Mr. Alfred Tillson ("Broads" Tillson to the trade) was only one of many men who cherished the hope that one day they might be privileged to meet the Saint again. Usually those ambitions included a dark night, a canal, and a length of lead pipe, with various trimmings and decorations according to the whim of the man concerned. But no bliss so unalloyed as that had ever come the way of any of those men; for canals and lengths of lead pipe did not enter into Simon Templar's own plans for his brilliant future, and on dark nights he walked warily as a matter of habit.
Mr. Alfred Tillson, however, enjoyed the distinction of being a man who did achieve his ambition and meet the Saint for a second time; although the re-encounter did not by any means take place as he would have planned it.
He was a lean grey-haired man with a long horse-like face and the air of a retired churchwarden — an atmosphere which he had created for himself deliberately as an aid to business, and which he had practised for so long that in the end he could not have shaken it off if he had tried. It had become just as much a part of his natural make-up as the faintly ecclesiastical style of dress which he affected; and over the years it had served him well. For Mr. "Broads" Tillson was acknowledged in the trade to be one of the greatest living card manipulators in the world. To see those long tapering fingers of his ruffling through a pack of cards and dealing out hands in which every pip had been considered and placed individually was an education in itself. He could do anything with a pack of cards except make it talk. He could shuffle it once, apparently without looking at it, and in that shuffle sort it out suit by suit and card by card, stack up any sequence he wanted, and put it all together again, with one careless flick of his hands that was too quick for the eye to follow.
If you were in the trade, if you were "regular" and you could induce him to give you a demonstration of his magic, he would invite you to deal out four hands of bridge, write down a list of cards in every hand, shuffle the pack again as much as you cared to, and give it back to him; whereupon he would take one glance at your list, shuffle the pack once himself, and proceed to deal out the four hands again exactly as you had listed them. And if you were unlucky enough to be playing with him in the way of business you could order brand-new packs as often as you cared to pay for them, without inconveniencing him in the least. Mr. Alfred Tillson had never marked a card in his life; and he could play any card game that had ever been invented with equal success.
On the stage he might have made a very comfortable income for himself, but his tastes had never led him that way. Mr. Tillson was partial to travel and sea air; and for many years he had voyaged the Atlantic and Pacific ocean routes, paying himself very satisfactory dividends on every trip, and invariably leaving his victims with the consoling thought that they had at least evaded the wiles of sharpers and lost their money to an honest man.
He might have retired long ago, if he had not had a weakness for beguiling the times between voyages with dissipations of a highly unclerical kind; and as a matter of fact it was to this weakness of his that he owed his first meeting with the Saint.
He had made a very profitable killing on a certain trip which he took to Maderia; but coming back overland from Lisbon a sylph-like blonde detained him too long in Paris, and he woke up one morning to find that he was a full twenty pounds short of his fare to New York. He set out for London with this pressing need of capital absorbing his mind; and it was merely his bad luck that the elegant young man whom he discovered lounging idly over the rail when the cross-Channel boat left Boulogne should have been christened Simon Templar.
Simon was not looking for trouble on that trip, but he was never averse to having his expenses paid; and when Mr. Tillson hinted that it was distressingly difficult to find any congenial way of passing the time on cross-Channel journeys, he knew what to expect. They played casino, and Simon won fifteen pounds in the first half-hour.
"A bit slow, don't you think?" observed the benevolent Mr. Tillson, as he shuffled the cards at this point and called for another brace of whiskies. "Shall we double the stakes?"
This was what Simon had been waiting for — and that gift of waiting for the psychological moment was one which he always employed on such occasions. Fifteen pounds was a small fish in his net, but who was he to criticise what a beneficent Providence cast kindly into his lap?
"Certainly, brother," he murmured. "Treble 'em if you like. I'll be with you again in a sec — I've just got to see a man about a small borzoi."
He faded away towards a convenient place; and that was the last Mr. Tillson saw of him. It was one of Mr. Tillson's saddest experiences; and three years later it was still as fresh in his memory as it had been the day after it happened. "Happy" Fred Jorman, that most versatile of small-time confidence men, whose round face creased up into such innumerable wrinkles of joy when he smiled, heard that "Broads" Tillson was in London, called on him on that third anniversary, and had to listen to the tale. They had worked together on one coup several years ago, but since then their ways had lain apart.
