"If I knew all about it I shouldn't have to go to Staines," he said conclusively. "I'm sorry, but I can't tell you where to go and pick up the money."
"Maybe I could run you down," Simon began temptingly. "Hoppy and I are all on our own this evening, and we were just looking for something useful to do. My car's outside, and it needs some exercise. Besides, I feel clever tonight. All my genius for sleuthing and deduction—"
"I'm sorry," Teal repeated. "There's a police car waiting for me already. I'll have to get along as well as I can without you." He stood up, and held out his hand. A sensitive man might almost have thought that he was in a hurry to avoid an argument. "Give me a ring one day next week, will you? I'll be able to tell you all about it then."
Simon Templar stood on the Embankment outside Scotland Yard and lighted a cigarette with elaborately elegant restraint.
"And that, Hoppy," he explained, "is what is technically known as the Bum's Rush."
He gazed resentfully at the dingy panorama which is the total of everything that generations of London architects and County Councils have been able to make out of their river frontages.
"Nobody loves us," he said gloomily. "Patricia forsakes us to be a dutiful niece to a palsied aunt, thereby leaving us exposed to every kind of temptation. We try to surround ourselves with holiness by dining with a detective, and he's too busy to keep the date. We offer to help him and array ourselves on the side of law and order, and he gives us the tax-collector's welcome. His evil mind distrusts our immaculate motives. He is so full of suspicion and uncharitable-ness that he thinks our only idea is to catch up with his bank holder-uppers before he does and relieve them of their loot for our own benefit. He practically throws us out on our ear, and abandons us to any wicked schemes we can cook up. What are we going to do about it?"
"I dunno, boss." Mr Uniatz shifted from one foot to the other, grimacing with the heroic effort of trying to extract a constructive suggestion from the gummy interior of his skull. He hit upon one at last, with the trepidant amazement of another Newton grasping the law of gravity. "Maybe we could go some place an' get a drink," he suggested breathlessly.
Simon grinned at him and took him by the arm.
"For once in your life," he said, "I believe you've had an inspiration. Let us go to a pub and drown our sorrows."
On the way he bought another evening paper and turned wistfully to the story of the bank holdup; but it gave him very little more than Teal had told him. The bank was a branch of the City & Continental, which handled the accounts of two important factories on the outskirts of the town. That morning the routine consignment of cash in silver and small notes had been brought down from London in a guarded van to meet the weekly payrolls of the two plants; and after it had been placed in the strong-room the van and the guards had departed as usual, although the factory messengers would not call for it until the afternoon. There was no particular secrecy about the arrangements, and the possibility of a holdup of the bank itself had apparently never been taken seriously. During the lunch hour the local police, acting on an anonymous telephone call, had sent a hurried squad to the bank in time to interrupt the holdup; but the bandits had shot their way out, wounding two constables in the process; and approximately fifteen thousand pounds' worth of untraceable small change had vanished with them. Their car had been found abandoned only a few blocks from the bank premises, and there the trail ended; and the Saint knew that it was likely to stay ended there for all the clues contained in the printed story. England was a small country, but it contained plenty of room for two unidentified bank robbers to hide in.
Simon refolded the newspaper and dumped it resignedly on the bar; and as he did so it lay in such a way that the headlines summarizing the epochal utterance of Mr Ebenezer Hogsbotham stared up at him with a complacent prominence that added insult to injury.
The Saint stared malevolently back at them; and in the mood which circumstances had helped to thrust upon him their effect had an almost fateful inevitability. No other man on earth would have taken them in just that way; but there never had been another man in history so harebrained as the Saint could be when his rebellious instincts boiled over. The idea that was being born to him grew momentarily in depth and richness. He put down his glass, and went to the telephone booth to consult the directory. The action was rather like the mental tossing of a coin. And it came down heads. Mr Hogsbotham was on the telephone. And accordingly, decisively, his address was in the book…
The fact seemed to leave no further excuse for hesitation. Simon went back to the bar, and his head sang carols with the blitheness of his own insanity.
"Put that poison away, Hoppy," he said. "We're going places."
Mr Uniatz gulped obediently, and looked up with a contented beam.
"Dijja t'ink of sump'n to do, boss?" he asked eagerly.
The Saint nodded. His smile was extravagantly radiant.
"I did. We're going to burgle the house of Hogsbotham."
II
It was one of those lunatic ideas that any inmate of an asylum might have conceived, but only Simon Templar could be relied on to carry solemnly into execution. He didn't waste any more time on pondering over it, or even stop to consider any of its legal aspects. He drove his huge cream and red Hirondel snarling over the roads to Chertsey at an average speed that was a crime in itself, and which would probably have given a nervous breakdown to any passenger less impregnably phlegmatic than Mr Uniatz; but he brought it intact to the end of the trip without any elaborations on his original idea or any attempt to produce them. He was simply on his way to effect an unlawful entry into the domicile of Mr Hogsbotham, and there to do something or other that would annoy Mr Hogsbotham greatly and at the same time relieve his own mood of general annoyance; but what that something would be rested entirely with the inspiration of the moment. The only thing he was sure about was that the inspiration would be forthcoming.
The telephone directory had told him that Mr Hogsbotham lived at Chertsey. It also located Mr Hogsbotham's home on Greenleaf Road, which Simon found to be a narrow turning off Chertsey Lane running towards the river on the far side of the town. He drove the Hirondel into a field a hundred yards beyond the turning and left it under the broad shadow of a clump of elms, and returned to Greenleaf Road on foot. And there the telephone directory's information became vague. Following the ancient custom by which the Englishman strives to preserve the sanctity of his castle from strange visitors by refusing to give it a street number, hiding it instead under a name like 'Mon Repos', 'Sea View', 'The Birches', 'Dunrovin', 'Jusweetu', and other similar whimsies the demesne of Mr Hogsbotham was apparently known simply as 'The Snuggery'. Which might have conveyed volumes to a postman schooled in tracking self-effacing citizens to their lairs, but wasn't the hell of a lot of help to any layman who was trying to find the place for the first time on a dark night.
Simon had not walked very far down Greenleaf Road when that fact was brought home to him. Greenleaf Road possessed no street lighting to make navigation easier. It was bordered by hedges of varying heights and densities, behind which lighted windows could sometimes be seen and sometimes not. At intervals, the hedges yawned into gaps from which ran well-kept drives and things that looked like cart-tracks in about equal proportions. Some of the openings had gates, and some hadn't. Some of the gates had names painted on them; and on those which had, the paint varied in antiquity from shining newness to a state of weatherbeaten decomposition which made any name that had ever been there completely illegible. When the Saint realized that they had already passed at least a dozen anonymous entrances, any one of which might have led to the threshold of Mr Hogsbotham's Snuggery, he stopped walking and spoke eloquently on the subject of town planning for a full minute without raising his voice.