Prelude for War (35 page)

25
ao
û
t:
   
Ouverture de I’Hospice de M
é
moire,

à
Neuilly, par M. Chaulage.

Fastened to it with a
detachable clip was a photograph of three men, one of whom was Luker,
apparently talking
in an office. And in the bottom corner
of the memorandum
sheet was pencilled in a different hand, so quick and
careless
as to require a clairvoyant to read
it:

Remember
the R———
?

The last word eluded even
the Saint’s powers of divina
tion. And that was all
there was.

3

Simon Templar lighted
another cigarette with the dis
passionate detachment of a
machine. He was more cold and
grim than the girl had ever
seen him, or had ever realized
that he could be. He looked
up at her with blue eyes that
bit with the intolerable
glittering cold of interstellar space.

“Come here,” he
said.

No power of mind that she
could conceive could have
disobeyed him.

She came over, in spite of
herself, like a mindless robot.
He took her hand and drew
her down on to the bed beside
him.

“Is this all there
ever was in this package?”

“I—I think so.”

“Have you taken
anything out ?”

“No.”

He knew she was telling
the truth. As he was then, she
could never have made him
believe a lie.

“Was the envelope
sealed when you put it in the check
room?”

“Yes.”

“It didn’t look as if
it had been tampered with when you
got it out?”

“No.”

But there he knew he was on
the wrong tack. If Luker
and Company had been able
to get at the packet, they
wouldn’t have left any of
it. And if they had known where
it was, in order to tamper
with it, they wouldn’t have been
going to such lengths to
locate it.

This was all that there
had ever been. And this was what K
ennet and Windlay
had died for.

He had expected that that
dossier would give him a light
that would make clear all
mysteries, and instead it had only
given him a darker
riddle. He stared at that enigmatic last
sheet
with a glacial and immobile fury. Whatever Kennet
and
Windlay had been murdered for must be hidden there
—he
was as sure of that as he could be sure of anything,
but
that was no help to him.
…
In a sudden uncontrolla
ble defining of his belief
he ripped off the rest of the heavy
batch of papers and
tossed them into her lap.

“There you are,”
he said. “You can have ‘em. If there’s
anything
there that’s worth a penny more than the
News
of the World
would pay you for it it ‘ll
take somebody a lot cleverer than me to dig it out.”

“That’s very nice of
you,” she said. “Anything that’s no
use,
and you don’t want, I can have. What’s that page you’re
keeping ?”

“I wish I knew.”

“May I see it?”

She was sitting straight
up, with a curious distant dignity.

He looked at her. In his
mind was a nebulous puzzlement
that he could not bring
into sharp focus. She had not asked
for terms then, nor
did she go on to ask for them, but he
didn’t seem to have
enough attention to spare for that.

He moved the paper a
little, and she read it over his
arm.

” ‘The twenty-fifth of
August—Opening of the Hospital
of Memory——
‘ “

” ‘The Hostel of
Memory, at Neuilly,’ ” he said. “I’ve
heard
something about it. It’s an old chateau converted into
a
sort of Old Soldiers’ Home, endowed by the French gov
ernment
for disabled veterans of the Great War to end
their
days in in reasonably pleasant surroundings.”

” ‘By Monsieur
Chaulage,’ ” she read. “Isn’t he the presi
dent,
or the premier, or something?”

He nodded, and a
recollection struck him like a deadened
blow.

“And tomorrow is the
twenty-fifth of August,” he said.

She stared at him with wide
expressionless eyes. There
was nothing definable that
her eyes could have expressed.
She was as nonplussed as
himself. They gazed at one
another in the barren
communion of hopeless bewilderment,
knowing that here
was something that might make their
blood run cold if they could understand
it, and yet not know
ing what to fear.

Presently she looked at
the sheet again.

“What’s the rest of
it?” She leaned over further to peer
at
the spidery scrawl across the corner. ” ‘Remember
the——
‘ What is it, Simon? It looks like ‘Rinksty.’
“

“You’re as good a
thought reader as I am. Does it mean
anything to
you?”

“Nothing.”

An idea crossed his mind.

“Do you know the
handwriting?”

“Of course. It’s
Johnny’s writing.”

“Johnny’s! Then you
must know what it means—you
must be able to read it——
”

She shook her head.

“But I can’t! Nobody
ever could, when he wrote like
that. Usually he wrote
quite neatly, but when he was in a
hurry he just
scrawled things down like that and if you
were
lucky and you knew what he was likely to be writing
about you could sometimes
guess what the words were from
the first
letters and how long they looked.”

“But he meant this for
you. He scribbled it on the page to make you think of the point. ‘Remember the
Rinksty?’
—or whatever it is. He thought it
would mean something to
you. Is it something that
he’d told you about before when
he was talking? Is it a
ship? Is it a hotel? Is it a pet name of your own that you had for some place
where you used
to meet—some place where he might have
told you about
this? For God’s sake,
think!”

