The Saint Intervenes (The Saint Series)

by Leslie Charteris

  “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 high-speed 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.”

  Mr Tanfold’s bouncing larynx almost throttled him. Never in all his days had he so much as dreamed of being the victim of such a staggering unblushing impudence. In a kind of daze, he felt himself being gripped by the arm, and a brief panorama of London streets swam dizzily through his vision and dissolved deliriously into the facade of the Palace Royal Hotel. Even the power of speech did not return to him until he found himself once more in the painfully reminiscent surroundings of Mr Tombs’s suite.

  “Well,” he demanded hoarsely, “what’s the game?”

  “The game,” answered Simon Templar genially, “is the royal and ancient sport of hoisting engineers with their own petards, dear old wallaby. Take a look at where you are, Gilbert. I’m here to let you out of the mess—at a price.”

  Mr Tanfold’s mouth opened.

  “But that…that’s blackmail!” he gasped.

  “It doesn’t bother me what you call it,” Simon said calmly. “I want twenty-five thousand pounds to forget that you forged my signature. How about it?”

  “You can’t get it,” Tanfold spat out. “If I published that photograph—”

  “I should laugh myself sick,” said the Saint. “I’m afraid there’s something you’d better get wise to, brother. My father isn’t a prominent Melbourne business man and social reformer at all, except for your benefit, and you can paste enlargements of that picture all over Melbourne Town Hall for all I care. Make some inquiries outside the bar downstairs, gorgeous, and get up to date. Come along, now—which is it to be? Twenty-five thousand smackers or the hoosegow? Take your choice.”

  Mr Tanfold’s face was turning green.

  “I haven’t got so much money in cash,” he squawked.

  “I’ll give you a week to find it,” said the Saint mercilessly, “and I don’t really care much if you do go bankrupt in the process. I find you neither ornamental nor useful. But just in case you think forgery is the only charge you have to answer, you might like to listen to this.”

  He went through the communicating door to the bedroom, and was back in a moment. Suddenly, through the door, Mr Tanfold heard the sounds of his own voice.

  “Let’s talk business…I’ve got a photograph that was taken of you while you were at the studio…”

  With his face going paler and paler, Mr Tanfold listened. He made no sound until the record was finished, and then he let out an abrupt squeal.

  “But that isn’t all of it!” he yelled. “It leaves off before the place where you gave me the cheque!”

  “Of course it does,” said the Saint shamelessly. “That would spike the forgery charge, wouldn’t it? But as it stands, you’ve got two things to answer. First you tried to blackmail me, and then, when you found that wouldn’t work, you forged my signature to a cheque for ten thousand quid. It was all very rash and naughty of you, Gilbert, and I’m sure the police would take a very serious view of the case—particularly after they’d investigated your business a bit more. Well, well, well, brother—we all make mistakes, and I’m afraid I shall have to send that Dictaphone record along to Chief Inspector Teal, as well as charging you with forgery, if you haven’t come through with the spondulix inside seven days.”

  Once again words rose to Mr Tanfold’s lips, and once again, glimpsing the unholy gleam in the Saint’s eye and remembering his previous experience in that room, they stuck in his throat. And once again Simon went to the door and opened it.

  “This is the way out,” said the Saint.

  Mr Gilbert Tanfold moved hazily towards the portal. As he passed through it, a pair of hands fell on his shoulders and steadied him with a light but masterful grip. Some premonition of his fate must have reached him, for his shrill cry disturbed the regal quietude of the Palace Royal Hotel even before the toe of a painfully powerful shoe impacted on his tender posterior had lifted him enthusiastically on his way.

  THE MAN WHO LIKED TOYS

  Chief Inspector Claud Eustace Teal rested his pudgy elbows on the table and unfolded the pink wrappings from a fresh wafer of chewing gum.

  “That’s all there was to it,” he said. “And that’s the way it always is. You get an idea, you spread a net out among the stool pigeons, and you catch a man. Then you do a lot of dull routine work to build up the evidence. That’s how a real detective does his job, and that’s the way Sherlock Holmes would have had to do it if he’d worked at Scotland Yard.”

  Simon Templar grinned amiably, and beckoned a waiter for the bill. The orchestra yawned and went into another dance number, but the floor show had been over for half an hour, and the room was emptying rapidly. It was two o’clock in the morning, and a fair proportion of the patrons of the Palace Royal had some work to think of before the next midnight.

  “Maybe you’re right, Claud,” said the Saint mildly.

  “I know I’m right,” said Mr Teal, in his drowsy voice. And then, as Simon pushed a fiver on to the plate, he chuckled. “But I know you like pulling our legs about it, too.”

