13 The Saint Intervenes (Boodle)

The Saint smiled. He had arrived only twenty minutes, before, fresh as a daisy, at the hotel in Paris where he had arranged to meet her; and he was unpacking.

From a large suitcase he had taken a small table, which was a remarkable thing for him to have even in his frequently eccentric luggage. He set it up before her, and placed on it a velvet-lined wooden box. The table was somewhat thicker in the top than most tables of that size, as if it might have contained a drawer; but she could not see any drawer.

"Watch," he said.

He touched a concealed spring somewhere in the side of the table—and the box vanished. Because she was watching it closely, she saw it go: it simply fell through a trapdoor into the hollow thickness of the top, and a perfectly fitted panel sprang up to fill the gap again. But it was all done in a split second; and even when she examined the top of the table closely it was hard to see the edges of the trapdoor. She shook the table, but nothing rattled. For all that any ordinary examination could reveal, the top might have been a solid block of mahogany.

"It was just as easy as that," said the Saint, with the air of a conjuror revealing a treasured illusion. "The crown never even left the room until I was ready to take it away. Fortu­nately the Prince hadn't actually paid for the crown. It was still insured by Vazey's themselves, so the Southshire Insur­ance Company's cheque will go direct to them—which saves me a certain amount of extra work. All I've got to do now is to finish off my alibi, and the job's done."

"But Simon," pleaded the girl, "when Teal grabbed your moustaches ——"

"Teal didn't grab my moustaches," said the Saint with dignity. "Claud Eustace would never had dreamed of doing such a thing. I shall never forget the look on that bird's face when the moustaches were grabbed, though. It was a sight I hope to treasure to my dying day."

He had unpacked more of the contents of his large bag while he was talking; and at that moment he was laying out a pair of imperially curled moustachios with which was con­nected an impressively pointed black beard. Patricia's eyes suddenly opened wide.

"Good Lord!" she gasped. "You don't mean to say you kidnapped the Prince and pretended to be him?"

Simon Templar shook his head.

"I always was the Prince of Cherkessia—didn't you know?" he said innocently; and all at once Patricia began to laugh.

V

The Treasure of Turk's Lane

There was a morning when Simon Templar looked up from his newspaper with a twinkle of unholy meditation in his blue eyes and a rather thoughtful smile barely touching the corners of his mouth; and to the privileged few who shared all his lawless moods there was only one deduction to be drawn when the Saint looked up from his newspaper in just that thoughtful and unholy way.

"I see that Vernon Winlass has bought Turk's Lane," he said.

Mr. Vernon Winlass was a man who believed in Getting Things Done. The manner of doing them did not concern him much, so long as it remained strictly within the law; it was only results which could be seen in bank accounts, share holdings, income tax returns, and the material circumstances of luxurious living, and with these things Mr. Winlass was very greatly and whole-heartedly concerned. This is not to say that he was more avaricious than any other business man, or more unscrupulous than any other financier. In his phi­losophy, the weakest went to the wall: the careless, the timid, the foolish, the simple, the hesitant, paid with their mis­fortunes for the rewards that came naturally to those of sharper and more aggressive talents. And in setting up that elementary principle for his only guiding standard, Mr. Winlass could justifiably claim that after all he was only demon­strating himself to be the perfect evolutionary product of a civilisation whose honours and amenities are given only to people who Get Things Done, whether they are worth doing or not—with the notable exception of politicians, who, of course, are exempted by election even from that requirement.

Simon Templar did not like Mr. Winlass, and would have considered him a legitimate victim for his illegitimate talents, on general principles that were only loosely connected with one or two things he had heard about Mr. Winlass's methods of Getting Things Done; but although the idea of devoting some time and attention to that hard-headed financier sim­mered at the back of his mind in a pleasant warmth of enthusiasm, it did not actually boil over until the end of the same week, when he happened to be passing Turk's Lane on his return from another business affair.