Saint Intervenes (29 page)

Mr. Tanfold
did not rub his hands gloatingly; but he or
dered another drink,
and when it had been served he laid a
ten-pound note on the bar.

“You
needn’t bother about the change,” he said, “if you’d
like to do
me a small favour.”

The barman looked at the note,
and picked it up. The only
other customers
at the bar at that moment were two men at
the other end of the room, who were out of earshot.

“What
can I do, sir?” he asked.

Mr. Tanfold put a card on top
of the note—it bore the name
 
of a firm of private inquiry agents who existed
only in his
imagination.

“I’ve
been engaged to make some inquiries about this fellow,” he said.
“Will you point him out to me when he
comes in? I’d like
you to introduce us. Tell him I’m another
lonely Australian,
and ask if he’d like to meet me—that’s
all I want.”

The barman
hesitated for a second, and then folded the note
and put it in his
pocket with a cynical nod. Mr. Tombs meant
nothing to him, and
ten pounds was ten pounds.

“That
ought to be easy enough, sir,” he said. “He usually
gets here
about this time. What name do I say?”

It was, as
a matter of fact, almost ridiculously simple—so
simple that it never
occurred to Mr. Tanfold to wonder why.
To him, it was only
an ordinary tribute to the perfection of his
routine—it is an
illuminating sidelight on the vanity of “clev
er” criminals
that none of Simon Templar’s multitudinous
victims had ever
paused to wonder whether perhaps someone
else might not be able
to duplicate their brilliantly applied
psychology, and do it
just a little better than they did.

Mr. Tombs
came in at half-past six. After he had had a
drink and glanced at
an evening paper, the barman whispered
to him. He looked at
Mr. Tanfold. He left his stool and
walked over. Mr. Tanfold beamed. The
barman performed
the requisite ceremony. “What’ll you have?” said
Mr. Tombs.
 
“This is with
me,” said Mr. Tanfold.

It was as
easy as that.

“Cheerio,”
said Mr. Tombs.

“Here’s
luck,” said Mr. Tanfold.

“Lousy
weather,” said Mr. Tombs, finishing his drink at
the second gulp.

“Well,”
said Mr. Tanfold, “London isn’t much of a place
to be in at any
time.”

The blue
eyes of Mr. Tombs, behind their horn-rimmed
spectacles, focused
on him with a sudden dawn of interest.
Actually, Simon was
assuring himself that any man bom of
woman could really look as unsavoury
as Mr. Tanfold and still
remain immune to beetle-paste. In this he had
some justifi
cation, for Mr. Gilbert Tanfold was a small and somewhat
fleshy man
with a loose lower lip and a tendency to pimples,
and his natty clothes
and the mauve shirts which he affected
did not improve his
appearance, though no doubt he believed
they did. But the
only expression which Mr. Tanfold discerned
was that which might
have stirred the features of a “weeping
Israelite by the
waters of Babylon who perceived a fellow
exile drawing
nigh” to hang his harp on an adjacent tree.

“You’ve
found that too, have you?” said Mr. Tombs, with
the morbid
satisfaction of a hospital patient discovering an
equally serious case
in the next bed.

“I’ve
found it for the last six months,” said Mr. Tanfold
firmly.
“And I’m still finding it. No fun to be had anywhere.
Everything’s
too damn respectable. I hope I’m not shocking
you——
”

“Not a
bit,” said Mr. Tombs. “Let’s have another drink.”

“This
is with me,” said Mr. Tanfold.

The drinks
were set up, raised, and swallowed.

“I’m
not respectable,” said Mr. Tanfold candidly. “I like
a bit of
fun. You know what I mean.” Mr. Tanfold winked—
a contortion of his
face which left no indecency unsuggested.
“Like you can
get in Paris, if you know where to look for it.”

“I
know,” said Mr. Tombs hungrily. “Have you been
there?”

“Have
I been there!” said Mr. Tanfold.

Considering
the point later, the Saint was inclined to doubt
whether Mr. Tanfold
had been there, for the stories he was
able to tell of his
adventures in the Gay City were far more
lurid than anything else of its kind which
the Saint had ever
heard—and Simon Templar
reckoned that he knew Paris from
the
Champs-
É
lys
é
es to the
fortifs.
Nevertheless, they served
to pass
the time very congenially until half-past seven, when
Mr. Tanfold suggested that they might have dinner together and
afterwards pool their resources in the quest for “a bit of fun.”

“I’ve
been here a bit longer than you,” said Mr. Tanfold
generously,
“so perhaps I’ve found a few places you haven’t
come across.”

It was a
very good dinner washed down with liberal quan
tities of liquid, for Mr. Tanfold was
rather proud of the hard
ness of his head.
As the wine flowed, his guest’s tongue loos
ened—but there, again, it
had never occurred to Mr. Tanfold
that a
tongue might be loosened simply because its owner was
anxious that no effort should be spared to give
its host all
the information which he wanted to hear.

“If
my father knew I’d been to Paris, I’m perfectly certain
he’d
disinherit me,” Mr. Tombs revealed. “But he won’t know.
He thinks
I’m sailing from Tilbury; but I’m going to have
a week in Paris and
catch the boat at Marseilles. He thinks
Paris is a sort of
waiting-room for hell. But he’s like that
about any place where
you can have a good time. And five
years ago he disowned a younger
brother of mine just because
he’d been seen at a night club with a girl
who was considered a bit fast. Wouldn’t listen to any excuses—just threw him
out
of the house and out of the business, and hasn’t even men
tioned his
name since. That’s the sort of puritan he is.”

