Saint Intervenes (30 page)

“Let’s
talk business,” he said shortly. “I’ve got a photo
graph that
was taken of you while you were at the studio.”

Mr.
Tombs’s expression wavered uncertainly; and it may be
mentioned that that
waver was not the least difficult of the
facial exercises which
the Saint had had to go through during his acquaintance with Mr. Tanfold. For
the expression which was at that moment spreading itself across Simon Templar’s
inside was a wholly different affair, which would have made the traditional
Cheshire cat look like a mask of melancholy:
even then, he had not
outgrown the urchin glee of watching
the feet of the ungodly planting
themselves firmly on the ba
nana-skin of doom.

Nevertheless,
outwardly he wavered.

“Photograph?”
he repeated.

Mr. Tanfold
drew out his wallet, extracted a photograph
therefrom, and handed
it over. The Saint stared at it, and
beheld his own unmistakable likeness,
except for the horn
rimmed spectacles which were not a normal part of his
attire, wrapped in a most undignified grapple with a damsel whose
clothing
set up its own standard of the irreducible minimum
of diaphanous
underwear.

“Good
Lord!” he gasped. “When was this taken?”

“You
ought to remember,” said Mr. Tanfold, polishing his finger-nails on his
coat lapel.

“But—but
——
” The first dim inkling of the perils of the
picture
which he held seemed to dawn on Mr. Tombs, and
he choked. “But
this was an accident! You remember, Tan
fold. They wanted her
to sit on top of a step-ladder—they
asked me to help her up—and I only
caught her when she
slipped——”

“I
know,” said Mr. Tanfold. “But nobody else does. You’re
the mug,
Tombs. That photograph wouldn’t look so good in
a Melbourne paper,
would it? With a caption saying: ‘Son of
prominent Melbourne
business man “holding the baby” at
artists’ revel in
Paris’—or something like that.”

Mr. Tombs
swallowed.

“But
 
I
 
can
 
explain
 
it
 
all,”
 
he
 
protested.
  
“It was——
”

“Your
father wouldn’t listen to any explanations when your
younger brother made
a mistake, would he?” said Tanfold.
“Besides, what
were you doing in that studio at all? Take
a look at where you are,
Tombs, and get down to business.
I’m here to sell you the negative of that
picture—at a
price.”

The Saint’s
mouth opened.

“But
that—that’s blackmail!” he gasped.

“It
doesn’t bother me what you call it,” Tanfold said smug
ly.
“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 op
timistic 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 spite
ful 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 photo
graph 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 high
speed 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 re
sponsible for him;
and you and the cashier can still be wit
nesses 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 pano
rama of London streets swam dizzily through his vision
and
dissolved deliriously into the fa
ç
ade
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 sur
roundings
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 pe
tards, dear old wallaby. Take a look at where you
are, Gil
bert. 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.