13 The Saint Intervenes (Boodle)

"I know I haven't," said the Saint, with a sudden weariness. "I've only got what I think. I think that Yearleigh planned this days ago—when Vould first asked for the interview, as Yearleigh mentioned. I think he guessed what it would be about. I think his only reason for putting it off was to give himself time to send those anonymous threats to himself—to build up the melodrama he had invented. I think you'll find that those anonymous threats started on the day when Vould asked for a talk with him, and that Yearleigh had no sound reason for going away except that of putting Vould off. I think that when they were in the study tonight, Yearleigh pointed to the window and made some excuse to get Vould to turn round, and then shot him in the back in cold blood, and put this paper-knife in his hand afterwards. I think that that is what Lady Yearleigh, who must have known Year­leigh so much better than any of us, was afraid of; and I think that when she said 'He's killed him,' she meant that Yearleigh had killed Vould, and not that Vould had killed Yearleigh."

The Saint's lighter flared, like a bomb bursting in the dark; and Teal looked up and saw his lean brown face, grim and curiously bitter in the light of the flame as he put it to his cigarette. And then the light went out again, and there was only Simon Templar's quiet voice speaking out of the dark.

"I think that I killed Maurice Vould as surely as if I'd shot him myself, because I couldn't see all those things until now, when it's too late. If I had seen them, I might have saved him."

"But in the back," said Teal harshly. "That's the part I can't swallow."

The tip of the Saint's cigarette glowed and died.

"Yearleigh was afraid of him," he said. "He couldn't risk any mistake—any cry or struggle that might have spoilt his scheme. He was afraid of Vould because, in his heart, he knew that Vould was so much cleverer and more desirable, so much more right and honest than he would ever be. He was fighting the old hopeless battle of age against youth. He knew that Vould had seen through the iniquity of his bill. The bill could never touch Yearleigh. He was too old for the last war, when I seem to remember that he made a great reputation by organising cricket matches behind the lines. He would be too old for the next. He had no children. But it's part of the psychology of life, whether you like it or not, that war is the time when the old men come back into their own, and the young men who are pressing on their heels are miraculously removed. Yearleigh knew that Vould de­spised him for it; and he was afraid. . . . Those are only the things I think, and I can't prove any of them," he said; and Teal turned abruptly on his heel and walked back towards the house.

IX

The Damsel in Distress

"You need brains in this life of crime," Simon Templar would say sometimes; "but I often think you need luck even more."

He might have added that the luck had to be consistent.

Mr. Giuseppe Rolfieri was lucky up to a point, for he happened to be in Switzerland when the astounding Liver­pool Municipal Bond forgery was discovered. It was a simple matter for him to slip over the border into his own native country; and when his four partners in the swindle stum­bled down the narrow stairway that leads from the dock of the Old Bailey to the terrible blind years of penal servi­tude, he was comfortably installed in his villa at San Remo with no vengeance to fear from the Law. For it is a principal of international law that no man can be extradited from his own country, and Mr. Rolfieri was lucky to have re­tained his Italian citizenship even though he had made him­self a power in the City of London.

Simon Templar read about the case—he could hardly have helped it, for it was one of those sensational scandals which rock the financial world once in a lifetime—but it did not strike him as a matter for his intervention. Four out of the five conspirators, including the ringleader, had been convicted and sentenced; and although it is true that there was a certain amount of public indignation at the immunity of Mr. Rolfieri, it was inevitable that the Saint, in his career of shameless lawlessness, sometimes had to pass up one inviting prospect in favour of another nearer to hand. He couldn't be every­where at once—it was one of the very few human limitations which he was ready to admit.

A certain Domenick Naccaro, however, had other ideas.

He called at the Saint's apartment on Piccadilly one morn­ing—a stout bald-headed man in a dark blue suit and a light blue waistcoat, with an unfashionable stiff collar and a stringy black tie and a luxuriant scroll of black moustache ornament­ing his face—and for the first moment of alarm Simon won­dered if he had been mistaken for somebody else in the same name but less respectable morals, for Signor Naccaro was accompanied by a pale pretty girl who carried a small infant swathed in a shawl.