13 The Saint Intervenes (Boodle)

by Leslie Charteris

  The Saint's mouth opened.

  "But that—that's blackmail!" he gasped.

  "It doesn't bother me what you call it," Tanfold said smug­ly. "There's the position, and I want five thousand pounds to let you out of it."

  Simon's eyes narrowed.

  "Well, perhaps this'll bother you," he said; and a fist like a chunk of stone shot over and sent Tanfold sprawling into the opposite corner of the room. Mr. Tombs unbuttoned his coat. "Get up and come back for some more, you lousy crook," he invited.

  Tanfold wiped his smashed lips with his handkerchief, and spat out a tooth. His small eyes went black and evil, but he did not get up.

  "Just for that, it'll cost you ten thousand," he said viciously. "That stuff won't help you, you damn fool. Whatever you do, you won't get the plate back that way."

  "It gives me a lot of fun, anyway," said the Saint coldly. "And I only wish your miserable body could stand up to more of it."

  He picked Mr. Tanfold up by the front of his mauve shirt with one hand, and slammed him back into the corner again with the other; and then he dropped into a chair by the table, pushed Mr. Tanfold's hat and stick on to the floor, and took out a cheque-book and a fountain-pen. He made out the cheque with some care, and dropped that also on the floor.

  "There's your money," he said, and watched the trembling Mr. Tanfold pick it up. "Now you can get out."

  Mr. Tanfold had more things to say, but caught a glimpse of the unholy light in Mr. Tombs's mild blue eye, and changed his mind in the nick of time. He gathered up his hat and stick and got out.

  In one of the washrooms of the hotel he repaired some of the damage that had been done to his natty appearance, and reflected malevolently that Mr. Tombs was somewhat op­timistic if he thought he was going to secure his negative for a paltry ten thousand pounds after what had happened. In a day or two he would make a further demand—but this time he would take the precaution of doing it by telephone. With a photograph like that in his possession, Mr. Tanfold could see nothing to stop him bleeding his victim to the verge of suicide; and he was venomously prepared to do it.

  He looked at the cheque again. It was made payable to Bearer, and was drawn on a bank in Berkeley Street. Ten minutes later he was passing it through the grille.

  "Do you mind waiting a few moments, sir?" said the cashier. "I don't know whether we have enough currency to meet this without sending out."

  Mr. Tanfold took a chair and waited, continuing his spite­ful thoughts. He waited five minutes. He waited ten minutes. Then he went to the counter again.

  "We're a bit short on cash, sir," explained the cashier, "and it turns out that the bank we usually borrow from is a bit short too. We've sent a man to another branch, and he ought to be back any minute now."

  A few moments later the clerk beckoned him.

  "Would you step into the manager's office, sir?" he asked. "We don't like passing such a large sum as ten thousand pounds over the counter. I'll give it to you in there, if you don't mind."

  Still unsuspecting, Mr. Tanfold stepped in the direction indicated. And the first person he saw in the office was the younger Tombs.

  Mr. Tanfold stopped dead, and his heart missed several beats. A wild instinct urged him to turn and flee, but the strength seemed to have ebbed out of his legs. It would have availed him nothing, anyway; for the courteous clerk had slipped from behind the counter and followed him—and he was a healthy young heavyweight who looked as if he would have been more at home on a football field than behind the grille of a cashier's desk.

  "Come in, Tanfold," said the manager sternly.

  Mr. Tanfold forced himself to come in. Even then he did not see what could possibly have gone wrong—certainly he was unable to envisage any complication in which the photo­graph he held would not be a deciding factor.

  "Are you the gentleman who just presented this cheque?" asked the manager, holding it up.

  Tanfold moistened his lips.

  "That's right," he said boldly.

  "You were asked to wait," said the manager, "because Mr. Tombs rang us up a short while ago and said that this cheque had been stolen from his book; and he asked us to detain anyone who presented it until he got here."

  "That's an absurd mistake," Tanfold retorted loudly. "The cheque's made out to me—Mr. Tombs wrote it out himself only a few minutes ago."

  The manager put his finger-tips together.

  "I am familiar with Mr. Tombs's handwriting," he said dryly, "and this isn't a bit like it. It looks like a very amateurish forgery to me."

