Prelude for War (8 page)

“Did you have any
luck?”

She shook her head.

“No. He was terribly
obstinate and silly. I wanted him
to have a good time
and forget all his stupid ideas, but he
just
wouldn’t. Instead of enjoying himself like an ordinary
person
he’d just sit and talk to me for hours, and some
times
he’d bring along a fellow called Windlay that he
lived
with, and then they’d both talk to me.”

“What did they talk
about?”

She spread out her hands in
a vague gesture.

“Politics—you know,
stupid
things. And he used to talk
about a thing called the
Ring, and Mr Luker, and General
Sangore, and even his own
father, and say the
beastliest
things about them.
And there were newspapers, and fac
tories, and some
people called the Sons of France
——”

The Saint was suddenly
very rigid.

“What was that
again?”

“The Sons of
France—or something like that. I don’t
know
what it was all about and I don’t care. I know he used
to
say that he was going to upset everything in a few weeks
and make things uncomfortable for everybody, and I used
to tell him not to be so damned selfish, because after all
what’s the point in upsetting everybody? Live and let live
is my motto, and I wouldn’t interfere with other people’s
private affairs if they’ll leave mine alone.”

The Saint put another
cigarette between his lips and
steadied his hands round
his lighter.

“Have you any idea
what he was going to do that was
going to upset everybody so
much?” he asked.

The girl shrugged her slim
shoulders.

“I don’t know. He had
a lot of papers that he was going
to publish and
prove something. And just a week or two
ago
he was frightfully excited about some photographs
that
he’d got hold of. I don’t know what they were, but both
he and Windlay were frightfully worked up about it. But
what does it
matter,
anyway?”
 

3

Simon Templar filled his
lungs with smoke and let it out
again in a trailing
streamer that flowed with the unbroken
evenness
of a deep river. The shock that had brought him
to
conscious immobility had passed, letting the tenseness
ebb
out of his muscles to leave his natural lazy imperturbability apparently
unchanged. But under his effortless and
unruffled
poise his brain was thrumming like an intoxicated
dynamo.

He had fished for clues
and he had brought them up in
a pail. It didn’t matter
for the moment how they fitted
together. Luker and the
Arms Ring; Sangore, formerly of
the War Office, how a
director of the Wolverhampton Ord
nance Company;
Fairweather, sometime secretary of state
for
war, now on the board of Norfelt Chemicals; Kennet the pacifist, the groping
crusader. Papers, exposes, photographs.
And
the Sons of France. Whichever way you spilled them,
they
fell into some sort of pattern. The drums he had heard
such
a short while ago thundered in the Saint’s temples;
the
blaring brass shrieked in his ears. He felt as if he were
standing on the brink of a breathless precipice, watching
the boiling of a hideously parturient abyss. The keen clear
zenithal winds of destiny fanned through his hair.

He was conscious, in a
curiously distant way, that the girl
was still talking.

“I never used to
listen very hard—I was too busy trying
to
think of ways to stop them. If I hadn’t stopped them,
they’d
have gone on all night. So when I’d had enough of
politics
I’d say something like ‘Let’s go to the Berkeley
and
have a drink,’ and then they’d both start talking about
the snobbishness of big hotels and how bad drink was for
me; and I didn’t mind that nearly so much, because I quite
like talking about hotels and drink.”

The Saint brought himself
back to her with a deliberate effort. He could think afterwards; now, precious
time was flying, and the inquest was already late. He could have no
more than a few seconds to take advantage of what Provi
dence had thrown into his lap.

He said: “But if
Kennet hated Luker and Sangore so
much, what made him
come down here for the week end ?”

“I did. I thought
that if he could come down here and
see what they were
really like, he might have given up his
stupid
ideas. And I knew they were going to offer him an
awfully
good job. Algy told me so.”

“Who?”

“Algy. Algy
Fairweather. Of
course
you know.”

“Of
course,”
said
the Saint humbly. “And didn’t Kennet
appreciate
it?”

“No. That’s what made
me so furious. When we got
here he told me he was
glad they wanted to see him, because
he wanted to see
them, too, and instead of them giving
him a job he was
going to see that theirs were made so
uncomfortable that
they’d be glad to give them up. So I
told him I thought
he was a silly, stupid, narrow-minded, bigoted halfwit, and a crashing bore as
well, and—and we
parted. After dinner he went into the
library to talk to
them, and I went to the movies with Don
Knightley, and
I never saw John again.” She gazed
at the Saint appealingly
. “D-do you really
think it was my fault that all this
happened?”

He considered her without
smiling.

“I think you deserve a
damned good hiding for leading
Kennet up the
garden,” he said dispassionately. “And if
I
were Windlay I’d see that you got one.”

She pouted. She seemed to
be more disappointed that
he could think of her like
that than seriously annoyed by
what he had said. And
then, quite unanswerably, a gleeful
little twinkle came
into her eyes that made her look momen
tarily
like a mischievous and very attractive child.

