Prelude for War (14 page)

The Saint extracted a
cigarette from his case. The minor
details of the
situation were satisfactorily cleared up—the remarkably prompt arrival of the
C.I.D. combined with the
absence of a crowd outside.
The fact that that exceptional
conjunction of
circumstances had resulted in his present
predicament
unfortunately remained unaltered; but it was
some
consolation to know that his first wild surmise was
wrong
and that Teal hadn’t been led there in some fan
tastic
way on a definite search for him. It made the odds
look
rather more encouraging.

“Madam,” he said
helpfully, “I should think you might
do
rather well for a while by inviting the public to drop
in
and charging them sixpence admission. X marks the spot
where
the body was found, and they can see the original
pool
of blood on the mat. With Inspector Teal’s bowler hat on the mantelpiece in a
glass case and a plaster cast
of his tummy in the hall——”

Mr Teal thrust himself
sizzlingly forward. He signed
to his plain-clothes
sergeant.

“Take her outside and
get her statement,” he gritted.

Then he turned back to the
Saint. His eyelids drooped as he fought frantically to maintain some vestige of
the
pose of somnolent boredom which had been his lifelong
defence against all calamities.

“And while that’s being done, I’d like to
hear what you’ve
got to say.”

“Say?” repeated
the Saint vaguely. He searched for his
lighter. “Why,
Claud, I can only say that it all looks most
mysterious.
But I’m sure it ‘ll all turn out all right. With that brilliant detective
genius of yours——
”

“Never mind
that,” Teal said pungently. “I want to
hear
what you’ve got to say for yourself. I came here and
found
you standing over the body.”

The Saint shrugged.

“Exactly,” he
said.

“What do you
mean—‘exactly’ ?”

Mr Teal’s voice was not
quite so monotonous as he wanted it to be. It tended to slide off its note into
a kind
of squawk. But that was something that the Saint’s
ineffa
ble sangfroid always did to him. It was something that
always brought Mr Teal to the verge of an apoplectic
seizure.

“What do you
mean?” he squawked.

“My dear ass,”
said the Saint patiently, in the manner
of
one who explains a simple point to a small and dull-
witted
child, “you said it yourself. You came in and found me standing over the
body. You know perfectly well that
when I murder people you never come in
and find me stand
ing over the body. Now, do
you ?”

Mr Teal’s eyes boggled in
spite of the effort he made
to control them. The hot
porridge came back into his larynx.

“Are you trying to
tell me you’re in the clear because I
came in and found you bending over the
body ?” he yawped.
“Well, this is
once when you’re wrong! Perhaps I haven’t
done it before. But I’ve done it now. I’ve got you, Saint.” The
superb, delirious conviction grew upon him. “This is
the one time you’ve made a mistake, and I’ve got
you.” Chief Inspector Teal drew himself up in the full pride of
his magnificent climactic moment. “Simon
Templar, I shall
take you into
custody on a charge of——
”

“Wait a minute,”
said the Saint quietly.

The porridge bubbled
underneath Teal’s
 
collar
 
stud.

“What for?” he
exploded.

“Because,” said
the Saint kindly, “in spite of all the rude
ideas
you’ve got about me, Claud, I like you. And it hurts
me
to see you going off like a damp squib. Didn’t you hear
the landlady say that she found the body about half an
hour ago?”

“Well?”

“Well, I should think
we could safely give her the full
half-hour—she could
hardly have got to a telephone and
got you here with
all your stooges in much less than that.
And
we’ve been talking for some minutes already. And if
I
murdered this body, you must give me a few minutes to spare at the other end.
Let’s be very conservative and say
that I could have
murdered him forty minutes ago.” Simon
consulted
his watch. “Well, it’s now exactly a quarter to
three.”

“Are you starting to
give me another of your alibis?”

“I am,” said the
Saint. “Because at twelve minutes past
one
I left the Golden Fleece in Anford, which is ninety-
five
miles from here. Quite a number of the natives and
several
disinterested visitors can vouch for that—including
a
member of the local police whose name, believe it or not,
is Reginald. And I know I’m the hell of a driver, but even I can’t
drive ninety-five miles in fifty-three minutes over
the
antediluvian cart tracks that pass for roads in this
country.”

Over Chief Inspector Teal’s
ruddy features smeared the same expression that must have passed over the face
of
Sisyphus when, having at last heaved his rock nearly
to the
top of the hill, it turned round and rolled back
again to
the bottom. In it was the same chaotic
blend of dismay,
despair, agonized weariness and
sickening incredulity.

He knew that the Saint must
be telling the truth. He
didn’t have to take a step
to verify it although that would
be done later as a matter
of strict routine. But the Saint
had never wasted time on an
alibi that couldn’t be checked
to the last comma. How it
was done, Teal never knew;
if he had been a superstitious man he would
have suspected
witchcraft. But it was done,
and had been done, too often
for him
not to recognize every brush stroke of the tech
nique. And once again he knew that his insane triumph had
been premature—that the Saint was slipping through
his
fingers for what seemed like the
ten thousandth time… .

He bent his pathetically
weary eyes on the body again,
as if that at least might
take pity on him and provide him
with the inspiration for a
comeback. And a sudden dull
flare of breathless
realization went through him.

