"What you're trying to say," she accused him at last, rather stiffly, "is that you think I'm in something crooked."
"I don't say that you're an accomplice," he replied calmly. "But I'd want a lot of convincing that some day the police aren't going to be looking for your boss."
"That's what I've been afraid of," she said. "That's why I made Anne and Hilton promise to introduce us as soon as you came to England, when they happened to mention that they knew you."
He looked at her admiringly.
"A conniving female!" he said. "And I liked you so much because you never asked any of the usual silly questions about my life as the Saint and so forth."
"I was afraid if I did you'd be too leary of letting me get you alone."
"So you had this date all planned before you let me think I thought of it."
"Worse than that. I might have tried to drag you out on this walk even if it 'd been pouring with rain."
The path had come down again from under the trees to curve inside the bend of the river. Ahead and to one side there were three green mounds that must have been ancient tumuli, and farther off yet the ridge of a railway embankment cut across a marshy stretch of lowland. From the place where Penelope Lynch stopped, pointing through a chance gap in an intervening coppice, could be seen close up against the embankment a wooden shack with a tar-paper roof, a rectangular box perhaps ten feet long which might once have been built to shelter a maintenance crew or their tools, with a door at one end and a single small window in one side. It was occupied, Simon realized from a thin wisp of smoke that curled up from a stovepipe projecting through the roof; and as he gazed at it puzzledly, wondering why Penelope was showing it to him, a man came out with a bucket.
He wore a brown pullover and dark trousers loosely tucked into rubber knee-boots. He was broad-shouldered and a little paunchy, and he moved with the plodding deliberation of a farm laborer rather than a construction worker. At that distance, even the Saint's keen eyes could not make out much more than that he had plentiful gray hair and a ruddy complexion. He carried the pail a few yards from the hut, emptied it on the ground, and plodded back inside.
"My boss," Penelope said.
Simon had to hold back the stereotyped "You're kidding!" because it was perfectly obvious from her expression that she wasn't. Instead, he said with determined nonchalance: "It's nice to see a man who hasn't been spoiled by success, still living the simple life."
"He used to be our gardener," Penelope said.
The Saint clung doggedly to his composure.
"Democracy is a wonderful thing," he remarked, as they resumed their walk. "And you may get a medal from some bleeding-heart committee for being so cheerful about changing places. But not for your story-telling technique. I've heard of quite nice girls getting their pretty heads bashed in with blunt instruments because they tantalized someone a lot less than you've already done to me."
"All right," she said. "If you'll forgive me for trapping you like this. But I couldn't think of any other way to do it. It's such a fantastic story. "
It was.
It began when she told the gardener, whose name was Tom Gull, that she couldn't afford to keep him on any longer, and that in any case she was going to have to put the house on the market and move away.
This was nothing like casting a faithful old retainer out to starve, for he only came one day a week, and served five other houses within a few miles' radius on the same basis. She had known nothing else about him except that he had knocked on the door one morning and announced that the garden looked as if it needed attention and he had a day to spare. He was unkempt and unshaven and smelled strongly of beer, but in those days gardeners were as hard to find as any other household help, and after a trial she had let him become a weekly fixture. He was not exactly an artist at his craft, nor did he ever risk injuring himself from over-exertion, but he was better than nothing, and both she and her husband were glad to be relieved of some chores for which neither of them happened to have any inclination.
He took his dismissal phlegmatically, but at the end of the day he came back with a proposition.
"I've got somethink 'ere, ma'm," he said, extracting a grubby and much-folded piece of paper from his pocket. "It needs correcting my spelling an' putting in good English, an' typing out neat an' proper. I know you've got a typewriter, 'cos I've 'eard you using it. Do you think you could 'elp me out?"
"Of course, I'll be glad to," she said, feeling some kind of obligation because of the employment she had just taken away from him.
"I wouldn't ask you to do it for nothink," he said. "You fix it up for me, an' I'll give you a bit more work in the garden."
She had protested that that wasn't necessary, but after she had done the job she was not so sure. As deciphered and edited by her, the document finally ran:
But not by studying the form book! The professionals who set the handicaps are much better at that than you, and in theory they should make every race end in a dead heat, but how often do they do it?
And not by following "information"! Who knows what secret plans have been made for every horse in a race?
The only method which can show a steady profit in the long run is a coldly mechanical mathematical method which will scientifically eliminate the element of chance. In other words, A SYSTEM.
Now, I know there are dozens of systems on the market, but it should be obvious that none of them can really be any good. If it were, the news would finally get around, and everybody would be using it, and all the bookies would be broke.
But after a lifetime of study I have developed and tested and proved a system which is infallible — which points out winner after winner, week after week, year after year!
Obviously, this system is not for sale. Even if I charged £100 for it, somebody would buy it and turn around and sell copies to 200 other people for £5 each, and I should be left out in the cold.
I dare not even disclose the names of the horses indicated by the System, because after studying them for a while someone else might be clever enough to deduce the method by which they were found. And in any case, if people all over the country were backing these horses and telling their friends, the prices would come down until they all started at odds on, and there would be nothing in it for anybody.
What I will do is operate the System myself for a limited number of clients who will invest in units of £100 with me, to be staked entirely at my discretion, from which I GUARANTEE to pay monthly dividends of £5 per unit.
Where else can you buy such an income at such a price? Don't delay! Send me your CASH today!
TOM GULL
116 WATKINS STREET, MAIDENHEAD, BERKS
The Saint read it as it appeared in print, on a page torn from the Sportsman's Guide which she gave him, and was profoundly awed.
"I've seen some fancy boob-bait in my time," he said, "but this is about the most preposterous pitch I think I've ever come across. Don't tell me that anyone actually falls for it."
"They've been doing it ever since the first advertisement came out."
It was she who had found the one-room office and furnished it, on Gull's insistence that the service was worth a good week's pay and that he would have to get someone to do it in any case.
"Ain't no use me going to see the agents," he said. "The way I look an' the way I talk, they wouldn't want to rent me anythink. An' I don't know wot you oughter 'ave in an office to run this job proper. But I can pay for it." He dug into his trousers and brought out a fistful of crumpled currency. "'Ere — take this, an' let me know if you need any more. I got a bit put away, wot I bin saving up till I was ready to start this business."