The Saint Steps In s-24 Read online

  "Come with me," she said.

  He took her arm and crossed the hall with her. They looked into the dining room, sedate and barren like any dining room between meals. They went on into the kitchen. It was clean and spotless, inhabited only by a ticking clock on a shelf.

  "I've been here," she said.

  "Would he have had dinner?"

  "I couldn't tell."

  "What about servants?"

  "We haven't had anyone living in for a couple of weeks, and we weren't going to do anything about it until I got back from Washington. Daddy couldn't have been bothered with interviewing them and breaking them in. I got him a girl who used to work for us, who got married and lives quite close by. She could have got him his dinner and cleaned up and gone home."

  After that there was a study lined with ponderous and well-worn books, and featuring a couple of filing cabinets and a big desk littered with papers as the principal movable furni­ture. It was fairly messy, in a healthy haphazard way.

  Simon went to one of the filing cabinets, and pulled open a drawer at random. The folders looked regular enough, to any­one who hadn't lived with the system.

  He turned from there to glance over the desk. He only saw a disarray of letters, circulars, cryptic memoranda, abstruse pamphlets, and assorted manuscript.

  "How does it look to you?" he asked.

  "About the same as usual."

  "You must have lived with some of this stuff. Does any of it look wrong?"

  She skimmed through the filing drawer that he had opened, and turned over some of the papers on the desk. After that she still looked blank and helpless.

  "I couldn't possibly say. He's so hopelessly untidy when he isn't being fanatically neat."

  Simon stared at the desk. He didn't know Calvin Gray's habits, or anything about his work and interests. He knew that it was perfectly possible to search files and papers without leaving a room looking as if a cyclone had gone through it.

  Anyway, what would anyone have been searching for? No­body would have been expected to keep a precious secret formula in an open filing cabinet, or sandwiched between tax demands and seed catalogs on top of a desk . . . And still he had that exasperating feeling of underlying discord, of some factor that didn't explain itself or didn't connect, as if he was trying to force everything into one or two wrong theories, when there was still a right theory that would have accom­modated everything, only he had been too blind to see it yet.

  "Let's see everything," he said shortly.

  They went upstairs and saw bedrooms. Madeline Gray's room. Calvin Gray's room. A couple of guest rooms. Bath­rooms. Everything looked ordinary and orderly. It was a nice well-kept house.

  "So he isn't here," said the Saint. "There's no blood and no smashed windows and no dead bodies in any of the closets. He went out and left the lights on. Why shouldn't he go out and leave the lights on?"

  He didn't know whether he was trying to console her or whether he wag arguing with himself. He knew damn well that it was perfectly simple to kidnap a man without wrecking his house. You just walked in on him and stuck a gun in his ribs and said "Come for a walk, pal," and nine times out of ten that was all the commotion there was going to be.

  "There's still the laboratory," she said in a small voice; and he caught at that for the moment's reprieve.

  "Why didn't you show me that before?"

  She took him out of the house, and they walked by a wind­ing path through tall slender trees whose delicate upper branches lost themselves in the darkness beyond the glow of his pencil flashlight.

  The laboratory had been invisible from the house and the driveway, and they came on it suddenly in a shadowy clear­ing—a long white modernistic building with a faint glow from inside outlining the Venetian windows. She led him to the door, and they went into a tiny hall. A door that stood ajar on one side disclosed tiled walls and a washbasin and shower.

  Beyond the little hall, the laboratory was a long sanitary barn with a single lamp burning overhead and striking bright gleams from glass tubes and retorts and long shelves of neatly labeled bottles and porcelain-topped benches and stranger pieces of less describable apparatus. But nothing was broken, and everything seemed reasonably in order. Only there was no one there.

  "Does this look all right too?" he asked.

  "Yes."

  He surveyed the details as meaninglessly as any other lay­man would have surveyed a chemical laboratory. If you were going to produce any brilliant observation in a setting like that, you had to be a master chemist too. And he wasn't. He wondered if any detective really ever knew everything, so that he could immediately start finding incongruities in any kind of technical setup, like super sleuths always could in stories.

  "You could make rubber here?" he said.

  "Of course."

  There must have been more doubt in his face than he meant to have there, or else he just looked blank because he was thinking along other lines, or else she also wanted to keep her mind busy along other lines.

  "I could show you now," she said.

  It didn't seem important, but it was another escape.

  "Show me," he said.

  She went and fetched bottles from the shelves. Some of them were unlabeled. She measured things in beakers and test tubes. She carried mixtures to a table where an elaborate train of processing gear was already set up. She poured a quantity of sawdust from an old coffee can into a glass bowl, lighted a burner under it, and began to blend it with various fluids. She looked as prosaic and efficient and at home as a seasoned cook mixing pancakes.

  The Saint hitched one hip on to another bench and watched.

