Prelude for War (39 page)

Nobody moved. None of them
spoke. A paralysis of futility seemed to have taken hold of them, and Luker
seemed to gloat over their strangulation. He gave them plenty of time
to absorb the consciousness of their own
moral
impotence while his own rocklike impassivity seemed
to
deepen with his contempt.

“In that case, I take
it that you wish me to continue,” he
proceeded
at length. “My instructions were carried out in part. Templar and Lady
Valerie have been captured. Their car was wrecked, and they were both stunned
in the crash
but otherwise not much harmed.”

“Where are they
now?” asked Fairweather limply. “Are
they
in London?”

Luker shook his head.

“No. My men rang up
from Amesbury, asking for further
orders. You see,
while they recovered all Kennet’s docu
ments,
the most important thing of all—the negative of a
certain
photograph—was not to be found, either in the car
or
on either of the captives. I therefore thought it advisable
to question both of them about what had happened to it.
You will understand that this may present some
difficulties,
since they may require—persuading.
Meanwhile, they had
to be kept in some safe place.
Luckily I remembered that
Bledford Manor was not far
from Andover, which is not
far from Amesbury. Knowing
that the Manor was closed
and the servants on
holiday, I told my men to take them
there.”

Lady Sangore started to
her feet as though she had been
jabbed in the behind with
a long needle.

“What?” she
protested shrilly. “You sent them to my
house?
How dare you! How
dare
you!”

The general fought against
suffocation. He made noises
like an ancient car trying
to start on a cold morning. His
face was the colour of old bricks.

“Tchah!” he
backfired. “Harrumph! By Gad, Luker,
that’s
going a bit too far. It’s monstrous. Tchah! I forbid it.
I forbid it absolutely!”

“You can’t forbid
it,” Luker said coolly. “It’s done.”

Fairweather pawed the air.

“This is nothing to
do with us,” he whined reproachfully.
“You’re
the only one in that photograph. Really, Luker,
I——”

“I quite
understand,” Luker said, with imperturbably
measured venom.
“This was an attractive business proposition for you so long as somebody
else took all the risk, but’ now that it isn’t going so smoothly you’d like to
wash your
hands of it, the same as
Sangore—of course from the highest
motives
and with the greatest regard for the honour of the
regiment and the old school. I’m sorry that I
can’t make it
so easy for you. In the
past I have helped you to make your
fortunes
in return for nothing much more than the use of
your honest British stupidity, which is so comforting to the
public. Doubtless you thought that you were earning
the
just rewards of your own
brilliance, but I assure you that I
could have taken my pick from
hundreds of distinguished
imbeciles of your
class. Now for the first time, in a small
way, I really need your assistance. You should feel flat
tered. But in any event I intend to have it. And I
can assure
you that even if this
particular photograph only refers to
me,
if I should be caught the subsequent investigation would
certainly implicate yourselves.”

He made the statement in a
way that left them no doubt
of how they might be
implicated if the worst came to the
worst. But they were
too battered to fight back. His words moved like barbs among the balloons of
their self-esteem.
They stared at him, curiously
deflated, trying to persuade
themselves that they were
not afraid… .

Luker’s square, powerful
hands lay flat on the blotter in
front of him, palm
downwards, in a pattern that symboli
cally and
physically and quite unconsciously expressed an instinct of command that held
down all opposition. He went on speaking with relentless precision, and with a
subtle but
incombatable change of manner.

“You, my dear Algy, have certain
connections which will
enable you to
approach the chief commissioner at Scotland
Yard. You will use those
connections to find out exactly what
Templar
told the police in Anford, and report to my secretary here as soon as you have
the information. I don’t think
he can
have told them anything important, but it will be
safer to find out. You,”—he turned to General
and Lady
Sangore—“will go down
to Bledford Manor. Since the
house is supposed to be shut up, some local
policeman may
notice that there are people
there and become inquisitive.
You
must be there to reassure him. You need not see the prisoners if it will
embarrass you. I myself am going to Paris
tonight, and I have arranged for Templar and Lady Valerie
to be taken there—it will be easier to question
them and dis
pose of them later on the
other side. But there may be a
slight
delay before they can be moved, and I want you at
Bledford as soon as possible as a precaution. You
had better
leave at once.”

He did not consider any
further argument. As far as he I was concerned, there was no more arguing to be
done. He
simply issued his commands. As he
finished he stood up, and
before any of them could
raise any more objections he had walked out of the room.

They sat still for some
moments after he had gone, each knowing what was in the minds of the others,
each trying to
pretend that he alone was still
dominant and unshaken.

Fairweather got up first.
He pulled out a big old-
fashioned gold watch and consulted
it with a brave imitation
of his old portly
pomposity.

“Well,” he said
croakily, “I must be getting along. Got
things
to attend to,”

He bustled out, very
quickly and busily.

The Sangores looked at each
other. Then Lady Sangore
spoke.

“It’s all that little
tart’s fault,” she said bitterly. “If she’d
had
any sense or decency at all we shouldn’t be in all this
trouble now. As for Luker, he ought to be kicked out of
every club in London.”

