From the hollow underneath he pulled out a stout canvas bag tied with a cord threaded through a row of grommets around the neck. Stencilled on one side were the words:
PETRIPLAST LTD.
SLOUGH.
The bag bulged with a load that was half-hard but springy. He loosened the cord, plunged a hand in, and brought it out with a mass of paper money, most of it fives.
A change in the intensity of light, rather than anything positively seen, made him turn and look up sharply.
Tom Gull stood in the doorway. It could have been no one else, in a suit that looked as if it had been slept in, but with a garish necktie knotted under a clean but threadbare collar. Tom Gull, dressed to go to the races, or to tell Penelope he was going, but already returned home instead. The untidy gray hair and ruddy face matched the impression that Simon had had from a distance, but at closer quarters it could be observed that the tint of cheeks and nose had not been produced by wind and sun without the assistance of internally administered colorants. The bear-like posture was the same, too, but not the speed with which he snatched up a pitchfork that leaned against the nearest wall.
"Hold it!" the Saint's voice crackled. "We mustn't get blood on it!"
For an instant the man was thrown off his mental stride, and that was sufficient to check him physically. But the fork was still levelled at the Saint's chest, the tines gleaming wickedly sharp, poised on the whim of the gardener's powerful arm like an arrow on the string of a drawn bow.
"Wot you think you're doing 'ere?"
"I know all about this," Simon said urgently, trying to keep his precarious hold on the other's attention. He threw the bag down on the bed so that the lettering on it was uppermost. "About a year ago this was stolen from the train to High Wycombe — the payroll for the Petriplast branch factory there. I was checking this morning on what robberies there'd been in the neighborhood where a lot of cash disappeared that'd never been found. There was about thirty-two thousand pounds in this. The guard put up a fight, and the men on the train were caught, but not before they'd thrown the bag out of a window. It was believed that they had accomplices waiting beside the line who got away with it and left them to take the rap, though they swore they didn't. I know what really happened. You were moseying around on your way to the local, and you stumbled over the bag and picked it up."
"Put down the rest of it," Gull growled.
Simon obeyed, slowly, and went on talking.
"Why don't you offer me a deal? Maybe a partnership in your horse-playing business? It's your only out, unless you want to kill me and bury me in the—"
Suddenly he realized that his improvisation, playing for time, had led him into a trap of its own. He had said the wrong thing to a man of Gull's limited but literal mentality. He saw it in the reddish glitter in the gardener's eyes, a tightening of the mouth and a tensing of muscles, and knew that in the flick of another thought he would feel the steel in his flesh.
From behind Gull came a short shrill scream.
It distracted him just enough, at the very moment when he was starting his lunge, for the Saint to leap in under the pitchfork, deflecting the shaft with his left arm, while his right fist drove like a piston into the man's solar plexus, doubling him forward to meet the standard left uppercut that followed.
"Jolly good," said Penelope. "I'm not the screaming type, honestly, but it was the only way I could think of to help."
"It was the one great brainstorm of his life," Simon said later, at her cottage. "Having picked up all that loot and hidden it, he was faced with the problem of getting to use it. You can't walk into a bank and open an account with thirty-two thousand in cash without questions being asked. And you can't even start spending money like a Greek ship-owner, if you've been known for years as a slob who only worked hard enough to earn the wherewithal to keep slightly sozzled, without people talking, and pretty soon the cops hear about it. And if you tried to disappear and start somewhere else under another name, they'd soon be looking for you, remembering that you'd been in the vicinity when all that legal tender got lost. He had to find a way to legitimize it, or build a complete set-up to account for how he got it."
"So he just sent himself the money and filled out his own coupons," Penelope said. "I suppose he picked names and addresses from the phone books in different towns, because it was easier than inventing them."
"And then he began producing the rest of the money as winnings. And when he had you address envelopes for the dividends, he just took them home and burned them. The same with those refund letters. The money that should have gone in them would just be produced as more winnings, and gradually he could claim they were all his."
"But what about the man who said he really had had his dividends and his money back?"
"Frightening as it seems, there actually were seven suckers who sent in a hundred pounds of their own money. They were the ones marked with crosses in his private book. He had to keep track of them, and let them be paid, so that there wouldn't be any complaints that would get him investigated."
"How can people be so gullible?"
"You've invented a word. But don't forget that you went along with the gag for some time before you began to wonder if anything was wrong."
"And don't forget that if I hadn't decided to do some detecting on my own, since you were being so superior and mysterious, and followed him this afternoon, you'd 've been stuck on his fork like a hot dog."
The Saint shuddered.
"Let's say you earned at least half the reward." He poured two more Peter Dawsons. "Do you think we should go out and celebrate, or just stay here by the fire?"
4. NASSAU: The Fast Women
"You're the Saint," said Cynthia Quillen challengingly. "You kill nasty people, don't you?"
"Sometimes," said Simon Templar tolerantly.
Over the years, he had learned to speak tolerantly, on occasion, especially such occasions as being challenged at cocktail parties by beautiful women who had absorbed a little too much festive spirit.
Of course, not all men would have rated Cynthia Quillen as beautiful. She was a blonde who conspicuously refused to conform to the pneumatic cotton-candy type beloved of Hollywood press agents, which looks as if it would melt in your mouth or any other comfortably upholstered place. She had the kind of "good" features that with enough hard wear can become bony, and the other extensions of her nicely proportioned skeleton were also sufficiently short of adipose padding to entitle a fast assessor to call her skinny. Which is one of those misleading fronts that separate the men from the boys. But Simon Templar had survived long enough to have learned that plenty of slender women were kept that way by a nervous hunger that would have scared Don Juan out of his jockstrap.
"All right," she said. "How much would you charge to wash out that nasty sample over in the corner?"
Simon peered as best he could through an intervening hedge of standing guests, towards the indicated corner, where a rather short well-knit man with a chiseled curly head almost absurdly reminiscent of an ancient Greek statue was absorbed in animated chatter with an even more statuesque brunette.
The Saint did not have to be an automobile-racing fan to recognize him, for Godfrey Quillen was one of the most highly publicized drivers of that or the preceding season, a newcomer who was reportedly crowding the pros in their ratings.