Catch the Saint (7 page)

“I don’t know what to
do,” Julie said forlornly, standing out
side
the still unopened door of her brother’s flat. “Do you think
that the Mr Fawkes I saw was really the man from the art gal
lery? I mean, I know he must have been, but it doesn’t seem pos
sible. He was there, with his secretary, in his office, with his
name on the door, and the man on duty downstairs didn’t think
there was anything peculiar …” She suddenly paused.
“Well,
he did say that Mr Fawkes was probably
out to lunch, but then
he found out he
wasn’t.”

“It’ll be very easy
to check this out,” Simon said. “May I use
your
telephone?”

Any suspicion or
resistance that remained in Julie’s mind was being rapidly washed away. She
hesitated for only a moment.

“All right.”

Simon took the key from
her hand and opened the door. As
soon as he followed her
inside he was intrigued by the mixture of
North-of-England
bourgeois and artistic individualism that char
acterised
the place. It was as if two people lived there and had shared in the
decoration—a very conventional middle-class old
maid, and the artist
who had tried to work in his own ideas
wherever
he could without unduly disconcerting his alter ego.
The effect was comfortable but a little stifling.

“Has your brother
always lived alone here?”

“Yes. He came down
about five years ago and he’s been here
the
whole time.”

“There’s one thing
that I’m puzzled about.” Simon smiled be
fore
he went on. “Well, one thing among several. I’m surprised
you didn’t recognise Pargit’s name when I asked you about
him.”

“Why?”

“Well, what sent you
to his art gallery?”

“Oh. I looked all through my brother’s
things, because I got
the idea that I
should find out as much as I could about him. I
thought I might get a
clue of some kind about what had been
going
on in his life before I came here, but I just couldn’t believe
Adrian had actually done anything wrong. So I
started hunting
round and I couldn’t
find much of anything … but on the
back
of one of Adrian’s paintings, on the back of the frame, there
was a
sticker that said ‘Leonardo Galleries,’ and a price, so I
thought he must have shown his work there or
something, and I
thought I’d talk to
them about him. That’s when you saw me.”
They were still standing in the middle of the sitting-room. “Won’t
you sit down? Would you like some tea?”

“Neither, thank
you,” Simon replied. He paced round, his eyes
taking
in and his memory recording every detail of the room, just
in case
there might be something informative or useful there. “But if your brother
had dealings with Pargit’s gallery, surely
there
must have been more than a sticker on the back of a frame. Wasn’t there any
correspondence with Pargit?”

Julie shook her head.

“I couldn’t find any
letters or receipts or anything like that
connected
with art galleries.”

“That’s a little odd,
isn’t it? You’re sure your brother really
was
a painter?”

“Is
a painter, Mr. Temple—”

“Templar, but please
call me Simon.”

“I’m sorry. Yes, he definitely is a
painter; I’ve watched him
work since I got
here. Would you like to see his studio?”

“Yes, but I’d like
to make that call first.” He still did not pick
up
the telephone. “You know, it’s impossible that your brother
didn’t have any business correspondence, unless he never
sold a
painting. He did sell, didn’t he?”

“Yes. And he used to
mention where he’d sold paintings; you
know,
in his letters to Mother and me; but the names didn’t
mean
anything to me and I don’t remember them.” She shrugged. “Probably I
just haven’t found all of his papers and things yet.”

“Or else those
Special Branch investigators purloined a few
letters
while you weren’t looking, just to slow down
your
investigations.”

“I didn’t see them
take anything.”

“They wouldn’t want
you to, would they?”

She shook her head.

“I can’t believe
there are people running around actually doing
things like that
…
to
me.
It’s like something in a
Hitchcock
film.”

“Let’s try out this
scene.”

The Saint picked up the
telephone and soon was being shut
tled through the
labyrinths of government switchboards.

“What was Fawkes’s
first name?” he asked Julie, his hand
over
the mouthpiece.

“Nobody told me. He
was in room 405, though.”

Simon spoke into the
telephone: “I’d like to speak with Mr Fawkes, in room 405.”

After one ring, a female
voice answered, “Factory Act Administration.”

“I was trying to
reach Mr Fawkes’s office,” Simon told her.

“I am Mr Fawkes’s
secretary.”

“In room 405?”

“Yes. May I help
you?”

“I’d like to speak
with Mr Fawkes. My name is Guide.”

“One moment.”

After a pause and a few
clicking sounds, a male voice said,
“Fawkes
speaking.”

“Mr Fawkes, I believe
you’re involved in administering the
Official Secrets
Act.”

“No. The Factory
Act.”

“Then you’re not the
Mr Fawkes who had a discussion in your
office
with Miss Julie Norcombe yesterday.”

“No.”

“Do you know how I
could reach a Mr Fawkes who’s involved
in
the Official Secrets Act?”

“I’ve never heard of
any such person, but of course …”

“Sorry to have
troubled you. Best of luck with your factories.”

Simon hung up and faced
Julie, who was sitting on the edge of
the sofa. “Mr Fawkes in room 405 is
not even remotely con
nected with official
secrets, and I doubt that your brother is
either. It looks as if comrade Pargit suffers from repressed longings
to be a member of the Civil Service, and spends his lunch
hours playing bureaucrat. He borrowed Fawkes’s
office just
long enough to talk to
you and scare you into keeping quiet.”

