Prelude for War

1

Perhaps the story really began when Simon Templar switched on the radio. At least, before that everything was peaceful; and afterwards, for many memorable days which were to find an unforgettable place in his saga of hairbreadth adventure, there was no peace at all. But Simon Templar's life always seemed to run that way: his interludes of peace seemed to have something inescapably transient about them, some inborn predestined seed of dynamite that was foredoomed to blast him back into another of those amazing episodes which to him were the ever-recurrent breath of life.

He was not thinking of trouble or adventure or anything else exciting. He lounged back comfortably in the long-nosed rakish Hirondel, his finger tips barely seeming to caress the wheel as he nursed it over the dark winding roads at a mere whispering sixty; for he was in no hurry. Overhead a bright moon was shining, casting long shadows over the fields and silvering the leaves of passing trees and hedges. His blue eyes probed lazily down the white reach of the headlights; and the unruffled calm of his brown face of a mocking buccaneer might have helped anyone to understand why in many places he was better known as "The Saint" than he was by his own name — without giving any clue to the disturbing fact that a mere mention of the Saint in initiated quarters was capable of reducing detectives and convicted criminals alike to a state of unprintable incoherence. None of the adventures that had left that almost incredible legend in their trail had left a mark on his face or in his mind: he was simply and serenely enjoying his interlude, though he must have known, even then, that it could only be an interlude until the next adventure began, because Fate had ordained him for adventure…

"You know," he remarked idly, "much as I've cursed them in my time, there's something to be said for these kindergarten English licensing laws. Just think — if it wasn't for the way our professional grandmothers smack our bottoms and pack us off to bed when the clock strikes, we might still be swilling inferior champagne and deafening ourselves with saxophones in that revolting roadhouse instead of doing our souls a bit of good with all this."

"When you start getting tolerant I'm always afraid you're sickening for something," said Patricia Holm sleepily.

He turned his head to smile at her. She looked very lovely leaning back at his side, with her blue eyes half closed and her lips softly shaped with humour: he was always discovering her loveliness again with an exciting sense of surprise, as if it had so many facets that it was never twice the same. She was something that was always changing and yet never changed; as much a part of him as his oldest memory, and yet always new; wherever he went and whatever other adventures he found, she was the one unending and exquisite adventure.

He touched the spun gold of her hair.

"All right," he said. "You can have the saxophones."

And that was when he switched on the radio.

The little dial on the dashboard glowed alight out of the darkness, and for a few seconds there was silence while the set warmed up. And then, with an eerie suddenness, there were no saxophones, but a loud brassy voice speaking in French. The set picked it out of the air in the middle of a sentence, flung it gratingly at them as it rose in a snarling crescendo.

"… to crush them like vermin, to destroy them like rats who would carry their plague germs through our fair land! The blood of a million Frenchmen, dead on the fields of glory, cries out to you to show yourselves worthy of their sacrifice. Rise up and arm yourselves against this peril that threatens you from within; stamp out these cowardly pacifists, these skulking traitors, these godless anarchists, these alien Jews who are betraying our country for a handful of gold… Sons of France, I call you to arms. Fling yourselves into the fight with a song on your lips and glory in your hearts, for only in the blood and fire of battle will our nation be purified and find once more her true soul!"

The brassy voice stopped speaking, and there was an instant's stillness. And then, like a thunderclap, another sound burst in — a hoarse, frenzied howl, shrill and hideous as the clamour of ten thousand hungry wolves maddened by the smell of blood, an inarticulate animal roar that scarcely seemed as if it could have come from human throats. Wild, savage, throbbing with a horrible blood lust, it fouled the peaceful night with visions of flame and carnage, of mad mindless mobs, of torture and the crash of guns, of shattered broken buildings and the shattered broken bodies of men and women and children. For a full minute it swelled and pulsed on their ears. And then came the music.

