Mr. Tombs suppressed a perfunctory tear, and accompanied Benny to his suite. A couple of well-worn suit-cases and a wardrobe trunk the size of a suburban villa, all ready stacked up and labelled, confirmed Benny's avowed intentions. Only one of the parcels of currency was visible, pushed untidily to one end of the table.
"Did you bring the money, Mr. Tombs?"
Mr. Tombs took out his battered wallet and drew forth a sheaf of crisp new fivers with slightly unsteady hands. Benny took them, glanced over them casually, and dropped them on to the table with the carelessness befitting a millionaire. He waved Mr. Tombs into an armchair with his back to the window, and himself sat down in a chair drawn up to the opposite side of the table.
"Two thousand one-pound notes are quite a lot to put in your pocket," he remarked. "I'll make them up into a parcel for you."
Under Mr. Tombs's yearning eyes he flipped off the four top bundles from the pile and tossed them one by one into his guest's lap. Mr. Tombs grabbed them and examined them hungrily, spraying the edges of each pack off his thumb so that pound notes whirred before his vision like the pictures on a toy cinematograph.
"You can count them if you like — there ought to be five hundred in each pack," said Benny; but Mr. Tombs shook his head.
"I'll take your word for it, Mr. Lucek. I can see they're all one-pound notes, and there must be a lot of them."
Benny smiled and held out his hand with a businesslike air. Mr. Tombs passed the bundles back to him, and Benny sat down again and arranged them in a neat cube on top of a sheet of brown paper. He turned the paper over the top and creased it down at the open ends with a rapid efficiency that would have done credit to any professional shop assistant; and Mr. Tombs's covetous eyes watched every movement with the intentness of a dumb but earnest audience trying to spot how a conjuring trick is done.
"Don't you think it would be a ghastly tragedy for a poor widow who put all her savings into these notes and then found that she had been — um — deceived?" said Mr. Tombs morbidly; and Benny's dark eyes switched up to his face in sudden startlement.
"Eh?" said Benny. "What's that?"