  It was no use his trying to look wise and intelligent about it. He had more than the average background of ordinary chem­istry, as he had of a hundred other unlikely subjects, but things went on in this production line that were utterly out of his depth. He saw fluids moving through tubes, and coils and bub­bling in flasks, changing color and condensing and precipitat­ing, and finally flowing into a small peculiar encased engine that looked as if it might house some kind of turbine, from which came a low smooth hum and a sense of dull heat. At the other end of this engine projected a long narrow troughed belt running over an external pulley; and over this belt began to creep a ribbon of the same shiny pale translucent orange-tinted stuff that she had shown him in the dining room of the Shore-ham. She tore off the strip when there was about a couple of feet of it, and gave it to him; and he felt it between his fingers and stretched it as he had done before. It was still warm, and smelled a little like wet leather and scorched wool.

  "It seems like a wonderful thing," he said. "But it looks a lit­tle more complicated than the bathtub proposition you were talking about."

  She was methodically stopping the machinery and turning off burners.

  "Not really," she said. "In terms of a big industrial plant, it's almost so simple that a village plumber could put it together."

  "But even a simple plant on a large scale costs a lot of money. Does your father want the WPB to go into production on their own, or is he rich enough to start off by himself?"

  "We aren't quite as rich as that. But if the Government went into it they'd give us a loan, and it wouldn't be any problem to raise the private capital. In fact, we'd probably have to hire guards to keep the investors away." She smiled at him wanly. "It's too bad I didn't meet you before, isn't it? You could have come in on the ground floor and made a fortune."

  "I can just see myself at any board meeting," he said.

  Then they were really looking at each other again, and the fear was back in her eyes and he was afraid to laugh at it any more.

  "What do you think has happened?" she asked; and he straightened up and trod on the butt of his cigarette.

  "Let's go back to the house," he said roughly.

  They went out, putting out the lights and closing the door after them.

  As they went through the tall arched tunnel of leaves again her hand slid into
the crook of his elbow, and he pressed it a little against his side from sympathy, but he was still thinking coldly and from quite a distance. He said: "Did you lock the door?"

  "I don't have the key."

  "When we got to the house, how did you let yourself in?"

  "I just went in. The door wasn't locked."

  "Isn't it ever locked?"

  "Hardly ever. Daddy can't be bothered with keys—he's al­ways losing them. Besides why should we lock up? We haven't anything worth stealing, and who'd be prowling around here?"

  "You said things had happened to the laboratory before."

  "Yes, but it's got so many windows that anybody could break in if they really wanted to."

  "So anybody could have walked in on your father at any time tonight."

  "Yes."

  There wasn't any more to say. They went back into the house, and into the comfortable living-room with the cold pipe in the ashtray, and passed the time. He strummed the piano, and parodied a song or two very quietly, and she sat in one chair after another and watched him. And all the time he knew that there wasn't anything to do. Or to say, at that moment.

  It got to be later.

  He took their bags upstairs, and put hers in her room and chose himself a guest room opposite, with a door directly fac­ing hers across the corridor. He opened his own bag before he came down again and fixed drinks for both of them. Into her drink he put a couple of drops from a phial that he brought down with him.

  Very quickly the hot bright strain went out of her eyes, and she began yawning. In a little while she was fast asleep. He carried her upstairs and put her in her bed, and then he went across to his own room and took off most of his clothes and lay down on the bed with his automatic tucked under the edge of the mattress close to his right hand, and switched off the lights. He didn't think it was at all likely that the Ungodly could get around to organising another routine so soon, but he always preferred to overrate the opposition rather than underrate them. He was awake for a long time; and when he finally let himself sink into a light doze the first pallor of dawn was creeping into the room, and he knew that he had been wrong about the bush-league skullduggery and that Calvin Gray was not coming home unless somebody fetched him.

  3. How Madeline Gray was Persuaded to Eat,

  and Mr. Angert gave it Up.

  It was half-past eight when Simon Templar woke up. He lay in bed for a few minutes, watching fleecy white clouds drift across the blue sky outside the windows, and reviving the thoughts on which he had fallen asleep. They didn't look any different now.

  He got up and put on a robe and went out into the corridor. It was nothing but a kind of last-ditch wishfulness that made him go quietly into Calvin Gray's bedroom. But the bed hadn't been slept in, and the room was exactly as he had last seen it. He knew all the time that it would be like that, of course. If Calvin Gray had come home with the milkman, the Saint was sure that he would have heard him—he. had been alert all night, even in his sleep, for much stealthier sounds than that would have been. But at least, he reflected wryly, he had forestalled a self-made charge of jumping to conclusions.

  He went back to his own room, shaved, showered, and dressed, and went downstairs.

  The table was laid with one place for breakfast in the din­ing room, and there were sounds of movement in the kitchen.

  Simon pushed through the swing door, and stopped. A rosy-cheeked young woman with dark curly hair and an apron looked up at him with slightly startled eyes as he came in. She was small and nicely plump, in a way that would obviously be­come stout and matronly exactly when you would expect.

  "Hullo," he said pleasantly. "Don't be scared. My name's Templar, and I came up from Washington with Miss Gray last night."

  "Oh," she said. "I'm Mrs. Cook. I just work here. You did scare me for a minute, though."

  He realised that since they had failed to talk to Calvin Gray there was no reason for anyone to expect them there. In fact, no one knew of their movement except Hamilton and the taxi driver who had brought them in from the airport. The driver might or might not talk or think anything of it. But at least it would take the Ungodly a little while to pick up the scent, which would be no disadvantage.

