Prelude For War s-19 Page 10

  She looked him suddenly straight in the eyes.

  "You remember what Luker said at the Golden Fleece? Well, I suppose if I'd got any sense I'd think the same, seeing what a reputation you've got. I suppose you could have got into the house somehow and killed Johnny, and locked his bedroom door, and started the fire, and got out again, and then come back and pretended to try and rescue him. And then of course you could easily have gone to London and shot Ralph Windlay."

  "Easily," said the Saint. "But you don't believe I did, do you? Or do you?"

  "I suppose not," she said. "In a way, I wish you had."

  She pushed away her plate, and he offered his cigarette case.

  "Why do you wish I'd killed them? I didn't have any reason to."

  "Well, it would have made everything so much easier. Of course I suppose they'd have had to hang you, but everybody knows you're a criminal so that would have been all right. But then you went and upset it all at the inquest, and you made it sound frightfully convincing to me whatever anybody else thought, only it didn't seem quite real then. I mean, you know, it was all rather like some­thing out of a book. Blazing Mansion Mystery, and all that sort of thing. I was terribly sorry about it all in a way because I was quite fond of Johnny, but I wasn't going to be brokenhearted about it or anything like that. And then when Ralph was killed it wouldn't have made much difference, because he was a nice, well-meaning boy but I never thought very much of him. After all, life's too short for one to be getting brokenhearted all the time, isn't it, and I'm sure it gives you circles under your eyes."

  "You were too close up against it then to realize it properly," said the Saint shrewdly. "Now you've got away from it, your nerves are going back on you. I'm afraid I sympathize with you. What you need is another drink."

  She pushed her glass forward.

  "That's exactly what I do need," she said.

  He poured out the last of the wine, and she sipped it and put the glass down again.

  "It's not really my nerves," she said, talking very quickly. "We modern girls have nerves of iron, you know, and we only swoon when we think a man needs a little encouragement. The point is, if I'd heard that Johnny had been killed in a railway accident I should have been terribly sorry whenever I thought about it, but I don't suppose I should have thought about it terribly often. You see, that would have been just one of those things that happen, and it would have been all over, and it wouldn't really have been anything to do with me."

  "But you invited him down to Whiteways, and that makes it different."

  She nodded feverishly.

  "Of course, I told you that, didn't I?"

  "The idea was that you were to get a fur coat if Johnny could be persuaded to keep his mouth shut," Simon pursued her ruthlessly. "He has been persuaded to keep his mouth shut. Do you get your fur coat?"

  Her fingers tightened on the stem of her wineglass. Her face had gone very pale, but her eyes were burning.

  "That's a filthy thing to say."

  "Murder is a moderately filthy subject," answered the Saint brutally. "You can't play with it and keep your little girlie ribbons clean. Haven't you realized that yet?"

  "Yes," she said.

  She picked up her glass and drained it at one gulp. Then she sat back and laughed at him with a kind of brittle giddiness.

  "Well?" he insisted.

  "I'm a nice girl, aren't I?" she chattered. "I do the odd spot of gold digging here and there, and in my spare time I lure men to their deaths. What would the dear vicar say if he knew?"

  "I expect he'd say plenty. But that doesn't seem to matter so much as what you say. Do you enjoy luring men to their deaths?"

  "I love it!"

  "Then of course you'll be wanting another job soon. Why don't you advertise ? There must be plenty of openings if you can produce proof of previous experience."

  She sat looking at him, and two scalding tears brimmed in her eyes.

  "You swine!" she whispered.

  "I'm sorry," he said cynically.

  "What have you got to talk about, anyway? I mean, you think Johnny was murdered. Well, why should you care? You've killed dozens of people yourself, haven't you?"

  "Only people who really needed it. You know, there are some people who are vastly improved by death."

  "If somebody murdered Johnny, perhaps they thought he needed it," she said. "I daresay the people you killed were pretty poisonous one way or another, but then who isn't? I mean, look at me, for instance. Supposing some­body murdered me. I suppose you'd think that was a damned good job."

