Prelude for War (18 page)

“You haven’t got
them?” he bleated shrilly. “Then who
has
got them?”

“Nobody. At least—it’s
frightfully difficult trying to tell
you all at once.
You see, what happened was something
like this. John and
I had been having a row—the usual
old row about you
and his father and Mr Luker and all
that. I was telling
him not to be ridiculous, and he sud
denly shoved a great
envelope full of papers into my hands
and told me to go
through them and then say if I still
thought he was being
ridiculous. Then he stormed out of
the place in a
fearful rage, and I had lots of things to do,
and
I couldn’t go on carrying a whacking great envelope
about
with me forever, so I dumped it somewhere and I
didn’t
think any more about it until the other day.”

“How do you mean, you
dumped
it?” squealed Fair-
weather, like a soul
in torment. “You must have put it
somewhere.
Where is it?”

“That’s just what I
don’t know,” she said. “Of course
it
must be
somewhere; I
mean, I didn’t just drop it over
the side of a bus or anything like that. But I simply can’t
remember where I had it last. I’ve got a sort of idea that it
might be in the cloakroom at Piccadilly Station, or I may
have left it in the cloakroom at the Savoy. In fact, I’m
pretty sure I did put it in a cloakroom somewhere.”

Fairweather clung to the
telephone bracket for support.

“Then you. must have
a ticket for it,” he pointed out
with heart-rending
logic. “Why don’t you look for the
ticket?”

“But I can’t,”
she said plaintively. “It’s a terrible bore.
You
see, if I had a ticket it was probably in my bag, and
of
course that was lost in the fire with all my other things.”

“But——
” said Fairweather.

The word “but”
is not commonly used to convey the
more cosmic
intensities of emotion, but Mr Fairweather’s
pronunciation
imbued it with a depth and colour that can rarely if ever have been achieved before.
The exasperation of a reasonable man who finds himself in an unreasonable and
chaotic universe, the sharp horror of a prisoner on an
excavating
party who learns that he has kindly been allowed
to dig his own grave,
the outraged protest of a mathema
tician to
whom has been demonstrated an insuperable fal
lacy in his proof that two and two make four—all these several shades of
travail were summed up and vivified in
Mr
Fairweather’s glorification of the word “but.”

“I wondered if it
might be a good scheme to get Mr
Templar to help me,”
Valerie went on. “I mean, he seems
to
have quite a crush on me, so he’d probably be glad to
do
it if I was nice to him, and he must have had loads of experience at ferreting
about and detecting things.”

“Grrr,” said Mr
Fairweather.

If possible, he improved on
his performance with the
word “but.” This time, in one
primitive ululation, he added
to his
symphonic integration of emotions the despairing
dolour of the camel whose backbone is just giving way under
the final straw, the shuddering panic of the
hunted hyena
which feels the tiger’s
fangs closing on its throat, the pitiful
expiring gasp of the goldfish which has just been neatly
hooked from its bowl by a hungry cat.

“Of course I’ve been
cursing myself for not thinking of
it before,”
said Lady Valerie penitently. “I mean, if those
papers
really were terribly important, I suppose I ought
to
have said something about them at the inquest. That’s
where
I’d like your advice. Do you think I ought to ring
up
Scotland Yard and tell them about it?”

Mr Fairweather had no new
depths to plumb. He was
a man who had already done
all the gamut running of
which he was capable.

“Listen,” he
said with frightfully muted violence. “You
must
put that idea out of your head at once. The police
have
no discretion. Think—think of how it might hurt poor
Johnny’s
father. And whatever happens, you mustn’t say
a
word to Templar. You haven’t told him about those
papers
yet, have you?”

“No, not definitely. But you know, I
believe he guesses
something about them. He’s
terribly suspicious. Two or
three
times this evening he asked me if Johnny had ever
given me anything to keep for him, or if I knew
where
Johnny might have kept his
private papers. But he can’t
do
anything to me, because I thought I’d better be on the
safe side and so I’ve taken plenty of precautions.
You see,
Celia Mallard probably knows
where I left those papers,
and I’ve
written to her about them. She’s at Cap d’Ail now,
but I’ll probably hear from her in a day or
two.”

“Celia Mallard knows
where they are?” moaned Fair-
weather. “How
the devil does she know?”

“Well, I seem to
remember that she was with me when
I dumped them, and
she’s got a perfectly marvellous mem
ory, so she’ll
probably remember all about it. I told her in
my
letter that they were worth thousands of pounds, and
that the Saint was
after them, and so if anything happened
to me
she was to go straight to the police. That ought to
stop the Saint doing anything really awkward,
oughtn’t it?”

Mr Fairweather’s mouth opened.
After all his other vicissitudes, he underwent the culminating sensation of
having been poured out of a frying pan into an ice-cold
bath. The contrast steadied him for a moment; but he
shivered.

“I suppose it
might,” he said. “But what made you say the papers were worth
thousands of pounds?”

“I don’t know. But I
thought, if they really are terribly
important, they’re bound to be worth a
lot of money to
somebody, aren’t they?”
she said reasonably.

