It was the interior of the room into which he was shown that began to place an excessive strain on his adaptability. It was without furnishings of any kind, unless the thick kind of mattress in one corner could be called furnishings, and the walls and floor were finished in some extraordinary style of decoration which made them look like quilted upholstery.
Mr. Oates looked about him, and turned puzzledly to his host.
"Well," he said, "where's the stamp?"
"What stamp?" asked Dr. Jethero.
Mr. Oates's laboriously achieved restraint was wearing thin again.
"Don't you understand? I'm Titus Oates. I was whipped from Aldgate to Newgate, and from Newgate to Tyburn. Didn't you hear what I said?"
"Yes, yes, yes," murmured the doctor peaceably. "You're Titus Oates. You stood in the pillory and they pelted you with rotten eggs."
"Well," said Mr. Oates, "what about the stamp?"
Dr. Jethero cleared his throat.
"Just a minute, Mr. Oates. Suppose we go into that presently. Would you mind taking off your coat and shoes?"
Mr. Oates gaped at him.
"This is going too far," he protested. "I'm Titus Oates. Everybody know Titus Oates. You remember — the Popish Plot—"
"Mr. Oates," said the doctor sternly, "will you take off your coat and shoes?"
The white-coated attendant was advancing stealthily towards him, and a sudden vague fear seized on the financier. Now he began to see the reason for the man's extraordinary behaviour. He was not crotchety. He was potty. He was worse — he must be a raving homicidal lunatic. Heaven knew what he would be doing next. A wild desire to be away from number 105 Matlock Gardens gripped Mr. Oates — a desire that could not even be quelled by the urge to possess a twopenny blue Mauritius in perfect preservation.
"Never mind," said Mr. Oates liberally. "I'm not really interested. I don't collect stamps at all. I'm just Titus Oates. Everyone knows me. I'm sure you'll excuse me — I have an appointment—"
He was edging towards the door, but Dr. Jethero stood in the way.
"Nobody's going to hurt you, Mr. Oates," he said; and then he caught the desperate gleam in Mr. Oates's eye, and signed quickly to the attendant.
Mr. Oates was seized suddenly from behind in a deft grip. Overcome with terror, he struggled like a maniac, and he was a big man; but he was helpless in the expert hands that held him. He was tripped and flung to the floor, and pinioned there with practised skill. Through whirling mists of horror he saw the doctor coming towards him with a hypodermic syringe, and he was still yelling feebly about the Popish Plot when the needle stabbed into his arm…
Dr. Jethero went downstairs and rang up a number which he had been given.
"I've got your uncle, Mr. Tombs," he announced. "He gave us a bit of trouble, but he's quite safe now."
Simon Templar, who had found the name of Tombs a convenient alias before, grinned invisibly into the transmitter.
"That's splendid. Did he give you a lot of trouble?"
"He was inclined to be violent, but we managed to give him an injection, and when he wakes up he'll be in a strait-jacket. He's really a most interesting case," said the doctor with professional enthusiasm. "Quite apart from the delusion that he is Titus Oates, he seems to have some extraordinary hallucination about a stamp. Had you noticed that before?"
"I hadn't," said the Saint. "You may be able to find out some more about that. Keep him under observation, doctor, and call me again on Monday morning."
He rang off and turned gleefully to Patricia Holm, who was waiting at his elbow.
"Titus is in safe hands," he said. "And now I've got a call of my own to make."
"Who to?" she asked.
He showed her a scrap of paper on which he had jotted down the words of what appeared to be a telegram.
Amazing discovery stop have reason to believe boom may be based on genuine possibilities stop do not on any account sell without hearing from me.
"Dicky Tremayne's in Paris, and he'll send it for me," said the Saint. "A copy goes to Abe Costello and Jules Hammel tonight — I just want to make sure that they follow Titus down the drain. By the way, we shall clear about twenty thousand if Midorients are still at 61 when they open again tomorrow morning."
"But are you sure Jethero won't get into trouble?" she said.
Simon Templar nodded.
"Somehow I feel that Titus will prefer to keep his mouth shut after I've had a little chat with him on Monday, " he said; and it is a matter of history that he was absolutely right.
III
The Newdick Helicopter
"I'm afraid," said Patricia Holm soberly, "you'll be getting into trouble again soon."
Simon Templar grinned, and opened another bottle of beer. He poured it out with a steady hand, unshaken by the future predicted for him.
"You may be right, darling," he admitted. "Trouble is one of the things that sort of happen to me, like other people have colds."
"I've often heard you complaining about it," said the girl sceptically.
The Saint shook his head.
"You wrong me," he said. "Posterity will know me as a maligned, misunderstood, ill-used victim of a cruel fate. I have tried to be good. Instinctive righteousness glows from me likean inward light. But nobody gives it a chance. What do you suggest?"
"You might go into business."
"I know. Something safe and respectable, like manufacturing woollen combinations for elderly ladies and lorgnettes. We might throw in a pair of lorgnettes with every suit. You could knit them, and I'd do the fitting — the fitting of the lorgnettes, of course." Simon raised his glass and drank deeply. "It's an attractive idea, old darling, but all these schemes involve laying out a lot of capital on which you have to wait such a hell of a long time for a return. Besides, there can't be much of a profit in it. On a rough estimate, the amount of wool required to circumnavigate a fifty-four inch bust —"
Monty Hayward, who was also present, took out a tobacco-pouch and began to fill his pipe.
"I had some capital once," he said reminiscently, "but it didn't do me much good."
"How much can you lend me?" asked the Saint hopefully.
Monty brushed stray ends of tobacco from his lap and tested the draught through his handiwork cautiously.
"I haven't got it any more, but I don't think I'd lend it to you if I had," he said kindly. "Anyway, the point doesn't arise, because a fellow called Oscar Newdick has got it. Didn't I ever tell you about that?"
The Saint moved his head negatively, and settled deeper into his chair.
"It doesn't sound like you, Monty. D'you mean to say you were hornswoggled?"
Monty nodded.
"I suppose you might call it that. It happened about six years ago, when I was a bit younger and not quite so wise. It wasn't a bad swindle on the whole, though." He struck a match and puffed meditatively. "This fellow Newdick was a bloke I met on the train coming down from the office. He used to get into the same compartment with me three or four times a week, and naturally we took to passing the time of day — you know the way one does. He was an aeronautical engineer and a bit of an inventor, apparently. He was experimenting with autogiros, and he had a little one-horse factory near Walton where he was building them. He used to talk a lot of technical stuff about them to me, and I talked technical stuff about make-up and dummies to him — I don't suppose either of us understood half of what the other was talking about, so we got on famously."