The Saint Plays with Fire (The Saint Series) Read online

  “Is that all you can remember?”

  “Yes. Everything,” she said despairingly. “But doesn’t it help you? I mean, it’s quite a lot for me to remember, really, and you’re so clever, you ought to be able to think of something—”

  The Saint might have hit her on the nose. He might have taken her neck in his two hands and wrung it out like a sponge. It stands to the credit of his self-control that he did neither of those things.

  Instead he did something so free from deliberate thought that it might have been almost instinctive, and yet which afterwards he was tempted to think must have been inspired. He couldn’t conscientiously pride himself on thinking so accurately and so far ahead. But he knew that photograph must be a vital part of the secret, if not the most vital part, and he knew that the negative mattered far more than the print. Of all things, that was what he must retain until he knew its secret. And retaining it might not be so easy. Even then, as he knew, all the police departments of England were hunting him, as well as the anonymous legions of the ungodly. Accidents could always happen, and at any moment one or the other might catch up with him, and then, whichever it was, the first thing that would follow would be that he would be searched. Luckily a Leica negative was not so hard to hide—

  That was how he might have worked it out if he had thought so long. But he didn’t. He simply got up and strolled over to the dressing-table with the negative held between his fingers. There, standing with his back to the girl, he took out his fountain pen, removed the cap, unscrewed the nib end, and carefully drew it out with the rubber ink sac attached. Then he rolled the negative gently with his finger and thumb, slid it down into the barrel of the pen, and replaced everything. It was not so good as the strong room of a safe deposit, where he would have liked to put it, but it was the best thing he could improvise at the moment, and the restrained mechanical occupation of his hands helped to liberate his struggling thoughts…

  “What are you doing?” the girl asked fretfully.

  “Thinking.” He turned round empty-handed, the pen back in his pocket. She had seen nothing. “This seems like a good time and place for it.” Again his eyes were narrowed on her like keen blades of sapphire probing for the first hint of deception, “And talking of places—what made you pick on this one to come to?”

  “Oh, that was something else that I thought was pretty clever of me. I mean, if you hadn’t been following me, which was sort of cheating, you’d never have thought of looking for me here, would you? And it all came to me in a flash, just like that, when I was at the cloakroom in Paddington. You see, I had to go somewhere, and I couldn’t go to my flat because everybody knows where that is, and I knew you and Algy and the Sons of France and everybody else would be looking for me, so I had to find somewhere to hide, and then I suddenly remembered reading in a detective story once that the best place to hide was the most obvious place, because nobody ever thought of looking in it. So then I thought, well, I was only down here a few days ago, and lots of awkward things were happening down here then, and so nobody would expect me to come back here. So I just got on the first train and came back, and I got hold of a porter just before the train went out and gave him a telegram to send to Algy and told him if he wanted to talk to me any more about these papers he could put an advertisement in the Morning Post…What’s the matter?”

  The Saint was standing and gooping at her as if he had been hit on the back of the head. It was a few moments before he recovered his voice.

  “You sent Fairweather a telegram before the train left?”

  “Yes.”

  “From Paddington?”

  “Yes. You see—”

  “Never mind what I see. You poor little blithering feather-head, can’t you see what you did?”

  “Did I do anything wrong?”

  The Saint swallowed.

  “No, nothing,” he said. “You only told him where to look for you. Haven’t you realised that your telegram would be marked as handed in at Paddington? And do you think he’s had a house here for all these years without knowing that Paddington is the station where you take off for Anford? And don’t you think your telegram is going to remind him about it? And don’t you think he’s ever read any detective stories? And don’t you think that that’s just the half-witted break he’d credit you with at once from what he knows of you? He can afford the risk of being wrong, but where do you think is the first place he’s going to look for you, just for luck? You…you female Uniatz, you’ve left him a trail a mile wide that leads straight to where you’re sitting!”

  At any other time her dismay might have been comical. She looked as if she was going to cry.

