The Saint in the Sun

3. ENGLAND: The Prodigal Miser

Contrary to the belief of many inhabitants of less rugged climes, the sun really does sometimes shine in England, though it is admittedly a fickle phenomenon which imparts a strong element of gambling to the planning of any outdoor activity. But when it shines, perhaps because familiarity never has a chance to breed satiety, it seems to have a special beauty and excitement which is lacking in the places where sunny days are commonplace.

It was on one of those golden days in early autumn that Simon Templar drove out to Marlow, that pleasantly placid village on the Thames made famous by Izaak Walton, the first of all fishing pundits, in The Compleat Angler, to take Mrs. Penelope Lynch out to lunch. He had met her only a few days before, in London, at a small and highly informal party to celebrate the seventh anniversary of a couple who have no other part in this story; and when he found out where she lived there had been the inevitable comparing of notes on places of interest in the neighborhood.

"Do you know my old pal Giulio Trapani at Skindle's?" he asked.

"Of course. We often used to go there. But for a smaller place, with more of a country-pub atmosphere, do you know the King's Arms at Cookham?"

"No, but I've been to the Crown, where they have wonderful home-made pasties."

"Yes, I've had them. But one day you must try the steak-and-kidney pie at the King's Arms. Mrs. Baker makes it herself, and it's the best I know anywhere — if you like steak-and-kidney pie."

"I love it." This was a natural opening that could hardly be passed by. "Would you like to show it to me sometime?"

"Don't make that too definite, or you might find yourself stuck with it."

"How about next Sunday?"

"That would be perfect. In fact, since I'm a working girl, it's about the only day."

He guessed her age at about 26, and had learned that she was a widow — her husband had been the export manager of a manufacturing firm in Slough, who had taken an overdose of sleeping pills when he learned that he had lung cancer about six months ago. That was all he knew about her, aside from what his eyes told him, which was that she had short chestnut hair and a short nose, a wide brow and a wide mouth that smiled very easily, the ingredients combining into a gay gamin look which formed an intriguing counterpoint to her sensuously modelled figure. To a true connoisseur of feminine attractions, which the Saint candidly confessed himself to be, she had an allure that was far more captivating than most conventional forms of pulchritude, and that was rare enough to demand at least a better acquaintance.

She was ready when he arrived, in a tweed skirt and a cardigan over a simple blouse, and sensible suede shoes, and she said: "I'm glad you're early, because it'll give us time to walk over instead of driving. That is, if you won't think that's too frighteningly hearty. It's only about four miles."

"I'm glad to know you're so healthy," he grinned. "Most girls these days would think a fellow was an unchivalrous cad if he suggested walking around the block. But it's such a beautiful day, it 'd be a shame not to take advantage of it."

Her house was near the southern end of the village, a tiled and half-timbered doll's-house with a walled garden that needed tidying but was still a carnival of color. They walked down a lane to the main road and across the bridge, then took a secondary fork to the end of the flat land, hairpinned up through Quarry Wood, and then branched off the pavement altogether to follow a well-worn footpath that rambled along the side of the slope around Winter Hill. The leaves which had fallen into a carpet underfoot had left myriad lacy openings in the canopy overhead through which the light came with fragmented brilliance, and the air was delicately perfumed with the damp scents of bark and foliage.

"Thank you for doing this," she said, after a while during which their flimsy acquaintance had been warming and easing through the exchange of trivialities not worth recording and the sense of companionship in sharing an uncomplicated pleasure. "I can see from your tan that you must be out of doors so much that you don't have to think about it, but it means a lot to me after being cooped up in an office all week."

"What sort of work do you do?"

"You'd never guess."

"Then I won't try."

"I'm secretary to a sort of horse-racing tipster. Or a kind of horse-playing service."

"That's certainly a bit out of the ordinary. How does it operate?"

"People give this man money to bet with, like an investment, and he sends them dividends from his profits."

"He really does?"

"Oh, yes. Every month."

And suddenly, in a flash, the pleasure of the walk was no longer uncomplicated. The air was the same, the loveliness of the leaf-tones and the dappled light were the same, but something else had intruded that was as out of place there as a neon bulb.

"It sounds interesting," said the Saint cautiously. "Where do you do this?"

