"The secret of contentment," said Simon Templar oratorically, "is to take things as they come. As is the daily office-work of the City hog in his top hat to the moments when he signs his supreme mergers, so are the bread-and-butter exploits of a pirate to his great adventures. After all, one can't always be ploughing through thrilling escapes and captures with guns popping in all directions; but there are always people who'll give you money. You don't even have to look for them. You just put on a monocle and the right expression of half-wittedness, and they come up and tip their purses into your lap."
He offered this pearl of thought for the approval of his usual audience; and it is a regrettable fact that neither of them disputed his philosophy. Patricia Holm knew him too well; and even Peter Quentin had by that time walked in the ways of Saintly lawlessness long enough to know that such pronouncements inevitably heralded another of the bread-and-butter exploits referred to. It wasn't, of course, strictly true that Simon Templar was in need of bread and butter; but he liked jam with it, and a generous world had always provided him abundantly with both.
Benny Lucek came over from New York on a falling market to try his luck in the Old World. He had half-a-dozen natty suits which fitted him so well that he always looked as if he would have burst open from his wrists to his hips if his blood-pressure had risen two degrees, he had a selection of mauve and pink silk shirts in his wardrobe trunk, pointed and beautifully polished shoes for his feet, a pearl pin for his tie, and no less than three rings for his fingers. His features radiated honesty, candour, and good humour; and as a stock-in-trade those gifts alone were worth several figures of solid cash to him in any state of the market.
Also he still had a good deal of capital, without which no Green Goods man can even begin to operate.
Benny Lucek was one of the last great exponents of that gentle graft; and although they had been telling him in New York that the game was played out, he had roseate hopes of finding virgin soil for a new crop of successes among the benighted bourgeoisie of Europe. So far as he knew, the Green Goods ground had scarcely been touched on the eastern side of the Atlantic, and Benny had come across to look it over. He installed himself in a comfortable suite on the third floor of the Park Lane Hotel, changed his capital into English banknotes, and sent out his feelers into space.
In the most popular Personal Columns appeared temptingly-worded advertisements of which the one that Simon Templar saw was a fair specimen.
ANY LADY or GENTLEMAN in reduced circumstances, — who would be interested in an enterprise showing GREAT PROFITS for a NEGLIGIBLE RISK, should write in STRICT CONFIDENCE, giving some personal information, to Box No.—
Benny Lucek knew everything there was to know about letters. He was a practical graphologist of great astuteness, and a deductive psychologist of vast experience. Given a two-page letter which on the surface conveyed the vaguest particulars about the writer, he could build up in his mind a character study with a complete background filled in that fitted his subject without a wrinkle ninety-nine times out of a hundred; and if the mental picture he formed of a certain Mr. Tombs, whose reply to that advertisement was included among several scores of others, was one of the hundredth times, it might not have been entirely Benny's fault. Simon Templar was also a specialist in letters, although his art was creative instead of critical.
Patricia came in one morning and found him performing another creative feat at which he was no less adept.
"What on earth are you doing in those clothes?" she asked, when she had looked at him.
Simon glanced over himself in the mirror. His dark blue suit was neat but unassuming, and had a well-worn air as if it were the only one he possessed and had been cared for with desperate pride. His shoes were old and strenuously polished; his socks dark grey and woollen, carefully darned. He wore a cheap pin-striped poplin shirt, and a stiff white collar without one saving grace of line. His tie was dark blue, like his suit, and rather stringy. Across his waistcoat hung an old-fashioned silver watch-chain. Anything less like the Simon Templar of normal times, who always somehow infused into the suits of Savile Row a flamboyant personality of his own, and whose shirts and socks and ties were the envy of the young men who drank with him in a few clubs to which he belonged, it would have been almost impossible to imagine.
"I am a hard-working clerk in an insurance office, earning three hundred a year with the dim prospect of rising to three hundred and fifty in another fifteen years, age about forty, with an anaemic wife and seven children and a semi-detached house at Streatham." He was fingering his face speculatively, staring at it in the glass. "A little too beautiful for the part at present, I think; but we'll soon put that right."
