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.
The Blind Spot
IT is rather trite to remark that the greatest and sublimest characters always have concealed in them somewhere a speck of human jelly that wobbles furtively behind the imposing armour-plate, as if Nature's sense of proportion refused to tolerate such a thing as a perfect superman. Achilles had his heel. The hard-boiled hoodlum weeps openly to the strains of a syncopated Mammy song. The learned judge gravely inquires: 'What is a gooseberry?' The Cabinet Minister prances pontificalty about the badminton court. The professor of theology knows the Saint Saga as well as the Epistle to the Ephesians. These things are familiar to every student of the popular newspapers.
But to Simon Templar they were more than mere curious facts, to be ranked with 'Believe-it-or-not' strips or popular articles describing the architectural principles of the igloo. They were the very practical psychology of his profession.
'Every man on earth has at least one blind spot somewhere,' Simon used to say, 'and once you've found that spot you've got him. There's always some simple little thing that'll undermine his resistance, or some simple little trick that he's never heard of. A high-class card-sharper might never persuade him to play bridge for more than a penny a hundred, and yet a three-card man at a race track might take a fiver off him in five minutes. Develop that into a complete technique, and you can live in luxury without running any risks of getting brain fever.'
One of Simon Templar's minor weaknesses was an insatiable curiosity. He met Patricia at Charing Cross underground station one afternoon with a small brown bottle.
'A man at the Irving Statue sold me this for a shilling,' he said.
The broad reach of pavement around the Irving Statue, at the junction of Green Street and Charing Cross Road, is one of the greatest open-air theatres in London. Every day, at lunchtime, idle crowds gather there in circles around the performers on the day's bill, who carry on their work simultaneously like a three-ring circus. There is the Anti-Socialist tub-thumper, the numerologist, the strong man, the Indian selling outfits to enable you to do the three-card trick in your own home, the handcuff escape king, the patent medicine salesman, every kind of huckster and street showman takes up his pitch there on one day or another and holds his audience spellbound until the time comes for passing the hat. Simon rarely passed there without pausing to inspect the day's offerings, but this was the first occasion on which he had been a buyer.
His bottle appeared to contain a colourless fluid like water, with a slight sediment of brownish particles.
'What is it?' asked Patricia.
'Chromium plating for the home,' he said. 'The greatest invention of the century-according to the salesman. Claimed to be the same outfit sold by mail-order firms for three bob. He was demonstrating it on a brass shell-case
