11 The Brighter Buccaneer

'I said five hundred,' murmured the Saint.

Mr. Potham turned back to his file with a hurt expression.

'Now here, Mr. Templar,' he said, 'we have No. 27, Cloudesley Street, Berkeley Square --'

'Which faces north,' murmured the Saint.

'Does it?' said Mr. Potham in some pain.

'I'm afraid it does,' said the Saint ruthlessly. 'All the odd numbers in Cloudesley Street do.'

Mr. Potham put back the sheet with the air of an adoring mother removing her offspring from the vicinity of some stran­ger who had wantonly smacked it. He searched through his file for some time before he produced his next offering.

'Well, Mr. Templar,' he said, adjusting his spectacles rather nervously, 'I have here a very charming service flat --'

Simon Templar knew from bitter experience that this proc­ess could be prolonged almost indefinitely; but that day he had one or two helpful ideas.

'I saw a flat to let as I came along here-just round the cor­ner, in David Square,' he said. 'It looked like the sort of thing I'm wanting, from the outside.'

'David Square?' repeated Mr. Potham, frowning. 'I don't think I know of anything there.'

'It had a Potham and Spode board hung out,' said the Saint relentlessly 'Perhaps Spode hung it up one dark night when you weren't looking.'

'David Square!' re-echoed Mr. Potham, like a forsaken bass in an oratorio. 'David Square!' He polished his spectacles agitatedly, burrowed into his file again, and presently looked up over his gold rims. 'Would that be No. 17?'

'I think it would.'

Mr. Potham extracted the page of particulars and leaned back, gazing at the Saint with a certain tinge of pity.

'There is a flat to let at No. 17, David Square,' he admitted in a hushed voice, as if he were reluctantly discussing a skele­ton in his family cupboard. 'It is one of Major Bellingford Smart's buildings.'

He made this announcement as though he expected the Saint to recoil from it with a cry of horror, and looked disap­pointed when the cry did not come. But the Saint pricked up his ears. Mr. Potham's tone, and the name of Bellingford Smart, touched a dim chord of memory in his mind; and never in his life had one of those chords led the Saint astray. Some­where, some time, he knew that he had heard the name of Bellingford Smart before, and it had not been in a complimen­tary reference.

'What's the matter with that?' he asked coolly. 'Is he a leper or something?'

Mr. Potham smoothed down the sheet on his blotter with elaborate precision.

'Major Bellingford Smart,' he said judiciously, 'is not a landlord with whose property we are anxious to deal. We have it on our books, since he sends us particulars; but we don't offer it unless we are specially asked for it.'

'But what does he do?' persisted the Saint.

'He is-ah-somewhat difficult to get on with,' replied Mr. Potham cautiously.

More than that his discretion would not permit him to say; but the Saint's appetite was far from satisfied. In fact, Simon Templar was so intrigued with the unpopularity of Major Bellingford Smart that he took his leave of Mr. Potham rather abruptly, leaving that discreet gentleman gaping in some astonishment at a virginal pad of Orders to View on which he had not been given a chance to inscribe any addresses for the Saint's inspection.

Simon Templar was not actively in search of trouble at that time. His hours of meditation, as a matter of fact, were almost exclusively occupied with the problem of devising for himself an effective means of entering the town house of the Countess of Albury (widow of Albury's Peerless Pickles) whose display of diamonds at a recent public function had impressed him as being a potential contribution to his Old Age Pension that he could not conscientiously pass by. But one of those sudden impulses of his had decided that the time was ripe for knowing more about Major Bellingford Smart; and in such a mood as that, a comparatively straightforward proposition like the Countess of Albury's diamonds had to take second place.

Simon went along to a more modern real estate agency than the honourable firm of Potham & Spode, one of those marble-pillared, super-card-index billeting offices where human habita­tions are shot at you over the counter like sausages in a cafe­teria; and there an exquisitely-dressed young man with a dou­ble-breasted waistcoat and impossibly patent-leather hair, who looked as if he could have been nothing less than the second son of a duke or an ex-motor-salesman, was more communica­tive than Mr. Potham had been. It is also worthy of note that the exquisite young man thought that he was volunteering the information quite spontaneously, as a matter of interest to an old friend of his youth; for the Saint's tact and guile could be positively Machiavellian when he chose.

'It's rather difficult to say exactly what is the matter with Bellingford Smart. He seems to be one of these sneaking swine who gets pleasure out of taking advantage of their position in petty ways. As far as his tenants are concerned, he keeps to the letter of his leases and makes himself as nasty as possible within those limits. There are lots of ways a landlord can make life unbearable for you if he wants to, as you probably know. The people he likes to get into his flats are lonely widows and elderly spinisters-they're easy meat for him.'

'But I don't see what good that does him,' said the Saint puzzledly. 'He's only getting himself a bad name --'

'I had one of his late tenants in here the other day-she told me that she'd just paid him five hundred pounds to release her. She couldn't stand it any longer, and she couldn't get out any other way. If he does that often, I suppose it must pay him.'

'But he's making it more and more difficult to let his flats, isn't he?'

The exquisite young man shrugged.