  "I should think it was a great pity," he said with sur­prising gentleness. "You see, you poor little idiot, I happen to like you."

  "Isn't that thrilling?" she said; and then she suddenly put her face in her hands.

  The Saint lighted a cigarette and watched her. She sat quite still, without sobbing. He knew that this was what he had been working for, the success of his relentless drive to break her down; and yet he felt sorry for her. An impulse of tenderness moved him that it was not easy to fight down. But he knew that on this moment might hang things too momentous to be thought about. His brain had to be cold, accurate, making no mistakes, even if he wanted to be kind.

  "All right," she said huskily. "Damn you."

  She put her hands down abruptly and looked at him, dry-eyed.

  "But what's the use?" she said. "It's done now, isn't it? I did it. Well, that's all about it. If I were the right sort of girl I suppose I'd go and jump in the river, but I'm not the right sort of girl."

  "That wouldn't help anybody very much." His voice was quiet now, understanding, not taunting. "It's done, but we can still do things about it. You can help me. We can go on with what Johnny was doing. But we've got to find out what it was all about. You've got to think. You've got to think back—think very hard. Try to remember what Johnny told you about Luker and Fairweather and Sangore. Try to remember what he'd got that was going to upset them all. You must remember something."

  He tried to hammer his words into her brain with all the urgency that was in him, to awaken her with the warmth of his own intense sincerity. She must tell him now if she was to help him at all.

  Her eyes stayed on him and her hands opened and closed again.

  She shook her head.

  "I don't," she replied. "Really. But ..."

  She stopped, frowning. He held his breath.

  "But what?" he prompted.

  "Nothing," she said.

  Simon turned the ash from his cigarette on to the edge of a plate with infinite restraint. The reaction had emptied him so that he had to make the movement with a deliber­ate effort.

  A waiter bustled up to the table and asked if they wanted coffee.

  Simon felt as if a fire in him had been put out. He felt as if he had been led blindfold to the top of a mountain and then turned back and sent down again without being given a glimpse of the view. While he mechanically gave the order he wondered, in an insanely cold-blooded sort of way, what would happen if he stood up and shot the waiter through the middle of his crisp, complacent shirt front. Probably it had made no ultimate difference, but it seemed as if that crowning clash of the banal had inscribed an irrevocable epilogue of frustration. The mood that might have meant so much was gone. Nothing would bring it back.

  He sat without moving while coffee and balloon glasses were set before them.

  Lady Valerie Woodchester stubbed out a half-smoked cigarette and lighted another. She tasted her brandy.

  "It's a hard life," she observed moodily. "I suppose if one can't get exactly what one wants the next best thing is to have bags of money. That's what I'm going to do."

  "Who are you going to blackmail?" Simon inquired steadily.

  Her eyes widened.

  "What do you mean?" she asked in astonishment.

  "Just that," he said.

  She laughed. Her laughter sounded a trifle false.

  She emptied her coffee cup and finished her brandy. She be
gan to be very busy collecting her accoutrements and dab­bing powder on her nose.

  "You do say the weirdest things," she remarked. "I'm afraid I must go now. Thanks so much for the dinner. It's been a lovely evening—most of it."

  "This is rather early for your bedtime, isn't it?" said the Saint slowly. "Don't you feel well, or are you a little bit scared?"

  "I'm scared of getting wrinkles," she said. "I always do when I stay up late. And then I have to spend a small fortune to have them taken out, and that doesn't help a bit, what with one thing and another. But a girl's got to keep her looks even if she can't keep anything else, hasn't she?"

  She stood up.

  The Saint's hands rested on the arms of his chair. A dozen mad and utterly impossible urges coursed through his mind, but he knew that they were all futile. The whole atmosphere of the place, which had brought her once to a brief fascinating ripeness, was arraigned against him.

  A lynx-eyed waiter ceremoniously laid a plate with a folded check on it in front of him.

  Simon rose to his feet with unalterable grace and spilled money on to it. He followed her out of the room and out of the hotel, and waited while the commissionaire produced a taxi and placed it before them with the regal gesture of a magician performing a unique and exclusive miracle.

