Prelude for War (5 page)

“No,” he said
innocently. “Except that this bloke Kennet
seemed
to be still in the house, so I just had a dart at fish
ing
him out. He wouldn’t be any relation of the M.P. by
any
chance, would he?”

“His son, I believe,
sir, from what I’ve heard in the vil
lage. Staying with
Mr Fairweather for the week end. He
must have been
suffocated in his sleep, pore devil—let’s
hope
‘e was, anyway. It ‘ll cause a bit of a stir, all right.”

“I shouldn’t be
surprised,” said the Saint thoughtfully.

The sergeant nodded
sagely, no doubt squandering a
moment on the satisfactory
vision of his own name in the
headlines. Then he
returned to business.

“I’d better just have
your name and address, sir, in case
you’re wanted for
the inquest.”

Simon felt in his pocket,
produced a card, scribbled on it
and handed it over.

“That’s where I’ll be
staying for the next few days.”
He started to move
on, and then turned back. “By the
way,
who was that other fellow—the bloke who looks as if he’d been chopped out of a
small piece of cliff?”

“You mean Mr Luker,
sir? He often comes down and
stays with Mr Fairweather.
He’s a financier, or something like that, I believe.”

“A financier, is
he?” said the Saint slowly. “What fun!”

He walked on and climbed
into the car with a new load
of tangled thoughts. The
engine started with a low whirr,
and they drove back along
the drive and slid round the corner into the road.

Presently the Saint said,
inconsequentially: “Next time
I go to a fire I’m
going to wear some old clothes.”

“You’re better off
than I am,” said Patricia. “You’ve got
some
other things left. Lady Sangore and Valerie Woodchester
between them have just about wrecked my suitcases.
Lady
Sangore practically told me that all my undies were
immoral,
but it didn’t stop her helping herself to all she
wanted.
You know the sort. A pillar of the British Empire
and
underpays her maids.”

“I know,” said
the Saint feelingly. “What about the Woodchester girl ?”

“Lady
Valerie Woodchester, to be exact. All I know
about
her is that she picked all my most expensive things
and
didn’t miss once.”

“Did either of them
tell you how the fire started?”

She shook her head.

“They didn’t know.
It’s an old house, but it had modern automatic fire alarms. All they could tell
me was that the alarms went off and everyone came tumbling out of bed.
There seems to have been a good deal of confusion. Lady
Sangore put the whole thing down to the Communists—
but then if she drops a stitch when she’s knitting, she puts
it down to the Communists. Valerie Woodchester was very
peeved because the young Guardsman insisted on rescuing
her without giving her time to put on a dressing gown.
That’s all I got out of her.”

“Did you talk to
anyone else ?”

“Well, that man you
were talking to——
”

“Luker?”

“Yes. He said he
thought it must have been a short cir
cuit in the
lighting system. But I couldn’t pay much attention
while
you were in there. You know. I was too busy worry
ing
about whether you were enjoying yourself.”

The Saint chuckled
absently.

“It was a bit dull at
times,” he said.

He drove on slowly. His
smile faded, and a faint ridge
of concentration formed
between his brows. It was an in
significant betrayal of
what was going on in his mind, for
the truth was that
he was thinking harder than he had done
for
a long time.

Patricia watched him
without interrupting. She had that
rare gift in a
woman, the ability to leave a man to his si
lence,
and she knew that the Saint would talk when he was
ready.
But there was nothing to stop her own thoughts. He had told her nothing; but in
a puzzled, bewildered way she
knew that he had something
startling to tell. The Saint on
the trail of trouble had
something vivid and dynamic and
transfiguring about him, as
unmistakable as the quivering
transformation of a hunting
dog that has caught a new hot
scent. Patricia knew all
the signs. But now, with no idea
of the reason for them,
they gave her the eerie feeling of
watching a dog
bristling before an apparently empty room.

“Which only shows you
that you never know,” said the
Saint presently, as
if she should have known everything.

She knew that she would
have to draw him out warily.

“They didn’t seem to
be a very brilliant crowd,” she said.
“I
didn’t seem to be able to get much more sense out of
them
than you could.”

“I was afraid you
wouldn’t,” he admitted. “Oh no,
they’re
not brilliant. But very respectable. In fact, just about
what you’d expect to find at a place like that at the week
end. Lady Sangore, the typical army officer’s wife, with her
husband the typical army officer. Lady Valerie Wood-
chester, the bright young society floozie, of the fearfully
county huntin’-shootin’-an’-fishin’ Woodchesters. Captain
Whoosis of the Buffoon Guards, her dashing young male
equivalent, probably a nephew or something like that of old
Sangore’s, invited down to make an eligible partner for
Lady Valerie. Comrade Fairweather, the nebulous sort of
modern country squire, probably Something in the City in
his spare time, and one of the bedrocks of the Conservative
party. A perfectly representative collection of English
ladies and gentlemen of what we humorously call the Upper
Classes. We can find out a bit more about them tomorrow
—Peter’s been living here long enough now to be able to dig
up some extra dirt from the village if he doesn’t know it
already. But I don’t think we’ll get anything sensational. People like
that live in an even deeper rut than the fellow who goes to an office every
morning, although they’d have
a stroke if you told them.
If only they hadn’t invited Com
rade Luker …”

“Who is he?”

