The Saint Plays with Fire (The Saint Series) Page 5

  “Good morning,” he said.

  She turned languidly and inspected him, one finely arched eyebrow slightly raised. She had lovely eyes, large and dark and sparkling, shaded by very long lashes. Her dark hair gleamed with a warm autumn richness. The poise of her exquisitely modelled head, the angle of her childishly tip-tilted nose, the curl of her pretty lips, proclaimed her utter and profound disinterest in Simon Templar.

  “What’s happened to Luker and the others?” Simon asked. “I saw them come in with you just now.”

  “They’re in the office talking to the Coroner, if you want them,” she said indifferently. Then suddenly she lost some of her indifference. “Are you a reporter?”

  “No,” said the Saint regretfully. “But I could get you one. May I compliment you on your taste in clothes? I always did like that dress.”

  He knew the dress very well, since he had helped Patricia to choose it.

  Lady Valerie stared at him hard for a moment, and then her expression changed completely. It ceased altogether to be cold and disdainful: her features became animated with eagerness.

  “Oh,” she said. “How silly of me! Of course I remember you now. You’re the hero, aren’t you?”

  “Am I?

  She frowned a little.

  “Not that I really hoot a lot about this hero business,” she went on. “I daresay it’s all very fine for great he-men to go rushing about dripping with sweat and doing noble things, but I think there ought to be special places set apart for them to perform in.”

  “You were rescued yourself the other night, weren’t you?” said the Saint pleasantly.

  “Rescued? My good man, I was simply thrown about like an old sack. When the fire alarm went off I didn’t realise what it was for a moment, and then when Don Knightley came charging into my room with his hair standing on end and his eyes sticking out and his ears absolutely flapping with the most frightful emotion, I merely thought I was in for a fate worse than death, and believe me I was. I mean, all’s fair in love and war and all that sort of thing, but to be heaved up by one arm and one leg and slung over a man’s bony shoulder, and then to be galloped about over miles of lawn with your only garment flapping up around your neck…”

  She seemed to be expecting sympathy.

  Simon laughed.

  “It must have been rather trying,” he admitted. “I haven’t seen my rival today, by the way—where is he?”

  “He had to go and Change the Guard, or something dreary. But it doesn’t matter. It’s nice to see you again.”

  She might almost have meant it.

  “Next time you want rescuing, you must drop me a line,” said the Saint. “I’m told I have a very delicate touch with damsels in distress. Maybe I could give you more satisfaction.”

  She glanced sideways at him out of the corners of her eyes. Her lips twitched slightly.

  “Maybe you could,” she said.

  “All the same,” Simon continued resolutely, “it would have been even more trying if you’d been left in your room, wouldn’t it?”

  Again her expression changed like magic; in a moment she looked utterly woebegone.

  “Yes,” she said in a low voice. “Like…like John.”

  She turned wide distressed eyes on him.

  “I…I can’t think what could have happened,” she said tremulously. “He…he must have heard the alarm, and I…I know he wasn’t drunk or anything like that. He couldn’t have committed suicide, could he? Nobody would commit suicide like…like that.”

  She seemed to be begging him to reassure her that Kennet had not committed suicide; there were actually tears in her eyes. Simon was puzzled.

  “No, he didn’t commit suicide,” he answered. “I’ll bet anything on that. But why should you think of it?”

  “Well, we did have the most awful row, and…and I swore I’d never speak to him again, and he seemed to take it rather to heart. Of course I didn’t really mean it, but I was getting awfully fed up with the whole silly business, and he was being terribly stupid and awkward and unreasonable.”

  “Were you engaged to him, or something like that?”

  “Oh, no. Of course, he may have thought…But then, nobody takes those things seriously…Oh damn! It’s all so hopelessly foul and horrible, and all just because of a silly bet.”

  “So he may have thought you were in love with him. You’d let him think so. Is that it?” Simon persisted.

  “Yes, I suppose so, if you put it that way. But what else could I do?”

  She stared at him indignantly, as if she were denying a thoroughly unjust accusation.

  “I bet you wouldn’t see a thousand-guinea fur coat that you were simply aching to have go slipping away just because you couldn’t make a bit of an effort with a man,” she said vehemently. “And it was in a good cause, too.”

  The Saint smiled systematically. He still hadn’t much idea what she was talking about, but he knew with a tumultuous certainty that he was getting somewhere. Out of all that confusion, something clear and revealing must emerge within another minute or two—if only luck gave him that other minute. He was aware that his pulses were beating a shade faster.

  “Was John going to give you a fur coat?” he inquired.

  “John? My dear, don’t be ridiculous. John would never have given me a fur coat. Why, he never even took me anywhere in a taxi.”

  She paused.

  “He wasn’t mean,” she added quickly. “You mustn’t think that. He was terribly generous, really, even though he didn’t have much money. But he used to spend it all on frightfully earnest things, like books and lectures and Brotherhood of Man leagues and all that sort of thing.” She shook her head dejectedly. “He used to work so hard and study such a lot and have such impossible ideals, and now…If only he’d had a good time first, it wouldn’t seem quite so bad somehow,” she said chokingly. “But he just wouldn’t have a good time. He was much too earnest.”

  “He probably enjoyed himself in his own way,” said the Saint consolingly. “But about this fur coat. Where was that coming from?”

  “Oh, that was Mr Fairweather,” she answered. “Of course, he’s got simply lashings of money; a thousand guineas is simply nothing to him. You see, he thought it would be quite a good thing if John became reconciled with his father and stopped being stupid, and then he thought that if John was engaged to me—only in a sort of unofficial way, of course—I could make him stop being stupid. So he bet me a thousand-guinea fur coat to see if I could do it. So of course I had to ty.”

  “Did you have any luck?”

  She shook her head.

  “No. He was terribly obstinate and silly. I wanted him to have a good time and forget all his stupid ideas, but he just wouldn’t. Instead of enjoying himself like an ordinary person he’d just sit and talk to me for hours, and sometimes he’d bring along a fellow called Windlay that he lived with, and then they’d both talk to me.”

  “What did they talk about?”

  She spread out her hands in a vague gesture.

  “Politics—you know, stupid things. And he used to talk about a thing called the Ring, and Mr Luker, and General Sangore, and even his own father, and say the beastliest things about them. And there were newspapers, and factories, and some people called the Sons of France—”

  The Saint was suddenly very rigid.

  “What was that again?”

  “The Sons of France—or something like that. I don’t know what it was all about and I don’t care. I know he used to say that he was going to upset everything in a few weeks, and make things uncomfortable for everybody, and I used to tell him not to be so damned selfish, because after all what’s the point in upsetting everybody? Live and let live is my motto, and I wouldn’t interfere with other people’s private affairs if they’ll leave mine alone.”

  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 t
o 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, now a director of the Wolverharnpton Ordnance Company; Fairweather, sometime Secretary 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 weekend?”

  “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 feather-rained 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 to 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 disorganised…” 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 desir
ably 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.”

  “Um.” 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 as 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 was 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.