Prelude for War

1

"I like this place," said Lady Valerie Woodchester, looking smugly around her. "It's one of the few places in London where civilized people can eat civilized food."

The Saint nodded. They had worked their way through three quarters of a menu selected with Simon Templar's own impeccable gastronomic artistry and served with the deference which waiters always instinctively gave him; and he had watched her personality expand and ripen like an exotic flower coming into bloom. Undoubtedly she did the setting no less justice than it did her. Her flawless shoulders and deliciously modelled head rose out of a plain but daringly cut evening gown like an orchid rising from a dark stem, with a startling loveliness that turned many envious eyes towards her; she knew it, and she was delighted, like a child who has been taken out on a special treat. A brighter sparkle had crept gradually into her eyes and a faint flush into her cheeks. It was fun, you felt, to be eating a good dinner, and to be in one of the best places among the best people, and to be with a man who was tall and dark and handsome and who could make waiters fuss about obsequiously. Her dazzling flow of gay, senseless prattle had given the Saint no need to make trivial conversation while they ate; but now he hardened his heart.

"Yes," he agreed. "The food is good and the atmosphere is right. Also a stitch in time saves embarrassing exposure, and the horse is the noblest of animals. Now you've earned your bread and butter, and you can stop entertaining me. Let's be serious for a minute. Have you seen any of our friends today?"

She didn't answer at once. She was looking down at her plate, drawing idle patterns with her fork. Her expression had become abstracted; her thoughts seemed to be very far away.

"Yes, I've seen them," she said vaguely.

"And how are they making out?"

She looked him suddenly straight in the eyes.

"You remember what Luker said at the Golden Fleece? Well, I suppose if I'd got any sense I'd think the same, seeing what a reputation you've got. I suppose you could have got into the house somehow and killed Johnny, and locked his bedroom door, and started the fire, and got out again, and then come back and pretended to try and rescue him. And then of course you could easily have gone to London and shot Ralph Windlay."

"Easily," said the Saint. "But you don't believe I did, do you? Or do you?"

"I suppose not," she said. "In a way, I wish you had."

She pushed away her plate, and he offered his cigarette case.

"Why do you wish I'd killed them? I didn't have any reason to."

"Well, it would have made everything so much easier. Of course I suppose they'd have had to hang you, but everybody knows you're a criminal so that would have been all right. But then you went and upset it all at the inquest, and you made it sound frightfully convincing to me whatever anybody else thought, only it didn't seem quite real then. I mean, you know, it was all rather like something out of a book. Blazing Mansion Mystery, and all that sort of thing. I was terribly sorry about it all in a way because I was quite fond of Johnny, but I wasn't going to be brokenhearted about it or anything like that. And then when Ralph was killed it wouldn't have made much difference, because he was a nice, well-meaning boy but I never thought very much of him. After all, life's too short for one to be getting brokenhearted all the time, isn't it, and I'm sure it gives you circles under your eyes."

"You were too close up against it then to realize it properly," said the Saint shrewdly. "Now you've got away from it, your nerves are going back on you. I'm afraid I sympathize with you. What you need is another drink."

She pushed her glass forward.

"That's exactly what I do need," she said.

He poured out the last of the wine, and she sipped it and put the glass down again.

"It's not really my nerves," she said, talking very quickly. "We modern girls have nerves of iron, you know, and we only swoon when we think a man needs a little encouragement. The point is, if I'd heard that Johnny had been killed in a railway accident I should have been terribly sorry whenever I thought about it, but I don't suppose I should have thought about it terribly often. You see, that would have been just one of those things that happen, and it would have been all over, and it wouldn't really have been anything to do with me."

"But you invited him down to Whiteways, and that makes it different."

She nodded feverishly.

"Of course, I told you that, didn't I?"

"The idea was that you were to get a fur coat if Johnny could be persuaded to keep his mouth shut," Simon pursued her ruthlessly. "He has been persuaded to keep his mouth shut. Do you get your fur coat?"

Her fingers tightened on the stem of her wineglass. Her face had gone very pale, but her eyes were burning.

"That's a filthy thing to say."