"In Maidenhead, which is quite convenient. Much better than having to go into London. And it came along just in time. When my husband died" — he liked the way she didn't hesitate before the word, or after it — "I was left practically broke, except for the cottage with the usual mortgage. He made a good salary, but we'd had a good time with it and hardly saved anything. And no insurance. It was when he went to take out a policy that they found out he had cancer. I thought I was going to have to sell the cottage and move into a little flat in town and look for a job there, which I'd 've hated, so this was almost like a miracle."

"People always will believe in miracles, I suppose."

"Well, perhaps I'm exaggerating. It wasn't quite the same as hearing that I'd inherited a couple of million from some distant relative that I'd never heard of."

"Or winning the Irish Sweep, or one of those fabulous football pools. I guess those are the simplest fantasies that most people who aren't millionaires have played with at one time or another. What would rank after that? Messing about with an old bureau and finding a secret compartment full of jewels? Stumbling over a suitcase full of cash that some bank robbers had dropped during their getaway? But that wouldn't be so easy to be dishonest about as you might think, unless you were fairly well heeled already: somebody might get curious about how you became so rich overnight. No, I suppose some fast scheme to beat the stock market, the casinos, or the bookies, would be the next most popular get-rich-quick gimmick."

They walked on for a while in silence.

"What you're trying to say," she accused him at last, rather stiffly, "is that you think I'm in something crooked."

"I don't say that you're an accomplice," he replied calmly. "But I'd want a lot of convincing that some day the police aren't going to be looking for your boss."

"That's what I've been afraid of," she said. "That's why I made Anne and Hilton promise to introduce us as soon as you came to England, when they happened to mention that they knew you."

He looked at her admiringly.

"A conniving female!" he said. "And I liked you so much because you never asked any of the usual silly questions about my life as the Saint and so forth."

"I was afraid if I did you'd be too leary of letting me get you alone."

"So you had this date all planned before you let me think I thought of it."

"Worse than that. I might have tried to drag you out on this walk even if it 'd been pouring with rain."

The path had come down again from under the trees to curve inside the bend of the river. Ahead and to one side there were three green mounds that must have been ancient tumuli, and farther off yet the ridge of a railway embankment cut across a marshy stretch of lowland. From the place where Penelope Lynch stopped, pointing through a chance gap in an intervening coppice, could be seen close up against the embankment a wooden shack with a tar-paper roof, a rectangular box perhaps ten feet long which might once have been built to shelter a maintenance crew or their tools, with a door at one end and a single small window in one side. It was occupied, Simon realized from a thin wisp of smoke that curled up from a stovepipe projecting through the roof; and as he gazed at it puzzledly, wondering why Penelope was showing it to him, a man came out with a bucket.

He wore a brown pullover and dark trousers loosely tucked into rubber knee-boots. He was broad-shouldered and a little paunchy, and he moved with the plodding deliberation of a farm laborer rather than a construction worker. At that distance, even the Saint's keen eyes could not make out much more than that he had plentiful gray hair and a ruddy complexion. He carried the pail a few yards from the hut, emptied it on the ground, and plodded back inside.

"My boss," Penelope said.

Simon had to hold back the stereotyped "You're kidding!" because it was perfectly obvious from her expression that she wasn't. Instead, he said with determined nonchalance: "It's nice to see a man who hasn't been spoiled by success, still living the simple life."

"He used to be our gardener," Penelope said.

The Saint clung doggedly to his composure.

"Democracy is a wonderful thing," he remarked, as they resumed their walk. "And you may get a medal from some bleeding-heart committee for being so cheerful about changing places. But not for your story-telling technique. I've heard of quite nice girls getting their pretty heads bashed in with blunt instruments because they tantalized someone a lot less than you've already done to me."

"All right," she said. "If you'll forgive me for trapping you like this. But I couldn't think of any other way to do it. It's such a fantastic story. "

It was.

It began when she told the gardener, whose name was Tom Gull, that she couldn't afford to keep him on any longer, and that in any case she was going to have to put the house on the market and move away.

