“Confide
in yer ?” retorted the lady indignantly. “None o’
your
sauce, young feller! I
want three pennyworth of
lickerish an’
chlorodeen lozenges, an’ that’s all. Young
Alf’s corf is awful
bad agin this morning.”
“That’s
too bad,” said the Saint, giving the shelves a
quick once-over, and
feeling somewhat helpless. “Just a
minute, auntie—I’m
still finding my way around.”
“Fresh,”
said the lady tartly, “is right.”
Liquorice
and chlorodyne lozenges were fairly easy. The
Saint found a large
bottle of them after a short search, and
proceeded to tip half
of it into a paper bag.
”
‘Ere, I don’t want all that,” yelped the woman. “Three
pennyworth,
I said!”
Simon
pushed the bag over the counter.
“As
an old and valued customer, please accept the extra quantity with Mr Osbett’s
compliments,” he said generously.
“Threepence is
the price to you, madam, and a bottle of
cough mixture thrown
in. Oh, yes, and you’d better give
young Alf some cod-liver oil ——
”
He piled
merchandise towards her until she grabbed up as
much as she could
carry and palpitated nervously out into
the street. Simon
grinned to himself and hoped he had not
overdone it. If the
news of his sensational bargain sale spread
around the district,
he would have his hands full.
During the
lull that followed he tried to take a survey of
the stock. He would be
safe enough with proprietary goods,
but if anyone asked for some more
complicated medicine he
would have to be careful. He had no grudge to
work off
against
the neighbourhood at large; which was almost a pity.
The next
customer required nothing more difficult than aspirin, and left the shop in a
kind of daze when the Saint insisted on supplying a bottle of a hundred tablets
for the
modest
price of twopence.
Simon took a
trip upstairs and found that his three prizes
had still failed to progress beyond the
stage of half conscious
meanings and a
spasmodic twitching of the lower limbs. He returned downstairs to attend to a
small snotty-nosed urchin
who was
asking for a shilling tin of baby food. Simon blandly
handed her the largest size he could see, and told
her that
Mr Osbett was making special
reductions that morning.
“Coo!”
said the small child, and added a bag of peardrops
to the order.
Simon poured
out a pound of them—“No charge for that,
Delilah—Mr Osbett is
giving peardrops away for an adver
tisement”—and the small child sprinted out as if it
was afraid
of waking up before it got home.
The Saint
lighted another cigarette and waited thought
fully. Supplying
everybody who came in with astounding quantities of Mr Osbett’s goods at
cut-throat prices was
amusing enough, admittedly, but it was not
getting him any
where. And yet a hunch that was growing larger every
minute
kept him standing behind the counter.
Maybe it
wasn’t such a waste of time… . The package of
Miracle Tea in which
he had found fifteen hundred testi
monials to the lavish beneficence of his guardian angel had
come from that shop; presumably it had been
intended for
some special customer;
presumably also it was not the only
eccentric
transaction that had taken place there, and there was
no reason why it should be the last. Maybe no
other miracles
of the same kind were
timed to take place that day; and
yet
…
Mr
Osbett’s boxes of extra special toilet soap, usually
priced at seven and sixpence, were reduced
for the benefit of
a charming young damsel
to a shilling each. The charming
damsel
was so impressed that she tentatively inquired the
price of a handsome bottle of bath salts.
“What,
this ?” said the Saint, taking the flagon down and
wrapping it
up. “As a special bargain this morning, sweet
heart, we’re letting
it go for sixpence.”
It went
for sixpence, quickly. The Saint handed over her
change without
encouraging further orders—as a matter of
fact, he was rather
anxious to get rid of the damsel, in spite of
her charm and obvious
inclination to be friendly, for a man
with a thin weasel face under a dirty
tweed cap already overdue for the dustbin had come in, and was earnestly inspecting
a showcase full of
safety razors and other articles which are
less
widely advertised. Quite obviously the man was not
anxious to draw
attention to himself while there was another
customer
in the shop; and while there was at least one
perfectly commonplace
explanation for that kind of bashful-
ness
the Saint felt a spectral tingle of expectation slide over
his scalp as the girl went out and Weasel Face
angled over to
the counter.
“I
haven’t seen you before,” he stated.
His manner
was flatly casual, but his small beady eyes
flitted over Simon’s
face like flies hovering.
“Then
you should be enjoying the view,” said the Saint
affably. “What
can I sell you today, comrade? Hot water
bottles? Shaving
cream? Toothpaste? We have a special
bargain line of castor oil——
”
“Where’s
Ossy?”
“Dear
old Ossy is lying down for a while—I think he’s
got a headache, or
something. But don’t let that stop you.
Have you tried some of our Passion Flower
lipstick, guaranteed to seduce at the first application ?”
The man’s
eyes circled around again. He pushed out a
crumpled envelope.
“Give
Ossy my prescription, and don’t talk so much.”
“Just
a minute,” said the Saint.