  Mr. Tanfold's eyes goggled, and his stomach flopped down past the waistband of his trousers and left a sick void in its place. His tongue clove to the roof of his mouth. Whatever else he might have feared, he had never thought of anything like that; and for some seconds the sheer shock held him speechless.

  In the silence, Simon Templar smiled—he had only re­cently decided that his alter ego had earned a bank account in its own name, and he did not know how he could have christened it better. He turned to the manager.

  "Of course it's a forgery," he said. "But I don't want to be too hard on the man—that's why I asked you over the phone not to send for the police at once. I really believe there's some good in him. You can see from the clumsy way he tried to forge my signature that it's a first attempt."

  "That's as you wish, of course, Mr. Tombs," said the manager doubtfully. "But——"

  "Yes, yes," said the Saint, with a paralysing oleaginousness that would have served to lubricate the bearings of a high­speed engine, "but I've spent a lot of time trying to make this fellow go straight and you can't deny me a last attempt. Let me take him home and talk to him for a while. I'll be re­sponsible for him; and you and the cashier can still be wit­nesses to what he did if I can't make him see the error of his ways."

  Mr. Tanfold's bouncing larynx almost throttled him. Never in all his days had he so much as dreamed of being the victim of such a staggering unblushing impudence. In a kind of daze, he felt himself being gripped by the arm; and a brief pano­rama of London streets swam dizzily through his vision and dissolved deliriously into the façade of the Palace Royal Hotel. Even the power of speech did not return to him until he found himself once more in the painfully reminiscent sur­roundings of Mr. Tombs's suite.

  "Well," he demanded hoarsely, "what's the game?"

  "The game," answered Simon Templar genially, "is the royal and ancient sport of hoisting engineers with their own pe­tards, dear old wallaby. Take a look at where you are, Gil­bert. I'm here to let you out of the mess—at a price."

  Mr. Tanfold's mouth opened.

  "But that—that's blackmail!" he gasped.

  "It doesn't bother me what you call it," Simon said calmly. "I want twenty-five thousand pounds to forget that you forged my signature. How about it?"

  "You can't get it," Tanfold spat out. "If I published that photograph——''

  "I should laugh myself sick," said the Saint. "I'm afraid there's something you'd better get wise to, brother. My father isn't a prominent Melbourne business man and social reformer at all, except for your benefit; and you can paste enlargements of that picture all over Melbourne Town Hall for all I care. Make some inquiries outside the bar downstairs, gorgeous, and get up to date. Come along, now—which is it to be? Twenty-five thousand smackers or the hoosegow? Take your choice."

  Mr. Tanfold's face was turning green.

  "I haven't got so much money in cash," he squawked.

  "I'll give you a week to find it," said the Saint mercilessly, "and I don't really care much if you do go bankrupt in the process. I find you neither ornamental nor useful. But just in case you think forgery is the only charge you have to answer, you might like to listen to this."

  He went through the communicating door to the bedroom and was back in a moment. Suddenly through the door, Mr. Tanfold heard the sounds of his own voice.

  "Let's talk business. . . . I've got a photograph that was taken of you while you were at
the studio. . ."

  With his face going paler and paler, Mr. Tanfold listened. He made no sound until the record was finished, and then he let out an abrupt squeal.

  "But that isn't all of it!" he yelled. "It leaves off before the place where you gave me the cheque!"

  "Of course it does," said the Saint shamelessly. "That would spike the forgery charge, wouldn't it? But as it stands, you've got two things to answer. First you tried to blackmail me; and then, when you found that wouldn't work, you forged my signature to a cheque for ten thousand quid. It was all very rash and naughty of you, Gilbert; and I'm sure the police would take a very serious view of the case—particularly after they'd investigated your business a bit more. Well, well, well, brother—we all make mistakes, and I'm afraid I shall have to send that dictaphone record along to Chief Inspector Teal, as well as charging you with forgery, if you haven't come through with the spondulix inside seven days."

  Once again words rose to Mr. Tanfold's lips; and once again, glimpsing the unholy gleam in the Saint's eye and re­membering his previous experience in that room, they stuck in his throat. And once again Simon went to the door and opened it.