“I don’t suppose he
belongs to every club in London,”
said
General Sangore dully.

His figure, usually so
ramrod erect, was bowed and sag
ging; his shoulders
drooped. Suddenly he looked very old and tired and pasty. He seemed bewildered,
like a man lost
in a chamber of unimaginable horrors;
he seemed to be
groping through the rusty machinery of
his mind for one
wheel that would turn to a task for
which it had never been
designed.

2

“Once upon a
time,” said the Saint, “there was a wall
eyed
wombat named Wilhelmina, who lived in a burrow in
Tasmania
and grieved resentfully over the fact that Nature
had
endowed her, like all females of the marsupial family,
with
an abdominal pouch or sac intended for the reception
and
protection of newborn marsupials. Since,” however, the strabismic
asymmetry of Wilhelmina’s features had always
deterred
discriminating males of her species from making
such
advances to her as might have resulted in the production of young wombats, she
was easily persuaded to regard
this useful and ingenious organ as an indecent
excrescence
invented by the Creator in a
lewd and absent-minded mo
ment, and
she soon became the leader of a strong movement among other unattractive
wombats to suppress all references
to
it and to decry its use as sinful and reprehensible, and
invariably wore a species of apron or sporran to
conceal
this obscene conformation of
tissue from the world. Now it
so
happened that one night a purblind male wombat named
Widgery, of dissolute habits …”

He was in the scullery of
Bledford Manor with Lady
Valerie Woodchester. They sat
on the hard cold tile floor
with their wrists and
ankles bound with strong cord. A smear
of
blood had dried across Simon’s face and in spite of his
quiet satiric voice his head was aching savagely. Lady Val
erie’s face was very dirty and her hair was in wild disarray;
she also had a headache, and she was in a poisonous temper.

“Oh, stop it!”
she burst out jitteringly. “You’ve got me
into
a hell of a nice mess, haven’t you ? I suppose you enjoy
this sort of thing, but I don’t. Aren’t you going to
do
something
about it?”

“What would you like
me to do?” he asked accommodatingly.

“What are they going
to do with us ?”

He shrugged.

“I’m not a thought
reader. But you can use your imagi
nation.”

She brooded. Her lower
lip was thrust out, her pencilled
eyebrows drawn
together in a vicious’ scowl.

“The damned
swine,” she said. “I’d like to see them all
die
the most horrible deaths. I’d like to see them being burnt
alive or something, and jeer at them… . My God, I wish
I had a cigarette… . Doesn’t it seem ages since we were
having dinner at the Berkeley? Simon, do you think
they’re
really going to kill us ?”

“I expect their ideas
are running more or less along those
lines,” he
admitted. “But they haven’t done it yet. What ‘ll
you
bet me we aren’t dining at the Berkeley again to
morrow
?”

“It’s all very well
for you to talk like that,” she said.
“It’s
your job. But I’m scared.” She shivered. Her voice
rose a trifle. “It’s horrible! I don’t want to die! I—I want
to have a
good time, and wear nice clothes, and—and …
Oh, what’s the good ?” She stared at him sullenly in the
dimming
light. “I suppose you think that’s frightful of me.
If your girl friend was in my place I expect she’d
think this
was an awfully jolly
party. I suppose she simply revels in
being
rolled over in cars, and knocked on the head, and
mauled about and tied
up and waiting to be killed, and all
the
rest of it. Well, all I can say is, I wish she was here instead of me.”

The Saint chuckled. He was
not particularly amused, but
he didn’t want her nerve to
crack completely, and he knew that her breaking point was not very far away.
“After all, you chose me for a husband, darling. I tried to discourage
you, but you seemed to have made up your
mind
that you liked the life. Never mind. I’m pretty good at getting out of
jams.”

“Even if we do get
out, I expect my hair will be snow
white or
something,” she said miserably.

She blinked. Her eyes were
very large and solemn; she looked very childish and pathetic. A pair of big
bright tears
formed in her eyes and rolled down her
cheeks.

“I
…
I do hate this so
much,” she whispered. “And
I’m so
uncomfortable.”

“All the same, you
mustn’t cry,” he said. “The floor’s
damp
enough already.”

“It couldn’t be any
damper. So why shouldn’t I cry? I can think of dozens of things I’d like to do,
and crying’s the only
one of them I can do. So
why shouldn’t I ?”

“Because it makes you
look like an old hag.”

She sniffed.

“Well, that’s your
fault,” she said; but she stopped cry
ing.
She twisted her head down and hunched up one shoulder and wriggled comically,
trying to dry the tears on her
blouse. She drew a long
shuddering sigh like a baby. She said: “All right, why don’t you talk to
me about something
and take my mind off it ? What were
you getting so excited
about when the car turned
over?”

The Saint gazed past her,
into one of the corners where
the dusk was rapidly
deepening. That memory had been the
first to return to
his mind when he painfully recovered con
sciousness,
had haunted him ever since under the surface
of his unconcern,
embittering the knowledge of his own
helplessness.