13 The Saint Intervenes (Boodle)

Mr. Tanfold had more things to say, but caught a glimpse of the unholy light in Mr. Tombs's mild blue eye, and changed his mind in the nick of time. He gathered up his hat and stick and got out.

In one of the washrooms of the hotel he repaired some of the damage that had been done to his natty appearance, and reflected malevolently that Mr. Tombs was somewhat op­timistic if he thought he was going to secure his negative for a paltry ten thousand pounds after what had happened. In a day or two he would make a further demand—but this time he would take the precaution of doing it by telephone. With a photograph like that in his possession, Mr. Tanfold could see nothing to stop him bleeding his victim to the verge of suicide; and he was venomously prepared to do it.

He looked at the cheque again. It was made payable to Bearer, and was drawn on a bank in Berkeley Street. Ten minutes later he was passing it through the grille.

"Do you mind waiting a few moments, sir?" said the cashier. "I don't know whether we have enough currency to meet this without sending out."

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."