Mr. Tanfold did not rub his hands gloatingly; but he ordered 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 "clever" 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 justification, 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-Élysées 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 quantities of liquid, for Mr. Tanfold was rather proud of the hardness of his head. As the wine flowed, his guest's tongue loosened—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 mentioned 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 invitation 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.