Prelude For War s-19 Read online

  The Saint put another cigarette between his lips and steadied his hands round his lighter.

  "Have you any idea what he was going to do that was going to upset everybody so much?" he asked.

  The girl shrugged her slim shoulders.

  "I don't know. He had a lot of papers that he was going to publish and prove something. And just a week or two ago he was frightfully excited about some photographs that he'd got hold of. I don't know what they were, but both he and Windlay were frightfully worked up about it. But what does it matter, anyway?"

  3

  Simon Templar filled his lungs with smoke and let it out again in a trailing streamer that flowed with the unbroken evenness of a deep river. The shock that had brought him to conscious immobility had passed, letting the tenseness ebb out of his muscles to leave his natural lazy imperturba­bility apparently unchanged. But under his effortless and unruffled poise his brain was thrumming like an intoxicated dynamo.

  He had fished for clues and he had brought them up in a pail. It didn't matter for the moment how they fitted together. Luker and the Arms Ring; Sangore, formerly of the War Office, how a director of the Wolverhampton Ord­nance Company; Fairweather, sometime secretary of state for war, now on the board of Norfelt Chemicals; Kennet the pacifist, the groping crusader. Papers, exposes, photographs. And the Sons of France. Whichever way you spilled them, they fell into some sort of pattern. The drums he had heard such a short while ago thundered in the Saint's temples; the blaring brass shrieked in his ears. He felt as if he were standing on the brink of a breathless precipice, watching the boiling of a hideously parturient abyss. The keen clear zenithal winds of destiny fanned through his hair.

  He was conscious, in a curiously distant way, that the girl was still talking.

  "I never used to listen very hard—I was too busy trying to think of ways to stop them. If I hadn't stopped them, they'd have gone on all night. So when I'd had enough of politics I'd say something like 'Let's go to the Berkeley and have a drink,' and then they'd both start talking about the snobbishness of big hotels and how bad drink was for me; and I didn't mind that nearly so much, because I quite like talking about hotels and drink."

  The Saint brought himself back to her with a deliberate effort. He could think afterwards; now, precious time was flying, and the inquest was already late. He could have no more than a few seconds to take advantage of what Provi­dence had thrown into his lap.

  He said: "But if Kennet hated Luker and Sangore so much, what made him come down here for the week end ?"

  "I did. I thought that if he could come down here and see what they were really like, he might have given up his stupid ideas. And I knew they were going to offer him an awfully good job. Algy told me so."

  "Who?"

  "Algy. Algy Fairweather. Of course you know."

  "Of course," said the Saint humbly. "And didn't Kennet appreciate it?"

  "No. That's what made me so furious. When we got here he told me he was glad they wanted to see him, because he wanted to see them, too, and instead of them giving him a job he was going to see that theirs were made so uncomfortable that they'd be glad to give them up. So I told him I thought he was a silly, stupid, narrow-minded, bigoted halfwit, and a crashing bore as well, and—and we parted. After dinner he went into the library to talk to them, and I went to the movies with Don Knightley, and I never saw John again." She gazed at the Saint appeal­ingly. "D-do you really think it was my fault that all this happened?"

  He considered her without smiling.

  "I think you deserve a damned good hiding for leading Kennet up the garden," he said dispassionately. "And if I were Windlay I'd see that you got one."

  She pouted. She seemed to be more disappointed that he could think of her like that than seriously annoyed by what he had said. And then, quite unanswerably, a gleeful little twinkle came into her eyes that made her look momen­tarily like a mischievous and very attractive child.

  "You wouldn't say that if you knew Windlay," she gig­gled. "He's a very pale and skinny young man with glasses."

  Simon gave up the struggle. Actually he felt a colder anger against the men who had used the girl as their tool. The possibility that she might have been something more than an unsuspecting instrument was one which he dis­carded almost at once. She had already told him far too much. And her mind, whatever its obvious failings, could never have worked that way.

