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."