The Saint’s voice hammered
at her with passionate inten
sity; the grip of his fingers must have been
bruising her arm.
Somehow he was neither
pleading nor commanding, but his
fire would have melted stone. She was
not stone. She twisted
her fingers together
and looked here and there, and her face
was crumpled with the frantic effort of memory; but her
eyes were big and tragic when they came to his face
again.

“It’s no good,”
she said. “It doesn’t ring a bell anywhere.
It
isn’t any place we went to, I’m sure of that.”

“Or anything he
talked about?”

“He used to talk about
so many things, but as I told
you I never paid any more
attention than I could help,
because it all seemed so
frightfully earnest and important
and I’m much too
young to start bothering about important things.”

She couldn’t’ have been
lying, or trying to keep anything
from him. If she had
been he must have known.

He stared at the paper as
if by sheer physical and mental
force he could drag out the
secret that was wrapped up in
that wandering trail of
graphite particles. To have got so
far and then to be
stopped there was maddening; his brain couldn’t accept it. He had never in his
life been stopped by
a puzzle that filled him
with such a sickening feeling of
impotence. This was no code
or cipher or riddle that wit
and patience might
eventually solve. There were no invisible
inks
to develop or clues to put together. The answer was already there in black and
white, exactly as Kennet had
jotted it down without any
intention to conceal it, wrapped
up in the skeletal
hieroglyphics which to him had been only
ordinary
hurried writing. Every kink and twist in that long
squiggle
that might have been “Rinksty” or “Ruckstig” or
a dozen other things had stood for a definite letter when
Kennet had traced his pencil over them; but he had finished
writing and he would not come back to read out what he
had written, and all the thought in the world wouldn’t make
one single kink one atom more distinct.

The Saint glared at it
until it blurred under his eyes.
“Something happens at
Neuilly tomorrow,” he said sav
agely, “and
this ought to tell us what it is. This is what
Luker
and the Sons of France are murdering scared of any
body
getting hold of. Johnny must have thought you’d
understand.
If only you’d listened to him——
”

“I know,” she
gulped. “I know I’m a silly little fool, b-but I’ll go on trying to think
of it. Is-isn’t the photograph any help?”

“You see if it
is.”

He detached the print from
the clip, and as he did so
a scrap of celluloid
perforated along the edges fluttered
away. He picked it
up and held it to the light. It was a
Leica negative,
obviously the original of the print he had
been
looking at.

He looked at the photograph
again, over her shoulder.
It was badly underexposed
but now he could identify two of the faces. On the left, seated at a desk, with
his right
profile to the camera, was a man with
white hair and a thin underslung jaw; and Simon knew that it was Colonel Marteau
, commandant
of the Sons of France. In an armchair,
further
back, almost facing the camera, was Luker’s square
granitic visage. The man on the right, who faced
the desk
as though being interviewed,
was tall and gangling and
shabbily
dressed: his face looked coarse and half witted,
but that might have been due to the lighting or a slight
movement when the picture was taken.

Simon touched him with one
finger.

“Do you know
him?” he asked.

“No. I’m sure I
don’t. I’ve never seen him before.”

“You told me that
Kennet was excited about a photo
graph. This must be it.
What did he say about it?”

Her forehead was
desperately wrinkled.

“I don’t know
…
I told you I never
listened.
I’ve
got
a sort—sort of idea he said it would prove something
about how Mr Luker was a murderer, but——
Oh,
I don’t
know!”

“Is that all you can
remember?”

“Yes.
Everything,” she said despairingly. “But doesn’t
it help you ? I mean, it’s quite a lot for me to remember,
really, and you’re so clever, you ought to be able to think
of something——
”

The Saint might have hit
her on the nose. He might have
taken her neck in his two
hands and wrung it out like a
sponge. It stands to the
credit of his self-control that he
did neither of those
things.

Instead he did something so free from
deliberate thought that it might have been almost instinctive, and yet which
afterwards he was tempted to think must have been
inspired. He couldn’t conscientiously pride himself on thinking so ac
curately
and so far ahead. But he knew that that photograph
must be a vital part of the secret, if not the most vital part; and he
knew that the negative mattered far more than the
print. Of all things, that was what he must retain
until he
knew its secret. And
retaining it might not be so easy. Even
then, as he knew, all the police departments of England
were hunting him, as well as the anonymous legions
of the
ungodly. Accidents could
always happen, and at any moment
one
or the other might catch up with him; and then, which
ever it was, the first thing that would follow
would be that
he would be searched.
Luckily a Leica negative was not so
hard
to hide… .

That was how he might have
worked it out if he had
thought so long. But he
didn’t. He simply got up and strolled
over to the
dressing table with the negative held between
his
fingers. There, standing with his back to the girl, he
took out his fountain
pen, removed the cap, unscrewed the
nib end
and carefully drew it out with the rubber ink sac
attached. Then he
rolled the negative gently with his finger
and
thumb, slid it down into the barrel of the pen and
replaced everything. It was not so good as the
strong room
of a safe deposit, where
he would have liked to put it, but
it
was the best thing he could improvise at the moment;
and the restrained mechanical occupation of his
hands
helped to liberate his
struggling thoughts… .