  They steered their way around the tables and up the stairs to the hotel lobby. It was another of those rare occasions when Mr Teal had been able to enjoy the Saint’s company without any lurking uneasiness about the outcome. For some weeks his life had been comparatively peaceful. No hints of further Saintly lawlessness had come to his ears.

  At such times he admitted to himself, with a trace of genuine surprise, that there were few things which entertained him more than a social evening with the gay buccaneer who had set Scotland Yard more mysteries than they would ever solve.

  “Drop in and see me next time I’m working on a case, Saint,” Teal said in the lobby, with a truly staggering
generosity for which the wine must have been partly responsible. “You’ll see for yourself how we really do it.”

  “I’d like to,” said the Saint, and if there was the trace of a smile in his eyes when he said it, it was entirely without malice.

  He settled his soft hat on his smooth dark head and glanced around the lobby with the vague aimlessness which ordinarily precedes a parting at that hour. A little group of three men had discharged themselves from a nearby lift and were moving boisterously and a trifle unsteadily towards the main entrance. Two of them were hatted and overcoated—a tallish man with a thin line of black moustache, and a tubby red-faced man with rimless spectacles. The third member of the party, who appeared to be the host, was a flabby flat-footed man of about fifty-five with a round bald head and a rather bulbous nose that would have persuaded any observant onlooker to expect that he would have drunk more than the others, which in fact he obviously had. All of them had the dishevelled and rather tragically ridiculous air of Captains of Industry who have gone off duty for the evening.

  “That’s Lewis Enstone—the chap with the nose,” said Teal, who knew everyone. “He might have been one of the biggest men in the City if he could have kept off the bottle.”

  “And the other two?” asked the Saint incuriously, because he already knew.

  “Just a couple of smaller men in the same game. Albert Costello—that’s the tall one—and John Hammel.” Mr Teal chewed meditatively on his spearmint. “If anything happens to them, I shall want to know where you were at the time,” he added warningly.

  “I shan’t know anything about it,” said the Saint piously.

  He lighted a cigarette and watched the trio of celebrators disinterestedly. Hammel and Costello he knew something about, but the more sozzled member of the party was new to him.

  “You do unnerstan’, boys, don’t you?” Enstone was articulating pathetically, with his arms spread around the shoulders of his guests in an affectionate manner which contributed helpfully towards his support. “It’s jus’ business. I’m not hard-hearted. I’m kind to my wife and children an’ everything, God bless ’em. An’ anytime I can do anything for either of you—why, you jus’ lemme know.”

  “That’s awfully good of you, old man,” said Hammel, with the blurry-eyed solemnity of his condition.

  “Le’s have lunch together on Tuesday,” suggested Costello. “We might be able to talk about something that’d interest you.”

  “Right,” said Enstone dimly. “Lush Tooshday. Hic.”

  “An’ don’t forget the kids,” said Hammel confidentially.

  Enstone giggled.

  “I shouldn’t forget that.” In obscurely elaborate pantomime, he closed his fist with his forefinger extended and his thumb cocked vertically upwards, and aimed the forefinger between Hammel’s eyes. “Shtick ’em up,” he commanded gravely, and at once relapsed into further merriment, in which his guests joined somewhat hysterically.

  The group separated at the entrance amid much handshaking and back-slapping and alcoholic laughter, and Lewis Enstone wended his way back with cautious and preoccupied steps toward the lift. Mr Teal took a fresh bite on his gum and tightened his mouth disgustedly.

  “Is he staying here?” asked the Saint.

  “He lives here,” said the detective. “He’s lived here even when we knew for a fact that he hadn’t got a penny to his name. Why I remember once—”

  He launched into a lengthy anecdote which had all the vitality of personal bitterness in the telling. Simon Templar, listening with the half of one well-trained ear that would prick up into instant attention if the story took any twist that might provide the germ of an adventure, but would remain intently passive if it didn’t, smoked his cigarette and gazed abstractedly into space. His mind had that gift of complete division, and he had another job on hand to think about. Somewhere in the course of the story he gathered that Mr Teal had once lost some money on the Stock Exchange over some shares in which Enstone was speculating, but there was nothing much about that misfortune to attract his interest, and the detective’s mood of disparaging reminiscence was as good an opportunity as any other for him to plot out a few details of the campaign against his latest quarry.

  “…So I lost my money, and I’ve kept the rest of it in gilt-edged stuff ever since,” concluded Mr Teal rancorously, and Simon took the last inhalation from his cigarette and dropped the stub into an ashtray.