He set to work on his face with the quick unhesitating touches of which he was such an amazing master. His eyebrows, brushed in towards his nose, turned grey and bushy; his hair also turned grey, and was plastered down to his skull so skilfully that it seemed inevitable that any barber he went to would remark that he was running a little thin on top. Under the movements of his swift fingers, cunning shadows appeared at the sides of his forehead, under his eyes, and around his chin — shadows so faint that even at a yard's range their artificiality could not have been detected, and yet so cleverly placed that they seemed to change the whole shape and expression of his face. And while he worked he talked.
"If you ever read a story-book, Pat, in which anyone disguises himself as someone else so perfectly that the impersonated bloke's own friends and secretaries and servants are taken in, you'll know there's an author who's cheating on you. On the stage it might be done up to a point; but in real life, where everything you put on has got to get by in broad daylight and close-ups, it's impossible. I," said the Saint unblushingly, "am the greatest character actor that never went on the stage, and I know. But when it comes to inventing a new character of your own that mustn't be recognised again — then you can do things."
He turned around suddenly, and she gasped. He was perfect. His shoulders were rounded and stooping; his head was bent slightly forward, as if set in that position by years of poring over ledgers. And he gazed at her with the dumb passionless expression of his part — an under-nourished, under-exercised, middle-aged man without hopes or ambitions, permanently worried, crushed out of pleasure by the wanton taxation which goes to see that the paladins of Whitehall are never deprived of an afternoon's golf, utterly resigned to the sombre purposelessness of his existence, scraping and pinching through fifty weeks in the year in order to let himself be stodgily swindled at the seaside for a fortnight in August, solemnly discussing the antics of politicians as if they really mattered and honestly believing that their cow-like utterances might do something to alleviate his burdens, holding a crumbling country together with his own dour stoicism and the stoicism of millions of his own kind…
"Will I do?" he asked.
From Benny Lucek's point of view he could scarcely have done better. Benny's keen eyes absorbed the whole atmosphere of him in one calculating glance that took in every detail from the grey hair that was running a little thin on top down to the strenuously polished shoes.
"Pleased to meet you, Mr. Tombs. Come along and have a cocktail — I expect you could do with one."
He led his guest into the sumptuous lounge, and Mr. Tombs sat down gingerly on the edge of a chair. It is impossible to refer to that man of the Saint's creation as anything but "Mr. Tombs" — the Simon Templar whom Patricia knew might never have existed inside that stoical stoop-shouldered frame.
"Er — a glass of sherry, perhaps," he said.
Benny ordered Dry Sack, and knew that the only sherry Mr. Tombs had ever tasted before came from the nearest grocer. But he was an expert at putting strangers at their ease, and the Simon Templar who stood invisibly behind Mr. Tombs's chair had to admire his technique. He chattered away with a disarming lack of condescension that presently had Mr. Tombs leaning back and chuckling with him, and ordering a return round of Dry Sack with the feeling that he had at last met a successful man who really understood and appreciated him. They went in to lunch with Benny roaring with infectious laughter over a vintage Stock Exchange story which Mr. Tombs had dug out of his memory.
"Smoked salmon, Mr. Tombs? Or a spot of caviare?.. Then we might have oeufs en cocotte Rossini — done in cream with foie gras and truffles. And roast pigeons with mushrooms and red currant jelly. I like a light meal in the middle of the day — it doesn't make you sleepy all the afternoon. And a bottle of Liebfraumilch off the ice to go with it?"
He ran through menu and wine list with an engaging expertness which somehow made Mr. Tombs an equal partner in the exercise of gastronomic virtuosity. And Mr. Tombs, whose imagination had rarely soared above roast beef and Yorkshire pudding and a bottle of Australian burgundy, thawed still further and recalled another story that had provoked howls of laughter in Threadneedle Street when he was in his twenties.
Benny did his work so well that the sordid business aspect of their meeting never had a chance to obtrude itself during the meal; and yet he managed to find out everything he wanted to know about his guest's private life and opinions. Liquefying helplessly in the genial warmth of Benny's hospitality, Mr. Tombs became almost human. And Benny drew him on with unhurried mastery.
"I've always thought that insurance must be an interesting profession, Mr. Tombs. You've got to be pretty wide awake for it, too — I expect you always have clients who expect to take more out of you than they put in?"
Mr. Tombs, who had never found his job interesting, and who would never have detected an attempted fraud unless another department had pointed it out to him, smiled noncommittally.
