'With that—and your false beard and smoked glasses—you're an excellent imitation of a blackguard,' he said.
'The point is not up for discussion,' said the visitor smoothly. 'Let us confine ourselves to the object of my presence here. Must I repeat that I know you to be a trader in illicit drugs? In this very room, probably, there is enough material evidence to send you to penal servitude for five years. The police, unaided, might search for it in vain. The secret of your ingenious little hiding-place under the floor in that corner might defy their best efforts. They do not know that it will only open when the door of this room is locked and the third and fifth sections of the wainscoting on that wall are slid upwards. But suppose they were anonymously informed——'
'And then found nothing there,' said Montgomery Bird, with equal suavity.
'There would still be other suggestions that I could make,' said the visitor.
He stood up abruptly.
'I hope you understand me,' he said. 'Your offences are no concern of mine, but they would be a great concern of yours if you were placed in the dock to answer for them. They are also too profitable for you to be ready to abandon them—yet. You will therefore pay me one hundred pounds a week for as long as I choose to demand it. Is that sufficiently plain?'
'You——
Montgomery Bird came out of his chair with a rush.
The bearded man was not disturbed. Only his right hand, in his overcoat pocket, moved slightly.
'My—er—elementary bluff is still waiting your investigation,' he said dispassionately, and the other stopped dead.
With his head thrust a little forward, he stared into the tinted lenses that masked the big man's eyes.
'One day I'll get you—you—swine.'
'And until that day, you will continue to pay me one hundred pounds a week, my dear Mr. Bird,' came the gentle response. 'Your next contribution is already due. If it is not troubling you too much——
He did not bother to complete the sentence. He simply waited.
Bird went back to the desk and opened a drawer. He took out an envelope and threw it on the blotter.
'Thank you,' said the visitor.
His fingers had just touched the envelope when the shrill scream of a bell froze him into immobility. It was not an ordinary bell. It had a vociferous viciousness about it that stung the eardrums—something like the magnified buzzing of an infuriated wasp.
'What is that?'
'My private alarm.'
Bird glanced at the illuminated clock on the mantelpiece; and the visitor, following the glance, saw that the dial had turned red.
'A police raid?'
'Yes.'
The big man picked up the envelope and thrust it into his pocket.
'You will get me out of here,' he said.
Only a keen ear would have noticed the least fraying of the edges of his measured accents; but Montgomery Bird noticed it, and looked at him curiously.
'If I didn't——
'You would be foolish—very foolish,' said the visitor quietly.
Bird moved back, with murderous eyes. Set in one wall was a large mirror; he put his hands to the frame of it and pushed it bodily sideways in invisible grooves, revealing a dark rectangular opening.
And it was at that moment that Simon Templar, for his own inscrutable reasons, tired of his voluntary exile.
'Stand clear of the lift gates, please,' he murmured.
To the two men, wheeling round at the sound of his voice like a pair of marionettes whose control wires have got mixed up with a dynamo, it seemed as if he had appeared out of the fourth dimension. Just for an instant. And then they saw the open door of the capacious cupboard behind him.
