The receiver at the other end of the line was lifted. The voice spoke.
"Baby Face," it said hollowly.
Simon Templar drew a deep breath, and a gigantic grin of bliss deployed itself over his inside. But outwardly he did not bat an eyelid.
"Two hundred pounds on Baby Face for Mr. Templar," he said; and the partners were too absorbed with other things to notice that he spoke in a very fair imitation of Mr. Immelbern's deep rumble.
He turned back to them, smiling.
"Baby Face," he said, with the quietness of absolute certitude, "will win the three o'clock race at Sandown Park."
Lieut.-Colonel Uppingdon fingered his superb white moustachios.
"By Gad!" he said.
Half an hour later the three of them went out together for a newspaper. Baby Face had won — at ten to one.
"Haw!" said the Colonel, blinking at the result rather dazedly.
On the face of Mr. Immelbern was a look of almost superstitious awe. It is difficult to convey what was in his mind at that moment. Throughout his life he had dreamed of such things. Horseflesh was the one true love of his unromantic soul. The fashions of Newmarket ruled his clothes, the scent of stables hung around him like a subtle perfume; he might, in prosperous times, have been a rich man in his illegal way, if all his private profits had not inevitably gravitated on to the backs of unsuccessful horses as fast as they came into his pocket. And in the secret daydreams which coil through even the most phlegmatic bosom had always been the wild impossible idea that if by some miracle he could have the privilege of reading the next day's results every day for a week, he could make himself a fortune that would free him for the rest of his life from the sordid labours of the confidence game and give him the leisure to perfect that infallible racing system with which he had been experimenting ever since adolescence.
And now the miracle had come to pass, in the person of that debonair and affluent young man who did not even seem to realise the potential millions which lay in his strange gift.
"Can you do that every day?" he asked huskily.
"Oh, yes," said the Saint.
"In every race?" said Mr. Immelbern hoarsely.
"Why not?" said the Saint. "It makes racing rather a bore, really, and you soon get tired of drawing in the money."
Mr. Immelbern gulped. He could not conceive what it felt like to get tired of drawing in money. He felt stunned.
"Well," said the Saint casually, "I'd better be buzzing along—"
At the sound of those words something came over Lieut-Colonel Sir George Uppingdon. It was, in its way, the turning of a worm. He had suffered much. The gibes of Mr. Immelbern still rankled in his sedate aristocratic breast. And Mr. Immelbern was still goggling in a half-witted daze — he who had boasted almost naggingly of his accessibility to new ideas.
Lieut.-Colonel Sir George Uppingdon took the Saint's arm, gently but very firmly.
"Just a minute, my dear boy," he said, rolling the words succulently round his tongue. "We must not be old-fashioned. We must move with the times. This psychic gift of yours is truly remarkable. There's a fortune in it. Damme, if somebody threw a purse into Irnmelbern's lap, he'd be asking me what it was. Thank God, I'm not so dense as that, by Gad. My dear Mr. Templar, my dear boy, you must — I positively insist — you must come back to my rooms and talk about what you're going to do with this gift of yours. By Gad!"
Mr. Immelbern did not come out of his trance until halfway through the bargaining that followed.
It was nearly two hours later when the two partners struggled somewhat short-windedly up the stairs to a dingy one-roomed office off the Strand. Its furniture consisted of a chair, a table with a telephone on it, and a tape machine in one corner. It had not been swept for weeks, but it served its purpose adequately.
The third and very junior member of the partnership sat on the chair with his feet on the table, smoking a limp cigarette and turning the pages of Paris Plaisirs. He looked up in some surprise not unmixed with alarm at the noisy entrance of his confederates — a pimply youth with a chin that barely contrived to separate his mouth from his neck.
"I've made our fortunes!" yelled Mr. Immelbern, and, despite the youth's repulsive aspect, embraced him.
A slight frown momentarily marred the Colonel's glowing benevolence.
"What d'you mean — you've made our fortunes?" he demanded. "If it hadn't been for me—"
"Well, what the hell does it matter?" said Mr. Immelbern. "In a couple of months we'll all be millionaires."
"How?" asked the pimply youth blankly.
Mr. Immelbern broke off in the middle of an improvised hornpipe.
"It's like this," he explained exuberantly. "We've got a sike — sidekick—"
"Psychic," said the Colonel.
"A bloke who can tell the future. He puts his hands over his eyes and reads the winners off like you'd read them out of a paper. He did it four times this afternoon. We're going to take him in with us. We had a job to persuade him — he was going off to the South of France tonight — can you imagine it, a bloke with a gift like that going away while there's any racing here? We had to give him five hundred quid advance on the money we told him we were going to make for him to make him put it off. But it's worth it. We'll start tomorrow, and if this fellow Templar—"
"Ow, that's 'is nime, is it?" said the pimply youth brightly. "I wondered wot was goin' on."
There was a short puzzled silence.
"How do you mean — what was going on?" asked the Colonel at length.
"Well," said the pimply youth, "when Sid was ringing up all the afternoon, practic'ly every rice—"
"What d'you mean?" croaked Mr. Immelbern. "I rang up every race?"
"Yus, an' I was giving' you the winners, an' you were syin' 'Two 'undred pounds on Baby Face for Mr. Templar' — Tour 'undred pounds on Cellophane for Mr. Templar' — gettin' bigger an' bigger all the time an' never givin' 'im a loser — well, I started to wonder wot was 'appening."
The silence that followed was longer, much longer; and there were things seething in it for which the English language has no words.
It was the Colonel who broke it.
"It's impossible," he said dizzily. "I know the clock was slow, because I put it back myself, but I only put it back five minutes — and this fellow was telephoning ten minutes before the times of the races."
"Then 'e must 'ave put it back some more while you wasn't watchin' 'im," said the pimply youth stolidly.
The idea penetrated after several awful seconds.
"By Gad!" said Lieut.-Colonel Sir George Uppingdon in a feeble voice.
II
The Unfortunate Financier
"The secret of success," said Simon Templar profoundly, "is never to do anything by halves. If you try to touch someone for a tenner, you probably get snubbed; but if you put on a silk hat and a false stomach and go into the City to raise a million-pound loan, people fall over each other in the rush to hand you blank cheques. The wretched little thief who pinches a handful of silver spoons gets shoved into clink through a perfect orgy of congratulations to the police and the magistrates, but the bird who diddles the public of a few hundred thousands by legal methods gets knighthood. A sound buccaneering business has to be run on the same principles."
While he could not have claimed any earth-shaking originality for the theme of his sermon, Simon Templar was in the perhaps rarer position of being able to claim that he practised what he preached. He had been doing it for so long, with so much diligence and devotion, that the name of the Saint had passed into the Valhalla of all great names: it had become a household word, even as the name of Miss Amelia Bloomer, an earlier crusader, was absorbed into the tongue that Shakespeare did not live long enough to speak — but in a more romantic context. And if there were many more sharks in the broad lagoons of technically legal righteousness who knew him better by his chosen nom de guerre than by his real name, and who would not even have recognised him had they passed him in the street, that minor degree of anonymity was an asset in the Saint's profession which more than compensated him for the concurrent gaps in his publicity.