  "It's all right," she said. "You needn't bother to see me home."

  Through the window of the cab, with the vestige of a sardonic bow, he handed her a sealed envelope.

  "You forgot something," he murmured. "That isn't like you, I'm sure."

  "Oh yes," she said. "That."

  She took the envelope, glanced at it and put it in her bag. It didn't seem to interest her particularly.

  She put out her hand again. He held it.

  "If——" she began, and broke off raggedly.

  "If what?" he asked.

  She bit her lip.

  "No," she said. "It wouldn't be any good. There's always the But."

  "I'll buy it," said the Saint patiently. "What's the answer?"

  She smiled at him rather wistfully.

  "There isn't any answer. One just thinks, 'If something or other,' and then one thinks, 'But something else,' which makes it impossible," she explained lucidly. "As a matter of fact, I was thinking that you and I would make a mar­vellous combination."

  "And why not?"

  She made a little grimace. At that moment, even more inescapably than at any other, she looked as if she was on the point of bursting into tears.

  "Oh, go to hell!" she said.

  Her hand slipped through his fingers and she sank back into the corner of the cab. It moved away.

  Simon Templar stood and watched it until the stream of traffic swallowed it up. And then he said "Hell and damna­tion!" with a meticulous clarity which caused the commis­sionaire to unbend in a glance of entirely misdirected sym­pathy before he resumed his thaumaturgical production of taxis.

  2

  After which various things happened that Simon Tem­plar would have been very edified to know about.

  Mr Algernon Sidney Fairwearher was sitting in the smoke room of his paralyzingly respectable and conserva­tive club finishing an excellent cigar and enjoying a sedate post-prandial brandy and soda and the equally sedate post-­prandial conversation of an august bishop, a retired ambas­sador and a senile and slightly lecherous baronet, when he was summoned to the telephone.

  "This is Valerie," said the voice on the wire. "I'm fright­fully sorry to bother you and all that, but I rather wanted your advice about something. Do you mind terribly? It's about Johnny."

  "What exactly do you want my advice about?" asked Mr Fairweather uncomfortably. "That man Templar hasn't been pestering you again, I hope?"

  "No—at least, not exactly," she answered. "I mean, he's quite easy to get on with really, and he simply throws money about, but he does ask rather a lot of questions."

  Fairweather cleared his throat.

  "The man is becoming a perfect nuisance," he said imperially. "But I think we can deal with him soon enough. I'm glad you told me about it. I'll have a word with the commissioner of police in the morning and see that he's taken care of."

  "Oh no, you mustn't do that," she said quickly. "I can . take care of myself all right, and it's rather thrilling to be pestered by a famous character like the Saint. That isn't what I rang you up for. What I wanted was to ask your advice about something Johnny left with me."

  "Something Kennet left with you ?"

  "Some papers he gave me to read only a week or two ago—a great thick wad of them."

  Mr Fairweather experienced the curious sensation of feeling the walls close in on him while at the same time the floor and the ceiling began to draw together. Since he was at that moment in a booth which had very little space to spare after enveloping his own ample circumference, the sensation was somewhat horrifying.

  It had caught him so completely unprepared that for a few seconds he seemed to have mislaid his voice. A cold perspiration broke out on his forehead. He felt as though he were being suffocated, but he dared not open the door of the booth to let in the air for which his lungs were aching. In fact, he drew it tighter.

  "Papers?" he got out hoarsely. "What papers? What were they about?"

  "I don't know. Johnny seemed to think they were ter­ribly important; but then he thought so many things were terribly important that I just couldn't keep track of them all. So I didn't even read them."

  The inward rush of the walls slackened for a moment. Mr Fairweather managed to snatch a handful of oxygen into his chest.

  "You didn't read them?" he echoed weakly. "Well, I'd better have a look at those papers. It's a good thing you told me about them. I'll come round at once."

  "But that wouldn't be any good," she said miserably. "You see, I haven't got the papers now. I don't even know where they are.. That's what I wanted your advice about."