It was not saxophones. It was brass and drums. Brass like the voice that had been speaking, blasting its brazen rhythm of ecstatic sacrifice in rasping fanfares that lashed clean through the filmy gloss of civilization to clog the blood with intolerable tension. Drums thudding the maddening pulse beats of a modern but more potent voodoo, hammering their insensate strum into the brains until the mind was stunned and battered with their merciless insistence. Brass shouting and shrieking its melodic echo of the clash of steel and the scream of human torment. Drums pattering their glib mutter of the rattle of firearms and the rumble of rolling iron. Brass blaring its hypnotic hymn of heroic death. Drums thumping like giant hearts. Brass and drums. Brass and drums. Brass and drums…

"Turn it off," said Patricia sharply, abruptly. "Stop it, Simon. It's horrible!"

He could feel her shiver.

"No," he said. "Listen."

He was tense himself, his nerves drawn to threads of quivering steel. The music had done that to him. The music went on, drowning out the incoherent voices until there were no more voices but only the crystallized blare and beat that was one voice for all. Brass and drums. And now into it, in rime with it, growing with it, swelling above it, came a new sound — the unmistakable monotonous crunch of booted feet. Left, right, left, right, left. The terrible juggernaut tramp of masses of marching men. Legs swinging like synchronized machinery. Heels falling together steadily, heavily, irresistibly, like leaden pile drivers pounding the bruised earth…

The Saint was in one of his queer moments of vision. He went on speaking, his voice curiously low against the background clamour of brass and drums and marching feet:

"Yes, it's horrible; but you ought to listen. We ought to remember what hangs over our peace… I've heard just the same thing before — one night when I was fiddling with the radio and I caught some Nazi anniversary jamboree in Nuremberg… This is the noise of a world gone mad. This is the climax of two thousand years of progress. This is why philosophers have searched for wisdom, and poets have revealed beauty, and martyrs have died for freedom — so that whole nations that call themselves intelligent human beings can exchange their brains for a brass band, and tax themselves to starvation to buy bombs and battleships, and live in a mental slavery that no physical slave in the old days was ever condemned to. And be so carried away by it that most of them really and honestly believe that they're proud crusaders building a new and glorious world… I know you can wipe out two thousand years of education with one generation of censorship and propaganda. But what is this sickness that makes one nation after another in Europe want to wipe them out?"

The bugles blared again and the feet marched against the tapping of the drums, in mocking denial of an answer. And then he touched the switch and the noise ceased.

Peace came back into the night with a strange softness, as if on tiptoe, fearful of a fresh intrusion. Once more there was only the murmuring hiss of the smooth-running engine and the rustle of the passing air, not even loud enough to blanket the hoot of an indignant owl scared from its perch on an overhanging bough; but it was a peace like waking from an ugly dream, with their ears still haunted by what they had heard before. It was some time before Patricia spoke though Simon knew she was wide awake now.

"What was it?" she asked at last, in a voice too even to be wholly natural.

"That was the Sons of France — Colonel Marteau's blue-shirt gang. You remember, they grew out of the breakup of the old Croix de Feu, only about ten times worse. They've been holding a midnight jamboree outside Paris, with torches and bonfires and flags and bands and everything. What we cut in on must have been the grand finale — Colonel Marteau's pep talk to the assembled cannon fodder."

He paused.

"First Russia, then Italy, then Germany, then Spain," he said soberly. "And now France is next. There, but for the grace of God, goes the next tin-pot dictator, on his way to make the world a little less fit to live in… There are almost enough of them now — marching mobs of idiots backwards and forwards and building guns and armies because they can't build anything else, and because it's the perfect solution to all economic problems so long as it lasts. How can you have peace and progress when fighting is the only gospel they've got to preach?… If you wanted to be pessimistic, you could feel that Nature had got the whole idea of progress licked from the start; because as soon as even the dumbest mass of people had just got educated. to the futility of modern warfare and the stupidity of patriotism, she could turn round and come back with some strutting monomaniac to sell the old stock all over again under a new trade mark and put the whole show back where it started from."

"But why?"

He shrugged.

