Prelude for War (16 page)

Simon put his hands in his
pockets and relaxed against
a cabinet full of hideous
porcelain.

“What I meant by it
was that I believe Kennet was mur
dered,” he said good-humouredly.
“Now have I made myself
quite
clear?”

The general glared at him
from under his bushy eye
brows. He seemed to expect
Simon to melt like wax.

“By Gad, sir,”
he said truculently, “you’re—you’re a bounder! I’ve never heard such bad
form in my life!”

“You mean that if it
was murder you’d rather have it hushed up, don’t you?” Simon said gently.
“You didn’t
murder him yourself by any chance, did
you?”

Sangore’s complexion went
a rich mottled puce. He tried
to speak, but there seemed
to be an obstruction in his
throat.

Simon went on talking, and
his voice was cool and piti
less.

“Last year, when
there was a strike at the Pyrford
Aviation Works,
which is a subsidiary of the Wolverhampton Ordnance Company, you stated
publicly that the ring
leaders ought to be put up
against a wall and shot. This
year, addressing the Easter
rally of the Imperial Defence
Society, you said: ‘A
great deal of nonsense has been talked
about
the horrors of war.’ If you would have liked to kill
half-a-dozen
men for the sake of dividends, and if you
think
it’s a great deal of nonsense to object to people being
massacred in millions, I can’t help feeling that you qualify
as a good suspect. What do you think?”

What General Sangore
thought could only be inferred;
he was still choking
impotently.

Lady Sangore came to his
rescue. Her face had gone
from white to scarlet, and
her small eyes were glittering
with vindictive passion.

“The man’s a
cad,” she proclaimed tremblingly. “It’s no
use
wasting words on him. He—he simply isn’t a sahib!”

She appeared to be
slightly appalled by her temerity,
as if she had pronounced the ultimate
unspeakable condem
nation.

“It’s—it’s an
outrage!” spluttered Fairweather. “The
man
is a well-known criminal. We’re only lowering our
selves——
”

The Saint’s cold blue eyes
picked him up like an insect
on a pin.

“Let me see,” he
said. “I seem to remember that you played a forward part in getting a
change made in the
workings of the National Defence
Contribution a few years ago. The sales talk was that the tax on excess profits
would
have paralyzed business enterprise; but the truth is
that it would have hit hardest against the firms that were booming on the
strength of the new rearmament program—of which,
I
think, Norfelt Chemicals was by no means the smallest.
And
you recently stated before a royal commission that
‘The
armament industry is one which provides employment
for
thousands of workers. The fact that its products are open to misuse can no more
be held against the industry
per se
than can the production of drugs which would be
poisonous if taken without medical advice.’ If those are
samples of your logic, I don’t see why we shouldn’t have
you on the suspected list—do you?”

Luker stepped forward.

“Surely, Mr
Templar,” he remarked urbanely, “you
aren’t
going to leave me out of your interesting summary.”

The Saint looked at him
steadily.

“I can give you some
news,” he said. “That is, if you
haven’t
heard it already. I spent the afternoon going to London to see if I could catch
Ralph Windlay, the man
Kennet lived with, before
an accident happened to him.
I’m sure you’ll be cheered
to know that everything went
off without a hitch and he
was already dead when I got
there.”

There was a dead silence.

And then Lady Valerie
Woodchester was tugging unconsciously at the Saint’s arm. Her full lips were
quivering and
there was an expression of dazed
horror on her face.

“Not Ralph?” she
was saying shakily. “No
…
no, he can’t have been murdered, too!”

The Saint’s eyes went to
her with an instant’s brief
compassion.

“I’m afraid so,”
he said. “Even our coroner here
couldn’t make out it
was an accident. He was shot right
between the
eyebrows, and his brains were all over the
carpet.”

“The use of the word
‘too’ is interesting.” Luker’s impassive
voice came levelly through the stillness. “If Kennet
was murdered, somebody killed him and then set fire to
the house. Within a few minutes Mr Templar arrives
on the scene. It is he who suggests foul play. Then Kennet’s
friend Windlay is murdered, and again Mr Templar is
first on the scene; again it is he who discovers that there
has been foul play. It certainly appears to be a coincidence to which
the attention of the police should be called.”

Simon’s bleak gaze took him
up.

“Or you might mention
it to the Sons of France,” he
said.

It was a shot in the dark,
but it hit a target somewhere.
For the first time since he
had known him, Simon saw
Luker’s graven mask slip
for a fraction of a second. For
that fleeting micron of
time the Saint saw the stark soul
of a man to whom
murder meant nothing.

IV

How Kane Luker Spoke His
Mind, and

Hoppy Uniatz Did the Best
He Could

with His

“I
LIKE THIS PLACE
,” said Lady Valerie Woodchester,
looking
smugly around her. “It’s one of the few places in
London
where civilized people can eat civilized food.”