"That reminds me of a beggar I met this spring," said Happy Fred, not to be outdone in anecdote — and the ecclesiastical-looking Mr. Tillson hoped that "beggar" was the word he used. "I met him in the Alexandra — he seemed interested in horses, and he looked so lovely and innocent. When I told him about the special job I'd got for Newmarket that afternoon —"
This was one of Happy Fred's favourite stories, and much telling of it had tended to standardize the wording.
There was a certain prelude of this kind of conversation and general reminiscence before Happy Fred broached the real reason for his call.
"Between ourselves, Broads, things aren't going too well in my business. There's too many stories in the newspapers these days to tell the suckers how it's done. Things have got so bad that one or two of the boys have had to go on the legit just to keep themselves alive."
"The circumstances are somewhat similar with me, Fred," confessed Mr. Tillson, regretfully. "The Atlantic liners are half empty, and those gentlemen who are travelling don't seem to have the same surplus of lucre for the purposes of — um — recreation as they used to."
Happy Fred nodded.
"Well, that's how it struck me, Broads," he said. "And what with one thing and another, I said to myself, 'Fred,' I said, 'the old tricks are played out, and you'd better admit it. Fred," I said, 'you've got to keep up with the times or go under. And what's wanted these days,' I said to myself, 'is a New Swindle.' "
Mr. Tillson raised his episcopal eyebrows.
"And have you succeeded in devising this — um — novel system of remunerative equivocation?"
"I have invented a new swindle, if that's what you mean," said Happy Fred. "At least, it's new enough for me. And the beauty of it is that you don't have to do anything criminal — anyway, not that anyone's ever going to know about. It's all quite straight and above-board, and whatever happens you can't get pinched for trying it, if you're clever enough about the way you work it."
"Have you made any practical experiments with this new method?" inquired Mr. Tillson.
"I haven't," said Happy Fred lugubriously. "And the trouble is that I can't. Here am I carrying this wonderful idea about with me, and I can't use it. That's why I've come to you. What I need, Broads, is a partner who won't double-cross me, who's clever with his hands and hasn't got any kind of police record. That's why I can't do it myself. The bloke who does this has got to be a respectable bloke that nobody can say anything against. And that's where you come in. I've been worrying about it for weeks, thinking of all the good money there is waiting for me to pick up, and wondering who I could find to come in with me that I could trust. And then just last night somebody told me that you were back; and I said to myself, 'Fred,' I said, 'Broads Tillson is the very man you want. He's the man who'll give you a square deal, and won't go and blow your idea about.' So I made up my mind to come and see you and see what you felt about it. I'm willing to give you my idea, Broads, and put up the capital — I've got a bit of money saved up — if you'll count me in fifty-fifty."
"What is this idea?" asked Mr. Tillson cautiously.
Happy Fred helped himself to another drink, swallowed half of it, and wiped his mouth on the back of his hand.
"It goes like this," he said, with the unconscious reverence of a poet introducing his latest brain-child to the world. "You go to one of the big jewellers, posing as a rich man who's got a little bit of stuff in Paris, see? That ought to be easy for you. You want to send this girl a lovely big diamond necklace or something out of his stock that you can get for about a thousand quid — that's as much as I can put up. This necklace has got to be sent by post, and so of course it's got to be insured. Now it's made into a parcel; and all this time you've got in your pocket another box about the same size, with pebbles in it to make it about the same weight. This is where the man who does it has got to be clever with his hands, like you are. As soon as the necklace has been packed in its box —"
Mr. Tillson sighed.
"There's nothing new about that," he protested. "You haven't got the money to reimburse this jeweller for his necklace, and therefore you desire the sealed package to be preserved in his safe until you post him the money and request him to send it to you. And when he tires of waiting for his instructions he opens the package and discovers that you have absconded with the necklace and left him the receptacle containing the pebbles. That's a very old one, Fred, don't you think?"
"Haven't got the money, nothing!" said Happy Fred scornfully. "Of course you've got the money — I tell you I'm putting up a thousand quid for this job. No jeweller would be taken in with that old trick you're thinking of these days — he'd send for the police as soon as you suggested it. You pay cash for this bit of jewellery you buy, and it's all square and above-board. Now listen to what I've got to say."
