Prelude For War s-19 Page 11

  "Celia Mallard knows where they are?" moaned Fair-weather. "How the devil does she know?"

  "Well, I seem to remember that she was with me when I dumped them, and she's got a perfectly marvellous mem­ory, so she'll probably remember all about it. I told her in my letter that they were worth thousands of pounds, and that the Saint was after them, and so if anything happened to me she was to go straight to the police. That ought to stop the Saint doing anything really awkward, oughtn't it?"

  Mr Fairweather's mouth opened. After all his other vicissitudes, he underwent the culminating sensation of having been poured out of a frying pan into an ice-cold bath. The contrast steadied him for a moment; but he shivered.

  "I suppose it might," he said. "But what made you say the papers were worth thousands of pounds?"

  "I don't know. But I thought, if they really are terribly important, they're bound to be worth a lot of money to somebody, aren't they?" she said reasonably.

  "That doesn't follow at all," Fairweather said firmly. "But—er—you know that I'd see you didn't lose by it, in any case. Now, will you let me know directly you hear from Celia Mallard, or as soon as you remember what you did with them? And—um—well, if it's a matter of money, you did tell me once that you needed a car to go with that fur coat, didn't you ?"

  "How could you ?" she said pathetically. "To talk about that fur coat now, and remind me of poor Johnny . . . Please don't talk to me about it any more; I don't think I can ever bear to hear it mentioned again. You're making me feel dreadfully morbid, Algy, and I've had such a tiring day. I think I'd better ring off now before I break down altogether. Good-bye."

  The receiver clicked.

  "Wait a minute," Fairweather said suddenly.

  There was no answer.

  Lady Valerie Woodchester was walking back across the bright modernistic sitting room of her tiny apartment on Marsham Street. She fitted a cigarette into a long holder and picked up the drink that she had put down when she telephoned. Over the rim of the glass she looked across to a small book table where there was propped up the cheap unframed photograph of a dark and not unhappily serious young man.

  "Poor old Johnny!" she said softly. "It was a lousy trick they played on you, my dear . . ."

  Mr Algernon Sidney Fairweather jiggled the receiver hook. He took a coin out of his pocket and poised it over the slot; and then he hesitated, and finally put it back in his pocket. He left the booth and made his way to the bar, where he downed a double brandy with very little dilution of soda. His plump cheeks seemed to have gone flabby and his hands twitched as they put down the glass.

  Twenty minutes later he was waddling jerkily up and down the carpet of a luxurious room overlooking Grosvenor Square, blurting out his story under a coldly observant scru­tiny that made him feel somehow like a beetle under a searchlight.

  "Do you believe Her when she says that she's lost this cloakroom ticket?" Luker asked.

  He was as calm as Fairweather was agitated. He sat imperturbably behind the huge carved oak desk where he had been writing when Fairweather blundered in and toyed with his fountain pen. The expression in his eyes was faintly contemptuous.

  "I don't know what to believe," said Fairweather dis­tractedly. "I—well, thinking it over, I doubt it. I've had enough dealings with her to know what her methods are, and personally I think she's fishing to see how much we're prepared to pay."

  "Or how much Templar is prepared to pay," said Luker phlegmatically. "Did you know that she had dinner with him tonight at the Berkeley?"

  Fairweather blinked as if he had been smacked on the nose.

  "What?" he yelped. His voice had gone back on him again. "But I particularly told her to have nothing more to do with him!"

  "That's probably why she did it," Luker replied unsym­pathetically. "I had an idea that something like this might happen—that's why I've been having them watched. For all you know, he may have put her up to this."

  Fairweather swallowed.

  "How much do you think she'll want?"

  "I don't know. I don't think I care very much. It doesn't seem to be very important. Money is a very temporary solution—you never know how soon you may have to repeat the dose. This cloakroom story may be a myth from beginning to end. She might easily have these papers in her dressing-table drawer. She might easily have no papers at all. Her attitude is the thing that matters; and with this man Templar in the background it would be unwise to take chances." Luker shrugged. "No, my dear Algy, I'm afraid we shall have to take more permanent steps to deal with both of them."