  The accumulation of seesaw effects was making Mr Fair-weather feel slightly seasick. He was very different from the staid and dignified gentleman who had been drinking a sedate brandy and soda only a few thousand years ago. He mopped his brow.

  "You haven't got them?" he bleated shrilly. "Then who has got them?"

  "Nobody. At least—it's frightfully difficult trying to tell you all at once. You see, what happened was something like this. John and I had been having a row—the usual old row about you and his father and Mr Luker and all that. I was telling him not to be ridiculous, and he sud­denly shoved a great envelope full of papers into my hands and told me to go through them and then say if I still thought he was being ridiculous. Then he stormed out of the place in a fearful rage, and I had lots of things to do, and I couldn't go on carrying a whacking great envelope about with me forever, so I dumped it somewhere and I didn't think any more about it until the other day."

  "How do you mean, you dumped it?" squealed Fair-weather, like a soul in torment. "You must have put it somewhere. Where is it?"

  "That's just what I don't know," she said. "Of course it must be somewhere; I mean, I didn't just drop it over the side of a bus or anything like that. But I simply can't remember where I had it last. I've got a sort of idea that it might be in the cloakroom at Piccadilly Station, or I may have left it in the cloakroom at the Savoy. In fact, I'm pretty sure I did put it in a cloakroom somewhere."

  Fairweather clung to the telephone bracket for support.

  "Then you. must have a ticket for it," he pointed out with heart-rending logic. "Why don't you look for the ticket?"

  "But I can't," she said plaintively. "It's a terrible bore. You see, if I had a ticket it was probably in my bag, and of course that was lost in the fire with all my other things."

  "But——" said Fairweather.

  The word "but" is not commonly used to convey the more cosmic intensities of emotion, but Mr Fairweather's pronunciation imbued it with a depth and colour that can rarely if ever have been achieved before. The exasperation of a reasonable man who finds himself in an unrea
sonable and chaotic universe, the sharp horror of a prisoner on an excavating party who learns that he has kindly been allowed to dig his own grave, the outraged protest of a mathema­tician to whom has been demonstrated an insuperable fal­lacy in his proof that two and two make four—all these several shades of travail were summed up and vivified in Mr Fairweather's glorification of the word "but."

  "I wondered if it might be a good scheme to get Mr Templar to help me," Valerie went on. "I mean, he seems to have quite a crush on me, so he'd probably be glad to do it if I was nice to him, and he must have had loads of experience at ferreting about and detecting things."

  "Grrr," said Mr Fairweather.

  If possible, he improved on his performance with the word "but." This time, in one primitive ululation, he added to his symphonic integration of emotions the despairing dolour of the camel whose backbone is just giving way under the final straw, the shuddering panic of the hunted hyena which feels the tiger's fangs closing on its throat, the pitiful expiring gasp of the goldfish which has just been neatly hooked from its bowl by a hungry cat.

  "Of course I've been cursing myself for not thinking of it before," said Lady Valerie penitently. "I mean, if those papers really were terribly important, I suppose I ought to have said something about them at the inquest. That's where I'd like your advice. Do you think I ought to ring up Scotland Yard and tell them about it?"

  Mr Fairweather had no new depths to plumb. He was a man who had already done all the gamut running of which he was capable.

  "Listen," he said with frightfully muted violence. "You must put that idea out of your head at once. The police have no discretion. Think—think of how it might hurt poor Johnny's father. And whatever happens, you mustn't say a word to Templar. You haven't told him about those papers yet, have you?"

  "No, not definitely. But you know, I believe he guesses something about them. He's terribly suspicious. Two or three times this evening he asked me if Johnny had ever given me anything to keep for him, or if I knew where Johnny might have kept his private papers. But he can't do anything to me, because I thought I'd better be on the safe side and so I've taken plenty of precautions. You see, Celia Mallard probably knows where I left those papers, and I've written to her about them. She's at Cap d'Ail now, but I'll probably hear from her in a day or two."