Prelude for War (17 page)

“I love it!”

“Then of course
you’ll be wanting another job soon.
Why don’t you
advertise ? There must be plenty of openings
if
you can produce proof of previous experience.”

She sat looking at him, and
two scalding tears brimmed
in her eyes.

“You swine!” she
whispered.

“I’m sorry,” he
said cynically.

“What have you got to
talk about, anyway? I mean,
you think Johnny was
murdered. Well, why should you care? You’ve killed dozens of people yourself,
haven’t
you?”

“Only people who
really needed it. You know, there are
some people who are
vastly improved by death.”

“If somebody murdered
Johnny, perhaps they thought
he needed it,” she
said. “I daresay the people you killed
were
pretty poisonous one way or another, but then who isn’t? I mean, look at me,
for instance. Supposing some
body murdered me. I
suppose you’d think that was a
damned good job.”

“I should think it
was a great pity,” he said with sur
prising
gentleness. “You see, you poor little idiot, I happen
to like you.”

“Isn’t that
thrilling?” she said; and then she suddenly
put
her face in her hands.

The Saint lighted a
cigarette and watched her. She sat
quite still, without
sobbing. He knew that this was what
he had been working
for, the success of his relentless drive
to
break her down; and yet he felt sorry for her. An
impulse
of tenderness moved him that it was not easy to
fight
down. But he knew that on this moment might hang
things
too momentous to be thought about. His brain had
to
be cold, accurate, making no mistakes, even if he
wanted
to be kind.

“All right,” she
said huskily. “Damn you.”

She put her hands down
abruptly and looked at him,
dry-eyed.

“But what’s the
use?” she said. “It’s done now, isn’t it?
I
did it. Well, that’s all about it. If I were the right sort
of girl I suppose I’d go and jump in the river, but I’m not the right
sort of girl.”

“That wouldn’t help
anybody very much.” His voice was
quiet
now, understanding, not taunting. “It’s done, but we
can still do things about it. You can help me. We can go
on with what Johnny was doing. But we’ve got to find out
what it was all about. You’ve got to think. You’ve got
to think back—think very hard. Try to remember what
Johnny told you about Luker and Fairweather and San
gore. Try to remember what he’d got that was going to
upset them all. You must remember something.”

He tried to hammer his
words into her brain with all
the urgency that was in
him, to awaken her with the warmth
of his own intense
sincerity. She must tell him now if she
was
to help him at all.

Her eyes stayed on him and
her hands opened and closed
again.

She shook her head.

“I don’t,” she
replied. “Really. But
…”

She stopped, frowning. He
held his breath.

“But what?” he
prompted.

“Nothing,” she
said.

Simon turned the ash from
his cigarette on to the edge
of a plate with infinite
restraint. The reaction had emptied
him so that he had
to make the movement with a deliber
ate effort.

A waiter bustled up to the
table and asked if they wanted
coffee.

Simon felt as if a fire in
him had been put out. He felt
as if he had been led
blindfold to the top of a mountain and
then
turned back and sent down again without being given
a glimpse of the view.
While he mechanically gave the order
he
wondered, in an insanely cold-blooded sort of way, what
would happen if he stood up and shot the waiter
through
the middle of his crisp,
complacent shirt front. Probably it
had
made no ultimate difference, but it seemed as if that
crowning clash of the banal had inscribed an
irrevocable
epilogue of frustration.
The mood that might have meant
so
much was gone. Nothing would bring it back.

He sat without moving while
coffee and balloon glasses
were set before them.

Lady Valerie Woodchester
stubbed out a half-smoked
cigarette and lighted
another. She tasted her brandy.

“It’s a hard
life,” she observed moodily. “I suppose if
one
can’t get exactly what one wants the next best thing
is
to have bags of money. That’s what I’m going to do.”

“Who are you going to
blackmail?” Simon inquired
steadily.

Her eyes widened.

“What do you
mean?” she asked in astonishment.

“Just that,” he
said.

She laughed. Her laughter
sounded a trifle false.

She emptied her coffee cup and finished her
brandy. She began to be very busy collecting her accoutrements and dab
bing powder on her nose.

“You do say the
weirdest things,” she remarked. “I’m
afraid
I must go now. Thanks so much for the dinner. It’s
been
a lovely evening—most of it.”

“This is rather early
for your bedtime, isn’t it?” said
the
Saint slowly. “Don’t you feel well, or are you a little
bit scared?”

“I’m scared of getting
wrinkles,” she said. “I always
do
when I stay up late. And then I have to spend a small
fortune
to have them taken out, and that doesn’t help a
bit,
what with one thing and another. But a girl’s got to
keep
her looks even if she can’t keep anything else, hasn’t
she?”

She stood up.

The Saint’s hands rested on
the arms of his chair. A
dozen mad and utterly
impossible urges coursed through
his mind, but he knew that
they were all futile. The whole atmosphere of the place, which had brought her
once to a
brief fascinating ripeness, was
arraigned against him.