  "W-what sort of steps?" stammered Fairweather feebly. "H-how can we deal with them?"

  That seemed to amuse Luker. The ghost of a smile dragged at the corners of his mouth.

  "Do you really want to know?" he asked interestedly.

  "You mean . . ." Fairweather didn't seem to know how to go on. His collar appeared to be choking him. He tugged at it in spasmodic efforts to loosen it. "I—I don't think so," he said. "I . . ."

  Luker laughed outright.

  "There's a sort of suburban piousness about you and Sangore that verges on the indecent," he remarked. "You're just like a couple of squeamish old maids who hold shares in a brothel. You want your money, but you're determined not to know how it's obtained. If anything unpleasant or drastic has to be done, that's all right with you so long as you don't have to do it yourselves. That's how you felt about getting rid of Kennet. Now it's Templar and Lady Valerie. Well, they've got to be murdered, haven't they?"

  Fairweather wriggled, as if his clothes were full of ants. His face was glistening with sweat.

  "I——Really, I don't——"

  "I expect you think I'm excessively vulgar," Luker con­tinued mercilessly. "I've got such a shockingly crude way of putting things, haven't I? I suppose you felt just the same when I offered you a place on the board of Norfelt Chemicals in return for certain items of business when you were secretary of state for war. That's quite all right, my dear fellow. Go home and hare a nice cup of tea and forget about it. There's no need for me to tell you to keep your mouth shut, is there? I know you're a worm, and you know you're a worm, but we won't let anybody else know you're a worm."

  Fairweather gobbled.

  "Really, Luker," he spluttered indignantly, "I—I——"

  "Oh, go away," said Luker. "I've got work to do."

  He spoke without impatience; if his voice carried any particular inflection, it was one of good-humoured tolerance. But there was no further argument. Fairweather went.

  Luker remained sitting at the great carved desk after he had gone. Fairweather's emotional antics had made no impression on him at all. He had no illusions about his associates. He had long been familiar with the partiality that politicians, generals and captains of industry have for squirming out of uncomfortable situations, with an air of being profoundly shocked by what has happened, and leav­ing somebody else to face the music. But that failing had its own compensation for him. Once started, the more dras­tic the measures he had to take, the stronger became his hold on them and the more blindly they would have to support him in whatever he did, as his safety became the more necessary to their own safety. The problems that he was considering were purely practical. He sat there, idly turning his fountain pen between his strong square fingers, until he had thought enough; and then he picked up the telephone and began to issue terse, incisive orders.

  3

  "Did you have a nice dinner?" asked Patricia Holm. "And how was the new candidate for your harem?"

  Simon Templar peeled off his coat, unbuttoned his shirt to the waist and deposited himself at a restful angle on the chesterfield under the open windows. Through the curtains came the ceaseless grind of Piccadilly traffic and a stir of sultry air tainted with petrol fumes and grime, too thick and listless to be properly termed a breeze; but in spite of that the spacious apartment in Cornwall House which was the Saint's London headquarters attained an atmo­sphere of comparative peace and freshness.
r />   "There are mugs of all kinds, but there are very special and superlative mugs who do their mugging in London; and we are it," he said gloomily. "I had a beautiful dinner, thanks. The truites au bleu were magnificent, and the pigeons truffés in aspic were a dream. The candidate was looking her best, which is pretty good. She went home early. Since then I've been drowning my sorrows at the Cafe Royal."

  Patricia contemplated him discerningly.

  "The dinner was beautiful, and the candidate was look­ing her best, and she went home early," she repeated. "What was the matter with her?"

  "She wanted her beauty sleep," said the Saint. "After you with that barley water, Hoppy."

  He stretched out a long arm and retrieved the bottle of scotch from Mr Uniatz' jealous grasp.

  "What Hoppy needs is compressed whiskey, so he could get a bottle into a wineglass," he commented.

  "Was it your scintillating conversation that made her yawn?" inquired Peter Quentin. "Or did she have the wrong kind of ideas about what sort of sleep would be good for her beauty?"