  “D-do you really think he’ll think of all that?”

  “I know damn well he’ll think of it. Has thought of it. There may be plenty of things about him I don’t like, but he couldn’t be where he is and be that dumb. And besides, he has Luker to help him think.” Simon glanced at his watch. “By this time—”

  He had no need to go into any further explanations of what might have happened by that time. A heavy knock on the door provided them for him.

  The sound went down into the Saint’s stomach as if he had swallowed a lump of lead. For an instant he felt as if all the blood stopped circulating in his veins, and his ears roared with the thunder of his own stillness. The knocking was so apt, so uncannily instantaneous on its cue, that for a fraction of a second he seemed to be jarred out of all power of movement.

  And then he was very quiet and very cool. His glance whirled over the room: its masses of furniture provided half a dozen hiding places, but none of them was any good. He took one step aside, and looked out of the window. It opened on to the High Street, and the sidewalks were busy with people.

  The Saint’s eyes went back to Lady Valerie, and they were oddly, incredibly gay. But besides that reckless humour they carried something else that could only be described here in page after page of inadequate words. She stared at him in the frightened continuation of a stupor that had lasted longer than his own, while his eyes spoke to her with that queer vague message that awoke no less formless questions and answers in her brain, and the two of them seemed to be infinitely alone in a strange universe of their own where thoughts passed without words; all of that in an eternity that could only have lasted for a moment, before his lips were shaping inaudible syllables:

  “Let them in.”

  She got up, and he moved behind her, and stood behind the door as she opened it, with his right hand resting lightly on the butt of his gun inside the breast of his coat.

  A voice said, “Lady Valerie? May we come in?”

  She stammered something, and stepped back. The Saint felt the edge of the bed against his knees and sat down quickly on it. The door, closing again, disclosed him to the arrivals at the same time as it revealed them to him. They were the police sergeant whom he had met before, in plain clothes, and the constable whose name was Reginald.

  4

  Whereupon quite a number of interesting jobs of looking proceeded to take place in various directions.

  The Saint looked at the two arms of the Law, and his face broke into an affable and untroubled smile of welcome. He took his right hand out of the breast of his coat with his cigarette case in it.

  The constable looked at the Saint, and his mouth sagged open. He said in a dazed and dumbfounded sort of voice, “Gorblimey, it’s ’im.” Then he went on staring, while his honest red face expressed an inward struggle between admiration and duty.

  The sergeant looked at the Saint, and stiffened. He looked slightly frightened, but his uneasiness was clearly subservient to his sense of responsibility. He planted himself more firmly on his by no means ethereal feet, as if bracing himself to deal with trouble.

  Then another thought seemed to cross his mind, distracting him. He tried to resist it, but it grew stronger. He frowned. He looked at Lady Valerie again, rather perplexedly.

  Lady Valerie looked at him, and twitched a rather weak
and uncertain little smile. Then she looked at the Saint.

  The Saint looked at her. His face was cheerfully composed, but his eyes said again, for her alone, the same things that they had said when the two of them had looked at one another before he told her to open the door. It was as if they met her with a challenge, a suggestion, a request, a mocking invitation, a sardonic query, anything but a plea, and yet no other eyes on earth could have pleaded more compellingly. And now she understood some things she had not understood before.

  She looked at the sergeant again.

  The sergeant looked at the constable.

  The constable looked at the sergeant, not very intelligently, perhaps, but with a dawning grasp of what was troubling his superior’s mind.

  Both of them looked at the Saint.

  Both of them looked at Lady Valerie.

  Both of them looked at the Saint once more.

  The sergeant scratched his head.

  “Well, I dunno,” he announced helplessly. “There must be somethink barmy about this.”

  Simon had his cigarette case open. He took out a cigarette.

  “What’s on your mind, brother?” he inquired amiably.

  The sergeant took another look round and apparently could only come to the same conclusion. As if in token of surrender, he took off his hat.

