13 The Saint Intervenes (Boodle)

Saturday morning, and returned to London on the Sunday. He announced his intention of leaving for Paris on the Tuesday, and they parted with mutual expres­sions of goodwill. Mr. Tanfold said that he himself would return to London on Monday, and they arranged to lunch together on that day and go on to paint the town red.

When Mr. Tanfold arrived at the Palace Royal Hotel a little before one o'clock on Monday, however, he did not have the air of a man who was getting set to experiment in what could be done with a pot of red paint and the metropolitan sky­line. Laying his hat and stick on the table and pulling off his lavender-tinted gloves in Mr. Tombs's suite, he was laconi­cally unresponsive to the younger Tombs's effusive cries of welcome.

'Look here, Tombs,' he said bluntly, when he had straight­ened his heliotrope tie, 'there's something you'd better know.'

'Tell me all, dear old wombat,' said Mr. Tombs, who ap­peared to have acquired some of the frothier mannerisms of the City during his visit. 'What have you done?'

'I haven't introduced myself properly,' said his guest bra­zenly. 'I am Gilbert Tanfold.'

For a moment the antipodean Tomblet seemed taken aback; and then he grinned good-humouredly.

'Well, you certainly spruced me, Gilbert,' he said. 'What a joke! So it was really your own studio we went to!'

Mr. Tombs grinned again. He made remarks about Mr. Tanfold's unparalleled sense of humour in terms which were clearly designed to be flattering, but which were too biological in trend to be acceptable in mixed company. Mr. Tanfold, however, was not there to be flattered. He cut his host short with a flick of one well-manicured hand.

'Let's talk business,' he said shortly. 'I've got a photo­graph that was taken of you while you were at the studio.'

Mr. Tombs's expression wavered uncertainly; and it may be mentioned that that waver was not the least difficult of the facial exercises which the Saint had had to go through during his acquaintance with Mr. Tanfold. For the expression which was at that moment spreading itself across Simon Templar's inside was a wholly different affair, which would have made the traditional Cheshire cat look like a mask of melancholy: even then, he had not outgrown the urchin glee of watching the feet of the ungodly planting themselves firmly on the ba­nana-skin of doom.

Nevertheless, outwardly he wavered.

'Photograph?' he repeated.

Mr. Tanfold drew out his wallet, extracted a photograph therefrom, and handed it over. The Saint stared at it, and beheld his own unmistakable likeness, except for the horn­rimmed spectacles which were not a normal part of his attire, wrapped in a most undignified grapple with a damsel whose clothing set up its own standard of the irreducible minimum of diaphanous underwear.

'Good Lord!' he gasped. 'When was this taken?'

'You ought to remember,' said Mr. Tanfold, polishing his finger-nails on his coat lapel.

'But—but ——' The first dim inkling of the perils of the picture which he held seemed to dawn on Mr. Tombs, and he choked. 'But this was an accident! You remember, Tanfold. They wanted her to sit on top of a step-ladder—they asked me to help her up—and I only caught her when she slipped——'

'I know,' said Mr. Tanfold. 'But nobody else does. You're the mug, Tombs. That photograph wouldn't look so good in a Melbourne paper, would it? With a caption saying: 'Son of prominent Melbourne business man 'holding the baby' at artists' revel in Paris'—or something like that.'

Mr. Tombs swallowed.

'But  I  can  explain  it  all,'  he  protested.   'It was——'