Mr. Alfred Tillson listened, and was impressed. Happy Fred's variation on an old theme appeared to have many of the qualities that were claimed for it by its proud inventor; and although it did not exactly come within Mr. Tillson's self-chosen province, it was true that the seasonal falling-off in transatlantic steamship travel had left him particularly receptive to ideas that opened up new possibilities of income.
The new swindle is a thing that every confidence man dreams of creating; it is the brain wave that sweeps through the trade once in a generation, and produces a golden harvest for its pioneers before the officious publicity of the press sends the soaring market slumping back again. Life is like that for chevaliers d'industrie like Happy Fred Jorman: the criminological trend of the Sunday newspaper reduces the ranks of the suckers every Sabbath, and the movies they see during the week haven't helped either. But this new swindle looked as if it might enjoy a fair run of success before it went the way of all other brilliant inventions.
Possibly it was because both partners in the new alliance were so pleased with the potentialities of their own brilliance that they temporarily forgot their common ambition to meet Simon Templar again — with a convenient canal and a length of lead pipe thrown in.
Simon himself was not thinking about them, for he had his own views on the kind of acquaintance which he was anxious to renew. Ruth Eden was a very different proposition. The fact that he had been privileged to rescue her in romantic circumstances from the attentions of the unspeakable Mr. Julian Lamantia, and that subsequently Mr. Lamantia had been one of three men who found themselves unexpectedly poorer for that meeting, included her among the register of people whom Simon Templar would have been pleased to meet again at any time.
He had managed to get her a job with another acquaintance of his, who was such an exclusive jeweller that he had an office instead of a shop, and produced his treasures out of a vast safe instead of leaving them about in glass-topped counters; but after that he had heard nothing of her for some while.
She rang him up one day about this time, and he was delighted to hear her voice. From the date of their first meeting she had exhibited commendable symptoms of hero-worship, and Simon Templar had no modesty in his composition.
"Have you forgotten me altogether?" she demanded; and the Saint chuckled into the transmitter.
"To tell you the truth, I've been so busy murdering people that I've hardly had a minute to spare. I thought you must have got married or something. Come and have dinner and see my collection of skulls."
"I'd love to. When?"
"Why not tonight? What time does Alan let you go?"
"Half past five."
"I'll call for you at six — that'll just give you time to put your hat on, darling," said the Saint angelically, and rang off before she could make a suitable reply.
He was engaged in a running commentary on her inevitable feminine manoeuvres in front of a mirror in Alan Emberton's outer office when the glass-panelled door of the inner sanctum opened, and the sound of a voice that seemed vaguely familiar made him break off in the middle of a sentence. In another second, to her intense astonishment, he had vanished under a desk like a rabbit into its burrow; and if she had not turned abruptly back to her mirror while Emberton showed his client out, she would have had to burst out laughing.
But Simon was on his feet again when the jeweller came back and he was completely unruffled by his own extraordinary behaviour.
"Hullo, Templar," said Emberton, noticing him with some surprise. "Where did you spring from?"
He was a big man, with a jovial red face, who looked more like a retired butcher than an exclusive jeweller, and he liked the Saint in spite of his sins. He held out his beefy hand.
"I was under the desk," said the Saint unblushingly. "I dropped a penny and I was looking for it. How's life?"
"Not so good as it might be," answered the other frankly. "However, I suppose I can't grumble. I've just sold a thousand-pound diamond bracelet to that fellow I was showing out. Did you see him?"
"No," said the Saint untruthfully.
He had just seen Mr. Alfred Tillson quite distinctly; and the problem of what Broads Tillson could possibly want with a thousand-pound bracelet bothered him quite a lot in the taxi in which he carried Ruth Eden off to the West End. Broads Tillson, he knew, was often extravagantly generous to his lady friends; but somehow he could not associate thousand-pound diamond bracelets even with that amorous man. Either Mr. Tillson had recently made no small click, or else there was more in that purchase than met the eye; and Simon had a constitutional objection to his old acquaintances embarking on enterprises of which he knew nothing.
The girl noticed his silence and challenged him.
"Why did you disappear under that desk, Simon? I feel there's some thrilling secret behind it."
"It was pure instinct," said the Saint brazenly, "to avoid being recognized. You see, Alan's latest client is one of the slickest card-sharpers in the world, and I once diddled him of fifteen quid that he threw out for ground bait."
"Are you sure? Gee, why ever didn't you tell Mr. Emberton at once?"