  "This is the way out," said the Saint.

  Mr. Gilbert Tanfold moved hazily towards the portal. As he passed through it, a pair of hands fell on his shoulders and steadied him with a light but masterful grip. Some premoni­tion of his fate must have reached him, for his shrill cry dis­turbed the regal quietude of the Palace Royal Hotel even before the toe of a painfully powerful shoe impacted on his tender posterior and lifted him enthusiastically on his way.

  XIII

  The Man Who Liked Toys

  Chief Inspector Claud Eustace Teal rested his pudgy elbows on the table and unfolded the pink wrappings from a fresh wafer of chewing gum.

  "That's all there was to it," he said. "And that's the way it always is. You get an idea, you spread a net out among the stool pigeons, and you catch a man. Then you do a lot of dull routine work to build up the evidence. That's how a real detective does his job; and that's the way Sherlock Holmes would have had to do it if he'd worked at Scotland Yard."

  Simon Templar grinned amiably, and beckoned a waiter for the bill. The orchestra yawned and went into another dance number; but the floor show had been over for half an hour, and Dora's Curfew was hurrying the drinks off the tables. It was two o'clock in the morning, and a fair proportion of the patrons of the Palace Royal had some work to think of before the next midnight.

  "Maybe you're right, Claud," said the Saint mildly.

  "I know I'm right," said Mr. Teal, in his drowsy voice. And then, as Simon pushed a fiver on to the plate, he chuck­led. "But I know you like pulling our legs about it, too."

  They steered their way round the tables and up the stairs to the hotel lobby. It was another of those rare occasions when Mr. Teal had been able to enjoy the Saint's company without any lurking uneasiness about the outcome. For some weeks his life had been comparatively peaceful. No hints of further Saintly lawlessness had come to his ears; and at such times he admitted to himself, with a trace of genuine surprise, that there were few things which entertained him more than a social evening with the gay buccaneer who had set Scotland Yard more mysteries than they would ever solve.

  "Drop in and see me next time I'm working on a case, Saint," Teal said in the lobby, with a truly staggering generosity for which the wine must have been partly respon­sible. "You'll see for yourself how we really do it."

  "I'd like to," said the Saint; and if there was the trace of a smile in his eyes when he said it, it was entirely without malice.

  He settled his soft hat on his smooth dark head and glanced round the lobby with the vague aimlessness which ordinarily precedes a parting at that hour. A little group of three men had discharged themselves from a near-by lift and were moving boisterously and a trifle unsteadily towards the main entrance. Two of them were hatted and overcoated—a tallish man with a thin line of black moustache, and a tubby red-faced man with rimless spectacles. The third member of the party, who appeared to be the host, was a flabby flat-footed man of about fifty-five with a round bald head and a rather bulbous nose that would have persuaded any observant onlooker to expect that he would have drunk more than the others, which in fact he obviously had. All of them had the dishevelled and rather tragically ridiculous air of Captains of Industry who have gone off duty for the evening.

  "That's Lewis Enstone—the chap with the nose," said Teal, who knew everyone. "He might have been one of the biggest men in the City if he could have kept off the bottle."

  "And the other two?" asked the Saint incuriously, because he already knew.

  "Just a couple of smaller men in the same game. Abe Cos­tello—that's the tall one—and Jules Hammel." Mr. Teal chewed meditatively on his spearmint. "If anything ever hap­pens to them, I shall want to know where you were at the time," he added warningly.

  "I shan't know anything about it," said the Saint piously.

  He lighted a cigarette and watched the trio of celebrators disinterestedly. Hammel and Costello he knew something about from the untimely reincarnation of Mr. Titus Oates; but the more sozzled member of the party was new to him.

  "You do unnerstan', boys, don't you?" Enstone was articula­ting pathetically, with his arms spread around the shoulders of his guests in an affectionate manner which contributed help­fully towards his support. "It's jus' business. I'm not hard­hearted. I'm kind to my wife an' children an' everything, God bless 'em. An' any time I can do anything for either of you—why, you jus' lemme know."

  "That's awfully good of you, old man," said Hammel, with the blurry-eyed solemnity of his condition.