He took the
envelope back towards the staircase and slit it open. One glance even in the
dim light that penetrated
there was enough to show him that whatever
else the thin
sheet
of paper it contained might mean, it was not a prescrip
tion that any ordinary pharmacist could have filled.
He stuffed
the sheet into his pocket and came back.
“Will you call again at
six o’clock ?” he said, and his flip
pancy
was no longer obtrusive. “I’ll have it ready for you
than.”
“Awright.”
The beady
eyes sidled over him once more, a trifle puzzedly
, and the man went
out.
Simon took
the paper back into the dispensing room and
spread it out under a
good light. It was a scale plan of a
building, with every detail plainly
marked even to the posi
tions of the larger pieces of furniture, and
provided in
addition with a closely-written fringe of marginal notes
which to
the Saint’s professional scrutiny provided every
item of information
that a careful burglar could have asked
for; and the first
fascinating but still incomplete comprehen
sion of Mr Osbett’s
extraordinary business began to reveal
itself to him as he
studied it.
IX
T
HE SIMPLE
beauty of
the system made his pulses skip.
Plans like that could be passed over in the
guise of prescriptions; boodle, cash payments for services rendered,
or almost
anything else, could be handed over the counter
enclosed in tubes of
cold cream or packets of Miracle Tea;
and it could all be done openly and with impunity even
while
other genuine customers were in the
shop waiting to be
served. Even if
the man who did it were suspected and under
surveillance, the same
transactions could take place countless
times
under the very eyes of a watcher, and be dismissed as an entirely unimportant
feature of the suspect’s daily activi
ties.
Short of deliberate betrayal, it left no loophole through
which Osbett himself could be involved at all—and
even
that risk, with a little
ingenuity, could probably be manipu
lated
so as to leave someone like the shifty-eyed young
assistant to hold the baby. It was foolproof and
puncture-
proof—except against such an
unforeseen train of accidents
as had delivered one fatal package of
Miracle Tea into Chief
Inspector Teal’s
unwitting paws, and tumbled it from his
pocket into Simon Templar’s car.
The one
vast and monumental question mark that was left was wrapped all the way round
the mystery of what was the
motive focus of the whole machinery.
A highly
organized and up-to-date gang of thieves,
directed by a Master
Mind and operating with the efficiency
of a big business ?
The answer seemed trite but possible. And
yet
…
All the
goods he could see round him were probably as
genuine as patent slimming salts and mouth
washes can be— any special packages would certainly be kept aside. And there
was nothing noticeably out of place at that time.
He examined the cash register. It contained nothing but a small
amount of money, which he transferred to a
hospital collect
ing box on the
counter. The ancient notes and invoices and prescriptions speared on to hook
files in the dispensing
compartment
were obviously innocuous—nothing incrimi
nating was likely to be left lying about there.
The first brisk spell of trade
seemed to have fallen off, and
no one else
had entered the shop since the visit of Weasel Face. Simon went back upstairs,
and investigated the room
into which
he had dodged when he followed the shifty-eyed
youth up the stairs. He remembered it as having had the air of a
storeroom of some kind, and he was right. It contained
various large jars, packing cases, and cardboard
cartons
labelled with assorted names and cryptic signs, some of them
prosaically familiar, stacked about in not
particularly metho
dical piles. But
the whole rear half of the room, in contrasting
orderliness, was stacked
from floor to ceiling with mounds of
small
yellow packages that he could recognize at a glance.
He looked
around again, and on one wall he found in a
cheap frame the
official certificate which announced to all
whom it might concern
that Mr Henry Osbett had dutifully
complied with the Law and registered
the fact that he was
trading under the business name of The Miracle
Tea Com
pany.
“Well,
well,
well!”
said the Saint dreamily. “What a small
world it
is after all… .”
He fished
out his cigarette case and smoked part of the
way through a
cigarette while he stood gazing abstractedly over the unilluminating contents
of the room, and his brain
was a whirlpool of new and startling
questions.
Then he
pulled himself together and went back to the office.
The three
men he had left there were all awake again by
then and squirming ineffectually. Simon
shook his head at
them.
“Relax,
boys,” he said soothingly. “You’re only wearing
yourselves
out. And think what a mess you’re making of your clothes.”
Their swollen eyes glared at
him mutely with three indivi
dual renderings
of hate and malevolence intensified by
different
degrees of fear; but if the Saint had been susceptible
to the cremating power of the human eye he would
have
been a walking cinder many years ago.
Calmly he proceeded to empty
their pockets and examine
every scrap of
paper he found on them; but except for a
driving licence which gave him Mr Nancock’s name and
address in Croydon he was no wiser when he had
finished.
After that
he turned his attention to the filing cabinet; but
as far as a lengthy
search could tell it contained nothing but a
conventional
collection of correspondence on harmless
matters concerned with
the legitimate business of the shop
and the marketing of Miracle Tea. He
sat down in Mr Osbett’s
swivel chair and went systematically through
the drawers of the desk, but they also provided him with no
enlightenment.
The net result of his labours was a magnifi
cent and
symmetrically rounded zero.