The Saint Plays with Fire (The Saint Series) Page 11

  She laughed. Her laughter sounded a trifle false.

  She emptied her coffee cup and finished her brandy. She began 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 held 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 do 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 Fairweather was sitting in the smoke-room of his paralysingly respectable and conservative club, finishing an excellent cigar and enjoying a sedate postprandial brandy and soda and the equally sedate postprandial 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 if he was 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 see-saw effects was making Mr Fairweather 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 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 Fairweather, 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 unreasonable 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 chance 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 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 deeps 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.”

  “Celia Mallard knows where they are?” moaned Fairweather. “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 when you hear from Celia Mallard, or as soon as you remember what you did with them? And…urn…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 anymore; 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. Goodbye.”

  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 she had put down when she telephoned. Over the rim of her 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 have 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.