The old hypnotic devilment danced in the Saint’s blue eyes, and Monty Hayward groaned.
“It makes me wish I’d had the sense to keep my mouth shut,” he said.
No such rueful presentiment clouded the horizon of Mr Isaiah Thoat as he watched the first rather unceremonious activation of the Sanitade Garden Plant — that would be a better name than “Factory,” he was thinking, and fitted the “Garden” motif so nicely.
The activation in fact consisted only of the delivery of a truck-load of cacao to an old but well-built barn which had been the only edifice on the plant site when he acquired it, which he had thriftily decided to preserve and use for miscellaneous storage. Though the new buildings were barely starting to rise from their footings, his shrewdness was already being vindicated: he had had the chance to pick up this consignment of essential raw material at a giveaway price, but would have had to turn it down if he had been limited to the storage facilities of the outgrown original Sanitade Factory which he was preparing to replace.
“You see, my dear Selina,” he observed to his daughter, who was with him, “Fortune does not only aid the wicked. Good luck is usually the reward of good judgment.”
“And you deserve all that you get, Papa,” she said.
She was one of those unlucky young females who seem to have been created solely to boost the morale of their nearest competitors. Beside her, no other creature in a skirt could have felt hopeless. It might be kinder not to detail her specifications, but simply to say that for every apparently ultimate disaster in feminine architecture there must be something worse, and she was it.
Mr Thoat signed the driver’s receipt and himself closed and locked the barn doors. He was just completing this when County Constable George Yelland rode by on his bicycle, and stopped.
“Good morning, sir — and Miss Selina,” said the young man, saluting smartly. “I see that you’re moving in already, in quite a big way.”
“Good morning, officer,” said Mr Thoat agreeably. “But what gave you the idea—”
“A large lorry has just stopped here, sir,” said the constable airily. “The tracks are quite plain, where it pulled in, and considerably lighter where it pulled out. Therefore, it discharged quite a load. It rained this morning from 5:10 a.m. until 7:35. The tracks were made since the rain, and since I find you here locking the door I conclude that the delivery has just taken place.”
“Excellent,” said Mr Thoat. “I only wish that some of those vulgar popular writers who seem to take such a delight in deriding the British police could be forced to observe you on your rounds. I shall write another letter to the Chief Constable about you — you are the young officer who took such good care of my daughter recently, aren’t you?”
He had not noticed that his offspring had returned the constable’s greeting with the swooning adoration of a dyspeptic sheep.
“Yes, Mr Thoat, I had that privilege... But what I’m concerned about now is whether it’s wise for you to leave anything valuable in this barn. I’ve noticed the contractor doesn’t keep a night watchman here.”
“I declined to underwrite that expense,” Mr Thoat said primly. “It’s up to him to see that there aren’t so many materials left lying around that it’s worth some professional loafer’s wages just to protect them from petty pilfering.”
“Yes, sir, but building jobs do catch the eye of a certain type of petty thief, and then a building like this barn becomes a sort of attraction, out here in the middle of nowhere, so to speak, where nobody would be likely to hear anyone breaking in.”
“Then I shall rely on you to keep an especially sharp watch on it, Constable—”
“Yelland, sir.”
“Ah, yes. I must remember that name, so that your services will be properly credited by the Authorities if my property is protected — or vice versa. I’m sure we are leaving everything in good hands — are we not, Selina?”
“Yes, indeed, Papa,” said Selina, with more than dutiful ardour.
Mr Thoat consulted his watch.
“I must be going, or I shall be late for my appointment in town. That wretched plumber should have been here an hour ago. Now he’ll just have to come back another time.”
“I could wait for him, Papa, and go back on the bus. I can tell him what you decided about the wash-rooms.”
“An excellent idea. And be sure he understands that I refuse to pay extra for such frivolities as coloured tiles.”
Mr Thoat drove himself back to London — he had a nine-year-old car which he never propelled beyond twenty miles an hour, thereby having caused several accidents to happen to other drivers who had been goaded to recklessness by the sheer exasperation of dragging behind him. But he had allowed plenty of time for his customary average, and arrived at the modest South Kensington tea-shoppe where he had made his luncheon rendezvous a few minutes before his guest, who had dallied until the last moment at the nearest tavern, taking prophylaxis against the aridity of the impending meal...
“I’m sorry to have kept you waiting, Mr Thoat.”
“Not at all, Mr Tombs, I was early,” Mr Thoat said generously.
He took out his wallet, extracted from it a neatly written check, and passed it across the table.
Simon Templar took it, verified the amounts, and put it away in his own billfold with equal gravity. He was wearing an old-fashioned double-breasted suit and tie of almost canonical drabness, and only the most assiduous students of his techniques of disguise would have recognized him. With a heavy powdering of white in the hair, the roughed-up eyebrows, and the untidy false moustache, behind an eye-shield of tinted glasses, and bowed in a concave-chested slouch, there was little to recall the dynamic exuberance that he wore like a halo when he chose to live up to more appropriate names than Tombs.
“The delivery was all right then, was it, Mr Thoat?”
“Oh, yes, Mr Tombs. Perfectly correct. I hope you aren’t offended by my reserving payment until it was completed, but after all, in making such a purchase from a total stranger, at so much below the current market price—”
“Don’t think any more about it, Mr Thoat. I understand. Of course I’m losing money. But I’m helping a good cause. And I can take the loss off my income tax. That makes it about the same as a donation, doesn’t it?”
“Yes, certainly, but—”
“But I can’t go on selling to you at a loss, Mr Thoat. I’m supposed to make my living in the commodity market. The Government would begin to get suspicious. I have been looking for another approach.”
“Do you gennelmun wanta order?” inquired an impatient waitress, leaning over with a threatening notebook.
The menu offered the grisly alternatives of boiled sausages, fricassée of veal, or a Health Salad compounded of raw vegetables, fruits, and nuts. It was obvious which of these delicacies Mr Thoat would order. Simon settled for the boiled sausages, steeling himself against Mr Thoat’s slightly pained expression with a placating bottle of Sanitade, and hoped that he would be able to get it down without a visible shudder.
“I’m not a capitalist, Mr Thoat — the income tax system has seen to that,” he resumed. “But I do receive the income from a trust fund set up by my late father, which I don’t really need. Since he accumulated this money by putting aside and investing each year the amount which he estimated he would have spent on drink if he had been a drinker, I think he would approve of my passing it on to help you in your wonderful work.”