"Because I'd like to know what his new trick is first." The blithe cavalier's blue eyes glinted at her mockingly. "Didn't you once tell me you'd love to be an adventurer's partner, Ruth? Well, here's a chance for you. Find out the whole details of the deal, every single fact you can get hold of, without saying anything to Alan. Give your best imitation of an adventuress worming out secrets so that the victim doesn't even know they have been wormed. And come and tell me. I'll promise you I'll see Alan doesn't get swindled; but wouldn't you hate to do anything so dull as just tell him to send for the police?"
She met him the next evening, full of excitement over the triumph of her maiden effort at sleuthing. She could hardly contain her news until he had ordered a cocktail.
"I can't see the catch in it at all; but perhaps you can. Mr. Tillson gave Mr. Emberton a cheque for the bracelet yesterday, and he particularly asked Mr. Emberton to get a special clearance so that there wouldn't be any difficulty about it. So the cheque must be all right. Mr. Tillson is sending the bracelet to a friend of his in Paris for a birthday present, he says, and he's having it insured to go over. A valuer came from the insurance company today to have a look at it. Mr. Tillson —"
"Call him 'Broads'," suggested the Saint. "He'd take it as a compliment."
"Why 'Broads'?" she asked, wrinkling her forehead.
"It refers to a hobby of his. How exactly is this bracelet being sent?"
"By post. Mr. Tillson — Broads is coming in tomorrow to see it off and enclose a letter, and a man from the insurance company is coming down as well — that seems an awful lot of formality, but I suppose they have to be careful. Now what do you think will happen? Will Broads pull out a gun and hold us all up?"
"I doubt it," murmured the Saint mildly. "Broads isn't a violent man. Besides, if there was anything like that in the air he'd have done it yesterday. Let me think."
He leaned back and scowled thoughtfully into space. More than once he had truthfully admitted that the solving of ancient mysteries wasn't in his line; but the imaginative construction of forthcoming ones was another matter. The Saint's immoral mind worked best and most rapidly along these lines… And then, as he scowled into space, a headline in the evening paper that was being read by a fat gent at an adjoining table percolated into his abstracted vision; and he sat up with a start that made the fat gent turn round and glare at him.
"I've got it!" he cried. "Whoops — and what a beauty!"
She caught at his sleeve.
"Tell me, Simon."
"No, darling. That I can't do — not till afterwards. But you shall hear it, if you like to meet me again on Saturday. What time is this posting party?"
"Eleven o'clock. But listen — I must tell Mr. Emberton —"
"You must do nothing of the sort." The Saint shook his head at her sadly. "What do you want to do, Ruth — ruin the only bit of business the poor man's done this week? He's got his money, hasn't he? The rest of the show is purely private."
When she continued to try and question him he returned idiotic answers that made her want to smack him; and she went home, provoked and disappointed, and not entirely consoled by his repeated promise to tell her the whole story after it was over.
But her sense of excitement returned when Mr. Tillson presented himself at the office next morning. Looking at that rather pathetically horse-faced gentleman in his faintly clerical garb, it was difficult to believe that he could possibly be the man that the Saint had described. He was punctual to the minute; and the insurance company's representative came in soon afterwards.
She showed them into the inner office, and found it easy to stay around herself while the package was being prepared and sealed. She watched the entire proceedings with what she would always believe was well-simulated unconcern, but which actually would have seemed like a hypnotic stare to anyone who had noticed her; and yet, when it was all over and the various parties had shaken hands and departed, she could not recall the slightest incident that had deviated from the matter-of-fact formality which should have been expected of the affair.
She even began to wonder, with a feeling that her doubt was almost sacrilegious, whether the Saint could have been mistaken…
Mr. Alfred Tillson was not so reassured. He was perspiring a little when he met Happy Fred Jorman on the street corner.
"Yes, I effected the substitution," he said shortly, in answer to his partner's questions. "I trust I have aroused no suspicion. There was a kind of girl amanuensis in the room all the time, and she stared at me from the minute I arrived until the minute I left. I expected her to make some comment at any moment but she took her eyes off me for a second when I knocked my hat off the desk. Let's get back to my hotel."
They took a taxi to the hotel in Bloomsbury where Mr. Tillson had taken a modest suite — Broads Tillson had luxurious tastes which had never helped him to save money, and he had insisted that this setting was necessary for the character he had to play. Happy Fred Jorman, whose liberty was not in jeopardy, was elated.
