"There might be some argument about it," he conceded. "At any rate, he's among the Saints."
"But what was it all about?"
The Saint lighted his cigarette and stretched himself out.
"Well, it was this way. Hoppy and I blew up the fire-escape, as arranged, and went in through the bathroom window. When we got inside, what should we hear but the voice of good old Claud Eustace Teal, holding converse with Sunny Jim. Apparently Claud was just on the point of getting a squeak out of him, and I was just getting down to the keyhole to take a look at the seance and hear what Sunny had to say, when a gun went off and broke up the party. As far as I've been able to make out, somebody opened the front door and took a pot at Sunny Jim at the crucial moment, and Teal went chasing the assassin down the stairs, along with a perfectly twee little policebody from Eton that he had with him."
Simon drew at his cigarette with a reminiscent smile, while the grey car whirled around Piccadilly Circus and plunged down the Haymarket.
"Anyway, Hoppy and I beetled in while they were away, and took a gander at Sunny Jim. And as a matter of fact, he isn't dead; though he's had the narrowest shave that any man ever had, and his head's going to ring carillons when he wakes up. He's been creased as neatly as I've ever seen it done-the bullet just parted his hair in a new place and knocked him out, but his skull hasn't any holes in it. That's when I had my brilliant idea."
"I was hoping we'd get to that," said the girl.
"But haven't you seen it already?" Simon demanded. "Look at what I've told you! Here's Sunny Jim preparing to squeal, and somebody tries to rub him out. Why? Squealers don't get bumped off, not in this country, just because they may have a little tit-bit to give away. Sunny Jim must have known something worth knowing; and there he was, sitting in his chair, out to the world, and nobody to get in our way. The bumper-offer can't be sure what's happened to him, and Claud Eustace is probably quite sure he's dead. But nobody knows. . . . Isn't it all pretty obvious?"
"It's getting clearer."
"Of course it is! I tell Hoppy to grab the body and hustle it down the fire-escape, out to this car, and pick me up later. And I wait for Claud Eustace and his boy friend. We exchange the compliments of the season, and have lots of fun and games together. And then I walk out. As soon as the next editions are on the streets, the bumper-offer is going to know that his body disappeared while I was around, and he's going to work himself into seven different kinds of cold sweat wondering whether it is a body. He may guess that it isn't, and itch to bump me off for what I may have found out from it; but he can't do that because if I got killed he'd never know what had happened to the body and where it might turn up next. Doesn't that make you see the joke?"
Patricia nodded slowly.
"But who," she said, "was the bumper-offer?"
"Who else could it be," asked the Saint, "but our old friend that all the excitement and bubble is about-the High Fence?"
There were adequate grounds for the outbreak of official excitement and bubble which had been provoked by the man who was known only by that unusual name.
A fence, in the argot, is nothing to do with steeple-chasing or an enclosure containing sheep. He is the receiver of stolen goods, the capitalist of crime, and incidentally the middleman but for whose functioning larceny in most of its forms would soon die a natural death. He runs less risk than any of the actual stealers, and makes much bigger profits. And very often he takes his cut both ways, making his profit on the receipt of stolen goods and betraying the stealers to a friendly detective at the same time.
The fence is a member of an unchartered union, the only code of which is to pay as little for a purchase as the vendor can be persuaded to accept.
Seven or eight months ago, the invisible tentacles of the C.I.D., which spread wider and more delicately than many of its critics would believe, touched on the rumour of a man who violated that rule. He bought nothing but metals and precious stones, and paid twice as much for them as any other receiver in London was offering. By contenting himself with a hundred per cent, profit instead of three hundred per cent. He could well afford to do it; but it is a curious fact that no other receiver before him had thought of such a scandalously unethical expedient. And through the strange subterranean channels in which such gossip circulates, the word went round that he was "good."
Because of the prices he paid, they called him the High Fence; but nobody knew anything more about him. He had no shop where he conducted his business. Anything that was offered to him for sale had to be sent through the post, to an accommodation address which was changed every week. The address was passed round the limited circle of his clients by word of mouth, and it was impossible to find out who first put it into circulation. Every client had always "heard about it" from another-the trail turned inevitably into a hopeless merry-go-round. Nor was the circle of initiates unrestricted. It was a jealously closed ring of talent which the High Fence picked for himself; and queer things were rumoured to have happened to those who had ventured to spread the good news among their friends without permission. To those who were tempted by circumstances to talk to the C.I.D., even queerer things could happen-as we have shown.
The High Fence might never have encountered a serious setback, if there had not been one outlaw in England for whom queer happenings had no terrors, and to whom the scent of booty was the supreme perfume in the breath of life.
"I'm afraid Claud Eustace has a depressingly cynical idea of what I'm up to," said the Saint. "He thinks I know who the High Fence is-in which he's flattering me too much, and I wish he wasn't. And he thinks that all I'm wanting is to find out where this bird keeps his boodle and his cash, so that I can take it off him before he gets pinched."
"In which he's perfectly right."
The Saint sighed.
"I don't know where you get these ideas from," he said in a pained voice. "By the way, are you going anywhere in particular, or are we just sight-seeing?"
"I'm waiting for you to tell me."
"Let's go to Abbot's Yard-it's about the only hide-out we have left that isn't in Teal's address-book. And I don't think Sunny Jim is going to be too keen on seeing callers for a while."
He relaxed at full length, with his eyes half closed against the smoke curling past them from his cigarette, while she circled Sloane Square and headed west along the King's Road. The soft waves of her fair golden head rippled in the gentle stir of air that came through the windows; her face was as calmly beautiful as if she had been driving them on nothing less innocuous than the commonplace sightseeing tour which he had mentioned. Perhaps she was only calm because even the most adventurous girl, after some years of partnership with such a man, must achieve permanent nonchalance or perish of nervous exhaustion; but one never knew. . . . And in the back of the car, Mr. Uniatz and Mr. Fasson were both, in their respective ways, silently unconscious.
The car threaded its way more slowly through the clotted congestion of trucks, omnibuses, vans, and drays with which the King's Road is permanently constipated, and turned off abruptly into a narrow side street composed of cottage hovels with freshly painted and utterly dilapidated fronts in approximately equal proportions. It was one of those Chelsea backwaters which are undergoing a gloomy degradation from honest slumdom to synthetic Bohemianism, and the external symptoms of its decay gave it an air of almost pathetic indecision, like a suburban bank manager on a spree in the high spots, who is trying to make up his mind whether to be thoroughly folksy or very dignified, but who is quite certain that he is as sober and important as any of his co-revellers. But in spite of this uninviting aspect, it contained a comfortable studio which the Saint had found useful before; and Simon roused himself cheerfully to open the door beside him as the car stopped.