Prelude For War s-19 Read online

  And once more that queer tingle of suspicion groped its way through the Saint's brain. Only this time it was more than a vague, formless hunch. He knew now, beyond any shadow of doubt, with an uncanny certainty, that he was on the threshold of something which his inborn flair for the strange twists of adventure was physically incapable of leaving unexplored. And an electric ripple of sheer delight brought every fibre of his being to ecstatic life. His inter­lude of peace was over.

  "Really," he affirmed flatly.

  "Then perhaps you were even luckier than you realize," said the square man smoothly. If he meant to give the words any extra significance, he did it so subtly that there was no single syllable on which an accusation could have been pinned. In point of time it had only lasted for a moment, that silent and apparently unimportant exchange of glances; and after it there was nothing to show that a challenge had been thrown down and taken up. "If we can offer you what hospitality we have left—I'm sure Mr Fairweather——"

  The Saint shook his head.

  "Thanks," he said, "but I haven't got far to go, and I've got a suitcase in the car."

  "Then I hope we shall be seeing more of you." The square man turned. "I suppose we should get along to the lodge, Sir Robert. We can't be any more use here."

  "Harrumph," said the general. "Er—yes. A splendid effort, young man. Splendid. Ought to have a medal. Harrumph."

  He allowed himself to be led away, rumbling.

  Mr Fairweather grasped the Saint's hand and pumped it vigorously up and down. He had recovered what must have been his normal tremendous dignity, and now he was also able to make himself heard.

  "I shall take personal steps," he announced majestically, "to see that your heroism is suitably recognized."

  He stalked off after the others, without stopping to inquire the Saint's name and address.

  Clanging importantly, the first fire engine swept up the gravel drive and came to a standstill in front of the terrace.

  4

  "I'm glad they got here in time to water the flowers," Simon observed rather bitterly.

  He was wondering how much difference it might have made if they had arrived early enough to get a ladder to the window of that locked room. But the nearest town of any size was Anford, about seven miles away, and the possi­bility that they could have arrived much sooner was purely theoretical. From the moment a fire like that took hold the house was inevitably doomed.

  The policeman who had been holding his arm had moved off during the conversation, and the other spectators were simply standing around and gaping in the dumb bovine way in which spectators of catastrophes usually stand and gape.

  Simon touched Patricia's arm.

  "We might as well be floating along," he said. "The excitement seems to be over, and it's past our bedtime."

  They had got halfway to the car when the police sergeant overtook them.

  "Excuse me, sir."

  "You are forgiven," said the Saint liberally. "What have you done?"

  "How did you happen to be here, sir?"

  "Me ? I just happened to see the fire from the main road, so I beetled over to have a look at it."

  "I see." The sergeant wrote busily in his notebook. "Any­thing else, sir?"

  The Saint's hesitation was imperceptible. Undoubtedly there had been various things else; but it would have been very complicated to go into them. And when Simon Tem­plar had got the scent of mystery in his nostrils, the last thing he wanted was to have the police blundering along the same keen trail—at least not before he had given a good deal of thought to the pros and cons.

  "No," he said innocently. "Except that this bloke Kennet seemed to be still in the house, so I just had a dart at fish­ing him out. He wouldn't be any relation of the M.P. by any chance, would he?"

  "His son, I believe, sir, from what I've heard in the vil­lage. Staying with Mr Fairweather for the week end. He must have been suffocated in his sleep, pore devil—let's hope 'e was, anyway. It 'll cause a bit of a stir, all right."

  "I shouldn't be surprised," said the Saint thoughtfully.

  The sergeant nodded sagely, no doubt squandering a moment on the satisfactory vision of his own name in the headlines. Then he returned to business.

  "I'd better just have your name and address, sir, in case you're wanted for the inquest."

  Simon felt in his pocket, produced a card, scribbled on it and handed it over.

  "That's where I'll be staying for the next few days." He started to move on, and then turned back. "By the way, who was that other fellow—the bloke who looks as if he'd been chopped out of a small piece of cliff?"