  “Well, sir, it’s like this. Just a few minutes ago we received a message from Scotland Yard saying as you’d kidnapped Lady Valerie Woodchester, an’ she’d escaped from you, an’ they ’ad reason to believe she might ’ave come here to Anford, an’ you might be arfter ’er to try an’ kidnap ’er again, an’ we was to endeavour to trace ’er an’ afford her every protection, an’ if we found you hanging about there was a warrant for your arrest. Well, we tried the hotels first, and as soon as we rang up ’ere they told us that Lady Valerie ’ad just come in and taken a room. So I come along to see if she’d like to make a statement an’ if she wanted a man to look arfter ’er, an’ now you’re here with ’er, and…Well,” said the sergeant, plugging his initial thesis, “there must be somethink barmy about it.”

  “There’s a warrant for my arrest?” Simon ejaculated. “What on earth is it for?”

  “Kidnapping Lady Valerie. An obstructing the police in the execution of their duty.”

  Simon had wondered how Mr Teal would officially describe being locked up in a wardrobe with an ex-Cabinet Minister.

  “Good Lord,” he said, “does it look as if Lady Valerie was excited about being rescued?”

  “That,” said the sergeant, with lugubrious finality, “is wot looks so barmy.”

  The Saint grinned, and leaned back.

  “Are you sure somebody hasn’t been pulling your leg?” he suggested.

  “I dunno. If anybody has, ’e’ll be sorry he ever tried it, before I’ve finished with ’im. But it sounded all right; just like the regular communications we ’ave from the Yard when there’s anythink doing.” The sergeant turned his disappointedly bewildered eyes back to the girl. “Did Mr Templar kidnap you, miss?” he asked, like a drowning man clutching at the last straw.

  Lady Valerie looked at the Saint again and back to the two policemen.

  Simon put his cigarette between his lips and drew at it very slowly.

  “Why,” she said, “that’s the funniest thing I ever heard!”

  There was a silence in which no pins could have been heard dropping because nobody was dropping pins. The sergeant scratched another part of his head, and squeezed little wedges of coagulated dandruff from under his fingernails. He looked as unhappy as any public servant must look when confronted by a situation that fails to follow the dotted line. Simon took his cigarette out of his mouth and trickled the smoke out in a long leisured streamer through the unaltered quizzical curve of his lips. His gaze rested contemplatively on Lady Valerie as her glance returned to him. She looked coy and complacent, like a puppy that has got away with an unguarded plate of foie gras canapés. It was left to the constable to make the first constructive contribution. An expression of mingled relief and pride had ironed the wrinkles out of his countenance when he heard Lady Valerie’s confirmatory denial: quite plainly he had been making a dutiful effort to convince himself that the Saint had actually been caught more or less red-handed, but he had never really made it stick hard enough to be able to let go of it, and it was distinctly cheering to him to be absolved from the strain of continuing to hold it down. Now he was free to indulge in his own theories, and the solution came to him with dazzling simplicity.

  “I can see wot’s ’appened,” he proclaimed. “It’s as clear as daylight. It’s a gang. That’s wot it is. One of these gangs which Mr Templar is always breakin’ up ’as got it in for ’im, and they’re tryin’ to frame him for this kidnapping which he knows nothing about so as to get ’im out o’ the way and leave ’emselves free to get on with their dirty work. That’s wot it is.”

  The sergeant did not seem impressed.

  “It isn’t because any threats ’ave bin made to you in case you tell the truth, is it, Lady Valerie?” he persisted, as if hoping against hope. “Because if they ’ave, I can tell you that while we’re here you need ’av no fear of any menaces, no matter ooze—”

  “Of course not,” said the girl. “Really, Sergeant, you’re very kind, and I’m sure you mean well, and all that sort of thing, but this is getting too ridiculous for words.”

  “It’s a gang,” repeated the constable confidently. “That’s wot—”

  “Will you shut your mouth?” said the sergeant crushingly, and when his subordinate had obeyed he looked rather miserable and lonely. “Wot the ’ell,” he said, giving way to forces stronger than official rank, “are we gain’ to do about this?”