This was nothing like casting a faithful old retainer out to starve, for he only came one day a week, and served five other houses within a few miles' radius on the same basis. She had known nothing else about him except that he had knocked on the door one morning and announced that the garden looked as if it needed attention and he had a day to spare. He was unkempt and unshaven and smelled strongly of beer, but in those days gardeners were as hard to find as any other household help, and after a trial she had let him become a weekly fixture. He was not exactly an artist at his craft, nor did he ever risk injuring himself from over-exertion, but he was better than nothing, and both she and her husband were glad to be relieved of some chores for which neither of them happened to have any inclination.

He took his dismissal phlegmatically, but at the end of the day he came back with a proposition.

"I've got somethink 'ere, ma'm," he said, extracting a grubby and much-folded piece of paper from his pocket. "It needs correcting my spelling an' putting in good English, an' typing out neat an' proper. I know you've got a typewriter, 'cos I've 'eard you using it. Do you think you could 'elp me out?"

"Of course, I'll be glad to," she said, feeling some kind of obligation because of the employment she had just taken away from him.

"I wouldn't ask you to do it for nothink," he said. "You fix it up for me, an' I'll give you a bit more work in the garden."

She had protested that that wasn't necessary, but after she had done the job she was not so sure. As deciphered and edited by her, the document finally ran:

The Saint read it as it appeared in print, on a page torn from the Sportsman's Guide which she gave him, and was profoundly awed.

"I've seen some fancy boob-bait in my time," he said, "but this is about the most preposterous pitch I think I've ever come across. Don't tell me that anyone actually falls for it."

"They've been doing it ever since the first advertisement came out."

It was she who had found the one-room office and furnished it, on Gull's insistence that the service was worth a good week's pay and that he would have to get someone to do it in any case.

"Ain't no use me going to see the agents," he said. "The way I look an' the way I talk, they wouldn't want to rent me anythink. An' I don't know wot you oughter 'ave in an office to run this job proper. But I can pay for it." He dug into his trousers and brought out a fistful of crumpled currency. "'Ere — take this, an' let me know if you need any more. I got a bit put away, wot I bin saving up till I was ready to start this business."

"If your system is so perfect, why don't you just work it for your own benefit?" she argued.

"Because it needs plenty o' capital, more 'n I could save up," he said seriously. "You got to 'ave reserves to see you through the losing runs, but if you keep going you can't 'elp winning in the end. So I got to 'ave share'olders, just like Woolworth's."

When the office was ready and the first advertisements had been placed, he had worked up to his culminating offer.

"I got to 'ave someone in the office answering letters an' all that. I wouldn't be much good at that meself, an' besides I better 'ang on to me gardening jobs till I see 'ow many share'olders I get. An' after that I'll 'ave to be going to the races or the betting shops every day, making the bets."

"But suppose you don't get any answers?"

"Then we pack up an' go 'ome. That's my little gamble. But we'll worry about that when it 'appens. I know you got to find a job, an' if you ain't too proud to take my money I'd be much obliged if you'd give it a try."

She had finally consented, not without a guilty feeling that she was helping him to throw away the last of his life's savings, but justifying herself with the thought that since he was stubbornly determined to go through with it she might as well take the job as let anyone else have it. She never dreamed that there would be such a response as she found herself coping with.

In the first week, five of the coupons which concluded the advertisement were returned, each accompanied by £100 in cash. In the second week there were ten, and Tom Gull went with her to a bank and opened an account. In the third week she banked £1600, and Mr. Gull showed up with a shave and a clean shirt and announced that he was going to begin working his System. The following Friday, after she had banked another £1400 for that week, he came in smelling more strongly of liquor and pulling packages of five-pound notes from every pocket.

"Not a bad start," he said. "Now we got to do somethink about paying them dividends."

He turned down her suggestion of writing checks, on the grounds that since their investments had been made in cash they were entitled to dividends in the same form, and that some people in such circumstances as he had been in himself not long ago might have difficulty in cashing a check. He had her address envelopes to all the subscribers, in which he would put the fivers they were entitled to, and which he would take to the post office himself.

"Not that I don't trust you," he said. "But if I post 'em meself, if there's ever any question, I can swear that everyone's bin paid."

So it had gone on ever since, with new investors enrolling at a rate of between twelve and twenty a week, besides additional £100 units sent in by presumably satisfied earlier subscribers. And each week Mr. Gull (as she was now used to calling him) displayed thick wads of winnings which he also allowed her to bank, except for what had to be set aside once a month for the payment of dividends, and the thousand pounds which he carried for "operating capital".