"As far as the Sons of France are concerned, you could be pretty cynical if you wanted to. The present French socialist government is rather unpopular with some of our leading bloodsuckers because it's introducing a new set of laws on the same lines Roosevelt started in America, to take all the profit out of war by nationalizing all major industries directly it starts. The whole idea, of course, is too utterly communistic and disgusting for words. Hence the Sons of France. All this blood-and-fire business tonight was probably part of the graft to get the Socialists chucked out and leave honest businessmen safe to make their fortunes out of murder. It's a lovely idea." "Are they going to get away with it?" "Who is to stop it?" asked the Saint bitterly. And when he asked the question he could imagine no answer. But afterwards he would remember it. This was, as has been said, one of his precarious interludes of peace. Twice already in his lawless career he had helped to snatch away the threat of war and destruction from over the heads of an unsuspecting world, but this time the chance that the history of Europe could be altered by anything he did seemed too remote to be given thought. But in the same mood of grim clairvoyance into which the interruption had thrown him he gazed sombrely down the track of the headlights, still busy with his thoughts, and seeing the fulfilment of his half-spoken prophecy. He saw the streets swarming with arrogant strangely uniformed militia, the applauding headlines of a disciplined press, the new breed of sycophantic spies, the beginnings of fear, men who had once been free learning to look over their shoulders before they spoke their thoughts, neighbour betraying neighbour, the midnight arrests, the third degree, the secret tribunals, the fantastic confessions, the farcical trials, the concentration camps and firing squads. He saw the hysterical ranting of yet another neurotic megalomaniac adding itself to the rising clamour of the crazy discords of Europe, the coming generations reared to believe in terrorism at home and war abroad as the apotheosis of a heroic destiny, children marching with toy guns as soon as they could walk, merging easily into the long crawling lines of new legions more pitiless than Caesar's. He saw the peaceful countryside before him gouged into swamps and craters where torn flesh rotted faster than the scavenging rats could eat; the long red tongues of the guns licking upwards into the dark as they thundered their dreadful litany; the first rose-pink glow of fire, deepening to crimson as it leaped up, flickering, spreading its red aura fanwise across the sky until the black silhouettes of trees could be seen clearly stamped against it… until with an odd sense of shock, as if he were coming out of another dream, the Saint realized that that at least was no vision — that his eyes really were seeing the scarlet reflection of swelling flame beyond the distant trees.

He pointed.

"Look."

Patricia sat up.

"Anyone would say it was a fire," she said interestedly.

Simon Templar grinned. His own reverie was swept away as quickly as it had begun — for that moment.

"I'll bet it's a fire," he said. "And in this neck of the woods the chances are that the nearest fire brigade is miles away. We'd better drift along and look it over."

He would never forget that fire. It was the beginning of the adventure.

2

As his foot came down on the accelerator his hand found the lever that opened the cutout, and the whisper of the great car turned into a deep-throated roar. They were dragged against the back of the seat as it surged forward with a sudden terrific access of power, and the susurration of the tires on the roadway rose to a shrill whine. It was as if an idly roaming tiger had suddenly been stung to vicious life.

The Saint had begun to drive.

He had no gift of second sight to tell him what that fire was to mean; but just as a fire it was sufficient. It might be fun. And he was going there — in a hurry now. And in his mercurial philosophy that was enough. His eyes had narrowed and come to life with the zest of the moment, and a shadow of his last smile lingered half remembered on his lips… Half a mile further on a side road opened sharply to the right, leading in the direction of the red glow. As he approached it, the Saint shifted his foot from the accelerator to the brake and wrenched the wheel round; the rear wheels whipped round with a scream of skidding rubber, spun, bit at the road again, took hold, and catapulted the car forward again at right angles to its previous course as the Saint's toe returned to the accelerator.

"That's how these racing blokes do it," he explained.

Patricia lighted two cigarettes.

"What do they do when they want to turn quickly?" she inquired tranquilly.

The way Simon slanted one of the cigarettes between his lips was its own impudent answer. The vivid red stain in the sky was almost straight ahead of them now, growing so that it blotted out the stars, and they were rushing towards it down the narrow lane with the speed of a hurricane. They squealed round another bend, and once more the Saint jammed on the brakes. On their left was a half-timbered lodge beside broad iron gates that opened on to a curving drive.