  "Where did Kennet and Windlay live?" he asked flatly.

  "Oh, miles from anywhere, out in Notting Hill, in an awful place called Balaclava Mansions."

  "Notting Hill isn't miles from anywhere," said the Saint. "The trouble with you is that you've never heard of any place outside the West End. You've got a brain; why don't you get reckless and try using it?"

  She sighed.

  "My God," she said. "Now you're going to come over all earnest on me. You think I ought to have a good hiding for the way I treated Johnny. I suppose my intentions weren't serious enough. I oughtn't to have pretended some­thing I didn't mean. Is that it?"

  "More or less," he said bluntly.

  He wondered what excuse she was going to make for herself.

  She didn't make any excuse. She laughed.

  "You have the nerve to stand there, in your beautiful clothes, with your dark hair and dashing blue eyes, and tell me that," she said startlingly. "I bet you've made love to heaps of women yourself, hundreds of times, and never meant a word of it."

  The Saint stared at her. For a moment he was com­pletely and irrevocably taken aback.

  In that moment his first hasty estimate of her underwent a surprising reversal, although it made no difference to his belief in her innocence. But it gave him an insight into her mind which he had not been expecting. She might be feather­brained and spoiled, but she had something more in her head than he had credited her with. For the first time he found himself appreciating her.

  "You win, darling," he said. The turn of his lips became impish. "Only I always mean it a little."

  Then one of the side doors opened and he saw Lady Sangore surge out like a full-rigged ship putting out from harbour. Behind her, in a straggling flotilla, came Sir Robert, Kane Luker and Mr Fairweather. Fairweather, peering round, caught sight of a ruddy-faced walrus-moustached man who. looked like a builder's foreman dressed up in his Sunday suit, who got up from the bench where he had been sitting as the party emerged. They shook hands, and Fairweather spoke to him for a moment before he shepherded him into the office which they had just left and came puttering back to rejoin the wake of the fleet. Simon noted the incident as he watched the armada catch sight of Lady Valerie and set a course for her.

  "My dear, I'm so sorry we've been such a long time," said Lady Sangore as she hove to. "All this bother only makes everything so much worse."

  She conveyed the impression that a fire in which some­body was burnt to death would not be nearly so distressing if it were not for the subsequent inconvenience which she personally had to suffer.

  "I hope you haven't been too bored, my dear," said Fairweather, puffing through into the foreground.

  Lady Valerie smiled.

  "Oh no," she said. "I've been very well looked after. You haven't forgotten the hero of the evening, have you?"

  Fairweather blinked at the Saint.

  "Of course—the gentleman who made that magnificent attempt to rescue poor old Kennet. I ought to have got in touch with you before, but—um—I'm sure you'll forgive us, everything has been so disorganized . . ." He shuffled his feet uneasily. "At any rate, it's a great relief to see that you don't look much the worse for your adventure."

  The Saint smiled—and to anyone who knew him well, that smile would have seemed curiously like the smile on the face of a certain celebrated tiger.

  He had been amazingly lucky. The return of Luker and Company had been delayed just long enough for him to coax out of Lady Valerie the whole incalculably important story which she had to tell; their reintroduction couldn't have been
more desirably timed if he had arranged it him­self. He could look for no more information, but he already had enough to keep his mind occupied for some time. Meanwhile, he could contribute something of his own which might add helpfully to the general embarrassment. He was only waiting for his chance.

  "I come from a long line of salamanders," he said cheerfully. "Wasn't that Kennet's father I saw you speaking to just now?"

  "Er—yes. I've known him for a long time, of course."

  "This inquest isn't being heard in camera by any chance, is it?"

  "Er—no. Why should it be?"

  "It seems to involve rather a lot of private interviews."

  "Urn." Fairweather looked even more uncomfortable. He seemed to inflate himself determinedly. "I fear I have never had any experience of these things. But of course it's the coroner's job to save as much of the court's time a possible."