Julie was suddenly on her feet, her hands
clenched. “Then where is Adrian, if he isn’t really under arrest? Why
couldn’t it
be the other way round?”

“You mean, could the
Leonardo Galleries be a front for some
Secret Service
operation? I hardly think so. If they were, they
wouldn’t want a whiff of scandal about them. And if ‘Pargit’
were an undercover name for Fawkes, he wouldn’t be
swindling
elderly widows as a side
line. No—I’m sure how that your ‘Special Branch’ visitors were phonies. Why
Pargit is going to these lengths is quite another puzzle.”

“Then what’s happened
to my brother?”

Julie’s voice was rising
to a dangerous pitch, so Simon put an
arm round her
shoulder and made her sit down beside him on
the
sofa.

“Take it easy,”
he said quietly. “Your brother has probably
been
kidnapped by Pargit and his pals for some reason we don’t
know yet.
The purpose of all the dramatic impersonations was
to throw you off the track and—more than anything else—keep
you from spreading word round that your brother
had disap
peared.”

Now the girl’s voice
became more angry than hysterical.

“I’m a complete
idiot! I believed the whole thing! And Adrian’s
probably
dead
or something!”

She started crying.

“Don’t be so
pessimistic,” Simon said, trying to counter her
despair
with reassurance. “If anyone had killed your brother it
wouldn’t have served much purpose to use four men—men you
might identify later—just to sell you on a fake version of
where
he’d be for the next few days or weeks. I certainly
don’t think
he’s dead. Assuming he’s taken an
involuntary leave of absence, whoever’s got him must plan to keep him for some
time—other
wise why go to so much trouble to stop
you reporting him as
missing? So I don’t
imagine he’s in any immediate danger.”

“But why would
anybody want to kidnap him?” Julie argued.
“Nobody
in our family is rich.”

“Maybe you can help
answer that,” said the Saint. “Any
ideas?”

“No. I can’t imagine Adrian doing anything
except painting.
He never had an ordinary
job.”

“Any strong
political views?”

“No political views
at all. He never joined anything.”

“What about trips
abroad?”

“He couldn’t afford them. I suppose he’s
been doing better
lately than he used to,
but he certainly wouldn’t have much spare
cash for foreign holidays.”

“It hardly sounds
like the traditional picture of an artist’s life.
What
about friends? Girlfriends?”

“He never mentioned
any girls. He must have friends, but I
don’t
know who they are. Adrian’s very quiet.”

Simon got to his feet.

“May I see his
studio?”

Julie took him back
through the hall to the room at the rear of the flat where her brother’s
sketches, paintings, and working
paraphernalia filled most
of the floor space.

“This is just the
way he left it,” she said.

For a long time Simon did
not say anything. He moved about
the studio, stopping for
a while in front of each of Adrian Norcombe’s
creations, occasionally going back to one, comparing it with another. When he
had made a complete circuit of the room, he went back to the large
half-finished painting in the middle of
the
studio, and then turned to Julie.

“Is everything here
his work?” he asked.

“I think so,”
she replied. “Do you like them?”

“Well, they’re very interesting,” the
Saint remarked. “Every
one of these
paintings is very good.” He leaned close to the big
canvas, moving the tips of his fingers very
lightly over the surface. “Technically, they’re brilliant. He seems to be
able to make
a brush do anything he
wants it to do. But he makes it do some
thing different each time. I
mean, each painting in here could
have been
done by a different man. There’s no continuity in the style.” He turned
back to Julie, wanting to draw her out more.
“Don’t you agree?”

She nodded a little
reluctantly, as if by agreeing she would be
criticising
her brother.

“Adrian said almost
the same thing about himself,” she ad
mitted.
“He said he couldn’t seem to find his own personal style. I
guess he learned to paint mostly by copying masterpieces in
museums, and he never grew out of it. That’s what he said. He’s
really made most of his money restoring paintings, or making
copies for
people. Even when he tried to paint something en
tirely his own, he said it came out looking like somebody else’s.”

Simon indicated the
bucolic scene on which Adrian had been
working.

“Titian in this
case,. Didn’t he ever go in for twentieth-century
styles?”

“I suppose not. He
doesn’t think much of modern painting. He loves the old masters.”

The Saint nodded almost
abruptly.

“I’d better be going
now. Thanks very much for everything
you’ve told me and
shown me.”

The suddenly almost formal way he spoke to her
suggested
that he wanted to break off the
discussion and get on with some
thing he considered more urgent. Julie
took it to mean that he
was dropping the
whole subject.

“But what are we
going to do?” she asked half frantically. “If
my brother’s been kidnapped we must call the police. That
man Pargit—”

“Is our only lead at the moment,”
Simon interrupted. “He’s
much more
likely to show us the way to your brother if he doesn’t
suspect anyone’s on to him than if the police land
on him. There
must be quite a group
involved in addition to Pargit if they had
three men round here posing as Special Branch officers. And
the stakes must be pretty high to merit all that
manpower.”