"This should be it," said the Saint; and again the great car seemed to pivot on its locked front wheels to make the turn.

In another moment they had the acrid smell of burning wood sharp in their nostrils. They swept round a semicircular channel of trees, and in an instant they were caught full in the red glare as if they had been picked up by quivering floodlights. Simon let the Hirondel coast to a breathless standstill beside a broad close-cropped lawn and hitched himself up to sit on the back of the seat for a better view.

"It is a fire," he decided, with profound satisfaction.

It was. The whole lawn was lit up by it like a stage set, and a curtain of black smoke hung over it like a billowing curtain. The house was one of those old historic mansions whose lining of massive beams and mellowed panelling could be diagnosed at a glance, and it was going up like a pile of tinder. The fire seemed to have started on the ground floor, for huge gusts of flame were spouting from the open windows along the terrace and climbing like wind-ripped banners towards the roof, roaring with a boisterous glee that could be clearly heard even above the reduced splutter of the Hirondel's exhaust. The Saint drew at his cigarette and settled more firmly into his conviction that, judged by any pyrotechnical standards, it was a beaut.

Figures in a grotesque assortment of deshabille were running across the lawn with the erratic scurrying wildness of flushed rabbits.

"At least they all seem to have got out," said the Saint.

He switched off the engine and hitched his legs over the side of the car. Some of the scurrying figures, attracted perhaps like moths by the new blaze of the headlights, had started to run towards them. The first to arrive was a young man who carried a girl over his shoulder. He was large and blond and impressively moustached, and he wore blue-and-green striped pajamas. He dumped the girl on the ground at the Saint's feet, rather like a retriever bringing in a bird, and stood over her for a moment breathing heavily.

"By Jove," he said. "Oh, by Jove!… Steady on, Val, old thing. It's all right now. You're quite safe."

He put out a hand to restrain her as she tried to get up, but with a quick movement she wriggled away from him and found her feet. She was dark and slender, but not so slender that the transparent nightgown which was her only covering lacked fascinating contours to cling to. The chiffon had slipped aside to bare one white shoulder and her curly hair was in a wild disarray, but even the thoroughly petulant spoiled-child expression that pouted her face could not disguise its amazing beauty.

"All right, all right," she said impatiently. "You've rescued me now, and I'm very much obliged. But for heaven's sake stop pawing me and find me something to wear."

She seemed to regard the fire as an event arranged by a malicious fate solely for her own inconvenience. The young man looked somewhat startled.

"Damn it, Valerie," he said in an injured tone, "do you realize—"

"Of course she does," said the Saint soothingly. "She knows you're a little hero. She's just being practical. And while we're being practical, do you happen to know whether anybody else is left in the house?"

The young man turned. He looked at Simon rather blankly, as if taken aback at being interrupted so unceremoniously.

"Eh? What?" he said. "I dunno. I fetched Valerie out."

From the way he said it, one gathered that nobody mattered except Valerie.

Simon patted him on the back.

"Yes, we know," he said kindly. "We saw you. You're a hero. We'll give you a diploma. But just the same, wouldn't it be a good idea to round up the others and make sure that nobody's missing?"

Again the young man looked blank and rather resentful. His expression indicated that having done his good deed for the day by rescuing Valerie, he expected to be set apart on a pedestal instead of being ordered about. But there was something about the Saint's cool assumption of command that eliminated argument.

"Oh, certainly. I see what you mean."

He moved reluctantly away, and presently people came straggling in from different parts of the lawn and gathered together near Simon's car. There was a tall red-faced man with a white moustache and the stereotyped chutney-and-scotch complexion of a professional soldier, a dour large-bosomed woman in a flannel dressing gown who could have belonged to nobody else, an excited little fat man who came chattering pompously, the guardsmanly youth who had herded them together, and a fourth man who strolled up in the background. The reflection of the fire shone redly in their faces as they assembled in a group with an air of. studied calm which proclaimed their consciousness of behaving like British aristocrats in an emergency.

