He piled merchandise towards her until she grabbed up as much as she could carry and palpitated nervously out into the street. Simon grinned to himself and hoped he had not overdone it. If the news of his sensational bargain sale spread around the district, he would have his hands full.
During the lull that followed he tried to take a survey of the stock. He would be safe enough with proprietary goods, but if anyone asked for some more complicated medicine he would have to be careful. He had no grudge to work off against the neighbourhood at large; which was almost a pity.
The next customer required nothing more difficult than aspirin, and left the shop in a kind of daze when the Saint insisted on supplying a bottle of a hundred tablets for the modest price of twopence.
Simon took a trip upstairs and found that his three prizes had still failed to progress beyond the stage of half conscious meanings and a spasmodic twitching of the lower limbs. He returned downstairs to attend to a small snotty-nosed urchin who was asking for a shilling tin of baby food. Simon blandly handed her the largest size he could see, and told her that Mr Osbett was making special reductions that morning.
"Coo!" said the small child, and added a bag of peardrops to the order.
Simon poured out a pound of them — "No charge for that, Delilah — Mr Osbett is giving peardrops away for an advertisement" — and the small child sprinted out as if it was afraid of waking up before it got home.
The Saint lighted another cigarette and waited thoughtfully. Supplying everybody who came in with astounding quantities of Mr Osbett's goods at cut-throat prices was amusing enough, admittedly, but it was not getting him anywhere. And yet a hunch that was growing larger every minute kept him standing behind the counter.
Maybe it wasn't such a waste of time… The package of Miracle Tea in which he had found fifteen hundred testimonials to the lavish beneficence of his guardian angel had come from that shop; presumably it had been intended for some special customer; presumably also it was not the only eccentric transaction that had taken place there, and there was no reason why it should be the last. Maybe no other miracles of the same kind were timed to take place that day; and yet…
Mr Osbett's boxes of extra special toilet soap, usually priced at seven and sixpence, were reduced for the benefit of a charming young damsel to a shilling each. The charming damsel was so impressed that she tentatively inquired the price of a handsome bottle of bath salts.
"What, this?" said the Saint, taking the flagon down and wrapping it up. "As a special bargain this morning, sweetheart, we're letting it go for sixpence."
It went for sixpence, quickly. The Saint handed over her change without encouraging further orders — as a matter of fact, he was rather anxious to get rid of the damsel, in spite of her charm and obvious inclination to be friendly, for a man with a thin weasel face under a dirty tweed cap already overdue for the dustbin had come in, and was earnestly inspecting a showcase full of safety razors and other articles which are less widely advertised. Quite obviously the man was not anxious to draw attention to himself while there was another customer in the shop; and while there was at least one perfectly commonplace explanation for that kind of bashfulness the Saint felt a spectral tingle of expectation slide over his scalp as the girl went out and Weasel Face angled over to the counter.
"I haven't seen you before," he stated.
His manner was flatly casual, but his small beady eyes flitted over Simon's face like flies hovering.
"Then you should be enjoying the view," said the Saint affably. "What can I sell you today, comrade? Hot water bottles? Shaving cream? Toothpaste? We have a special bargain line of castor oil—"
"Where's Ossy?"
"Dear old Ossy is lying down for a while — I think he's got a headache, or something. But don't let that stop you. Have you tried some of our Passion Flower lipstick, guaranteed to seduce at the first application?"
The man's eyes circled around again. He pushed out a crumpled envelope.
"Give Ossy my prescription, and don't talk so much."
"Just a minute," said the Saint.
He took the envelope back towards the staircase and slit it open. One glance even in the dim light that penetrated there was enough to show him that whatever else the thin sheet of paper it contained might mean, it was not a prescription that any ordinary pharmacist could have filled.
He stuffed the sheet into his pocket and came back.
"Will you call again at six o'clock?" he said, and his flippancy was no longer obtrusive. "I'll have it ready for you than."
"Awright."
The beady eyes sidled over him once more, a trifle puzzedly, and the man went out.
Simon took the paper back into the dispensing room and spread it out under a good light. It was a scale plan of a building, with every detail plainly marked even to the positions of the larger pieces of furniture, and provided in addition with a closely-written fringe of marginal notes which to the Saint's professional scrutiny provided every item of information that a careful burglar could have asked for; and the first fascinating but still incomplete comprehension of Mr Osbett's extraordinary business began to reveal itself to him as he studied it.
IX
The simple beauty of the system made his pulses skip. Plans like that could be passed over in the guise of prescriptions; boodle, cash payments for services rendered, or almost anything else, could be handed over the counter enclosed in tubes of cold cream or packets of Miracle Tea; and it could all be done openly and with impunity even while other genuine customers were in the shop waiting to be served. Even if the man who did it were suspected and under surveillance, the same transactions could take place countless times under the very eyes of a watcher, and be dismissed as an entirely unimportant feature of the suspect's daily activities. Short of deliberate betrayal, it left no loophole through which Osbett himself could be involved at all — and even that risk, with a little ingenuity, could probably be manipulated so as to leave someone like the shifty-eyed young assistant to hold the baby. It was foolproof and puncture-proof — except against such an unforeseen train of accidents as had delivered one fatal package of Miracle Tea into Chief Inspector Teal's unwitting paws, and tumbled it from his pocket into Simon Templar's car.
The one vast and monumental question mark that was left was wrapped all the way round the mystery of what was the motive focus of the whole machinery.
A highly organized and up-to-date gang of thieves, directed by a Master Mind and operating with the efficiency of a big business? The answer seemed trite but possible. And yet…
All the goods he could see round him were probably as genuine as patent slimming salts and mouth washes can be — any special packages would certainly be kept aside. And there was nothing noticeably out of place at that time. He examined the cash register. It contained nothing but a small amount of money, which he transferred to a hospital collecting box on the counter. The ancient notes and invoices and prescriptions speared on to hook files in the dispensing compartment were obviously innocuous — nothing incriminating was likely to be left lying about there.
The first brisk spell of trade seemed to have fallen off, and no one else had entered the shop since the visit of Weasel Face. Simon went back upstairs, and investigated the room into which he had dodged when he followed the shifty-eyed youth up the stairs. He remembered it as having had the air of a storeroom of some kind, and he was right. It contained various large jars, packing cases, and cardboard cartons labelled with assorted names and cryptic signs, some of them prosaically familiar, stacked about in not particularly methodical piles. But the whole rear half of the room, in contrasting orderliness, was stacked from floor to ceiling with mounds of small yellow packages that he could recognize at a glance.