13 The Saint Intervenes (Boodle)

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.'

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.