"That kind of mixed morality has always interested me," said Benny, as if the point had only just occurred to him. "A man who wouldn't steal a sixpence from a man he met in the street hasn't any objection to stealing half-crowns from the Government by cutting down his income tax return or smuggling home a bottle of brandy when he comes across from France. If he's looking for a partner in business he wouldn't dream of putting a false value on his assets; but if his house is burgled he doesn't mind what value he puts on his things when he's making out his insurance claim."
Mr. Tombs shrugged.
"I suppose Governments and wealthy public companies are considered fair game," he hazarded.
"Well, probably there's a certain amount of lawlessness in the best of us," admitted Benny. "I've often wondered what I should do myself in certain circumstances. Suppose, for instance, you were going home in a taxi one night, and you found a wallet on the seat with a thousand pounds in it. Small notes that you could easily change. No name inside to show who the owner was. Wouldn't one be tempted to keep it?"
Mr. Tombs twiddled a fork, hesitating only for a second or two. But the Simon Templar who stood behind his chair knew that that was the question on which Benny Lucek's future hung — the point that had been so casually and skilfully led up to, which would finally settle whether "Mr. Tombs" was the kind of man Benny wanted to meet. And yet there was no trace of anxiety or watchfulness in Benny's frank open face.
Benny tilted the last of the Liebfraumilch into Mr. Tombs's glass, and Mr. Tombs looked up.
"I suppose I should. It sounds dishonest, but I was trying to put myself in the position of being faced with the temptation, instead of theorising about it. Face to face with a thousand pounds in cash, and needing money to take my wife abroad, I might easily — er — succumb. Not that I mean to imply —"
"My dear fellow, I'm not going to blame you," said Benny heartily. "I'd do the same thing myself. I'd reason it out that a man who carried a thousand pounds in cash about with him had plenty more in the bank. It's the old story of fair game. We may be governed by plenty of laws, but our consciences are still very primitive when we've no fear of being caught."
There was a silence after that, in which Mr. Tombs finished his last angel on horseback, mopped the plate furtively with the last scrap of toast, and accepted a cigarette from Benny's platinum case. The pause gave him his first chance to remember that he was meeting the sympathetic Mr. Lucek in order to hear about a business proposition — as Benny intended that it should. As a waiter approached with the bill, Mr. Tombs said tentatively: "About your — um — advertisement —"
Benny scrawled his signature across the account, and pushed back his chair.
"Come up to my sitting-room and we'll talk about it."
They went up in the lift, with Benny unconcernedly puffing Turkish cigarette smoke, and down an expensively carpeted corridor. Benny had an instinctive sense of dramatic values. Without saying anything, and yet at the same time without giving the impression that he was being intentionally reticent, he opened the door of his suite and ushered Mr. Tombs in.
The sitting-room was small but cosily furnished. A large carelessly-opened paper parcel littered the table in the centre, and there was a similar amount of litter in one of the chairs. Benny picked up an armful of it and dumped it on the floor in the corner.
"Know what these things are?" he asked off-handedly.
He took up a handful of the litter that remained on the chair and thrust it under Mr. Tombs's nose. It was generally green in colour; as Mr. Tombs blinked at it, words and patterns took shape on it, and he blinked still harder.
"Pound notes," said Benny. He pointed to the pile he had dumped in the corner. "More of 'em." He flattened the brown paper around the carelessly-opened parcel on the table, revealing neat stacks of treasure packed in thick uniform bundles. "Any amount of it. Help yourself."
Mr. Tombs's blue eyes went wider and wider, with the lids blinking over them rapidly as if to dispel an hallucination.
"Are they — are they really all pound notes?"
"Every one of 'em."
"All yours?"
"I guess so. I made 'em, anyway."
"There must be thousands."
Benny flung himself into the cleared armchair.
"I'm about the richest man in the world, Mr. Tombs," he said. "I guess I must be the richest, because I can make money as fast as I can turn a handle. I meant exactly what I said to you just now. I made those notes!"
Mr. Tombs touched the pile with his finger tips, as if he half expected them to bite him. His eyes were rounder and wider than ever.
"You don't mean — forgeries?" he whispered.
"I don't," said Benny. "Take those notes to the nearest bank — tell the cashier you have doubts about them — and ask him to look them over. Take 'em to the Bank of England. There isn't a forgery in the whole lot — but I made 'em! Sit down and I'll tell you."