  "You mean Mr Luker, sir? He often comes down and stays with Mr Fairweather. He's a financier, or something like that, I believe."

  "A financier, is he?" said the Saint slowly. "What fun!"

  He walked on and climbed into the car with a new load of tangled thoughts. The engine started with a low whirr, and they drove back along the drive and slid round the corner into the road.

  Presently the Saint said, inconsequentially: "Next time I go to a fire I'm going to wear some old clothes."

  "You're better off than I am," said Patricia. "You've got some other things left. Lady Sangore and Valerie Woodchester between them have just about wrecked my suitcases. Lady Sangore practically told me that all my undies were immoral, but it didn't stop her helping herself to all she wanted. You know the sort. A pillar of the British Empire and underpays her maids."

  "I know," said the Saint feelingly. "What about the Woodchester girl ?"

  "Lady Valerie Woodchester, to be exact. All I know about her is that she picked all my most expensive things and didn't miss once."

  "Did either of them tell you how the fire started?"

  She shook her head.

  "They didn't know. It's an old house, but it had modern automatic fire alarms. All they could tell me was that the alarms went off and everyone came tumbling out of bed. There seems to have been a good deal of confusion. Lady Sangore put the whole thing down to the Communists— but then if she drops a stitch when she's knitting, she puts it down to the Communists. Valerie Woodchester was very peeved because the young Guardsman insisted on rescuing her without giving her time to put on a dressing gown. That's all I got out of her."

  "Did you talk to anyone else ?"

  "Well, that man you were talking to——"

  "Luker?"

  "Yes. He said he thought it must have been a short cir­cuit in the lighting system. But I couldn't pay much attention while you were in there. You know. I was too busy worry­ing about whether you were enjoying yourself."

  The Saint chuckled absently.

  "It was a bit dull at times," he said.

  He drove on slowly. His smile faded, and a faint ridge of concentration formed between his brows. It was an in­significant betrayal of what was going on in his mind, for the truth was that he was thinking harder than he had done for a long time.

  Patricia watched him without interrupting. She had that rare gift in a woman, the ability to leave a man to his si­lence, and she knew that the Saint would talk when he was ready. But there was nothing to stop her own thoughts. He had told her nothing; but in a puzzled, bewildered way she knew that he had something startling to tell. The Saint on the trail of trouble had something vivid and dynamic and transfiguring about him, as unmistakable as the quivering transformation of a hunting dog that has caught a new hot scent. Patricia knew all the signs. But now, with no idea of the reason for them, they gave her the eerie feeling of watching a dog bristling before an apparently empty room.

  "Which only shows you that you never know," said the Saint presently, as if she should have known everything.

  She knew that she would have to draw him out warily.

  "They didn't seem to be a very brilliant crowd," she said."I didn't seem to be able to get much more sense out of them than you could."

  "I was afraid you wouldn't," he admitted. "Oh no, they're not brilliant. But very respectab
le. In fact, just about what you'd expect to find at a place like that at the week end. Lady Sangore, the typical army officer's wife, with her husband the typical army officer. Lady Valerie Wood-chester, the bright young society floozie, of the fearfully county huntin'-shootin'-an'-fishin' Woodchesters. Captain Whoosis of the Buffoon Guards, her dashing young male equivalent, probably a nephew or something like that of old Sangore's, invited down to make an eligible partner for Lady Valerie. Comrade Fairweather, the nebulous sort of modern country squire, probably Something in the City in his spare time, and one of the bedrocks of the Conservative party. A perfectly representative collection of English ladies and gentlemen of what we humorously call the Upper Classes. We can find out a bit more about them tomorrow —Peter's been living here long enough now to be able to dig up some extra dirt from the village if he doesn't know it already. But I don't think we'll get anything sensational. People like that live in an even deeper rut than the fellow who goes to an office every morning, although they'd have a stroke if you told them. If only they hadn't invited Com­rade Luker . . ."