“That doesn’t follow
at all,” Fairweather said firmly.
“But—er—you
know that I’d see you didn’t lose by it, in
any
case. Now, will you let me know directly you hear from
Celia Mallard, or as
soon as you remember what you did
with them?
And—um—well, if it’s a matter of money, you
did tell me once that you
needed a car to go with that fur
coat,
didn’t you ?”

“How
could
you
?” she said pathetically. “To talk about
that
fur coat now, and remind me of poor Johnny …
Please
don’t talk to me about it any more; I don’t think
I can ever bear to hear
it mentioned again. You’re making
me feel
dreadfully morbid, Algy, and I’ve had such a tiring day. I think I’d better
ring off now before I break down
altogether. Good-bye.”

The receiver clicked.

“Wait a minute,”
Fairweather said suddenly.

There was no answer.

Lady Valerie Woodchester
was walking back across the bright modernistic sitting room of her tiny
apartment on
Marsham Street. She fitted a cigarette
into a long holder
and picked up the drink that she had put down when she
telephoned. Over the rim of the glass she looked
across
to a small book table where
there was propped up the cheap
unframed photograph of a dark and not
unhappily serious
young man.

“Poor old Johnny!” she said softly.
“It was a lousy trick
they played on
you, my dear …”

Mr Algernon Sidney
Fairweather jiggled the receiver
hook. He took a coin out of
his pocket and poised it over
the slot; and then he
hesitated, and finally put it back in
his pocket. He left
the booth and made his way to the bar,
where he downed a
double brandy with very little dilution
of
soda. His plump cheeks seemed to have gone flabby and
his hands twitched
as they put down the glass.

Twenty minutes later he was
waddling jerkily up and
down the carpet of a
luxurious room overlooking Grosvenor
Square, blurting
out his story under a coldly observant scru
tiny
that made him feel somehow like a beetle under a
searchlight.

“Do you believe Her
when she says that she’s lost this
cloakroom
ticket?” Luker asked.

He was as calm as
Fairweather was agitated. He sat
imperturbably behind the huge carved oak desk
where he
had been writing when Fairweather
blundered in and toyed
with his
fountain pen. The expression in his eyes was
faintly contemptuous.

“I don’t know what to believe,” said
Fairweather dis
tractedly. “I—well,
thinking it over, I doubt it. I’ve had
enough
dealings with her to know what her methods are,
and personally I think she’s fishing to see how much we’re
prepared to pay.”

“Or how much Templar is prepared to
pay,” said Luker
phlegmatically.
“Did you know that she had dinner with
him tonight at the Berkeley?”

Fairweather blinked as if
he had been smacked on the
nose.

“What?” he
yelped. His voice had gone back on him
again.
“But I particularly told her to have nothing more
to
do with him!”

“That’s probably why
she did it,” Luker replied unsympathetically. “I had an idea that
something like this might
happen—that’s why I’ve
been having them watched. For
all you know, he may have
put her up to this.”

Fairweather swallowed.

“How much do you think
she’ll want?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think I care very
much. It doesn’t
seem to be very important.
Money is a very temporary
solution—you
never know how soon you may have to
repeat
the dose. This cloakroom story may be a myth from
beginning to end. She might easily have these
papers in her
dressing-table drawer. She might easily have no papers at
all. Her attitude is the thing that matters; and
with this
man Templar in the
background it would be unwise to take
chances.”
Luker shrugged. “No, my dear Algy, I’m afraid
we shall have to take more permanent steps to deal
with
both of them.”

“W-what sort of
steps?” stammered Fairweather feebly.
“H-how
can we deal with them?”

That seemed to amuse Luker.
The ghost of a smile dragged at the corners of his mouth.

“Do you really want to know?” he
asked interestedly.

“You mean …”
Fairweather didn’t seem to know how to go on. His collar appeared to be choking
him. He tugged at it in spasmodic efforts to loosen it. “I—I don’t think
so,”
he said. “I …”

Luker laughed outright.

“There’s a sort of
suburban piousness about you and
Sangore that verges on the
indecent,” he remarked. “You’re
just
like a couple of squeamish old maids who hold shares
in
a brothel. You want your money, but you’re determined
not
to know how it’s obtained. If anything unpleasant or
drastic
has to be done, that’s all right with you so long as
you
don’t have to do it yourselves. That’s how you felt
about
getting rid of Kennet. Now it’s Templar and Lady
Valerie.
Well, they’ve got to be murdered, haven’t they?”

Fairweather wriggled, as
if his clothes were full of ants.
His face was
glistening with sweat.

“I——
Really, I don’t——
”

“I expect you think
I’m excessively vulgar,” Luker con
tinued
mercilessly. “I’ve got such a shockingly crude way
of putting things, haven’t I? I suppose you felt just the
same when I offered you a place on the board of Norfelt
Chemicals in return for certain items of business when you
were secretary of state for war. That’s quite all right, my
dear fellow. Go home and hare a nice cup of tea and forget
about it. There’s no need for me to tell you to keep your
mouth shut, is there? I know you’re a worm, and you know
you’re a worm, but we won’t let anybody else know you’re
a worm.”