Simon looked them over without reverence. He knew none of them by sight, and it was none of his business, but he was the only one present who seemed to have any coherent ideas. His voice stilled their chatter.

"Well," he said, "you ought to know. Are you all here?"

They glanced at each other in an awed and scared sort of way and then turned and looked frightenedly at the blazing house and back again, as though it were the first time that any of their thoughts had gone beyond their own personal safety.

Suddenly the voice of the girl in the nightgown sounded shrilly behind Simon.

"No! They aren't all here! John isn't here! Where's Johnny?"

There was an awful stillness, in which realization crawled horribly over chalky faces.

"B-but where can he be?" asked the short fat man in a quavering voice. "He — he must have heard the alarm—"

The military-looking man turned round and raised his voice in a barrack-square bawl.

"Kennet!" he shouted. "Kennet!"

He sounded as if he were bellowing at a slovenly recruit who was late on parade.

The only answer was the derisive cackle of the leaping flames.

The large-bosomed woman shrieked. She opened her mouth wide and yelled at the top of her voice, her face contorted with an awful terror.

"No! No! It's too dreadful. He can't be still in there! You can't have—"

Her words broke off in a kind of gulp. For a couple of seconds her mouth went on opening and shutting like that of a fish out of water; then, without another sound, she collapsed like an empty sack.

"She's fainted," somebody said stupidly.

"So she has," said the Saint witheringly. "Now we all ought to gather round and hold her hands."

The military man, bending over her, turned up his purple face.

"By Gad, sir!" he burst out cholerically. "Haven't you—" He stopped. Another thought, overwhelming in its enormity, seemed to have erupted under his nose. He straightened up, glaring at the Saint as if he had just really become aware of his presence for the first time. "Anyway," he said, "what the devil are you doing here?"

The idea percolated into the brains of the others and brought them back to gaping stillness. And while they were staring in vacuous indignation, the man who had stayed in the background moved to the front. He was short and very broad shouldered, with a square and rather flat face and very sunken shrewd dark eyes. Unlike the others, he was fully dressed. There was no sign of flurry or alarm about him; with his powerful chin and thin straight mouth he looked as solid and impassive as a chunk of granite.

"Yes," he said, "who are you?"

Simon met his gaze with cold insouciance. The antagonism was instant and intuitive. Perhaps it was that that touched the Saint's swift mind with the queer itch of dissatisfaction that was to lead to so many things. Perhaps it was then that the first wraith of suspicion took nebulous shape in his mind. But there was no time to dwell on the point just then. He only knew that something like a fine thread of steel wove through the plastic outlines of his attitude.

"At the moment," he said evenly, "I seem to be the only person who isn't behaving like a stuffed owl. Where does this man Kennet sleep?"

"I don't know," answered the square-built man. "Someone else will be able to tell you."

His face was expressionless; his tone was so expressionless as to sound almost ironical. There seemed to be a stony sort of amusement lurking at the back of his deep-set eyes. But that might have been an illusion created by the flickering firelight.

The girl Valerie supplied the information.

"He's in the end room on the left — that window there."

Simon looked.

The room was at the end of the house which was burning most fiercely — the end close to which the fire had probably started. Under it, the ground floor looked like an open furnace through which the draught from the open windows and the open front door was driving flame in long roaring streamers. The end upper window was about fifteen feet from the ground, and there was no way of reaching it from outside without a ladder.

The fat little man was wringing his hands.

"He can't still be there," he wailed. "He must have heard the alarm—"

"Suppose he got the wind up and fainted or something?" suggested the large young man in the striped pajamas helpfully.

Simon almost hit him.

"Do you know where there's a ladder, you amazing oaf?" he demanded.

The young man blinked at him dumbly. Nobody else answered. They all seemed to be in a fog.

Simon swung round to Patricia.

"Do what you can, darling," he said.

He turned away, and for a moment the others seemed to be held petrified.

