“I’ll do the dishes,” volunteered Selina, “while you and Papa wash your hands.”
Simon tidied the dining-living-room, thankful that there had been no smoking to add its problems of telltale ashes and odors, and joined Selina in the kitchen while Mr Thoat was completing the euphemistic lavage. He was glad to see that she had cleaned up as meticulously as her upbringing would have predicted — he only wanted to be sure that an inoffensive earl would find no trace of vandalism, and might even staunchly deny that anyone could have used his flat in the way Mr Thoat might subsequently claim that it had been used.
Selina Thoat, however, was ruminating a different idea.
“If your servant has the day off,” she said, “would you like me to come back and cook dinner for you?”
“You’re very kind,” said the Saint. “But I’m having dinner with a business associate, who’s taking me to the airport.”
“When you come back, then. Any Sunday when you’re alone. Just call me.”
“Thank you,” said the Saint, and was able to sound more grateful because Mr Thoat returned at that moment. “But now you really must be going.”
He herded them to the door, picking up the deeds from the coffee-table on the way.
“You won’t want to have this stuff bulging out of your pockets in the parade,” he said. “Let me mail you your copy.”
“You are mos’ conshidrate, Mr Tombs,” Mr Thoat said portentously. He amplified the thought, with an air of inspiration: “You have cast your bread upon the warrers. It will come back to you in good measure, preshed down an’ run over.”
He essayed a courtly bow, lurched a little, and proceeded down the stairs with extreme precision.
The deputation of Angels of Abstinence was already marshalled in military formation when Mr Thoat and Selina located them in the irregular column of demonstrators which blocked half the old Carriage Road on the east of Park Lane. While they waited for the promenade to get under way, they were ringing the welkin with a song which Mr Thoat himself had authored, to an accompaniment of drums, bazookas, and harmonicas played by the more talented members of the party:
Emotionally stirred to the depths of his soul by the familiar melody and the uplifting words, Mr Thoat was moved as he approached to adopt the rôle of conductor, waving his arms with an ecstatic exuberance that could only have been surpassed by Leonard Bernstein. The fact that this change of balance almost made him trip over his own feet he attributed to the unevenness of the ground.
“There he is,” said Constable Yelland excitedly, standing in the fringe of the spectators in his best Sunday suit, beside an older man in somewhat plainer clothes on which the brand of Sir Robert Peel was nevertheless almost legible.
“Him?” said the Scotland Yard man, half incredulously. “I thought he was one of the top teetotallers.”
Isaiah Thoat, suffused with a delirious sense of power which he attributed to the encouraging smiles of his flock, led them more vehemently into another stanza:
“Boom-boom-boo-rah,” added Mr Thoat, stamping his feet up and down in a martial manner, at which point the Scotland Yard man tapped him on the shoulder and presented himself with the time-honored introduction.
“And I have a warrant for your arrest on a charge of receiving stolen goods knowing the same to have been stolen. It is my duty to warn you—”
“Ridiclush,” said Mr Thoat, leaning on him heavily. “I’ll report you to your shuprir offcer. Why, do you know, I’ve jus’ bin incrusted with a trush fund... lemme tell you...”
Simon Templar had followed at a very discreet distance, merely to make sure that nothing remediable went wrong with the situation on which he had toiled so honestly. But even at that range he was able to appreciate the extra bulge of Selina Thoat’s bovine eyes as she recognized Constable Yelland even in his horrible tailoring, and flung her arms around his neck.
“My dream man,” she moaned.
The standard-bearer of Scotland Yard was sniffing Isaiah Thoat at almost equally close quarters, and his verdict was fast and seasoned.
“He’s reeking of it — rum, whisky, and I don’t know what else. She must be the same. Probably celebrating the haul they made. We’d better take ’em both in. Blow your whistle, stupid!”
The uncured ham
Copyright © 1961 by Sales Publications, Inc.
Once upon a time there was in Sweden a Stallmästar, a master of the royal stables, whose lodge and dependencies were situated at the edge of a wooded park and a pretty lake only two miles north of the center of Stockholm. But even as far back as the middle of the seventeenth century such a choice location could not escape the covetous attention of more mercenary enterprise, and he was abruptly dispossessed in favor of an inn which, while still commemorating him sentimentally by calling itself Stallmästaregarden, today features the hors d’oeuvre table instead of the horse trough.
Once upon a much later time there was a thief in the United States who would have preferred to be an actor — or, if he had been giving his own version, an actor who was forced by lack of appreciation to become a thief. His name was Ernest Moldys, and it was the opinion of every producer for whom he had auditioned that he was a very bad actor indeed. It was, however, the consensus of many police departments that he was an excellent appraiser of jewels and a first-class burglar of houses, apartments, and hotel suites. These contradictory assessments had never convinced him, or discouraged him from declaiming long passages of Shakespeare whenever he could command an audience, which was usually in some tavern where he was buying drinks. Surmises were less unanimous as to whether he was obsessed with The Theatre for its own sake, or whether he was more lured by the putative fringe benefits of the profession — the international glamor queens whom he would professionally embrace and publicly escort, the swooning fans who would offer him their all for an autograph. He was certainly a dedicated dazzler of girls, the younger and more innocent the better; in fact, it was his too brilliant fascination, seduction, impregnation, and desertion of a teen-age beauty whom he found in a drama school which had achieved what a dozen detective bureaus had failed to do and put him to flight across the Atlantic to settle tentatively in Sweden, a country which will not extradite Americans on such locally incomprehensible complaints.
Once upon a yet more recent time, Simon Templar, who was known in many circles but fortunately for him not everywhere as “The Saint,” chanced to be dining at an adjacent table at Stallmästaregarden on the same night as Ernest Moldys had elected to take fodder at that hostelry.
“What I want,” said Mr Moldys aggressively, “is some of these ‘crayfters.’ ”
He was then still in his mid-thirties, and handsome enough in the pseudo-rugged way that appeals to advertising photographers commissioned to prove that even hairy-chested tattooed he-men can enjoy after-shave lotions. In lieu of personality he affected an aggressive manner developed from watching certain old television films and designed to impress his masculinity upon his consorts of the moment, whom he carefully selected for their youthful impressionability, like the round-faced flaxen-haired girl who accompanied him that evening.