Mr. Tombs sat down, stiffly. His eyes kept straying back to the heaps of wealth on the floor and the table, as though at each glance he would have been relieved rather than surprised if they had vanished.
"It's like this, Mr. Tombs. I'm taking you into my confidence because I've known you a couple of hours and I've made up my mind about you. I like you. Those notes, Mr. Tombs, were printed from a proof plate that was stolen out of the Bank of England itself by a fellow who worked there. He was in the engraving department, and when they were making the plates they made one more than they needed. It was given to him to destroy — and he didn't destroy it. He was like the man we were talking about — the man in the taxi. He had a genuine plate that would print genuine pound notes, and he could keep it for himself if he wanted to. All he had to do was to make an imitation plate that no one was going to examine closely — you can't tell a lot from a plate, just looking at it — and cut a couple of lines across it to cancel it. Then that would be locked up in the vaults and probably never looked at again, and he'd have the real one. He didn't even know quite what he'd do with the plate when he had it, but he kept it. And then he got scared about it being found out, and he ran away. He went over to New York, where I come from.
"He stopped in the place I lived at, over in Brooklyn. I got to know him a bit, though he was always very quiet and seemed to have something on his mind. I didn't ask what it was, and I didn't care. Then he got pneumonia.
"Nobody else had ever paid any attention to him, so it seemed to be up to me. I did what I could for him — it didn't amount to much, but he appreciated it. I paid some of the rent he owed. The doctor found he was half starved — he'd landed in New York with just a few pounds, and when those were gone he'd lived on the leavings he could beg from chop houses. He was starving himself to death with a million pounds in his grip! But I didn't know that then. He got worse and worse; and then they had to give him oxygen one night, but the doctor said he wouldn't see the morning anyhow. He'd starved himself till he was too weak to get well again.
"He came to just before the end, and I was with him. He just looked at me and said: 'Thanks, Benny.' And then he told me all about himself and what he'd done. 'You keep the plate,' he said. 'It may be some good to you.'
"Well, he died in the morning, and the landlady told me to hurry up and get his things out of the way as there was another lodger coming in. I took 'em off to my own room. There wasn't much; but I found the plate.
"Maybe you can imagine what it meant to me, after I'd got it all figured out. I was just an odd-job man in a garage then, earning a few dollars a week. I was the man in the taxi again. But I had a few dollars saved up; I'd have to find the right paper, and get the notes printed — I didn't know anything about the technical side of it. It'd cost money; but if it went through all right that poor fellow's legacy would make me a millionaire. He'd starved to death because he was too scared to try it; had I got the guts?"
Benny Lucek closed his eyes momentarily, as if he were reliving the struggle with his conscience.
"You can see for yourself which way I decided," he said. "It took time and patience, but it was still the quickest way of making a million I'd ever heard of. That was six years ago. I don't know how much money I've got in the bank now, but I know it's more than I can ever spend. And it was like that all of three years ago.
"And then I started thinking about the other people who needed money, and I began to square my conscience by helping them. I was working over in the States then, of course, changing this English money in small packets at banks all over the continent. And I started giving it away — charities, down-and-outs, any good thing I could think of. That was all right so far as it went. But then I started thinking, that fellow who gave me the plate was English, and some of the money ought to go back to people in England who needed it. That's why I came across. Did I tell you that fellow left a wife behind when he ran away? It took me two months to find her, with the best agents I could buy; but I located her at last serving in a tea-shop, and now I've set her on her feet for life, though she thinks it was an uncle she never had who died and left her the money. But if I can find any other fellow whose wife needs some money he can't earn for her," said Benny nobly, "I want to help him too."
Mr. Tombs swallowed. Benny Lucek was a master of elocution among his other talents, and the manner of his recital was calculated to bring a lump into the throat of an impressionable listener.
"Would you like some money, Mr. Tombs?" he inquired.
Mr. Tombs coughed.
"I — er — well — I can't quite get over the story you've told me."
He picked up a handful of the notes, peered at them minutely, screwed them in his fingers, and put them down again rather abruptly and experimentally, as if he were trying to discover whether putting temptation from him would bring a glow of conscious virtue that would compensate for the worldly loss. Apparently the experiment was not very satisfactory, for his mouth puckered wistfully.