  "Who is he?"

  Simon drew another cigarette to a bright glow from the stump of the last.

  "If he's a financier, as the policeman said, and he's the bloke I'm thinking of, I've heard of him. Which is more than most people have done. He moves in a mysterious way."

  "Where does he move?"

  "In the most distinguished international circles. He hob­nobs with foreign secretaries and ambassadors and prime ministers, and calls dictators by their first names. But you never read about him in the newspapers, and there are never any photographers around when he pays his calls. They must like him just because he's such a charming guy. Of course he's one of the biggest shareholders in the Stelling Steel Works in Germany, and the Siebel Arms Factory in France, and the Wolverhampton Ordnance Company in England; but you couldn't be so nasty as to think that that had anything to do with it. After all, he plays no favourites. In the last Spanish revolution, the rebels were mowing down Loyalists with Stelling machine guns just as busily as the government was bopping the rebels with Siebels. It was just about the same in the war between Bolivia and Para­guay, except that the Wolverhampton Ordnance Company was in on that as well—on both sides."

  The knot around Patricia's heart seemed to tighten.

  "Just one of Nature's altruists," she said mechanically.

  "Oh yes," said the Saint, with a kind of deadly and dis­tant cheerfulness. "You couldn't say he was anything but impartial. For instance, he's one of the directors of the Voix Populaire, a French newspaper that spends most of its time howling about the menace of the Italo-German Fascist entente and at the same time he's part owner of the Deutscher Unterricht, which lets off periodical blasts about the French threat to German recovery. ... At home, of course, he's a staunch patriot. He's one of the most gener­ous subscribers to the Imperial Defence Society, which spends its time proclaiming that Britain must have bigger and better armaments to protect herself against all the European enemies of peace. In fact, the I.D.S. takes a lot of credit for the latest fifteen-hundred-million-pound rearmament programme which our taxes are now paying for. And naturally it's just an unavoidable coincidence that the Wolverhampton Ordnance Company is now working night and day to carry out its government contracts."

  "I see," said Patricia; but it was only as if a fog had eddied and parted capriciously, giving her a glimpse of something huge and terrifyingly inhuman looming through shifting veils of mist.

  Simon Templar's face was as dark and cold as graven copper.

  "You know what I mean?" he said. "Kane Luker is probably the only serious rival that our old friend Rayt Marius ever had. And now that Angel Face is no longer with us, Luker stands alone—the kingpin of what somebody once called the Merchants of Death. It's interesting to have met him, because I've often thought that we may have to liquidate him one day."

  The mists broke in Patricia's mind, so that for an instant she could see with a blinding clarity. It was as if the whole interruption of the fire had never happened, as if she was still sitting in the car as she had been before, listening to the sounds that came over the radio, without a break, just as she had been listening. Their primitive stridency beat in her brain again as if they had never ceased—the lusting clangour of trumpets, the machinelike prattle of the drums. Brass and drums. And men marching like lines of ants, their boots thudding like the tick-tock of some monstrous clock eating up time. Left, right, left. In time with the brass and drums. And in time, too, now, with the hammer and clang of flaring forges and the deep rolling reverberation of stu­pendous armouries pouring out the iron tools of war. . . .

  She looked at the Saint and was aware of him in the midst of all that, like a shining light, a bright sword, a clear note of music in the thunder of brute destruction, following his amazing destiny. But the thunder went on.

  She tried to shut it out.

  She said, almost desperately: "That fellow who was left —in there. Why did you ask if he was any relation of the M.P.?"

  "It just occurred to me. And he was. That's the funny part. Because unless my memory's all cockeyed, he's a flaming Red and a frightful thorn in the side of his respecta­ble papa. He's the one part of the picture that doesn't fit in. Why should a really outstanding crop of old and young Diehards like that ask anyone like John Kennet down for a week end?"

  "He might have amused them."

  "Would you credit them with that much sense of humour?"