“Look!” he
almost yelped.

The Saint looked.

“Messy sort of
business, isn’t it ?” he said chattily. “Some
of these hoodlums have no respect for the furniture. There ought to be
a correspondence course in Good Manners for
Murderers.”

“That blood,”
Teal said incoherently. “It’s drying …”

He went down clumsily on
his knees beside the body,
fumbled over it, and
peered at the stain on the carpet.
Then he got slowly
to his feet, and his hot, resentful eyes
burned
on the Saint with a feverish light.

“This man has been
dead for from three, to six hours,”
he
said. “You could have gone to Anford and come back
in that time!”

“I’m sorry,” said
the Saint regretfully.

“What for?”

Teal’s voice was a hoarse
bark.

Simon smiled.

“Because I spent all
the morning in Anford.”

“What were you doing
there?”

“I was at an
inquest.”

“Whose inquest?”

“Some poor blighter by
the name of John Kennet.”

“Do you mean the
foreign secretary’s son—the man who
was killed in that
country-house fire?” Teal asked sharply.

Simon regarded him
benevolently.

“How you do keep up
with the news, Claud,” he murmured admiringly. “Sometimes I feel
quite hopeful about
you. It’s not often, but it’s so
cheering when it happens.
A kind of warm glow comes
over me——
”

“What were you doing
at that inquest?” Teal said torridly
.

The Saint moved his hands.

“Giving evidence. I
was the hero of the proceedings, so
I got nicely chewed
up by the coroner for a reward. You’ll read all about it in the evening papers.
I hate to disappoint
you, dear old weasel, but
I’m afraid I’ve been pretty well
in the public eye since
about half-past ten.”

Simon struck his lighter
and made the delayed kindling
of his cigarette.

“So what with one
thing and another, Claud,” he said,
“I’m
afraid you’re going to have to let me go.”

Chief Inspector Teal barred
his way. The leaden bitter
ness of defeat was
curdling in his stomach, but there was
a
sultry smoulder in his eyes that was more relentless and
dangerous than his first unimpeded blaze of wrath. He
might have suffered ten thousand failures, but he had never
given up. And now there was a grim lourd determination
in him that tightened his teeth crushingly on his battered scrap of
spearmint.

“You still haven’t
told me what you’re doing here,” he
said
stolidly.

Simon Templar trickled
smoke through momentarily
sober lips.

“I came to see
Windlay,” he said. “I wanted to see him
before
somebody else did. Only I was too late. You can
believe
that or not as you like. But the late John Kennet
shared
this place with him.”

The detective’s eyes went
curiously opaque. He stood
with a wooden stillness.

“What was the verdict
at this inquest?”

“Accidental
death.”

“Do you think there
was anything wrong with that?”

Simon’s glance travelled
again over the disordered room.

“Someone seems to have
been looking for something,”
he said aimlessly.
“I wonder if he found what he was
after?”

Casually, as if performing
some quite idle action, he
leaned forward and picked
up a crumpled sheet of news
paper from the litter
scattered over the floor. It was a
French newspaper
five days old, and a passage in it had
been
heavily marked out in blue pencil.

“Well, well,
well,” he said. “Listen, Claud. What do
you
make of this?
‘We should like your readers to ask
themselves
where this criminal association calling itself the
Sons of France obtains its funds and the store of arms
which Colonel Marteau has so often boasted that he
has
hidden away for the day when they
will be needed. And
we ask our
readers, how long will they tolerate the existence
of this terrorist organization in their midst?’
“

He picked up a second scrap
of paper from the floor. Again there was a blue-pencilled paragraph.

”
‘M. Roquambert,
in a vitriolic speech to the Chamber
of
Deputies last night, urged on the government the neces
sity for a greatly increased expenditure on armaments. “Are
we,” he demanded, “to suffer the Boche to batter once more
on the gates of Paris?” ‘ ”
Simon
let the cuttings flutter
out of his fingers. “I
seem to remember that Comrade
Roquambert is one of the
heads of the Sons of France,” he said. “Doesn’t that interest
you?”

“What was wrong with
that verdict?” Teal repeated.

The Saint looked at him,
and for once there was no
mockery in his eyes.

“I think it would be a
good idea if you started investi
gating two murders instead
of one,” he said.

4

Which was undoubtedly a
highly effective and dramatic
exit line, Simon
reflected, as the Hirondel roared westwards
again
towards Anford; but how wise it had been was
another
matter. It had been rather a case of meeting trouble
halfway
and taking the first smack at it. In the course of
his
inquiries Teal would inevitably have discovered that
Kennet had shared the
flat with Windlay, and Simon knew
only too
well how the detective’s mind would have worked on from there directly the
inquest headlines hit the stands.
The
Saint had had no option about taking the bull by the
horns, but he wondered now whether he might have
achieved
the same result without
saying quite so much. Chief Inspec
tor
Teal’s officially hidebound intelligence might sift slowly,
but it
sifted with a dour and dogged thoroughness. Simon
realized at the same time that if he had an adequate alibi
for the period during which Windlay might have been
killed, Luker and his satellites had
an alibi that was abso
lutely
identical—it gave him an insight into the efficiency
of the machinery that he had tampered with which
was
distinctly sobering, and he had plenty to think about on the
return journey.