  Simon toyed gently with his cigarette.

  "Lady Valerie and I were just talking it over," he said. "She seemed to have an idea that Kennet might have com­mitted suicide."

  "Suicide?" boomed General Sangore with gruff author­ity. "No, no, my dear fellow, that wouldn't do at all. We can't possibly have any sort of scandal. Think what it would mean to the poor chap's father. No. Accidental death is the verdict, eh?"

  He spoke as if the matter were all arranged. Fairweather supported him.

  "That's the only possible verdict," he said. "We've got to avoid any silly gossip. You know what these beastly newspapers are like—they'd give anything for the chance to make a sensation out of a case like this. Luckily the coroner is a sensible man. He won't stand any nonsense."

  "Isn't that splendid?" said the Saint.

  They all looked at him at once with a new intentness. The edge in his voice was as fine as a razor, but it cut through the threads of their complacency in a way that left them clammily suspended in an uncharted void. Before that, disarmed by his appearance and accent, they had taken him for granted as a slightly unusual member of a familiar species—their own species. Now they stared at him sus­piciously, as they might have stared at an intruding foreigner.

  "Are we to understand that you would disagree with that verdict, Mr Templar?" Luker inquired suavely.

  He was the only one who had remained immune to that involuntary stiffening. But he had had a chance to measure the Saint before, when, for one intangible moment, they had crossed swords in the garden during the fire.

  Simon's gaze sought him out with a sparkle of wicked sapphire.

  "Simon Templar is the full name," he said deliberately. "While you were finding out who I was, you should have talked to one of the policemen. He could have refreshed your memory. When you've read about me in the papers, I've usually been called the Saint."

  He might have dropped a bomb under their feet with a short fuse sizzling. There were times when the effects of revealing his identity gave him an indescribable delight, and this was one of them.

  Lady Valerie Woodchester let out a little squeal. Lady Sangore's mouth opened and then closed like a trap. The general's florid face added a tint of bright magenta to its varied hues. Fairweather dropped his hat, and it settled on the floor with an ear-splitting ploff. Only Luker remained motionless, with his dark sunken eyes riveted on the Saint.

  And the Saint went on smiling.

  There was a general eddy towards the entrance of the courtroom, and a red-faced constable took up his position beside the doors and began to intone self-consciously from a tattered piece of paper.

  "Oyez! Oyez! Oyez! All manner of persons having anything to do at this court, before the king's coroner for this county, touching the death of John Kennet, draw near and give your attendance, and if anyone can give evidence on behalf of our sovereign lord the king, when, how, and by what means John Kennet came to his death, let him come forward and he shall be heard; and you good men of this county summoned to appear here this day to enquire for our sovereign lord the king, when, how, and by what means John Kennet came to his death, answer to your names as they shall be called, every man at first call, on the pains and penalties that may fall thereon. God save the king!"

  4

  The courtroom was not crowded, in perceptible contrast with the encouraging throng of gapers that Simon had seen outside, so that he knew at once that some steps must have been taken to discourage the influx of the vulgar mob. Those of the public who had been able to gain admittance were accommodated in rows of hard wooden chairs set across the room with an aisle down the centre. Simon located Peter and Patricia among them, but he took a seat by himself on the other side of the gangway. His eyes met Patricia's for a moment of elusive mockery and then went on to take in the rest of his bearings.

  The first two rows on the right were occupied by the party from Whiteways, the Sangores, Luker, Fairweather and Lady Valerie, mingled with a few other people of the same obvious class who all seemed to know each other. They had an air of being apart from the remainder of the public, among them, but not of them, a small party of gentlefolk, self‑contained and self-sufficient, only vaguely conscious that there were other people present.

  The first two rows on the left had been reserved for the press, and there was not a vacant chair among them. In front of them, and at right angles to the general public, sat the coroner's jury, five good men of the county and two women. There was an attitude of respectful decorum about them, as if they had been in church. The Saint sized them up as being a representative panel of local shopkeepers. Only one of them was markedly different from the others —a little black-bearded scowling man who seemed to resent being in court at all.