"Stop him," bleated the little fat man suddenly. "For God's sake, stop him! It's suicide!"

"Hey!" bellowed the puce-faced militarist commandingly. "Comeback!"

The queenly woman screeched indistinguishably and collapsed again,

Simon Templar heard none of these things. He was halfway across the lawn by that time, racing grimly towards the house.

3

The heat from the hall struck him like a physical blow as he plunged through the front door; the air scorched his lungs like a gust from a red-hot oven. At the far end of the hall long sheets of flame were sweeping greedily up a huge pair of velvet curtains. Smaller flames were dancing over a rug and leaping with fiercer eagerness up the blackening banisters of a wide staircase. The paint on the broad beams crossing the high ceiling was bubbling and boiling under the heat, and occasionally small drops of it fell in a scalding rain to take hold of new sections of the floor.

The Saint hardly checked for an instant before he went on. He dodged across the hall like a flitting shadow and leapt up the stairs four at a time. Fire from the banisters snatched at him as he went up, stung his nostrils with the smell of his own scorching clothes.

On the upper landing the smoke was thicker. It made his eyes smart and filled his throat with coughing; his heart was hammering with a dull force that jarred his ribs; he felt an iron band tightening remorselessly around his temples. He stared blearily down the corridor which led in the direction he had to go. Halfway along it great gouts of flame were starting up from the floor boards, waving like monstrous flowers swaying in a blistering wind. It could only be a matter of seconds before the whole passage would plunge down into the incandescent inferno below.

The Saint went on.

It was not so much a deliberate effort as a yielding to instinctive momentum. He had no time to think about being heroic — or about anything else, for that matter. In that broiling nightmare a second's hesitation might have been fatal. But he had set out to do something, knowing what it might mean; and so long as there was any hope of doing it his only idea was to go on. He kept going with nothing to carry him on but the epic drive of a great heart that had never known what it was to turn back for the threat of danger.

He came out in a clear space on the other side of the flames, beating the sparks from his sleeves and trousers. Open doors and glimpses of disordered beds on either side of the passage showed where various rooms had been hastily vacated; but the door of the room at the very end was closed. He fell on the handle and turned it.

The door was locked.

He thundered on it with fists and feet.

"Kennet!" he shouted. "Kennet, wake up!"

His voice was a mere harsh croak that was lost in the hoarse roar of the fire. It brought no answer from behind the door.

He drew back across the corridor, braced himself momentarily and flung himself forward again. Hurled by the muscles of a trained athlete, his shoulder crashed into the door with all the shattering force of one hundred and seventy-five pounds of fighting weight behind it, in an impact that shook every bone in his body; but he might just as well have charged a steam roller. The floor might be cracking and crumbling under his feet, but that door was of tough old English oak seasoned by two hundred years of history and still untouched by the fire. It would have taken an axe or a sledge-hammer to break it down.

His eyes swept it desperately from top to bottom. And as he looked at it, two pink fingers of flame curled out from underneath it. The floor of the room was already taking fire.

But those little jagged fangs of flame meant that there was a small space between the bottom of the door and the floor boards. If he could only push the key through so that it fell on the floor inside he might be able to fish it out through the gap under the door. He whipped out his penknife and probed at the keyhole.

At the first attempt the blade slipped right through the hole without encountering any resistance. The Saint bent down and brought his eye close to the aperture. There was enough firelight inside the room for him to be able to see the whole outline of the keyhole. And there was no key in it.

For one dizzy second his brain whirled. And then his lips thinned out, and a red glint came into his eyes that owed nothing to the reflections of the fire.

Again he fought his way incredibly through the hellish barrier of flame that shut off the end of the corridor. The charred boards gave ominously under his feet, but he hardly noticed it. He had remembered noticing something through the suffocating murk on the landing. As he beat out his smouldering clothes again he located it — a huge medieval battle-axe suspended from two hooks on the wall at the top of the stairs. He measured the distance and jumped, snatching eagerly. The axe came away, bringing the two hooks with it, and a shower of plaster fell in his face and half blinded him.