"You've told me all about yourself," said Benny, "and about your wife being delicate and needing to go away for a long sea voyage. I expect there's trouble about getting your children a proper education that you haven't mentioned at all. You're welcome to put all that right. You can buy just as many of these notes as you like, and twenty pounds per hundred is the price to you. That's exactly what they cost me in getting the special paper and inks and having them printed — the man I found to print 'em for me gets a big rake-off, of course. Four shillings each is the cost price, and you can make yourself a millionaire if you want to."
Mr. Tombs gulped audibly.
"You're — you're not pulling" my leg, are you?" he stammered pathetically.
"Of course I'm not. I'm glad to do it." Benny stood up and placed one hand affectionately on Mr. Tombs's shoulders. "Look here, I know all this must have been a shock to you. It wants a bit of getting used to. Why don't you go away and think it over? Come and have lunch with me again tomorrow, if you want some of these notes, and bring the money with you to pay for them. Call me at seven o'clock and let me know if I'm to expect you." He picked up a small handful of money and stuffed it into Mr. Tombs's pocket. "Here — take some samples with you and try them on a bank, just in case you still can't believe it."
Mr. Tombs nodded, blinking.
"I'm the man in the taxi again," he said with a weak smile.
"When you really do find the wallet —"
"Who loses by it?" asked Benny, with gently persuasive rhetoric. "The Bank of England, eventually. I never learnt any economics, but I suppose they'll have to meet the bill. But are they going to be any the worse off for the few thousands you'll take out of them? Why, it won't mean any more to them than a penny does to you now. Think it over."
"I will," said Mr. Tombs, with a last lingering stare at the littered table.
"There's just one other thing," said Benny. "Not a word of what I've told you to any living soul — not even to your wife. I'm trusting you to treat it as confidentially as you'd treat anything in your insurance business. You can see why, can't you? A story like I've told you would spread like wildfire, and once it got to the Bank of England there'd be no more money in it. They'd change the design of their notes and call in all the old ones as quick as I can say it."
"I understand, Mr. Lucek," said Mr. Tombs.
He understood perfectly — so well that the rapturous tale he told to Patricia Holm when he returned was almost incoherent. He told her while he was removing his make-up and changing back into his ordinary clothes; and when he had finished he was as immaculate and debonair as she had ever seen him. And finally he smoothed out the notes that Benny had given him at parting, and stowed them carefully in his wallet. He looked at his watch.
"Let's go and see a show, darling," he said, "and then we'll buy a pailful of caviare between us and swill it down with a gallon of Bollinger. Brother Benjamin will pay!"
"But are you sure these notes are perfect?" she asked; and the Saint laughed.
"My sweetheart, every one of those notes was printed by the Bank of England itself. The green goods game is nothing like that; though I've often wondered why it hasn't been worked before in this — Gott in Himmel!"
Simon Templar suddenly leapt into the air with a yell; and the startled girl stared at him.
"What in the name of —"
"Just an idea," explained the Saint. "They sometimes take me in the seat of the pants like that. This is rather a beauty."
He swept her off boisterously to the promised celebrations without telling her what the idea was that had made him spring like a young ram with loud foreign oaths; but at seven o'clock punctually he found time to telephone the Park Lane Hotel.
"I'm going to do what the man in the taxi would do, Mr. Lucek," he said.
"Well, Mr. Tombs, that's splendid news," responded Benny."I'll expect you at one. By the way, how much will you be taking?"
"I'm afraid I can only manage to — um — raise three hundred pounds. That will buy fifteen hundred pounds' worth, won't it?"
"I'll make it two thousand pounds' worth to you, Mr. Tombs," said Benny generously. "I'll have it all ready for you when you come."
Mr. Tombs presented himself at five minutes to one, and although he wore the same suit of clothes as he had worn the previous day, there was a festive air about him to which a brand-new pair of white kid gloves and a carnation in his button-hole colourfully contributed.
"I handed in my resignation at the office this morning," he said. "And I hope I never see the place again."
Benny was congratulatory but apologetic.
"I'm afraid we shall have to postpone our lunch," he said. "I've been investigating a lady who also answered my advertisement — a poor old widow living up in Derbyshire. Her husband deserted her twenty years ago; and her only son, who's been keeping her ever since, was killed in a motor accident yesterday. It seems as if she needs a fairy godfather quickly, and I'm going to dash up to Derbyshire and see what I can do."