“You wouldn’t say
that if you knew Windlay,” she gig
gled.
“He’s a very pale and skinny young man with glasses.”

Simon gave up the struggle.
Actually he felt a colder
anger against the men who
had used the girl as their tool. The possibility that she might have been
something more
than an unsuspecting instrument was
one which he dis
carded almost at once. She had already
told him far too
much. And her mind, whatever its
obvious failings, could
never have worked that way.

“Where did Kennet and
Windlay live?” he asked flatly.

“Oh, miles from
anywhere, out in Notting Hill, in an
awful place called
Balaclava Mansions.”

“Notting Hill isn’t
miles from anywhere,” said the Saint.
“The
trouble with you is that you’ve never heard of any
place
outside the West End. You’ve got a brain; why don’t
you
get reckless and try using it?”

She sighed.

“My God,” she
said. “Now you’re going to come over
all
earnest on me. You think I ought to have a good hiding
for
the way I treated Johnny. I suppose my intentions
weren’t
serious enough. I oughtn’t to have pretended some
thing
I didn’t mean. Is that it?”

“More or less,”
he said bluntly.

He wondered what excuse she
was going to make for
herself.

She didn’t make any
excuse. She laughed.

“You have the nerve
to stand there, in your beautiful
clothes, with your
dark hair and dashing blue eyes, and tell
me
that,” she said startlingly. “I bet you’ve made love to
heaps of women yourself, hundreds of times, and never
meant a word of it.”

The Saint stared at her.
For a moment he was completely
and irrevocably taken
aback.

In that moment his first
hasty estimate of her underwent
a surprising reversal,
although it made no difference to his belief in her innocence. But it gave him
an insight into her
mind which he had not been expecting. She might be feather
brained and spoiled, but she had something more in
her
head than he had credited her
with. For the first time he found himself appreciating her.

“You win,
darling,” he said. The turn of his lips became
impish.
“Only I always mean it a little.”

Then one of the side doors
opened and he saw Lady
Sangore surge out like a
full-rigged ship putting out from
harbour. Behind her,
in a straggling flotilla, came Sir
Robert, Kane Luker and
Mr Fairweather. Fairweather,
peering round, caught
sight of a ruddy-faced walrus-
moustached man who. looked
like a builder’s foreman
dressed up in his Sunday suit, who got up from
the bench
where he had been sitting as the
party emerged. They
shook hands, and
Fairweather spoke to him for a moment
before
he shepherded him into the office which they had
just left and came puttering back to rejoin the wake of
the fleet. Simon noted the incident as he watched
the armada
catch sight of Lady Valerie
and set a course for her.

“My dear, I’m
so
sorry
we’ve been such a long time,”
said Lady Sangore as
she hove to. “All this bother only
makes
everything so much
worse.”

She conveyed the impression that a fire in
which some
body was burnt to death would not be
nearly so distressing
if it were not
for the subsequent inconvenience which she
personally had to suffer.

“I hope you haven’t
been too bored, my dear,” said
Fairweather, puffing
through into the foreground.

Lady Valerie smiled.

“Oh no,” she
said. “I’ve been very well looked after.
You
haven’t forgotten the hero of the evening, have you?”

Fairweather blinked at the
Saint.

“Of course—the
gentleman who made that magnificent
attempt to rescue
poor old Kennet. I ought to have got
in touch with you before, but—um—I’m
sure you’ll forgive
us, everything has been
so disorganized …” He shuffled
his feet uneasily. “At any rate, it’s a great relief to see that
you don’t look much the worse for your
adventure.”

The Saint smiled—and to
anyone who knew him well, that smile would have seemed curiously like the smile
on
the face of a certain celebrated tiger.

He had been amazingly
lucky. The return of Luker and
Company had been delayed
just long enough for him to
coax out of Lady Valerie
the whole incalculably important
story which she had to
tell; their reintroduction couldn’t
have been more
desirably timed if he had arranged it himself
.
He could look for no more information, but he already
had
enough to keep his mind occupied for some time.
Meanwhile, he could
contribute something of his own which
might
add helpfully to the general embarrassment. He was
only waiting for his chance.

“I come from a long
line of salamanders,” he said cheer
fully.
“Wasn’t that Kennet’s father I saw you speaking
to
just now?”

“Er—yes. I’ve known
him for a long time, of course.”

“This inquest isn’t
being heard in camera by any chance,
is it?”

“Er—no. Why should it
be?”

“It seems to involve
rather a lot of private interviews.”

“Urn.”
Fairweather looked
 
even more
uncomfortable.
He seemed to inflate himself
determinedly. “I fear I have
never had any
experience of these things. But of course it’s
the
coroner’s job to save as much of the court’s time a
possible.”

Simon toyed gently with
his cigarette.

“Lady Valerie and I
were just talking it over,” he said.
“She seemed to
have an idea that Kennet might have committed
suicide.”