Simon drew another
cigarette to a bright glow from the
stump of the last.

“If he’s a financier,
as the policeman said, and he’s the
bloke I’m thinking
of, I’ve heard of him. Which is more
than most people
have done. He moves in a mysterious
way.”

“Where does he
move?”

“In the most
distinguished international circles. He hobnobs with foreign secretaries and
ambassadors and prime
ministers, and calls dictators by their first
names. But you
never read about him in the
newspapers, and there are never
any
photographers around when he pays his calls. They
must like him just because he’s such a charming
guy. Of
course he’s one of the
biggest shareholders in the Stelling
Steel Works in Germany, and the
Siebel Arms Factory in
France, and the
Wolverhampton Ordnance Company in England; but you couldn’t be so nasty as to
think that that
had anything to do with it. After all, he plays no
favourites.
In the last Spanish revolution,
the rebels were mowing
down
Loyalists with Stelling machine guns just as busily as
the government
was bopping the rebels with Siebels. It was
just
about the same in the war between Bolivia and Para
guay, except that the Wolverhampton Ordnance
Company was in on that as well—on both sides.”

The knot around Patricia’s
heart seemed to tighten.

“Just one of Nature’s
altruists,” she said mechanically.

“Oh yes,” said
the Saint, with a kind of deadly and dis
tant cheerfulness.
“You couldn’t say he was anything but
impartial.
For instance, he’s one of the directors of the
V
oix Populaire,
a French newspaper that spends most of its
time howling about the menace of the Italo-German Fascist
entente and at the same time he’s part owner of the
Deutscher Unterricht,
which lets off periodical blasts about
the French threat to German recovery.
…
At
home, of
course, he’s a staunch
patriot. He’s one of the most gener
ous
subscribers to the Imperial Defence Society, which
spends its time proclaiming that Britain must have
bigger
and better armaments to
protect herself against all the
European
enemies of peace. In fact, the I.D.S. takes a lot of
credit for the latest fifteen-hundred-million-pound
rearma
ment programme which our taxes
are now paying for. And
naturally
it’s just an unavoidable coincidence that the
Wolverhampton Ordnance Company is now working night
and day to carry out its government
contracts.”

“I see,” said
Patricia; but it was only as if a fog had
eddied
and parted capriciously, giving her a glimpse of
something
huge and terrifyingly inhuman looming through
shifting
veils of mist.

Simon Templar’s face was
as dark and cold as graven
copper.

“You know what I
mean?” he said. “Kane Luker is
probably
the only serious rival that our old friend Rayt
Marius
ever had. And now that Angel Face is no longer
with
us, Luker stands alone—the kingpin of what somebody
once called the
Merchants of Death. It’s interesting to have met him, because I’ve often
thought that we may have to
liquidate him
one day.”

The mists broke in Patricia’s mind, so that for
an instant
she could see with a blinding
clarity. It was as if the whole
interruption
of the fire had never happened, as if she was
still sitting in the car as she had been before, listening to the
sounds that came over the radio, without a break,
just as
she had been listening. Their
primitive stridency beat in her
brain
again as if they had never ceased—the lusting
clangour of trumpets, the machinelike prattle of the drums.
Brass and drums. And men marching like lines of
ants, their
boots thudding like the
tick-tock of some monstrous clock
eating up time. Left, right, left. In
time with the brass and drums. And in time, too, now, with the hammer and clang
of flaring forges and the deep rolling
reverberation of stu
pendous
armouries pouring out the iron tools of war… .

She looked at the Saint and
was aware of him in the
midst of all that, like a
shining light, a bright sword, a clear
note
of music in the thunder of brute destruction, following
his amazing destiny. But the thunder went on.

She tried to shut it out.

She said, almost
desperately: “That fellow who was left
—in
there. Why did you ask if he was any relation of the
M.P.?”

“It just occurred to
me. And he was. That’s the funny part. Because unless my memory’s all cockeyed,
he’s a
flaming Red and a frightful thorn in the side of his
respecta
ble papa. He’s the one part of the
picture that doesn’t fit
in. Why should a really
outstanding crop of old and young
Diehards like that
ask anyone like John Kennet down for
a week end?”

“He might have amused
them.”

“Would you credit them
with that much sense of
humour?”

“I don’t know. But if
it was a joke, they must be feeling
pretty badly about
it.” She shuddered. “I know it’s all over
now,
but I hope—I hope they were right—that the smoke
did
put him out before the fire got to him.”

Simon’s cigarette reddened
again for a long moment before he answered.

“If there’s one thing
I’m sure of, I’m sure that the fire
didn’t hurt
him,” he said; and the way he said it stopped her breath for a moment.

The noise in her brain
screamed up in an insane cacoph
ony.

“You mean——
”