That shower of grit probably saved his life. He slumped against the wall, trying to clear his streaming eyes; and that brief setback cheated death for the hundredth time in its long duel with the Saint's guardian angel. For even as he straightened up again with the axe in his hands, about twenty feet of the passage plunged downwards with a heart-stopping crash in a wild swirl of flame, leaving nothing but a gaping chasm through which fire roared up in a fiendish fountain that sent him staggering back before its intolerable heat. The last chance of reaching that locked room was gone.

A great weariness fell on the Saint like a heavy blanket pressing him down. There was nothing more that he could do.

He dropped the battle-axe and stumbled falteringly down the blazing stairs. There was no more battle now to keep him going. It was sheer blind automatism rather than any conscious effort on his part that guided him through another inferno to come reeling out through the front door, an amazing tatterdemalion outcast from the jaws of hell, to fall on his hands and knees on the terrace outside. In a dim faraway manner he was aware of hands raising him; of a remembered voice, low and musical, close to his ear.

"I know you like warm climates, boy, but couldn't you have got along with a trip to Africa?"

He smiled. Between him and Patricia there was no need for the things that other people would have had to say. They spoke their own language. Grimy, dishevelled, with his clothes blackened and singed and his eyes bloodshot and his body smarting from a dozen minor burns, the Saint smiled at her with all his old incomparable impudence.

"I was trying to economize," he said. "And now I shall probably catch my death of cold."

Already the cool night air, flowing like nectar into his parched lungs, was beginning to revive him, and in a few minutes his superb resilience would do the rest. He reviewed his injuries more systematically, and realized that comparatively speaking he was almost miraculously unscathed.

The thing that had come nearest to downing him was the smoke and fumes of the fire; and the effects of that were dispersing themselves like magic now that he could breathe again without feeling as if he were inhaling molten ash.

He cocked an eye at the stolid country policeman who was holding his other arm.

"Do you have to be quite so professional, Reginald?" he murmured. "It makes me feel nervous."

The constable's hold relaxed reassuringly.

"I'd get along and see the doctor, sir, if I was you. He's in the lodge now with Lady Sangore."

"Is that the old trout's name? And I'll bet her husband is at least a general." The Saint was starting to get his bearings, and his legs began to feel as if they belonged to him again. He searched for a cigarette. "Thanks, but Lady Sangore can have him. I'd rather have a drink. I wonder if we could get any co-operation from the owner of this jolly little bonfire?"

"You mean Mr Fairweather, sir? That's him, coming along now."

While Simon had been inside the house, a number of other people had arrived on the scene, and another policeman and a sergeant were loudly ordering them to stand back. Paying no attention to this whatever, they swarmed excitedly round the Saint, all talking at once and completely frustrating the fat little Mr Fairweather, who seemed to be trying to make a speech. The voice of the general rose above the confused jabber like a foghorn.

"A fine effort, young man. A splendid effort, by Gad 1 But you shouldn't have tried it."

"Tell the band to strike up a tune," said the Saint shortly. "Did anybody find a ladder?"

With his strength rapidly coming back, he still fought against admitting defeat. His face was hard and set and the blue in his eyes was icy as he glanced over the group.

"A ladder wouldn't be much use now," said a quiet voice. "The flames are pouring out of his window. There isn't a hope."

It was the square-jawed man who spoke; and again it seemed to Simon that there was a faint sneer in his dark eyes.

The Saint's gaze turned back to the house; and as if to confirm what the other had said there came from the blaze a tremendous rumbling rending sound. Slowly, with massive deliberation, the roof began to bend inwards, sagging in the middle. Faster and faster it sagged; and then, with a shattering grinding roar like an avalanche, it crumpled up and vanished. A great shower of golden sparks shot upwards and fell in a brilliant rain over the lawns and garden.

"You see?" said the square man. "You did everything you could. But it's lucky you turned back when you did. If you had reached his room, the chances are that you'd never have got back."

Simon's eyes slanted slowly back to the heavy-set powerful face.