  "I don't know. But if it was a joke, they must be feeling pretty badly about it." She shuddered. "I know it's all over now, but I hope—I hope they were right—that the smoke did put him out before the fire got to him."

  Simon's cigarette reddened again for a long moment before he answered.

  "If there's one thing I'm sure of, I'm sure that the fire didn't hurt him," he said; and the way he said it stopped her breath for a moment.

  The noise in her brain screamed up in an insane cacoph­ony.

  "You mean——"

  "I mean—murder," said the Saint.

  II

  How Lady Valerie Complained about

  Heroes, and Mr Fairweather Dropped

  His Hat

  "SEEING that time is flying," said Peter Quentin, "and since you have to attend an inquest this morning, I suppose you could use some extra nourishment."

  "How right you are," said the Saint. "Some people have no respect for anything. It's a gloomy thought. Even when you're dead, you're liable to be lugged out of the morgue at the squeak of dawn to have your guts poked over by some revoltingly healthy jury of red-faced yokels."

  "I like getting you up early," said Patricia. "It seems to lend a sort of ethereal delicacy to your ideas."

  Simon Templar grinned and watched Peter nipping the caps from a row of bottles of Carlsberg. As a matter of fact it was nearly ten o'clock, and for half an hour after breakfast they had been sitting in the sun on the porch out­side Peter's dining room. Two days had gone by since the fire, and it would have been hard to identify the supremely elegant Saint who sprawled in Peter's most comfortable deck chair with the blistered smoke-blackened scarecrow who had arrived there in the small hours of a certain morning with his grim foreboding.

  He took the tall glass that Peter handed him and eyed fit appreciatively.

  "And while we're soothing our tender nerves with this ambrosia," he said, "I suppose we'd better just run over what we've found out about these people who roast their week-end guests."

  "I might have known I should be let in for this," Peter said moodily. "I ought to have known better than to ask you down. This was the most peaceful place in England before you came near it, but wherever you go something unpleasant happens." He lifted his glass and drank. "How­ever, as usual, I've been doing your dirty work. Our local gossip writer has been snooping and eavesdropping, and will now present his report—such as it is."

  He returned to his chair and lighted a cigarette before he went on.


  "As you know, the house that provided the fireworks was called Whiteways. The owner is Mr A. S. Fairweather, a gentleman of wealth who is highly respected in local circles. For fifteen years he warmed a seat in the House of Commons as Conservative M.P. for Hamborough, and for one year just before he retired he held the job of secretary of state for war. His abilities must have impressed some people more than they impressed the other members' of that cabinet, because as soon as he retired he was offered a place on the board of the Norfelt Chemical Company, where he has sat ever since. He has a town house in Grosvenor Square, a Rolls Royce, and he has recently subscribed five hundred pounds toward the restoration of our local parish church—which means that he either has, or has not, a ripe sense of humour."

  Down by the bottles something stirred. It was something that looked rather like a reconstruction of the Piltdown Man might have looked if it had been first badly mauled with a sledge hammer and then encased in a brilliant check suit.

  "I know a guy once what has a chemical factory," announced Hoppy Uniatz, with the happy interest of a big-game hunter who hears the conversation veering round to the subject of big game. "He makes any kind of liquor. Just say de woid, an' it's rye or boigundy wit' all de labels an' everyting." A thought appeared to strike him in a vital spot. "Say, maybe we got someting, boss. Maybe dis guy Fairwedder is in de same racket."

  The Saint sighed.

  Between Simon and Peter there was the understanding of men who had fought shoulder to shoulder in many bat­tles. Between Simon and Hoppy Uniatz there was no such bond, since Nature, by some unfortunate oversight, had neglected to provide Mr Uniatz with any more gray matter than was required for the elementary functions of eating, drinking and handling firearms. He was at once the joy and despair of Simon's life; but his dumb devotion to what he regarded as the positively supernatural genius of the Saint was so wistful that Simon had never had the heart to let him go.

  "No, Hoppy," he said. "That stuff only burns your throat. The Norfelt product burns you all over."