and naturally we took to passing the time of
day—you
know the way one does. He was an aeronautical
engineer and a bit of
an inventor, apparently. He was experi
menting with
autogiros, and he had a little one-horse factory
near Walton where he
was building them. He used to talk
a lot of technical stuff about them to
me, and I talked techni
cal stuff about make-up and dummies to him—I
don’t sup
pose either of us understood half of what the other was
talk
ing about, so we got on famously.”

With his
pipe drawing satisfactorily, Monty possessed him
self of the
beer-opener and executed a neat flanking move
ment towards the
source of supply.

“Well,
one day this fellow Newdick asked me if I’d like
to drop over and have
a look at his autogiros, so the follow
ing Saturday afternoon
I hadn’t anything particular to do and
I took a run out to
his aerodrome to see how he was getting
along. All he had
there was a couple of corrugated-iron sheds
and a small field
which he used to take off from and land at,
but he really had got
a helicopter effect which he said he’d
made himself. He told
me all about it and how it worked,
which was all double-Dutch to me; and
then he asked me if
I’d like to go up in it. So I said ‘Thank you very much,
I should simply hate to go up in it.’ You know what these
things look like—an ordinary
aeroplane with the wings taken
off and just
a sort of large fan business to hold you up in the
air—I never thought they looked particularly safe
even when
they’re properly made, and
I certainly didn’t feel like risking
my
neck in this home-made version that he’d rigged up out of old bits of wood and
angle iron. However, he was so
insistent about it and seemed so upset
when I refused that
eventually I thought I’d
better gratify the old boy and just
keep
on praying that the damn thing wouldn’t fall to pieces
before we got down again.”