When she suggested that it would be safer for him to open credit accounts with bookmakers, he shook his head.

"Them chaps are all in league," he said darkly. "They'd soon catch on to wot I was doing, an' then they'd all close my accounts. They might even put me in 'ospital to get even. I make my bets on the courses, picking different bookies every time, or sometimes on the tote, or goin' around the betting shops in London — there's 'undreds of 'em to choose from, so nobody 'as a chance to get to know me."

The names and addresses of the subscribers were kept in a card index in the office, and also in a loose-leaf pocket address book which he bought himself and brought in twice a week for her to enter the latest additions. Against each of the names in this private list he made cryptic marks of his own. Altogether, there were now more than 200 members of this extraordinary syndicate, and a total of almost £30,000 had been invested. At which point Mr. Gull told her to stop the advertisements, and the flow of funds abruptly dried up.

"He told me it was as much as he could handle," Penelope said, "and if he had to make his bets any bigger he wouldn't be able to spread them around inconspicuously."

"And he still is betting?" Simon asked.

"Oh, yes. And he brought in some more winnings last week."

"Then why is he still living in that broken-down shanty?"

"He says it wouldn't be right for him to use the money that's been invested for anything else than it was given him for. And he wants to save all his own winnings till he can pay everyone back and have his own capital to work with."

"Penelope," said the Saint, "in spite of your unscrupulous methods, you've got me fascinated. But this has angles that need a bit of thinking about."

She refrained from pressing him until they were at table and the steak-and-kidney pie had been served. The first taste told him that it amply fulfilled her promise, and gratitude alone would have obliged him to give attention to her problem even if it had been less provocative than it was.

"Do you know what I call the Ponzi Routine?" he said. "It's one of the classical sucker-traps. You offer investors a fantastic return on their money, and for a while you actually pay it — long enough for them to spread the good word and get more and more suckers enrolled. Of course, the 'dividends' are coming out of their own capital, but you can afford to pay out as long as enough new money is pouring in. It's been worked in all sorts of variations, but I call it the Ponzi in honor of the guy who may have been its most successful operator, who racked up several million dollars with it in America before I was around."

"But Mr. Gull is winning more than enough money to pay the dividends."

"That's one of the angles I was talking about that doesn't fit. And wanting to stop the investments rolling in is another. And so is this business of not living it up himself, with all that dough in the bank. And even talking about paying it back."

"So you don't think I'm a complete idiot not to have gone to the police?"

"I can see why it might be a bit difficult. Your gardener hasn't done anything criminal yet. It isn't a crime to ask people to invest in any wildcat scheme, unless they can prove false pretenses. But under English law a man is innocent until he's proved guilty; and until Gull stops banking winnings or stops paying dividends, you'd have a job to prove false pretenses. Maybe you're doing the poor bastard a horrible injustice. Maybe he really has discovered an infallible system. But that's an awful lot to swallow."

"Is it impossible?"

Simon shrugged.

"I never heard of one yet. But lots of things are impossible until somebody does them. Like television, or rocket ships to Mars, I believe that some great scientists once proved that it was mathematically impossible for a helicopter to get off the ground. You can't convict a man of fraud because he claims to have discovered a trick that nobody could do before. Everything about Gull is still legitimate — until he falls on his face. And if and when that happens, he might be in South America — and you could have a tough time proving that you weren't an active confederate."

"That's why I thought it might be such a help if I could talk to you," she said.

The Saint scowled over his food, which was most unfair to it.

"One of Ponzi's best ploys," he said, "was when the first rumor got around that his golden-egg factory was goosey, and a few hundred stockholders panicked and came yelling for their money back. Ponzi produced sacks of bullion and cheerfully paid them off. The scare fizzled out, and in a few days more mugs than ever were begging him to accept their deposits."

"But nobody's asked Mr. Gull for their money back, yet."

"Exactly. And so far he's only talking about this voluntary payoff. If it goes beyond talking, it'll be something else to get quietly hysterical about. Meanwhile, I promise to lose some sleep over the contradictions you've given me already. I wish I could give you the answers right now, all gift-wrapped and tied up with ribbons, but the reports of my supernatural powers are slightly exaggerated. I'm only a human genius."

