"But what does he do?" persisted the Saint.
"He is — ah — somewhat difficult to get on with," replied Mr. Potham cautiously.
More than that his discretion would not permit him to say; but the Saint's appetite was far from satisfied. In fact, Simon Templar was so intrigued with the unpopularity of Major Bellingford Smart that he took his leave of Mr. Potham rather abruptly, leaving that discreet gentleman gaping in some astonishment at a virginal pad of Orders to View on which he had not been given a chance to inscribe any addresses for the Saint's inspection.
Simon Templar was not actively in search of trouble at that time. His hours of meditation, as a matter of fact, were almost exclusively occupied with the problem of devising for himself an effective means of entering the town house of the Countess of Albury (widow of Albury's Peerless Pickles) whose display of diamonds at a recent public function had impressed him as being a potential contribution to his Old Age Pension that he could not conscientiously pass by. But one of those sudden impulses of his had decided that the time was ripe for knowing more about Major Bellingford Smart; and in such a mood as that, a comparatively straightforward proposition like the Countess of Albury's diamonds had to take second place.
Simon went along to a more modern real estate agency than the honourable firm of Potham & Spode, one of those marble-pillared, super-card-index billeting offices where human habitations are shot at you over the counter like sausages in a cafeteria; and there an exquisitely-dressed young man with a double-breasted waistcoat and impossibly patent-leather hair, who looked as if he could have been nothing less than the second son of a duke or an ex-motor-salesman, was more communicative than Mr. Potham had been. It is also worthy of note that the exquisite young man thought that he was volunteering the information quite spontaneously, as a matter of interest to an old friend of his youth; for the Saint's tact and guile could be positively Machiavellian when he chose.
"It's rather difficult to say exactly what is the matter with Bellingford Smart. He seems to be one of these sneaking swine who gets pleasure out of taking advantage of their position in petty ways. As far as his tenants are concerned, he keeps to the letter of his leases and makes himself as nasty as possible within those limits. There are lots of ways a landlord can make life unbearable for you if he wants to, as you probably know. The people he likes to get into his flats are lonely widows and elderly spinsters — they're easy meat for him."
"But I don't see what good that does him," said the Saint puzzledly. "He's only getting himself a bad name —"
"I had one of his late tenants in here the other day — she told me that she'd just paid him five hundred pounds to release her. She couldn't stand it any longer, and she couldn't get out any other way. If he does that often, I suppose it must pay him."
"But he's making it more and more difficult to let his flats, isn't he?"
The exquisite young man shrugged.
"All the estate agencies know him — we refuse to handle his stuff at all, and we aren't the only ones. But there are plenty of prospective tenants who've never heard of him. He advertises his flats and lets them himself whenever he can, and then the tenants don't find out their mistake till it's too late. It must seem amazing to you that anything like that can go on in this neighbourhood; but his petty persecutions are all quite legal, and nobody seems to be able to do anything about it."
"I see," said the Saint softly.
The solution of the mystery, now that he knew it, struck him as being one of the most original, and at the same time one of the meanest and most contemptible, forms of blackmail that he had ever heard of; and the fact that it skulked along under the cover of the law made it twice as sickening. He had no doubt that it was all true — even the worthiest of estate agents are not in the habit of turning down commissions without the strongest possible grounds, and Major Bellingford Smart's nastiness appeared to be common knowledge in the profession. There were some forms of unpleasantness that filled the Saint with an utter loathing, and the meanness of Major Bellingford Smart was one of them. Simon had an entirely immoral respect for the wholehearted criminal who gambled his liberty on the success of his enterprises, but a livelihood that was gained principally by bullying and swindling fat-headed old women turned his stomach.
"He has quite a lot of property around here," the exquisite young man was informing him. "He buys up houses and converts them into flats. You'll see what sort of a man he is when I tell you that while his conversions are being carried out it's his habit to hire a room in the neighbourhood from which he can overlook the site, and he prowls around there at odd times with a pair of field-glasses to see if he can catch his workmen slacking. Once he saw a couple of men having a cup of tea in the afternoon, and went around and fired them on the spot."
"Isn't there anything he doesn't sink to?" asked the Saint.
"I can't think of it," said the exquisite young man slanderously. "A few months ago he had a porter at 17, David Square who'd stayed with him eleven years — I can't think why. The porter's wife acted as a sort of housekeeper, and their daughter was employed in the Major's own flat as a maid. You can imagine what a man like that must be like to work for, and this daughter soon found she couldn't stick it. She tried to give notice, and Smart told her that if she left him her father and mother would be fired out into the street — the porter was an old man of well over sixty. The girl tried to stay on, but at last she had to run away. The first the porter and his wife knew about it was when Smart sent for them and gave them a month's notice. And at the end of the month they duly were fired out, with Smart still owing them three weeks' wages which they tried for weeks to get out of him until the son of one of the tenants went round and saw Smart and damned well made him pay up under the threat of putting his own solicitors on the job. The porter died shortly afterwards. I expect it all sounds incredible, but it's quite true."
Simon departed with a sheaf of Orders to View which he destroyed as soon as he got outside, and walked round very thoughtfully in the direction of David Square. And the more he thought of it, the more poisonous and utterly septic the personality of Major Bellingford Smart loomed in his consciousness. It occurred to the Saint, with a certain honest regret, that the calls of his own breezy buccaneering had lately taken his thoughts too far from that unlawful justice which had once made his name a terror more salutary than the Law to those who sinned secretly in tortuous ways that the Law could not touch. And it was very pleasant to think that the old life was still open to him…
With those thoughts he sauntered up the steps of No. 17, where he was stopped by a uniformed porter who looked more like a prison warder — which, as a matter of fact, he had once been.
"Can you tell me anything about this flat that's to let here?" Simon inquired, and the man's manner changed.
"You'd better see Major Bellingford Smart, sir. Will you step this way?"
Simon was led round to an extraordinary gloomy and untidy office on the ground floor, where a man who was writing at a desk littered with dust-smothered papers rose and nodded to him.
"You want to see the flat, Mr. — er —"
"Bourne," supplied the Saint. "Captain Bourne."
"Well, Captain Bourne," said the Major dubiously, "I hardly know whether it would be likely to suit you. As a matter of fact —"
"It doesn't have to suit me," said the Saint expansively. "I'm inquiring about it for my mother. She's a widow, you know, and she isn't very strong. Can't go walking around London all day looking at flats. I have to go back to India myself at the end of the week, and I very much wanted to see the old lady fixed up before I sailed."