“That was one piece of circumstantial evidence he didn’t manufacture himself. There were two photos — press photos, remember? — with the dates stamped on the back. Both the tenth of June. Dio, presenting a yachting trophy in the Bahamas — that was late afternoon — and Dio at a party in Lisbon that same night, maybe six or eight hours later. Or at least, I assumed it was that same night. And with the time difference, he’d have had to travel almost instantaneously to get there. And it’s three thousand miles.”
“So how can the photos be explained?” she asked.
“By the fact that the Lisbon one was taken first. I saw the photos at the Daily Express office, and as the agency names were stamped on the backs along with the dates, I was able to phone diem and check. As I’d suspected, the Lisbon agency always date their prints the day they’re processed. Normally that’s almost at once. But a picture taken during the night — say, at a party — is pretty certain to carry the next day’s date.”
“I think I’m beginning to see. He went to the party in Lisbon on the night of the ninth—”
“Or you might say, the night of the ninth-tenth. So let’s suppose the picture was taken at midnight. He might easily have left for the Bahamas at, say, three in the morning, on the tenth. By my reckoning, he could have got there in eighteen or twenty hours without much sweat. Let’s say he landed at twenty-two hundred hours. But remember the time-zone change. In Nassau it wasn’t ten o’clock at night — it was only four in the afternoon. So he was in time to wave to the out-island yachtsmen.”
The Saint stood up and looked at his watch.
“And now I think it’s time for that lunch I promised you.”
“Just one last question,” Ariadne said. “What are you getting out of this?”
He looked at her with imps of mischief dancing in his clear blue eyes. “The excitement of the chase — the satisfaction of a day’s work well done—”
“I mean, you were supposed to be paid, weren’t you?”
“And what makes you think I haven’t been?” he asked with as straight a face as he could muster. “I’ll let you into a secret. There are occasions, I’m sorry to say, when I steal more than codebooks. Though it was from the codebook that I copied down an interesting-looking series of figures.” He turned his most innocent gaze on her and added, “And do you know what those figures turned out to be?”
Ariadne shook her head, and Simon grinned.
“The combination to a safe — the one right behind you, in fact.”
He patted his breast pocket meaningly, and the girl’s eyes widened.
“You helped yourself?”
“Shamelessly,” replied the Saint. “To forty thousand pounds in conveniently large-denomination Swiss franc notes.”
“Forty thousand! But... you said your fee was to be twenty thousand!”
Simon Templar looked aggrieved.
“But I was commissioned for that sum twice,” he pointed out. “Twenty thousand from Patroclos One, twenty thousand from Patroclos Two. Wasn’t it lucky that they turned out to share a safe?”
And he smiled his incorrigible mocking smile.
“Come on — let’s go and get that lunch,” said the Saint.
II
The Pawn Gambit
1
On a certain grey afternoon in November of that year — traditionally a month when depression and despair sink to the nadir — a short balding man with an exclusive legal right to the name of Albert Nobbins was walking dejectedly by the Serpentine in London’s Hyde Park.
There was rain in the air, and no one else was visible in the park except a few dutiful dog-walkers dotted about way over beyond the far side of the lake. Nobbins walked with an aimless and plodding gait, faltering frequently like a man with scarcely more incentive to move forward than to go back, or to stand still. His purposeless steps took him along the lakeside path because that was the way he always went; and he was walking there in the park, not because he had anywhere in particular to go, nor even with the object of exercising his small flabby body, but because it was his habit, and because there was nothing else he could think of to do.
He neither saw nor heard the black car that slowed to a crawl on the road some fifty yards obliquely behind him. But even if he had seen or heard it, he was too deeply sunk in melancholy thought to pay it any special attention, and too far away from it to see the heavy revolver which the man in the back seat was toying with, almost affectionately...
Some men are Winners, gifted with every advantage in the scramble of life that nature and nurture with their most munificent combined efforts can supply. The Winner is that rare man who seems to lead a charmed life right from the beginning. As an infant, he never knows what it is to be short of a lollipop. His schoolboy marbles invariably conquer and multiply, and he attacks a ball with various conventional implements with seemingly innate dexterity. Later, his girlfriends are abundantly plural and pulchritudinous; he reaps sporting or academic honours, or both, by the dozen; and plum jobs drop into his lap even when he hasn’t exerted himself beyond the effort of sitting under the tree.
Success, recognition, popularity, money, affection: all through his life the Winner seems to attract them with nonchalant ease. He enjoys a distinguished and rewarding career, leading a blamelessly honourable existence and in due season breeding tribes of children and grandchildren — themselves doubtless including a goodly proportion of Winners.
Now to someone whose outlook as a respectable dutiful citizen has been perverted by exposure to some heretical scepticism about the Establishment, this picture of fulfilled felicity will undeniably seem tinged with dullness around at least some of its edges. Albert Nobbins, however, as he plodded along by the Serpentine on that damp grey November day, could contemplate it only with envy.
Nobbins was a Loser — an insignificant little man whose failures seemed to him as congenital as a Winner’s successes. As if it were not enough to have inherited such a risible cognomen as Nobbins, his parents had compounded his misfortune by linking it with one of the most unglamorous of Christian names. And from that depressing start, his fortune was apparently foredoomed. Lollipops, marbles, girls, success in sport or studies or career, were all one to Albert Nobbins: they had all evaded him as if by some inexorable magnetic repulsion. And despite his most desperate endeavours, his attempts to wield a bat or club or racquet had infallibly wobbled themselves into a shape so ineffectually awkward, so far removed from any semblance of style, that onlookers were invariably reduced to helpless howls of laughter.
He could hear that cruel laughter still, more than forty years on.
He stopped and stared glumly at the water: half a dozen ducks scudded hopefully towards him and converged on a spot a few yards from the bank, the distance which they knew from experience to be the average crust-tossing range of the general public. But Albert Nobbins shook his head at them abstractedly, and they dispersed as he plodded on with the same short, somehow inefficient steps. An insignificant little man, plump and balding and bespectacled, who every morning shaved his face to the same pink well-scrubbed shininess.
He had always been acutely resentful of his puny physique. He knew it was one of the roots of his lack of confidence, and he knew that his lack of confidence in turn explained his lifelong failures. He had no presence. Nobody noticed him; and the ultimate result of that was that whatever potentialities he might have had to be positive, assertive — effective — had been stunted. But buried within him was a smouldering core of angry rebellion; buried less deeply now than at any time in his life, but still unsuspected by nearly everyone who knew him. He had ability and diligence — enough to have served his country in positions of modest responsibility and trust (as he might have put it himself) but he was bitterly conscious of how much he might have done but hadn’t, of how much of him was unfulfilled.