  “Thanks for the tip, Claud,” he said lightly. “I gather that next time I murder somebody you’d like me to make it a financier.”

  Teal grunted, and hitched his coat around. “I shouldn’t like you to murder anybody,” he said from his heart. “Now I’ve got to go home—I have to get up in the morning.”

  They walked towards the street doors. On their left they passed the information desk, and beside the desk had been standing a couple of bored and sleepy page-boys. Simon had observed them and their sleepiness as casually as he had observed the colour of the carpet, but all at once he realized that their sleepiness had vanished. He had a sudden queer sensitiveness of suppressed excitement, and then one of the boys said something loud enough to be overheard which stopped Teal in his tracks and turned him abruptly.

  “What’s that?” he demanded.

  “It’s Mr Enstone, sir. He just shot himself.”

  Mr Teal scowled. To the newspapers it would be a surprise and a front-page sensation; to him it was a surprise and a potential menace to his night’s rest if he butted into any responsibility. Then he shrugged.

  “I’d better have a look,” he said, and introduced himself.

  There was a scurry to lead him towards the lifts. Mr Teal ambled bulkily into the nearest car, and quite brazenly the Saint followed him. He had, after all, been kindly invited to “drop in” the next time the plump detective was handling a case. Teal put his hands in his pocket and stared in mountainous drowsiness at the downward-flying shaft. Simon studiously avoided his eye, and had a pleasant shock when the detective addressed him almost genially.

  “I always thought there was something fishy about that fellow. Did he look as if he’d anything to shoot himself about, except the head that was waiting for him when he woke up?”

  It was as if the decease of any financier, however caused, was a benison upon the earth for which Mr Teal could not help being secretly and quite immorally grateful. That was the subtle impression he gave of his private feelings, but the rest of him was impenetrable stolidity and aloofness. He dismissed the escort of page-boys and strode to the door of the millionaire’s suite. It was closed and silent. Teal knocked on it authoritatively, and after a moment it opened six inches and disclosed a pale agitated face. Teal introduced himself again and the door opened wider, enlarging the agitated face into the unmistakable full-length portrait of an assistant manager. Simon followed the detective in, and endeavoured to look equally official.

  “This will be a terrible scandal, Inspector,” said the assistant manager.

  Teal looked at him woodenly.

  “Were you here when it happened?”

  “No. I was downstairs, in my office—”

  Teal collected the information, and ploughed past him. On the right, another door opened off the generous lobby, and through it could be seen another elderly man whose equally pale face and air of suppressed agitation bore a certain general similarity and also a self-contained superiority to the first. Even without his sombre black coat and striped trousers, grey side-whiskers and passive hands, he would have stamped himself as something more cosmic than the assistant manager of a hotel—the assistant manager of a man.

  “Who are you?” asked Teal.

  “I am Fowler, sir. Mr Enstone’s valet.”

  “Were you here?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Where is Mr Enstone?”

  “In the bedroom, sir.”

  They moved back across the lobby, with the assistant manager assuming the lead. Teal stopped.

  “Will you be in
your office if I want you?” he asked with great politeness, and the assistant manager seemed to disappear from the scene even before the door of the suite closed behind him.

  Lewis Enstone was dead. He lay on his back beside the bed, with his head half-rolled over to one side, in such a way that both the entrance and the exit of the bullet which had killed him could be seen. It had been fired squarely into his right eye, leaving the ugly trail which only a heavy-calibre bullet fired at close range can leave…The gun lay under the fingers of his right hand.

  “Thumb on the trigger,” Teal noted aloud.

  He sat on the edge of the bed, pulling on a pair of gloves, pink-faced and unemotional. Simon observed the room. An ordinary, very tidy bedroom, barren of anything unusual except the subdued costliness of furnishing. Two windows, both shut and fastened. On a table in one corner, the only sign of disorder, the remains of a carelessly-opened parcel. Brown paper, ends of string, a plain cardboard box—empty. The millionaire had gone no further towards undressing than loosening his tie and undoing his collar.

  “What happened?” asked Mr Teal.

  “Mr Enstone had friends to dinner, sir,” explained Fowler, “A Mr Costello—”

  “I know that. What happened when he came back from seeing them off?”

  “He went straight to bed, sir.”

  “Was this door open?”

  “At first, sir. I asked Mr Enstone about the morning, and he told me to call him at eight. I then asked him whether he wished me to assist him to undress, and he gave me to understand that he did not. He closed the door, and I went back to the sitting-room.”

  “Did you leave the door open?”

  “Yes, sir. I was doing a little clearing up. Then I heard the shot, sir.”