Send for the Saint by Leslie Charteris, Peter Bloxsom Page A

photos at the Daily Express office, and as the agency names were stamped on the backs along with the dates, I was able to phone diem and check. As I’d suspected, the Lisbon agency always date their prints the day they’re processed. Normally that’s almost at once. But a picture taken during the night — say, at a party — is pretty certain to carry the next day’s date.”
    “I think I’m beginning to see. He went to the party in Lisbon on the night of the ninth — “
    “Or you might say, the night of the ninth-tenth. So let’s suppose the picture was taken at midnight. He might easily have left for the Bahamas at, say, three in the morning, on the tenth. By my reckoning, he could have got there in eighteen or twenty hours without much sweat. Let’s say he landed at twentytwo hundred hours. But remember the time-zone change. In Nassau it wasn’t ten o’clock at night — it was only four in the afternoon. So he was in time to wave to the out-island yachtsmen.”
    The Saint stood up and looked at his watch.
    “And now I think it’s time for that lunch I promised you.”
    “Just one last question,” Ariadne said. “What are you getting out of this?”
    He looked at her with imps of mischief dancing in his clear blue eyes. “The excitement of the chase — the satisfaction of a day’s work well done — “
    ” I mean, you were supposed to be paid, weren’t you ?”
    “And what makes you think I haven’t been ?” he asked with as straight a face as he could muster. “I’ll let you into a secret. There are occasions, I’m sorry to say, when I steal more than codebooks. Though it was from the codebook that I copied down an interesting-looking series of figures.” He turned his most innocent gaze on her and added, “And do you know what those figures turned out to be?”
    Ariadne shook her head, and Simon grinned.
    “The combination to a safe — the one right behind you, in fact.”
    He patted his breast pocket meaningly, and the girl’s eyes widened.
    “You helped yourself?”
    “Shamelessly,” replied the Saint. “To forty thousand pounds in conveniently large-denomination Swiss franc notes.”
    “Forty thousand! But … you said your fee was to be twenty thousand!”
    Simon Templar looked aggrieved.
    “But I was commissioned for that sum twice,” he pointed out. “Twenty thousand from Patroclos One, twenty thousand from Patroclos Two. Wasn’t it lucky that they turned out to share a safe ?”
    And he smiled his incorrigible mocking smile.
    “Come on — let’s go and get that lunch,” said the Saint.
    II
THE PAWN GAMBIT
On a certain grey afternoon in November of that year — traditionally a month when depression and despair sink to the nadir — a short balding man with an exclusive legal right to the name of Albert Nobbins was walking dejectedly by the Serpentine in London’s Hyde Park.
    There was rain in the air, and no one else was visible in the park except a few dutiful dog-walkers dotted about way over beyond the far side of the lake. Nobbins walked with an aimless and plodding gait, faltering frequently like a man with scarcely more incentive to move forward than to go back, or to stand still. His purposeless steps took him along the lakeside path because that was the way he always went; and he was walking there in the park, not because he had anywhere in particular to go, nor even with the object of exercising his small flabby body, but because it was his habit, and because there was nothing else he could think of to do.
    He neither saw nor heard the black car that slowed to a crawl on the road some fifty yards obliquely behind him. But even if he had seen or heard it, he was too deeply sunk in melancholy thought to pay it any special attention, and too far away from it to see the heavy revolver which the man in the back seat was toying with, almost affectionately …
    Some men are Winners, gifted with every advantage in the scramble of life that nature and nurture with