For the rest of the day he was nothing but human, but he repeated his promise before he left. And it was not for lack of mental effort that a solution to the mystery of Mr. Gull continued to elude him. Some factor seemed to be missing which left all the equations open-ended, but he could not put his finger on it.

Then, on the following Thursday, Penelope Lynch phoned him.

"Well," she said, "it's happened."

His heart sank momentarily.

"What has? He's skipped?"

"No. He's going to start giving the money back. He came in this morning and told me to write letters to the first five people who invested, saying that he's decided to close down his business, thanking them for their help and confidence, and enclosed please find their original hundred pounds. He says he's planning to pay off at least that many people every week from now on."

"This I have got to see more of," said the Saint. "I'll be down this afternoon."

He thoughtfully packed a bag and put it in his car, and drove to Maidenhead immediately after lunch.

The office was above a tobacconist and newsagent on a turning off the High Street. It was minimally furnished with a filing cabinet, a book-case which contained only boxes of stationery, and two desks, on one of which was a typewriter, behind which sat Penelope.

She showed him one of the letters which she had finished, but he was less interested in it than in the five envelopes she had prepared. He copied the addresses on a sheet of paper, and then asked to see the card index, but he could find nothing significant in the bare data on when their investments had been received and what dividends had been paid.

"Mr. Gull left his own book here this morning," she mentioned, and Simon recalled what she had said about the cryptic marks that Mr. Gull made on his own records.

He went carefully through the lists under each initial. Opposite some of the typewritten names had been pencilled an "O", and opposite some others appeared an "X". There were very few 'X's — in fact, when he checked back, the total was only seven. He wrote those down also; but neither the names nor the addresses thus distinguished seemed to have any characteristic in common, at least on the surface. Only one of them happened to be among the five to whom the first refunds were going.

"You're not making out checks for these, either?" he asked.

"No. But they're to be registered, as you see."

"That's about all I can see," he said wryly. "If something doesn't click pretty soon, you're going to wonder how I ever got my reputation. And so am I. Now I'm going to beat it before he comes back, but I'll expect you for dinner at Skindle's. Will seven o'clock give you time to run home and change?"

When she arrived, and they had ordered cocktails in the bar, she told him that Gull had come in at five, laden with more money, and had approved and signed the refund letters.

"Then he said I could go home, and he'd make up the refund packages and mail them himself, like he always did the dividends. He had time to do it and get to the post office before it closed."

"You didn't happen to hang around outside and see whether he made it?"

"I thought of it, but I got cold feet. I was afraid he might see me, and it might spoil something for you."

"Well, assuming that he did catch the mail, the letters should be delivered tomorrow morning. And I just think I'll check on that."

She was beginning to seem a little troubled.

"Perhaps there is nothing wrong after all, and I'm wasting your time like an old maid who thinks every man on the street at night is Jack the Ripper. If that's how it turns out, I'll want to shoot myself."

"Somehow, I'm sure you'll never turn out to be an old maid," he said cheerfully.

"But if Mr. Gull really has a system — you said it was always possible—"

"It could still be just as dangerous. Perhaps I haven't been careful enough how I phrased some of the things I've said. There are theoretically infallible systems — but in practice they eventually blow up. For instance, it's a fact that about two out of five favorites win. So in theory, you only have to double your stake after each loser, and fairly soon you must hit a winner and show a net profit. According to you, Uncle Tom is a rather simple soul, and he may have figured this out in his little head and thought he'd discovered something like atomic energy. But the snag is that the average two-out-of-five is the end result of a lot of very erratic winning and losing runs. There are plenty of days when no favorites win at all. Now, suppose you started with a bet of ten pounds; doubling up, you bet twenty, forty, eighty, a hundred and sixty, then three hundred and twenty on the sixth race. The next day, you have to start off betting six hundred and forty, twelve hundred and eighty, twenty-five hundred and sixty, five thousand one hundred and twenty — and if that one wins at even money, you net exactly ten pounds. If it goes down, your next bet would be more than ten thousand — and where would you find the bookies to take it?"

"And I suppose there have been two days in a row without a winning favorite?"

"There have. Perhaps not often, but now and again they happen. I don't say that that's Uncle Tom's system, but it could be something along those lines. If so, he may have been lucky so far, but one day it's going to blow up with an almighty bang, as sure as there'll be a frost before summer."