  Simon splashed soda into his glass and drank medi­tatively.

  "She's an attractive wench," he said. "I like her. She's so innocent and disarming, and as harmless as a hungry shark. The trouble is that if she's not careful she's going to wake up one day and find herself left in a dark alley with her throat cut, and that will be a great pity for any­one with a face and figure like hers."

  "Say, where do ya get dat stuff?" demanded Mr Uniatz loudly.

  He sat forward on the edge of his chair, his hamlike hands practically obliterating his half-empty glass, with a deep frown corrugating the negligible clearance between his eyebrows and his hair, and his paleolithically rough­cast face chopped into masses of fearsome challenge.

  Simon raised his head to stare at him. A criticism like that coming from Mr Uniatz, a man to whom any form of mental exercise was such excruciating torture that he had always been dumb with worship before the Saint's godlike ability to think, had something awe-inspiring about it that numbed its audience. It was nothing like a rabbit turning round to bare its teeth at a greyhound. It was more like a Storm Trooper turning round and asking Hitler why he didn't stop strutting around and get wise to himself. For one reeling instant the Saint wondered if history had been made that night, and the whiskey which had for years been flowing in gargantuan quantities down Hoppy's asbestos throat had at long last soaked through to some hidden sensitive section of his entrails.

  Mr Uniatz reddened bashfully under the stares that impinged upon him. He was unaccustomed to being the focus of so much attention. But he clung valiantly to his point.

  "It sounds like a pipe dream to me, boss," he said.

  "Let me get this straight," said the Saint carefully. "I gather that you don't think that Valerie Woodchester runs any risk of getting her throat cut. Is that the idea ?"

  Mr Uniatz looked about him in dazed perplexity. He seemed to think that everyone had gone mad.

  "I dunno, boss," he said, refusing to be sidetracked. "What I wanna know is where do ya get dat stuff ?"

  "What stuff?" asked Peter faintly.

  "De compressed whiskey," said Mr Uniatz.

  There was a pregnant silence.

  The Saint laid his head slowly back on the cushions and closed his eyes.

  "Hoppy," he said solemnly, "I love you. When I die, the word 'Uniatz' will be found written on my heart."

  "How about if de goil is selling it, boss?" ventured Mr Uniatz, tiptoeing into the dizzy realms of Theory. "Maybe she's in de racket, too, woikin' for de chemical factory where dey make it."

  Simon passed him the whiskey bottle.

  "Maybe she is, Hoppy," he said. "It's an idea, anyway. Give yourself some more nourishment while we think it over."

  "Didn't you get anything useful out of her?" asked Patricia.

  "She held out on me," said the Saint ruefully. "I did my best, but I might have saved myself the trouble. Amazing as it may seem, she wouldn't confide in me. The secrets of her girlish heart are still the secrets of her girlish heart so far as I'm concerned."

  Peter clicked his tongue.

  "You've met her four times now, and she hasn't confided in you," he said in accents of distress. "You must be losing your touch. They don't usually hold out so long."

  "What do you mean by 'they'?" demanded the Saint unblushingly.

  "He means your harem candidates," said Patricia. "The wild flowers that droop shyly at you from the hedges as you pass by. This one must be pretty tough if she still hasn't given way to your manly charms."

  Simon reached for a cigarette and flicked his thumbnail thoughtfully over a match.

  "She's tough, all right," he said. "But I don't know how tough. She'll need all she's got to sit in on this game. She's sitting in, and I'm still wondering whether she really knows what the stakes are. There was one time tonight when I thought we were going to get somewhere, but she closed up again and went home."

  "You started to get somewhere, then," said Peter.

  The Saint nodded.

  "Oh yes, I started. But I didn't finish, so we might just as well forget about it. She knows something, though—I found that out, even if she didn't admit it. But she's going to play her own hand; and so she'll probably get her throat cut, as I was saying. It makes everything very difficult."

  He sat up in an access of unruly energy, and his blue eyes went over them with an almost angry light.