  There was a pause of intense cogitation.

  “Get ’old of Scotland Yard,” said the constable, “and tell ’em wot Lady Valerie says.”

  “While we keep Mr Templar in custody,” said the sergeant, seeing light.

  “But you can’t!” the girl said indignantly. “How can you lock Mr Templar up in your beastly prison for kidnapping me when I’m here to prove that he hasn’t done anything of the sort? I mean, I’m the one who’s supposed to have been kidnapped, so I ought to have some say about it. Who’s got any right to say I’ve been kidnapped if I say I haven’t?”

  The sergeant wriggled wretchedly inside his coat.

  “I dunno, miss,” he said. “But those are the instructions we ’ad from London—”

  “I won’t hear of it!” she said tearfully.

  She sat down on the bed beside the Saint and took hold of his arm. Her lovely brown eyes gazed at him with something like worship.

  “Do you think we ought to tell them, Simon?” she said.

  “Do you?” he replied, not knowing what she was talking about, but with an awful premonition.

  “Yes.” She flounced up, and took hold of the sergeant’s arm. “You see,” she said, “Mr Templar and I are going to be married.”

  Simon Templar leaned back on his elbows just a split second before he would have fallen back on them. His brain whirred like a clock preparing to strike.

  The sergeant blinked.

  The constable gulped, and then his face opened in a great joyful romantic beam.

  He said, “Wot?”

  She said, “Yes. You see, we only just fixed it up last night, when we found out we were in love. And…and we didn’t want any publicity. I mean, you know what the newspapers would do with anything like that. So we thought we’d just run away. I suppose some of my friends have been trying to get hold of me, or something, and when they found I’d disappeared they thought something frightful had happened to me, and so they told Scotland Yard and started all this silly scare, but there’s nothing in it really, and we’ve just eloped, and we’re going to be married as soon as we can fix it up, and you can’t arrest Mr Templar because that would spoil everything and it’d be in all the papers and we’d get all the limelight that we’re trying to get
away from. You do understand, don’t you?”

  The Saint lay completely back and closed his eyes, because he could think of nothing else to do.

  And she had the nerve to sit down beside him and kiss him.

  And then the constable was pumping his limp hand and saying, “Well, sir, may I ’ave the honour of being the first to congratulate you—”

  “You may, Reginald,” said the Saint feebly. “Indeed you may. And for all I know, you may be the last.”

  “Well, I dunno,” said the sergeant, harping on his theme. “I suppose in that case all we can do is take a statement an’ let both of you go.”

  “I’ll take it down,” said the constable.

  He rummaged eagerly in his pocket and pulled out sheets of official foolscap. With his tongue protruding, he wrote laboriously at dictation.

  “ ‘My name is Lady Valerie Woodchester…I was not kidnapped by Mr Simon Templar. I am in love with him. We have eloped together…I eloped in secret because we did not wish any fuss…’ Will you sign your name ’ere, miss?”

  Lady Valerie signed.

  “Mr Templar’d better sign it too,” said the sergeant gloomily.

  The Saint drew a deep breath, but he could say nothing. He took the pen, and wrote his name with a steady hand.

  The sergeant read over the sheet, folded it, and put it in his pocket.

  “Well,” he said despondently, “that’s all we can do. Will you be stayin’ ’ere for some time, sir?”

  “No,” said the Saint definitely. “We were only spending a few hours before we went on to Southampton to catch a boat.” He got up. “We’ll go out with you.”

  They went out. The constable carried Lady Valerie’s tiny valise. Simon paid the bill for her room at the desk. They left the hotel.

  Simon steered the cortège along the street to the side turning where he had parked the Daimler. If Lady Valerie was surprised to see it, she gave no sign. He opened the near-side door and ushered her in with ceremonial courtesy. Just then he was too full of thoughts for words. He went round the car and got into the driving seat.