  "Less have lunch together on Tuesday," suggested Costello. "We might be able to talk about something that'd interest you."

  "Right," said Enstone dimly. "Lush Tooshday. Hic."

  "An1 don't forget the kids," said Hammel confidentially.

  Enstone giggled.

  "I shouldn't forget that!" In obscurely elaborate pantomime, he closed his fist with his forefinger extended and his thumb cocked vertically upwards, and aimed the forefinger between Hammel's eyes. "Shtick 'em up!" he commanded gravely, and at once relapsed into further merriment, in which his guests joined somewhat hysterically.

  The group separated at the entrance amid much handshak­ing and back-slapping and alcoholic laughter; and Lewis Enstone wended his way back with cautious and preoccupied steps towards the lift. Mr. Teal took a fresh bite on his gum and tightened his mouth disgustedly.

  "Is he staying here?" asked the Saint.

  "He lives here," said the detective. "He's lived here even when we knew for a face that he hadn't got a penny to his name. Why, I remember once——"

  He launched into a lengthy anecdote which had all the vi­tality of personal bitterness in the telling. Simon Templar, lis­tening with the half of one well-trained ear that would prick up into instant attention if the story took any twist that might provide the germ of an adventure, but would remain intently passive if it didn't, smoked his cigarette and gazed abstract­edly into space. His mind had that gift of complete division; and he had another job on hand to think about. Somewhere in the course of the story he gathered that Mr. Teal had once lost some money on the Stock Exchange over some shares in which Enstone was speculating; but there was nothing much about that misfortune to attract his interest, and the detec­tive's mood of disparaging reminiscence was as good an op­portunity as any other for him to plot out a few details of the campaign against his latest quarry.

  ". . . So I ,lost half my money, and I've kept the rest of it in gilt-edged stuff ever since," concluded Mr. Teal rancor­ously; and Simon took the last inhalation from his cigarette and dropped the stub into an ashtray.

  "Thanks for the tip, Claud," he said lightly. "I gather that next time I murder somebody you'd like me to make it a financier."

  Teal grunted, and hitched his coat round.

  "I shouldn't like you to murder anybody," he sa
id, from his heart. "Now I've got to go home—I have to get up in the morning."

  They walked towards the street doors. On their left they passed the information desk; and beside the desk had been standing a couple of bored and sleepy page-boys. Simon had observed them and their sleepiness as casually as he had ob­served the colour of the carpet, but all at once he realised that their sleepiness had vanished. He had a sudden queer sensitiveness of suppressed excitement; and then one of the boys said something loud enough to be overheard which stopped Teal in his tracks and turned him round abruptly.

  "What's that?" he demanded.

  "It's Mr. Enstone, sir. He just shot himself."

  Mr. Teal scowled. To the newspapers it would be a surprise and a front-page sensation: to him it was a surprise and a potential menace to his night's rest if he butted into any responsibility. Then he shrugged.

  "I'd better have a look," he said, and introduced himself.

  There was a scurry to lead him towards the lift. Mr. Teal ambled bulkily into the nearest car, and quite brazenly the Saint followed him. He had, after all, been kindly invited to "drop in" the next time the plump detective was handling a case. . . . Teal put his hands in his pockets and started in moun­tainous drowsiness at the downward-flying shaft. Simon stu­diously avoided his eye, and had a pleasant shock when the de­tective addressed him almost genially.

  "I always thought there was something fishy about that fel­low. Did he look as if he'd anything to shoot himself about, except the head that was waiting for him when he woke up?"

  It was as if the decease of any financier, however caused, was a benison upon the earth for which Mr. Teal could not help being secretly and quite immorally grateful. That was the subtle impression he gave of his private feelings; but the rest of him was impenetrable stolidity and aloofness. He dis­missed the escort of page-boys and strode to the door of the millionaire's suite. It was closed and silent. Teal knocked on it authoritatively, and after a moment it opened six inches and disclosed a pale agitated face. Teal introduced himself again and the door opened wider, enlarging the agitated face into the unmistakable full-length portrait of an assistant hotel manager. Simon followed the detective in, endeavouring to look equally official.