  "God damn it," he said quietly, "it's a complete and perfect setup—with only the foundation missing. I've worked it all out a dozen times since we talked it over at Anford, and I expect you have, too. We'll run over it again if you like, and get it all in one piece."

  "All right," said Peter. "You run over it. We like hear­ing you listen to yourself."

  "Here it is, then. We've got our friend Luker, the arms wangler. He's on a job. In this case he's in on it with a couple of his stooges named Sangore and Fairweather—two highly esteemed gentlemen with complete faith in their own respec­tability but completely under his thumb for any dirty work he wants to put in. Also vaguely related is Lady Valerie, a sort of spare-time entraîneuse for Fairweather. Okay. On the other side you have well-meaning but not very agile professional pacifists Kennet and Windlay. Somehow or other they dig up inside information about the job Luker is on. This is where their lack of agility shows up. They threaten exposure unless Luker drops it. Okay. Luker has no intention of dropping it. The first move is through Fairweather, to sic Lady Valerie on to Kennet and see if she can seduce him from his irritating ideals. This fails. Lady Valerie is therefore used for the last time to lure Kennet down to Whiteways for a conference, where he meets with a fortunate accident. The coroner, a staunch friend of the aristocracy, is probably persuaded that Kennet was caught in a drunken stupor, and keeps the inquest nicely ham­strung to save scandal. Everything goes off smoothly; and meanwhile Windlay is mysteriously murdered, apparently by some prowling thug. Okay again."

  "And so soothing," said Peter. "Especially for the corpses."

  "Unfortunately this isn't quite the end of it. The ungodly haven't found Kennet's incriminating evidence. Meanwhile Kennet has been partly overcome by Lady Valerie, at least enough to give her a little information about this evidence —either what it is, or where it is, or something. We now come to Lady Valerie's psychology."

  "I thought we should come to that eventually," said Patricia.

  Simon threw a cushion at her.

  "She's not a bad kid, really," he said. "But she likes having a good time, and she has an almost infantile ability to rationalize anything that helps to get her what she thinks is a good time, to her own entire satisfaction. Nor is she anything like so dumb as she tries to make out. When Kennet meets with a highly suspicious accident and Windlay is just obviously murdered, it wakes her up a bit—possibly with a certain amount of help from my own blundering bluntness. And maybe she even feels a genuine remorse. From the symptoms, I should say she did. She's absent-mindedly go
ne just a little further than she'd ever have gone if she knew exactly what she was doing, and done something really nasty. She also realizes that it's given her some sort of hold over Fairweather and the others. But she still doesn't want to confide in me. She's paddling her own canoe. And as far as I can see there are only two ways she can be heading. Either she's got some crazy idea of making amends by carrying on Kennet's work on her own, and taking some wild vengeance on the gang that used her for a cat's-paw, or else she simply means to blackmail them. And I may be daft, but it seems to me that her scheme might very well combine the two."

  Peter Quentin got up and refilled his glass. He sat down again and looked at the Saint seriously.

  "And she's the only link we've got with what's going on?" he said.

  "The one and only. Kennet and Windlay are dead, and we shouldn't get anything out of Luker and Company unless we beat it out of them, which mightn't be so easy as it sounds. Meanwhile we're tied hand and foot. We're just sitting tight and twiddling our thumbs while she's playing her own fool game. What should we do? Use her for bait and wait until something happens, with the risk of finding her as useful as John Kennet at the end of it? Or start again and try to cut in from another angle?"

  "You tell us," said Patricia.

  There was a pause in the intermittent glugging which had punctuated the conversation from the corner where Mr Uniatz was marooned with his consoling bottle in the midst of the uncharted wilderness of Thought. Mr Uniatz was no longer clear about why his purely sociable contribution to the powwow should have marooned him there, but in his last conscious moment he had been invited to join in thinking about something, and since then he had been submerged in his lonely struggle. Now, corning to the surface like a diver whose mates have suddenly remembered him and pulled him up, the anguished irregularities of his face dis­solved into a radiant beam of heaven-sent inspiration.

  "I got it, boss!" he announced ecstatically. "What we gotta do wit' dis wren is catch her at de aerodrome before she takes off."