"Then I only hope it lasts long enough for him to give everyone their money back."

"That'll take about ten months, on the present schedule," he said. "I don't think I can hold my breath that long."

It was hard enough for him to wait until after breakfast the next day and an hour at which the morning mail could be safely assumed to have been delivered and opened.

The one subscriber of the five earmarked for the first refunds who was also marked with an X on Mr. Gull's private list had an address in North London and a telephone number in the directory.

"This is the Sportsman's Guide," said the Saint, to the cantankerous elderly voice that answered. "We understand that you were a client of one of our advertisers, Mr. Tom Gull."

"That is correct."

"Mr. Gull tells us that he is going out of business and is refunding all investments. Has he notified you of that?"

"I received a letter to that effect this morning, enclosing my money."

Simon took a deep breath.

"Until then, did you receive your dividends regularly?"

"I did. It was a most satisfactory service. In fact, I think it's most inconsiderate of him to discontinue it so arbitrarily. But there you are. Nothing seems to have any stability these days."

"That's what comes of keeping horses in them," said the Saint sympathetically, and hung up.

Another of the five was also in the London directory, but the number did not answer.

The other three addresses were in Beaconsfield, Windsor, and Staines. It took some time to find out and connect with the next number through the hotel switchboard — he had taken a room at Skindle's to remain closer to the subject of his investigation — but when he introduced himself with the same formula, the response was startlingly different.

"I never heard of him."

"You are Mr. Eric Botolphome?"

"In a manner of speaking, yes."

"But you haven't had any dealings with Mr. Gull."

"I have not. And I never heard of your publication, either."

"I'm sorry, Mr. Botolphome," said the Saint slowly. "We must have been misinformed."

"The name," said his respondent plaintively, "is pronounced 'Boffam'."

"Congratulations," Simon said, and carefully cradled the handset again.

Scanning his lists, he realized that the process of having telephone numbers in a wide range of different towns researched and requested through the hotel switchboard and assorted exchanges would put a strain on the hotel operator and the lines at her disposal which would test her patience as much as his own. On the other hand, Windsor and Staines could both be reached in a single twelve-mile drive which might not take any more time and which would give a physical vent to his impatience — besides satisfying a foaming curiosity about the types who might or might not make up Mr. Gull's strange inventory of contributors.

He threw on a coat and ran downstairs and began driving.

The address in Windsor turned out to be a weathered brick villa on Vansittart Road built on stark Edwardian lines that harmonized excellently with the complexion and corseted contours of the beldam who finally opened the door.

"Tom Gull?" she croaked. "What does he do?"

"He runs a kind of betting service."

She cupped a hand to her ear.

"Eh?"

"A kind of betting service."

"I don't need a vet. Haven't had any animals around since my last cat died."

"No, betting," Simon said, with increased projection. "You invest money with him, and he backs horses with it and sends you the profits."

"Young man," said the matriarch crustily, "if I had my way, I'd see all the bookmakers hanged, like they used to hang people for sheep-stealing. All this betting and bingo, it's no wonder we can't stop the Russians occupying the moon. And people like you, trying to get customers for them, you're no better than they are."

She slammed the door in his face.

The nominee in Staines, a few miles further on, proved to be the proprietor of a small grocery store on the road out towards Laleham. In a more genial way, he was no less definite.

"Who, me? Not bloody likely. The Guide's all right, but some o' those advertisements make me laugh. I like to have a little bet sometimes, but I want to know what I'm puttin' my half-crown on. Anyone who'd send someone a hundred quid to play with, like that, must be a proper Charley, if you don't mind my sayin' so."

Simon went back to his car and studied his second list — the names which had been singled out with an X in Mr. Gull's personal register. Of the remaining six, one lived in Croydon, but the others were in Bournemouth, Worthing, Sevenoaks, Torquay, and Scarborough — a variety of respectable distances in too many different directions for it to be practicable to continue the investigation by personal visits.

He drove back to Skindle's, stopping on the way to buy a large and expensive box of chocolates, and hoping that the telephone operator had a sweet tooth and a sympathetic disposition.

Already he had an inkling of a pattern, but it was not until that evening that he had finally succeeded in contacting all the names and proving it beyond peradventure.