A lynx-eyed waiter
ceremoniously laid a plate with a
folded check on it
in front of him.

Simon rose to his feet with
unalterable grace and spilled
money on to it. He
followed her out of the room and out
of the hotel, and
waited while the commissionaire produced
a
taxi and placed it before them with the regal gesture of
a magician performing a unique and exclusive miracle.

“It’s all right,”
she said. “You needn’t bother to see me
home.”

Through the window of the
cab, with the vestige of a
sardonic bow, he handed her
a sealed envelope.

“You forgot
something,” he murmured. “That isn’t like
you,
I’m sure.”

“Oh yes,” she
said. “That.”

She took the envelope, glanced
at it and put it in her
bag. It didn’t seem to
interest her particularly.

She put out her hand
again. He held it.

“If——
” she began, and broke off raggedly.

“If what?” he
asked.

She bit her lip.

“No,” she said.
“It wouldn’t be any good. There’s always
the
But.”

“I’ll buy it,”
said the Saint patiently. “What’s the
answer?”

She smiled at him rather
wistfully.

“There isn’t any
answer. One just thinks, ‘
If
something
or
other,’ and then one thinks,
‘But
something else,’ which
makes it impossible,” she explained lucidly. “As a matter
of fact, I was thinking that you and I would make a mar
vellous combination.”

“And why not?”

She made a little grimace.
At that moment, even more
inescapably than at any
other, she looked as if she was on
the point of
bursting into tears.

“Oh, go to hell!”
she said.

Her hand slipped through
his fingers and she sank back
into the corner of the cab.
It moved away.

Simon Templar stood and
watched it until the stream of
traffic swallowed it up.
And then he said “Hell and damnation!” with a meticulous clarity
which caused the commissionaire to unbend in a glance of entirely misdirected
sym
pathy before he resumed his thaumaturgical production
of
taxis.

2

After which various things
happened that Simon Tem
plar would have been very
edified to know about.

Mr Algernon Sidney
Fairwearher was sitting in the
smoke room of his
paralyzingly respectable and conserva
tive club finishing an excellent cigar
and enjoying a sedate
post-prandial brandy
and soda and the equally sedate post-
prandial
conversation of an august bishop, a retired ambas
sador and a senile and slightly lecherous baronet,
when he
was summoned to the
telephone.

“This is
Valerie,” said the voice on the wire. “I’m fright
fully sorry to bother you and all that, but I rather wanted your advice
about something. Do you mind terribly? It’s
about
Johnny.”

“What exactly do you
want my advice about?” asked
Mr Fairweather
uncomfortably. “That man Templar hasn’t
been
pestering you again, I hope?”

“No—at least, not
exactly,” she answered. “I mean, he’s
quite
easy to get on with really, and he simply throws
money
about, but he does ask rather a lot of questions.”

Fairweather cleared his
throat.

“The man is becoming
a perfect nuisance,” he said
imperially.
“But I think we can deal with him soon enough.
I’m
glad you told me about it. I’ll have a word with the commissioner of police in
the morning and see that he’s
taken care of.”

“Oh no, you mustn’t
do that,” she said quickly. “I can
.
take care of myself all right, and it’s rather thrilling to be
pestered by a famous character like the Saint. That isn’t
what I rang you up for. What I wanted was to ask your
advice about something Johnny left with me.”

“Something Kennet left
with you ?”

“Some papers he gave
me to read only a week or two
ago—a great thick wad of
them.”

Mr Fairweather experienced
the curious sensation of
feeling the walls close in
on him while at the same time the
floor and the
ceiling began to draw together. Since he was
at
that moment in a booth which had very little space to
spare
after enveloping his own ample circumference, the
sensation
was somewhat horrifying.

It had caught him so
completely unprepared that for
a few seconds he seemed to have mislaid his
voice. A cold
perspiration broke out on his
forehead. He felt as though he were being suffocated, but he dared not open the
door
of the booth to let in the air
for which his lungs were
aching. In
fact, he drew it tighter.

“Papers?” he got
out hoarsely. “What papers? What
were they
about?”

“I don’t know. Johnny
seemed to think they were ter
ribly important; but then
he thought so many things were
terribly important that I
just couldn’t keep track of them
all. So I didn’t even read
them.”

The inward rush of the
walls slackened for a moment.
Mr Fairweather managed to
snatch a handful of oxygen
into his chest.

“You didn’t read
them?” he echoed weakly. “Well, I’d
better
have a look at those papers. It’s a good thing you
told
me about them. I’ll come round at once.”

“But that wouldn’t be
any good,” she said miserably.
“You see, I
haven’t got the papers now. I don’t even know
where
they are.. That’s what I wanted your advice about.”

The accumulation of seesaw
effects was making Mr Fair-
weather feel slightly
seasick. He was very different from
the staid and
dignified gentleman who had been drinking
a
sedate brandy and soda only a few thousand years ago.
He
mopped his brow.