  "I'm sorry," he said. "What are the chances for breakfast?"

  "I'll set some more places."

  "Miss Gray was pretty tired out last night. I'm hoping she'll sleep late."

  "The Professor's usually up before this," she said. "He must have been working late."

  The Saint had a friendly and engaging ease, whenever he wanted to use it, which made it seem the most natural thing in the world for anyone to keep on talking to him. He used that effortless receptiveness now, as a happy substitute for more tiresome and elaborate methods.

  He said quite conversationally: "The Professor wasn't in last night."

  "Wasn't he? He's nearly always in."

  "We tried to phone him from Washington to say we were on our way, but the number didn't answer."

  "Was that very late? I was here until about nine o'clock."

  "It was later than that."

  "I gave him his dinner at seven-thirty, and then I had to wash up. He was in the living-room, reading, when I went home."

  "He didn't say anything about going out?"

  "No. But I didn't ask him."

  "He didn't have any visitors?"

  "Not while I was here."

  "Maybe he's been going out a bit while Miss Gray's been away."

  "Oh, no, sir. The Professor's never been one for going out——"

  It was only then that she began to be dimly aware of what his innocent questions were leading to. A trace of puzzlement crept into her eyes.

  "Anyway," she said, almost defiantly, "he's sure to be down soon."

  The Saint shook his head.

  "I'm afraid he isn't, Mrs. Cook," he said quietly. "He didn't come in at all last night. His bed hasn't been slept in. And he's not in the house now."

  She stopped on her way into the dining room with a handful of knives and forks and spoon, and stared at him blankly.

  "You mean he isn't here at all?"

  "That's right."

  "Wasn't he expecting you?"

  "No. I told you, we tried to phone, but we couldn't get him."

  "Didn't he leave a note or anything?"

  "No."

  Her eyes began to get very wide.

  "You don't think anything's happened to him, do you?"

  "I don't know," said the Saint frankly. "It does look a little peculiar, doesn't it? The man just walks out of the house with­out a word or a message to anyone, and doesn't come back. Some people do things like that all the time, but you say he wasn't that type."

  "Is Miss Gray worried about him?—I expect she is."

  "Wouldn't you be?"

  She began mechanically setting other places at the table, more as if she was going through a routine of habitual move­ments than as if she was thinking about what she was doing. "I expect somebody called him and had him go into New York on business after I'd left, and he was kept late and had to stay over," she said, seeming to reassure herself as much as her au­dience. "He'll probably be home before lunch-time, and if he isn't he'll phone. He wouldn't stay away without letting me know he wouldn't be back for dinner."

  "Do you know where he usually stayed in New York?"

  "He always stopped at the Algonquin. But he might have stayed with whoever he was with."

  In a little while this mythical character would be as satis­factory as a real person.

  "Maybe," said the Saint adaptively. "I'll have some eggs and bacon as soon as they're ready.'

  He went out and found the telephone in the living room, and called New York. The Algonquin Hotel informed him that nobody of the name of Calvin Gray had registered there the night before.

  He lighted a cigarette and strolled out of the house. Sunlight made crazy fretwork patterns through the leaves of the sur­rounding trees, and flowers in well-kept bed
s splashed daubs of gay color against the white of the house and the green of square-trimmed hedges. The landscape fulfilled all the promise of the flashlight glimpses he had had the night before. The air was still cool, and there were clean and slightly damp sweet smells in it. It was a very pleasant place—a place that had been created for and that still nursed its memories of a gracious way of living that the paranoia of an unsuccessful house-painter was trying to destroy.

  It seemed a long way from there to the thunder and flame of slaughter and destruction that ringed the world. And yet while that war went on Simon Templar could only acknowledge the peace and beauty around him with his mind. He had no ease in his heart to give to the enjoyment of the things he loved like fhat. No man had, or could have, until the guns were si­lent and the droning wings soared on the errands of life instead of death . . .

  And perhaps even the tranquil scene in which he stood was part of a battlefield that the history books would never men­tion, but where uncountable decisions in Europe and the Orient might be lost or won.

  He walked slowly around the house, his hands in his pockets and his eyes ranging over the ground. He would have missed nothing that could have told him a story, but it was a fruit­less trip. The gravel drive registered no tire prints; there were no footprints in flower beds, no conveniently dropped hand­kerchiefs or hats or wallets. Not even a button. The only con­solation was that he wasn't disappointed. He hadn't hopefully expected anything. It would have been dangerously like a trite detective story if he had found anything. But he had made the effort.

  And it left him with nothing but the comfortless certainty that he had no material clues of any kind at all.

  He went back into the house, and entered the dining room just as Mrs. Cook was putting a plate of sturdy eggs and crisp aromatic bacon on the table.

  "That looks wonderful," he said. "It might even put a spark of life into my dilapidated brain."

  It was typical of him that he started on the meal with as much zest as if he had nothing more important than a day's golf on his mind. He knew that he would solve no problems by starving himself; but unlike most men, he found that ele­mentary argument quite sufficient to let him eat with un­alloyed enjoyment.