It was true that there was nothing more that he could do. But now, for the first time since the beginning of those last mad minutes, he could stop to think. And his mind went back to the chaotic questions that had swept through it for one vertiginous instant back there in the searing stench of the fire.

"But I did reach his room," he answered deliberately. "Only I couldn't get in. The door was locked. And the key wasn't in it."

"Really?"

The other's tone expressed perfunctory concern, but his eyes no longer held their glimmer of cold amusement. They stared hard at Simon with a cool, analytical steadiness, as if weighing him up, estimating his qualities and methodically tabulating the information for future reference.

And once more that queer tingle of suspicion groped its way through the Saint's brain. Only this time it was more than a vague, formless hunch. He knew now, beyond any shadow of doubt, with an uncanny certainty, that he was on the threshold of something which his inborn flair for the strange twists of adventure was physically incapable of leaving unexplored. And an electric ripple of sheer delight brought every fibre of his being to ecstatic life. His interlude of peace was over.

"Really," he affirmed flatly.

"Then perhaps you were even luckier than you realize," said the square man smoothly. If he meant to give the words any extra significance, he did it so subtly that there was no single syllable on which an accusation could have been pinned. In point of time it had only lasted for a moment, that silent and apparently unimportant exchange of glances; and after it there was nothing to show that a challenge had been thrown down and taken up. "If we can offer you what hospitality we have left — I'm sure Mr Fairweather—"

The Saint shook his head.

"Thanks," he said, "but I haven't got far to go, and I've got a suitcase in the car."

"Then I hope we shall be seeing more of you." The square man turned. "I suppose we should get along to the lodge, Sir Robert. We can't be any more use here."

"Harrumph," said the general. "Er — yes. A splendid effort, young man. Splendid. Ought to have a medal. Harrumph."

He allowed himself to be led away, rumbling.

Mr Fairweather grasped the Saint's hand and pumped it vigorously up and down. He had recovered what must have been his normal tremendous dignity, and now he was also able to make himself heard.

"I shall take personal steps," he announced majestically, "to see that your heroism is suitably recognized."

He stalked off after the others, without stopping to inquire the Saint's name and address.

Clanging importantly, the first fire engine swept up the gravel drive and came to a standstill in front of the terrace.

4

"I'm glad they got here in time to water the flowers," Simon observed rather bitterly.

He was wondering how much difference it might have made if they had arrived early enough to get a ladder to the window of that locked room. But the nearest town of any size was Anford, about seven miles away, and the possibility that they could have arrived much sooner was purely theoretical. From the moment a fire like that took hold the house was inevitably doomed.

The policeman who had been holding his arm had moved off during the conversation, and the other spectators were simply standing around and gaping in the dumb bovine way in which spectators of catastrophes usually stand and gape.

Simon touched Patricia's arm.

"We might as well be floating along," he said. "The excitement seems to be over, and it's past our bedtime."

They had got halfway to the car when the police sergeant overtook them.

"Excuse me, sir."

"You are forgiven," said the Saint liberally. "What have you done?"

"How did you happen to be here, sir?"

"Me? I just happened to see the fire from the main road, so I beetled over to have a look at it."

"I see." The sergeant wrote busily in his notebook. "Anything else, sir?"

The Saint's hesitation was imperceptible. Undoubtedly there had been various things else; but it would have been very complicated to go into them. And when Simon Templar had got the scent of mystery in his nostrils, the last thing he wanted was to have the police blundering along the same keen trail — at least not before he had given a good deal of thought to the pros and cons.

"No," he said innocently. "Except that this bloke Kennet seemed to be still in the house, so I just had a dart at fishing 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 village. 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 circuit in the lighting system. But I couldn't pay much attention while you were in there. You know. I was too busy worrying 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 insignificant 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 silence, 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 Comrade 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 Paraguay, 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 distant cheerfulness. "You couldn't say he was anything but impartial. For instance, he's one of the directors of the Voix 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 generous 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 rearmament 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 stupendous 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 respectable 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 cacophony.

"You mean—"

"I mean — murder," said the Saint.