Benny scrawled his signature across the account, and pushed back his chair.
"Come up to my sitting-room and we'll talk about it."
They went up in the lift, with Benny unconcernedly puffing Turkish cigarette smoke, and down an expensively carpeted corridor. Benny had an instinctive sense of dramatic values. Without saying anything, and yet at the same time without giving the impression that he was being intentionally reticent, he opened the door of his suite and ushered Mr. Tombs in.
The sitting-room was small but cosily furnished. A large carelessly-opened paper parcel littered the table in the centre, and there was a similar amount of litter in one of the chairs. Benny picked up an armful of it and dumped it on the floor in the corner.
"Know what these things are?" he asked off-handedly.
He took up a handful of the litter that remained on the chair and thrust it under Mr. Tombs's nose. It was generally green in colour; as Mr. Tombs blinked at it, words and patterns took shape on it, and he blinked still harder.
"Pound notes," said Benny. He pointed to the pile he had dumped in the corner. "More of 'em." He flattened the brown paper around the carelessly-opened parcel on the table, revealing neat stacks of treasure packed in thick uniform bundles. "Any amount of it. Help yourself."
Mr. Tombs's blue eyes went wider and wider, with the lids blinking over them rapidly as if to dispel an hallucination.
"Are they — are they really all pound notes?"
"Every one of 'em."