  The coroner was a well-fed, well-scrubbed looking man with close-cropped gray hair and a close-cropped gray moustache. He wore a dark suit, with a stiff white collar and a blue bow tie with small white spots on it. While the jury was being sworn, he shuffled over a small batch of papers on his table, which occupied the centre of a dais at the very end of the room.

  When the jury were seated again, he cleared his throat noisily and addressed them.

  "We are here to inquire into the circumstances attending the death of the late John Kennet. It is your duty to listen carefully to the evidence which will be put before you and to return a verdict in accordance with that evidence. The facts concerning which evidence will be given are as follows. On the night of the seventeenth, the house known as Whiteways, the property of Mr Fairweather, was burnt to the ground. Various people were in the house when the fire started, including Mr Fairweather himself, General Sir Robert Sangore and Lady Sangore, Mr Kane Luker, Lady Valerie Woodchester, Captain Donald Knightley and the deceased. All of them except Captain Knightley are in court today. They will tell you that after they had left the build­ing they discovered that John Kennet was missing. An attempt to reach his room was unsuccessful owing to the rapid spread of the fire, and on the following day his charred remains were found in the wreckage of the house."

  His manner was brusque and important; quite plainly, nobody could tell him anything about how to run an inquest, and equally plainly he regarded a jury as nothing but a necessary evil, to be kept firmly in its place.

  "If you wish to do so you are entitled to view the body. Do you wish to view the body?" He paused perhaps long enough to take another breath, and said: "Very well, then. We shall proceed to hear evidence of how the body was found. Call the first witness."

  The sergeant standing behind him consulted a list of names and called out: "Theodore Bream."

  A man who looked rather like a retired carthorse lum­bered up on to the dais, sweating profusely, and took the oath. The coroner leaned back in his chair and looked him over like a schoolmaster inspecting a new pupil.

  "You are the captain of the Anford Fire Brigade?"

  "Yessir."

  "On the morning of the eighteenth you examined the ruins of Whiteways."

  "Yessir."

  "What did you find?"

  "In the ruins of the library, among a lot of daybree, I found the b
ody of the deceased."

  "Did you find anything else?"

  "Yessir. I found bits of a burned-up bedstead—coil springs and suchlike."

  "What deductions did you make from the position of the body and the burned fragments of the bedstead?"

  "Well, sir, I come to the conclusion that they'd dropped through the ceiling from one of the rooms above."

  The coroner rubbed his chin.

  "I see. You came to the conclusion that the bed, with the deceased in it, had dropped through the ceiling from one of the rooms above the library when the floor collapsed in the fire."

  "Yessir."

  "That seems quite plain. Did you find anything to suggest what might have been the cause of the fire?"

  "No sir. It might 've bin anything. The place was burned out so bad there wasn't enough left to show how it started."

  The coroner turned to the jury.

  "Have you any questions to ask this witness?"

  Hardly giving them any time to answer, he turned again to the sergeant.

  "Next witness, please."

  "Algernon Sidney Fairweather."

  Fairweather went up on to the platform and took the oath. The coroner's manner became less peremptory. He clearly regarded it as a pleasant relief to be able to examine a witness of his own class.

  "You are the owner of Whiteways, Mr Fairweather?"

  "I am."

  "The deceased was a guest in your house on the night of the seventeenth ?"

  "He was."

  "Which room was he occupying?"

  "The end bedroom in the west wing, directly above the library."

  "So that in the event of the collapse of the floor of his room, his bed would fall through into the library?"

  "It would."

  The coroner glanced at the jury triumphantly, as much as to say: "There you are, you see." Then he turned back to Fairweather even more deferentially.

  "Would you give us your account of what occurred on the night of the fire, Mr Fairweather?"