"The ones with the crosses are all satisfied customers," he told Penelope. "The others are real live people too — or at least the four I'd jotted down — but every one of them denies having had anything to do with Brother Gull."

Her eyes were big and wide.

"Why would they do that?"

"It could be because they're all ashamed to admit that they're secret gamblers. But I doubt it. I want to have another look at the original card index."

They went to the office after dinner, and he went through the cards one by one, confirming an impression which he had suddenly recalled that afternoon, during one of the waits between calls.

"Had you noticed that apart from the London addresses, which come up regularly, the earliest replies all came from the south and west, and not too far away? Later on they get more varied — here's St Albans, Cambridge, Clacton, Folkestone. But there isn't one of the 'O' names with an address as far away as Torquay or Scarborough."

"No, I hadn't," she said. "Would it be because people living a long way from London aren't so interested in racing?"

"Not that I ever heard. Who do you think goes to all those tracks in the North — and even in Scotland?"

"Yes, that was silly. But then, what is the answer?"

"I think we may have stumbled on a Communist conspiracy to ruin the capitalist countries by debasing their currency. Tom Gull is a mad scientist who has invented a molecular multiplier which makes three or four fivers out of one. The advertisement is a code which tells all the cell captains to send in as much cash as they can; after a while they get it back, but the Central Committee has built up a store of perfect duplicates ready to flood the international exchanges. The 'O' names, of course, are the eggheads who are secretly cooperating in the scheme. The 'X' is a shorthand form of the hammer and sickle, and indicates the elite of the organization. Tom Gull's cabin is actually a camouflaged rocket pad—"

"And he's got the fuel buried in all the flower-beds he digs up. I know. There's somebody who writes books like that."

The Saint's smile was a silent laugh.

"Is Gull going racing again tomorrow?" he asked.

"He said he was going to Ascot again. He was there today."

"Good. Then it should be safe to have a closer look at that shack of his in the afternoon."

"Do you have a theory, really?"

"It's such a wild one that I wouldn't dare tell you until I've proved it," he said. "Then if I'm wrong, you won't classify me with that writer. But invite me for cocktails tomorrow, and I may dazzle you with my brilliance."

He had one more call to make in the morning, to David Lewin of the Express, and before lunch he had the answer to a question which gave him considerably more confidence when he set out for Cookham.

He enjoyed a couple of pasties and a pint of bitter at the Crown, and left his car parked there when he left soon after two o'clock to retrace the riverside footpath to the railroad track.

He stood hidden at the edge of the thicket for a while, studying the hut. This time there was no smoke coming from the chimney and no other sign of occupancy, but the only way to make finally sure of that was to go close enough to expose himself. He took a diagonal course that would lead him past it by at least fifteen yards, and studiously avoided any appearance of interest in it. Then when he was near enough he flashed a sidelong glance at the door without turning his head, and saw that there was a padlock in place which could not possibly have been fixed from inside.

He turned and went directly to it. The lock was a good one, but like many such installations it was betrayed by the hasp which it secured, which was fastened to the woodwork merely with four screws which offered no resistance to the screwdriver blade of the Saint's Swiss army pocket-knife. He put the screws in his pocket for future replacement, opened the door, and went in.

The interior, dimly lighted by the one grimy window, was stuffy with the mingled stalenesses of beer, smoke, and sweat. Gardening tools stood in three corners, and some soiled articles of clothing hung on hooks. A battered kettle and a dirty saucepan sat on the small black stove. There was a dresser with a stained and scarred top on which stood an enamel basin, a chipped cup and saucer, a couple of plates, some cheap flatware, and a can of beans. The only other furniture was an ancient armchair with the stuffing leaking through rents in the upholstery, and an iron bedstead with drab blankets carelessly heaped on a bare gray mattress.

If what he was looking for was there at all, there were not many places where it could be hidden. The dresser drawers yielded only a disorderly hodge-podge of clothing, canned food, old magazines, patent medicines, pieces of string and wire, and an empty gin bottle. Through the larger splits in the chair his probing fingers touched only springs and cotton batting. The mattress seams showed no signs of having been recently re-sewn. That left only the floor, which he checked board by board, until under the bed, when he moved it away from the wall, he found one that was loose and which came up easily.

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:

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?"