The Saint nodded. They had
worked their way through
three quarters of a menu
selected with Simon Templar’s
own impeccable gastronomic
artistry and served with the deference which waiters always instinctively gave
him; and
he had watched her personality expand
and ripen like an
exotic flower coming into bloom.
Undoubtedly she did the
setting no less justice
than it did her. Her flawless shoul
ders and deliciously
modelled head rose out of a plain but
daringly cut evening
gown like an orchid rising from a
dark stem, with a
startling loveliness that turned many envi
ous
eyes towards her; she knew it, and she was delighted,
like
a child who has been taken out on a special treat. A
brighter
sparkle had crept gradually into her eyes and a
faint
flush into her cheeks. It was fun, you felt, to be eating
a good dinner, and to be in one of the best places among
the best people, and to be with a man who was tall and
dark and handsome and who could make waiters fuss
about obsequiously. Her dazzling flow of gay, senseless prattle had
given the Saint no need to make trivial conver
sation
while they ate; but now he hardened his heart.

“Yes,” he agreed.
“The food is good and the atmosphere
is
right. Also a stitch in time saves embarrassing exposure,
and the horse is the noblest of animals. Now you’ve earned
your bread and butter, and you can stop entertaining me. Let’s be
serious for a minute. Have you seen any of our
friends
today?”

She didn’t answer at once.
She was looking down at her
plate, drawing idle
patterns with her fork. Her expression
had
become abstracted; her thoughts seemed to be very
far
away.

“Yes, I’ve seen
them,” she said vaguely.

“And how are they
making out?”

She looked him suddenly
straight in the eyes.

“You remember what
Luker said at the Golden Fleece?
Well, I suppose if I’d got
any sense I’d think the same,
seeing what a reputation
you’ve got. I suppose you could
have got into the house
somehow and killed Johnny, and locked his bedroom door, and started the fire,
and got out
again, and then come back and pretended
to try and rescue
him. And then of course you could
easily have gone to
London and shot Ralph Windlay.”

“Easily,” said
the Saint. “But you don’t believe I did,
do
you? Or do you?”

“I suppose not,”
she said. “In a way, I wish you had.”

She pushed away her plate,
and he offered his cigarette
case.

“Why do you wish I’d
killed them? I didn’t have any reason to.”

“Well, it would have
made everything so much easier. Of course I suppose they’d have had to hang
you, but
everybody knows you’re a criminal so
that would have
been all right. But then you went and
upset it all at the
inquest, and you made it sound
frightfully convincing to
me whatever anybody else
thought, only it didn’t seem quite
real then. I mean,
you know, it was all rather like some
thing out of a
book. Blazing Mansion Mystery, and all
that
sort of thing. I was terribly sorry about it all in a
way
because I was quite fond of Johnny, but I wasn’t going
to
be brokenhearted about it or anything like that. And
then
when Ralph was killed it wouldn’t have made much
difference,
because he was a nice, well-meaning boy but I
never
thought very much of him. After all, life’s too short
for
one to be getting brokenhearted all the time, isn’t it,
and I’m sure it gives you circles under your eyes.”

“You were too close up
against it then to realize it
properly,” said the
Saint shrewdly. “Now you’ve got away
from
it, your nerves are going back on you. I’m afraid
I
sympathize with you. What you need is another drink.”

She pushed her glass
forward.

“That’s exactly what
I do need,” she said.

He poured out the last of
the wine, and she sipped it
and put the glass down
again.

“It’s not really my
nerves,” she said, talking very
quickly. “We
modern girls have nerves of iron, you know,
and we only swoon when
we think a man needs a little
encouragement.
The point is, if I’d heard that Johnny had
been killed in a railway accident I should have been terribly
sorry whenever I thought about it, but I don’t
suppose I
should have thought about
it terribly often. You see, that
would
have been just one of those things that happen, and
it would have been all over, and it wouldn’t
really have
been anything to do with
me.”

“But you invited him
down to Whiteways, and that
makes it different.”

She nodded feverishly.

“Of course, I told
you that, didn’t I?”

“The idea was that
you were to get a fur coat if Johnny
could be persuaded
to keep his mouth shut,” Simon pursued
her
ruthlessly. “He has been persuaded to keep his mouth
shut. Do you get your fur coat?”

Her fingers tightened on
the stem of her wineglass. Her
face had gone very pale,
but her eyes were burning.

“That’s a filthy thing
to say.”

“Murder is a
moderately filthy subject,” answered the
Saint
brutally. “You can’t play with it and keep your little
girlie ribbons clean. Haven’t you realized that yet?”

“Yes,” she said.

She picked up her glass
and drained it at one gulp. Then
she sat back and laughed at
him with a kind of brittle
giddiness.

“Well?” he
insisted.

“I’m a nice girl,
aren’t I?” she chattered. “I do the odd
spot
of gold digging here and there, and in my spare time
I
lure men to their deaths. What would the dear vicar
say
if he knew?”

“I expect he’d say
plenty. But that doesn’t seem to matter
so
much as what you say. Do you enjoy luring men to their
deaths?”