Mr. Tanfold
made sympathetic noises with his tongue, while
the area of flesh
under the front of his mauve shirt which
might by some stretch
of imagination have been described as his bosom warmed with the glowing ecstasy
of a dog sighting
a new and hitherto undreamed-of lamp-post.

“When
are you making this trip to Paris, old man?” he
asked enviously.

“At
the end of next week, I hope,” said the unregenerate scion of the house of
Tombs. “It all depends on how soon I
can get my business
finished. I’ve got to go to Birmingham on
Friday to see some
manufacturers, worse luck—and that’ll
probably be even deadlier than
London.”

Mr.
Tanfold’s head hooked forward on his neck, and his
eyes expanded.

“Birmingham?”
he ejaculated. “Well, I’m damned! What
a coincidence!”

“What’s
a coincidence?”

“Why,
your going to Birmingham. And you think it’s a
deadly place! Haven’t
you ever heard of Gilbert Tanfold?”

Mr. Tombs
nodded.

“Sells
pictures, doesn’t he? Yes, I’ve had some of ‘em. I
didn’t think they were
so hot.”

Mr.
Tanfold was so happy that this aspersion on his Art
glanced off him like
a pea off a tortoise.

“You
can’t have had any of his good ones,” he said. “He keeps those for
people he knows personally. I met him last
week, and he showed me
pictures …” Mr. Tanfold went into details which eclipsed even his
adventures in Paris.
“The coincidence is,” he wound up,
“that I’ve got an invita
tion to go to Birmingham on Friday myself and
visit his
studio.”

Mr. Tombs
swallowed so that his Adam’s apple jiggered
up and down.

“Gosh,”
he said jealously, “that ought to be interesting.
I wish I had your
luck.”

Tanfold’s
face lengthened commiseratingly, as if the
thought that his
new-found friend would be unable to share
his good fortune had
taken away all his enthusiasm for the project. And then, as if the solution had
only just struck him,
he brightened again.

“But
why shouldn’t you?” he demanded. “I said we’d pool our resources, and
I ought to be able to arrange it. Now, sup
pose we go to
Birmingham together—that is, if you don’t
think I’m thrusting
myself on you too much——
”

And that
part also was absurdly easy; so that Mr. Gilbert
Tanfold returned to
his more modest hotel much later that
night with his heart singing the happy
song of a vulture div
ing on a particularly fruity morsel of
carrion. He had not even
had to devise any pretext to induce the simple
Tombs to
travel to Birmingham—Mr. Tombs had already planned the
trip in his
itinerary with a thoughtfulness which almost
suggested that he had
foreseen Mr. Tanfold’s need. And yet,
once again, this obvious explanation
never occurred seriously
to Gilbert Tanfold. He preferred to believe in
miracles
wrought for his benefit by a kindly Providence, which was
a disastrous error for him to make.

The rest
of his preparations proceeded with the same
smoothness of routine.
They went to Birmingham together
on the Friday, and kept the steward busy on
the Pullman
throughout the journey. In Birmingham they had lunch to
gether,
diluted with more liquor. By the time they were
ready for their visit
to the studios of G. Tanfold & Co., Mr,
Tanfold estimated that
his companion was in an ideal con
dition to enjoy his experience. On arrival
they were informed,
most unveraciously, that urgent business had called Mr.
Tan
fold himself to London, but he had arranged that they
should
have the free run of the premises. The entertainment
offered, it is
sufficient to record, was one in which Mr. Tan
fold believed he had
surpassed himself as an impresario of
impropriety.

Mr. Tombs,
with remarkable fortune, was able to conclude
his business on the
Saturday morning, and returned to London
on the Sunday. He
announced his intention of leaving for
Paris on the Tuesday,
and they parted with mutual expressions of goodwill. Mr. Tanfold said that he
himself would return to London on Monday, and they arranged to lunch
together
on that day and go on to paint the town red.

When Mr.
Tanfold arrived at the Palace Royal Hotel a little
before one o’clock on
Monday, however, he did not have the
air of a man who was getting set to
experiment in what could
be done with a pot of red paint and the
metropolitan sky
line. Laying his hat and stick on the table and pulling
off his
lavender-tinted gloves in Mr. Tombs’s suite, he was laconi
cally
unresponsive to the younger Tombs’s effusive cries of
welcome.

“Look
here, Tombs,” he said bluntly, when he had straight
ened his
heliotrope tie, “there’s something you’d better know.”

“Tell
me all, dear old wombat,” said Mr. Tombs, who ap
peared to have
acquired some of the frothier mannerisms of the City during his visit.
“What have you done?”

“I
haven’t introduced myself properly,” said his guest bra
zenly.
“I am Gilbert Tanfold.”

For a
moment the antipodean Tomblet seemed taken aback;
and then he grinned
good-humouredly.

“Well,
you certainly spruced me, Gilbert,” he said. “What
a joke! So
it was really your own studio we went to!”

Mr. Tombs
grinned again. He made remarks about Mr.
Tanfold’s
unparalleled sense of humour in terms which were
clearly designed to be
flattering, but which were too biological
in trend to be
acceptable in mixed company. Mr. Tanfold, however, was not there to be
flattered. He cut his host short
with a flick of one well-manicured hand.