Mr. Tombs suppressed a perfunctory tear, and accompanied Benny to his suite. A couple of well-worn suit-cases and a wardrobe trunk the size of a suburban villa, all ready stacked up and labelled, confirmed Benny's avowed intentions. Only one of the parcels of currency was visible, pushed untidily to one end of the table.
"Did you bring the money, Mr. Tombs?"
Mr. Tombs took out his battered wallet and drew forth a sheaf of crisp new fivers with slightly unsteady hands. Benny took them, glanced over them casually, and dropped them on to the table with the carelessness befitting a millionaire. He waved Mr. Tombs into an armchair with his back to the window, and himself sat down in a chair drawn up to the opposite side of the table.
"Two thousand one-pound notes are quite a lot to put in your pocket," he remarked. "I'll make them up into a parcel for you."
Under Mr. Tombs's yearning eyes he flipped off the four top bundles from the pile and tossed them one by one into his guest's lap. Mr. Tombs grabbed them and examined them hungrily, spraying the edges of each pack off his thumb so that pound notes whirred before his vision like the pictures on a toy cinematograph.
"You can count them if you like — there ought to be five hundred in each pack," said Benny; but Mr. Tombs shook his head.
"I'll take your word for it, Mr. Lucek. I can see they're all one-pound notes, and there must be a lot of them."
Benny smiled and held out his hand with a businesslike air. Mr. Tombs passed the bundles back to him, and Benny sat down again and arranged them in a neat cube on top of a sheet of brown paper. He turned the paper over the top and creased it down at the open ends with a rapid efficiency that would have done credit to any professional shop assistant; and Mr. Tombs's covetous eyes watched every movement with the intentness of a dumb but earnest audience trying to spot how a conjuring trick is done.
"Don't you think it would be a ghastly tragedy for a poor widow who put all her savings into these notes and then found that she had been — um — deceived?" said Mr. Tombs morbidly; and Benny's dark eyes switched up to his face in sudden startlement.
"Eh?" said Benny. "What's that?"
But Mr. Tombs's careworn face had the innocence of a patient sheep's.
"Just something I was thinking, Mr. Lucek," he said.
Benny grinned his expansive display of pearly teeth, and continued with his packing. Mr. Tombs's gaze continued to concentrate on him with an almost mesmeric effect; but Benny was not disturbed. He had spent nearly an hour that morning making and testing his preparations. The upper sash-cords of the window behind Mr. Tombs's chair had been cut through all but the last thread, and the weight of the sash was carried on a small steel peg driven into the frame. From the steel peg a thin but very strong dark-coloured string ran down to the floor, pulleyed round a nail driven into the base of the wainscoting, and disappeared under the carpet; it pulleyed round another nail driven into the floor under the table, and came up through a hole in the carpet alongside one leg to loop conveniently over the handle of the drawer.
Benny completed the knots around his parcel, and searched around for something to trim off the loose ends.
"There you are, Mr. Tombs," he said and then, in his fumbling, he caught the convenient loop of string and tugged at it. The window fell with a crash.
And Mr. Tombs did not look around.
It was the most flabbergasting thing that had ever happened in Benny Lucek's experience. It was supernatural — incredible. It was a phenomenon so astounding that Benny's mouth fell open involuntarily, while a balloon of incredulous stupefaction bulged up in the pit of his stomach and cramped his lungs. There came over him the feeling of preposterous injury that would have assailed a practised bus-jumper who, preparing to board a moving bus as it came by, saw it evade him by rising vertically into the air and soaring away over the housetops. It was simply one of the things that did not happen.
And on this fantastic occasion it happened. In the half-opened drawer that pressed against Benny's tummy, just below the level of the table and out of range of Mr. Tombs's glassy stare, was another brown paper parcel exactly similar in every respect to the one which Benny was finishing off. Outwardly, that is. Inside, there was a difference; for whereas inside the parcel which Benny had prepared before Mr. Tombs's eyes there were undoubtedly two thousand authentic one-pound notes, inside the second parcel there was only a collection of old newspapers and magazines cut to precisely the same size. And never before in Benny's career, once the fish had taken the hook, had those two parcels failed to be successfully exchanged. That was what the providentially falling window was arranged for, and it constituted the whole simple secret of the green goods game. The victim, when he got home and opened the parcel and discovered how he had been swindled, could not make a complaint to the police without admitting that he himself had been ready to aid and abet a fraud; and forty-nine times out of fifty he would decide that it was better to stand the loss and keep quiet about it. Elementary, but effective. And yet the whole structure could be scuppered by the unbelievable apathy of a victim who failed to react to the stimulus of a loud bang as any normal human being should have reacted.
