'I'm afraid it would take too long,' said the Saint regretfully. 'Especially when we got north of the Tweed. No-we shall have to muck along with what we can collect in lumps from just a few people. Which reminds me that it must be nearly three months since we last thought of Mr. Nilder.'
It was quite true that Simon Templar's memory had almost lost hold of that natty and unsavoury little gentleman. Three months ago he had sent him through the post a polite intimation that a gift of about ten thousand pounds to the Actors' Orphanage would be in order, but that had been rather more of a derisive gesture to Mr. Teal than a proposal of serious dimensions. The other exciting things that had happened about that time had driven the idea out of his head, but now it came back to him out of the blue.
He felt that a brief interlude of change from the somewhat strenuous circumstances of his war with Tex Goldman would do him good. Ordinary gang wars, after all, were not strictly in his line. They provided a definite interest in life, and a plentiful supply of skylarking and song, but taken continuously they were a heavy diet. Simon Templar required his share of the lighter things as well.
No one knew better than the Saint that Scotland Yard was perfectly capable of taking care of the ordinary and open forms of law-breaking. In the Saint's various arguments with the Tex Goldman mob, he had done very little more than could have been done by any detective with an original turn of mind and an equal freedom from responsibility to the stolidly unimaginative Powers who draw princely salaries for encumbering with red tape and ballyhoo the perfectly simple process of locating ungodliness and smacking it on the nose. His self-appointed mission was far more concerned with those ugly twists of ungodliness which rarely come within the ken of Scotland Yard at all- and which, if they do come within that myopic ken, are usually found to be so studiously legal that officialdom can find nothing to do about them.
The profession of Mr. Nilder came very fairly into that category.
At that moment Simon Templar knew little about him. A word of information had come his way through one of the mysterious channels by which such words reached his ears. It was a word that would have meant nothing to Scotland Yard, but to the Saint it opened up an avenue of fascinating speculation which he knew he would have to explore some day. Three months ago he had seized on it blindly for a passing need, and now it seemed to him that the time was ripe for investigating it further.
'We ought to know more about Ronald,' said the Saint.
It was quite natural for him to turn aside like that to such a comparatively trivial affair, though his life had been called for twice in the last few days and the Green Cross boys were still combing London for him with their message of death. Numbers of beefy men were drawing their weekly pay envelopes for looking after the Green Cross boys, but he was not included in the distribution.
Mr. Ronald Nilder left London the next morning, as a matter of history-alone, and driving the modest two-year- old Buick which was the limit of his ostentation on the road. Simon Templar, also as a matter of history, went with him-though Mr. Nilder did not know this.
The preparation of successful buccaneering raids on the aforesaid members of the ungodly requires an extensive knowledge of the victims' habits. The actual smacking of them on the nose is very spectacular and entertaining to behold; but although it is those high spots of privateering that the chronicler is happiest to record, it is still tediously true that if there were no dull periods of preparation there would be no high spots. You have to get to the top of the Eiffel Tower before you can dive off, and the elevator is often out of order.
Simon figured it was a nice day for a drive. London was in the grip of its brief summer. From Aldgate to the Brompton Road, locked lines of grumbling traffic edged along their routes in rackety crawls of a few feet at a time, and subsided again into jammed immobility with a ceaseless belching of blue smoke and mephitic fumes-an unforgettable procession of tribute to the singular genius of the authorities who had organized enormous gangs of workmen to dig up roads and excavate new and superfluous Underground stations at every point where their activities could set a capstone on the paralytic confusion. The slobbering sultans of Whitehall thought about the colossal tax on petrol, and rubbed their greasy hands gleefully at the idea of the tens of thousands of gallons that were being spewed out into space for the pleasure of keeping engines running between two-yard snail's-rushes; while the perspiring public stifled in the fetid atmosphere, and wondered dumbly what it was all about-being constitutionally incapable of asking why their money should be paid into the bank balances of traffic commissioners nominally employed to see that such conditions should not exist. London, in short, was just the same as it always was, except for the temperature; and the Saint felt almost kindly disposed towards Mr. Nilder as the dusty Buick picked up speed as they left Kingston, and he was led rapidly out into the cleaner air of Surrey.
With these bolshevistic reflections to divert him, the Saint had an easy part to play as the hind quarters of a loose tandem that headed by the most direct road to Bursledon. Mr. Nilder did not know the Saint's car, and he did not know the Saint; and Simon made no particular effort to hide himself. After all, there is nothing very startling about two motorists trailing to the same destination at approximately the same average speed, and the Saint did not feel furtive that morning.
They ran into Bursledon with fifty yards between them, and there Mr. Nilder's car swung off sharply to the right down a lane that led along the backs of the many dockyards that line the river. Simon drove on Across the bridge, parked at the side of the road, and returned on foot.
He stood in the middle of the bridge and leaned his elbows on the parapet, gazing down along the lines of houseboats and miscellaneous other craft that were moored in the stream. The mingled smells of paint and tar and sea water drifted to his nostrils down the slight sultry breeze, and he could hear the clunk of spasmodic hammering from one of the yards on his right. Somehow it brought back to him a nostalgia of other and perhaps better days when he had been free to go down to limpid tropical seas under the swelling white sails of a schooner and his forays against the ungodly had been fought under the changing skies of forbidden pearling grounds. All at once that twist of retrospect made him envy the men he had left behind-bad men and all. And for one moment of memory he felt tired of the grubby ratting through smirched city streets which had claimed him for so long. . . .
And then he saw a dinghy putting out from the shore, and Mr. Ronald Nilder in the stern.
His cigarette canted up alertly, and the blue far-seeing eyes ranged out over the water. In a few moments he was able to pick out the dinghy's objective-a trim white fifty-foot motor cruiser that rode lazily at its moorings in midstream. It looked fast-faster than anything else in the perspective-and at the same time it had a sweetly proportioned breadth of beam that guaranteed it seaworthy as well.
The Saint hunched himself off the parapet and strolled along to the lane down which Nilder's car had disappeared. Wandering through the yards, he had glimpses of the cruiser which showed him Ronald Nilder's progress in a series of illuminating snapshots.
He saw the dinghy come alongside and the oarsman holding it steady while Nilder climbed aboard. Then he saw Nilder disappearing into the cabin and the oarsman making the dinghy fast to a cleat on the stern. Then the oarsman going forward over the cabin roof and lowering himself into the cockpit. Then Nilder appearing again beside him, having exchanged his grey homburg for a white-topped yachting cap, and not looking very nautical even then. . . .
