11 The Brighter Buccaneer

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.