"That was just your imagination, Broads," he said as they let themselves in. "She was probably wishing she had a friend who sent her thousand-pound bracelets. It's just the newness of it that's upset you — you'll get used to it after you've done it a few times. I was saying to myself all the time you were practising. 'Fred,' I was saying. 'Broads Tilson rings the changes better than anyone else you've ever met in your life. You've picked the best partner—' "
Mr. Tillson poured himself out a whisky-and-soda and sank into a chair. From his breast pocket he drew a packet with one seal on it — it was the exact replica of the packet that had been mailed to Paris, as it had appeared after the first seal had been placed on it in Mr. Emberton's office.
"You'll have to fence the article, Fred," said Mr. Tillson. "I've never had anything to do with such things."
"I'll fence it all right," said Happy Fred. "We'll get four hundred for it easily. And then what happens? That other little packet I registered at the same time blows off and sets the mailbag on fire in the train, and when they've cleared up the mess they find your bracelet is missing. Then there's just another sensational mail-bag robbery for the newspapers, and everybody's wondering how it was done; while we just collect the insurance money. That's four hundred pounds profit for a couple of hours' work, and we can turn that over every week while it lasts."
Happy Fred slapped his thigh. "Gosh, Broads, when I think of the money we're going to make out of that idea of mine —"
"You might live to make it," remarked a very pleasant voice behind them, "if you both sat quite still."
The two men did not sit quite still. They would have been superhuman stoics if they had. They spun around as if they had each been hit on the side of the jaw with a blackjack. And they saw the Saint.
The door of Mr. Tillson's private bathroom had opened and closed while they were talking without them hearing it; and now it served as a neat white background for the lean and smiling man who was propping himself gracefully up against it. There was an automatic in his hand, and it turned from side to side in a lazy arc that gave each of them an opportunity to blink down its black uncompromising barrel.
"Possibly I intrude," murmured the Saint, very pleasantly; "but that's just too bad."
On the faces of the two men were expressions of mingled astonishment, fear, indignation, horror and simple wrath, which would have done credit to a pair of dyspeptic cows that had received an electric shock from a clump of succulent grass. And then Mr. Tillson's voice returned.
"Good God!" he squeaked. "It's the man I was telling you about —"
"The bloke I was telling you about!" ejaculated Happy Fred savagely. "The skunk who took thirty pounds of my money in the Alexandra, and then —"
The two men's heads revolved until they looked into each other's eyes and gazed into the souls beyond. And the Saint. hitched himself off the door and came towards them.
"A very neat piece of work, if I may say so, Fred," he remarked. "Not so original as it might have been, perhaps, but new enough. It's very kind of you to have worked so hard for me."
"What are you going to do?" asked Mr. Tillson weakly.
Simon took the packet out of his hands.
"Relieve you of this encumbrance, brother. It's a very pretty bracelet, but I don't think you could wear it. People might think it was rather odd."
"I'll have the police on to you for this, you —"
Simon raised his eyebrows. "The police? To tell them that I've stolen your bracelet? But I understood your bracelet was in the mail, on its way to your little girl in Paris? Can I be mistaken, Alfred?"
Mr. Tillson swallowed painfully; and then Happy Fred jumped up.
"Damn the police!" he snarled. "I'll settle with this bluffer. He wouldn't dare to shoot —"
"Oh, but you're quite wrong about that," said the Saint gently. "I shouldn't have any objection to shooting you if you asked for it. It's quite a long time since I last shot anyone, and I often feel afraid that if I abstain for too long I may get squeamish. Don't tempt me, Fred, because I'm feeling nervous enough already."
But the Saint's blue eyes were as steady as the gun in his hand, and it was Happy Fred's gaze that wavered.
"I shall have to tie you up while I make my getaway," said the Saint amiably, "so would you both mind turning around? You'll be able to undo yourselves quite quickly after I've gone."
"You wouldn't be a part to a low insurance swindle, would you?" protested Happy Fred aggrievedly, as the Saint looped coils of rope over his wrists.
"I wouldn't be a party to any kind of swindle," said the Saint virtuously. "I'm an honest holdup man, and your insurance policies have nothing to do with me."
He completed the roping of the two men, roughly gagged them with their own handkerchiefs, and retreated leisurely to the door.