"The — the window seems to have fallen down," Benny pointed out hoarsely; and felt like a hero of a melodrama who has just shot the villain in the appointed place at the end of the third act, and sees him smilingly declining to fall down and die according to the rehearsed script.
"Yes," agreed Mr. Tombs cordially. "I heard it."
"The — the sash-cords must have broken."
"Probably that's what it was."
"Funny thing to happen so — so suddenly, wasn't it?"
"Very funny," assented Mr. Tombs, keeping up the conversation politely.
Benny began to sweat. The substitute parcel was within six inches of his hovering hands: given only two seconds with the rapt stare of those unblinking eyes diverted from him, he could have rung the changes as easily as unbuttoning his shirt; but the chance was not given. It was an impasse that he had never even dreamed of, and the necessity of thinking up something to cope with it on the spur of the moment stampeded him to the borders of panic.
"Have you got a knife?" asked Benny, with perspiring heartiness. "Something to cut off this end of string?"
"Let me break it for you," said Mr. Tombs.
He stood up and moved towards the table; and Benny shied like a horse.
"Don't bother, please, Mr. Tombs," he gulped. "I'll — I'll —"
"No trouble at all," said Mr. Tombs.
Benny grabbed the parcel, and dropped it. He was a very fine strategist and dramatic reciter, but he was not a man of violence — otherwise he might have been tempted to act differently. That grab and drop was the last artifice he could think of to save the day.
He pushed his chair back and bent down, groping for the fallen parcel with one hand and the substitute parcel with the other. In raising the fallen packet past the table the exchange might be made.
His left hand found the parcel on the floor. His right hand went on groping. It ran up and down the drawer, sensitively at first, then frantically. It plunged backwards and forwards. His fingernails scrabbled on the wood… He became aware that he couldn't stay in that position indefinitely, and began to straighten up slowly, with a cold sensation closing on his heart. And as his eyes came up to the level of the drawer he saw that the dummy parcel had somehow got pushed right away to the back: for all the use it would have been to him there it might have been in the middle of the Arizona desert.
Mr. Tombs smiled blandly.
"It's quite easy, really," he said.
He took the parcel from Benny's nerveless hand, put it on the table, twisted the loose end of string round his forefinger, and jerked. It snapped off clean and short.
"A little trick of mine," said Mr. Tombs chattily. He picked up the parcel and held out his hand. "Well, Mr. Lucek, you must know how grateful I am. You mustn't let me keep you any longer from your — um — widow. Good-bye, Mr. Lucek."
He wrung Benny Lucek's limp fingers effusively, and retired towards the door. There was something almost sprightly in his gait, a twinkle in his blue eyes that had certainly not been there before, a seraphic benevolence about his smile that made Benny go hot and cold. It didn't belong to Mr. Tombs of the insurance office…
"Hey — just a minute," gasped Benny; but the door had closed. Benny jumped up, panting. "Hey, you —"
He flung open the door, and looked into the cherubic pink fullmoon face of a very large gentleman in a superfluous overcoat and a bowler hat who stood on the threshold.
"Morning, Mr. Lucek," said the large gentleman sedately. "May I come in?"
He took the permission for granted, and advanced into the sitting-room. The parcel on the table attracted his attention first, and he took up a couple of bundles from the stack and looked them over. Only the top notes in each bundle were genuine pound notes, as the four whole bundles which departed with Mr. Tombs had been: the rest of the thickness was made up with sheets of paper cut to the same size.
"Very interesting," remarked the large gentleman.
"Who the devil are you?" blustered Benny; and the round rosy face turned to him with a very sudden and authoritative directness.
"I am Chief Inspector Teal, of Scotland Yard, and I have information that you are in possession of quantities of forged banknotes."
Benny drew breath again hesitatingly.
"That's absurd, Mr. Teal. You won't find any phoney stuff here," he said; and then the detective's cherubic gaze fell on the sheaf of five-pound notes that Mr. Tombs had left behind in payment.
He picked them up and examined them casually, one by one.
"H'm — and not very good forgeries, either," he said, and called to the sergeant who was waiting in the corridor outside.