"Murder is a moderately filthy subject," answered the Saint brutally. "You can't play with it and keep your little girlie ribbons clean. Haven't you realized that yet?"

"Yes," she said.

She picked up her glass and drained it at one gulp. Then she sat back and laughed at him with a kind of brittle giddiness.

"Well?" he insisted.

"I'm a nice girl, aren't I?" she chattered. "I do the odd spot of gold digging here and there, and in my spare time I lure men to their deaths. What would the dear vicar say if he knew?"

"I expect he'd say plenty. But that doesn't seem to matter so much as what you say. Do you enjoy luring men to their deaths?"

"I love it!"

"Then of course you'll be wanting another job soon. Why don't you advertise? There must be plenty of openings if you can produce proof of previous experience."

She sat looking at him, and two scalding tears brimmed in her eyes.

"You swine!" she whispered.

"I'm sorry," he said cynically.

"What have you got to talk about, anyway? I mean, you think Johnny was murdered. Well, why should you care? You've killed dozens of people yourself, haven't you?"

"Only people who really needed it. You know, there are some people who are vastly improved by death."

"If somebody murdered Johnny, perhaps they thought he needed it," she said. "I daresay the people you killed were pretty poisonous one way or another, but then who isn't? I mean, look at me, for instance. Supposing somebody murdered me. I suppose you'd think that was a damned good job."

"I should think it was a great pity," he said with surprising gentleness. "You see, you poor little idiot, I happen to like you."

"Isn't that thrilling?" she said; and then she suddenly put her face in her hands.

The Saint lighted a cigarette and watched her. She sat quite still, without sobbing. He knew that this was what he had been working for, the success of his relentless drive to break her down; and yet he felt sorry for her. An impulse of tenderness moved him that it was not easy to fight down. But he knew that on this moment might hang things too momentous to be thought about. His brain had to be cold, accurate, making no mistakes, even if he wanted to be kind.

"All right," she said huskily. "Damn you."

She put her hands down abruptly and looked at him, dry-eyed.

"But what's the use?" she said. "It's done now, isn't it? I did it. Well, that's all about it. If I were the right sort of girl I suppose I'd go and jump in the river, but I'm not the right sort of girl."

"That wouldn't help anybody very much." His voice was quiet now, understanding, not taunting. "It's done, but we can still do things about it. You can help me. We can go on with what Johnny was doing. But we've got to find out what it was all about. You've got to think. You've got to think back — think very hard. Try to remember what Johnny told you about Luker and Fairweather and Sangore. Try to remember what he'd got that was going to upset them all. You must remember something."

He tried to hammer his words into her brain with all the urgency that was in him, to awaken her with the warmth of his own intense sincerity. She must tell him now if she was to help him at all.

Her eyes stayed on him and her hands opened and closed again.

She shook her head.

"I don't," she replied. "Really. But…"

She stopped, frowning. He held his breath.

"But what?" he prompted.

"Nothing," she said.

Simon turned the ash from his cigarette on to the edge of a plate with infinite restraint. The reaction had emptied him so that he had to make the movement with a deliberate effort.

A waiter bustled up to the table and asked if they wanted coffee.

Simon felt as if a fire in him had been put out. He felt as if he had been led blindfold to the top of a mountain and then turned back and sent down again without being given a glimpse of the view. While he mechanically gave the order he wondered, in an insanely cold-blooded sort of way, what would happen if he stood up and shot the waiter through the middle of his crisp, complacent shirt front. Probably it had made no ultimate difference, but it seemed as if that crowning clash of the banal had inscribed an irrevocable epilogue of frustration. The mood that might have meant so much was gone. Nothing would bring it back.

He sat without moving while coffee and balloon glasses were set before them.

Lady Valerie Woodchester stubbed out a half-smoked cigarette and lighted another. She tasted her brandy.

"It's a hard life," she observed moodily. "I suppose if one can't get exactly what one wants the next best thing is to have bags of money. That's what I'm going to do."

"Who are you going to blackmail?" Simon inquired steadily.

Her eyes widened.

"What do you mean?" she asked in astonishment.

"Just that," he said.

She laughed. Her laughter sounded a trifle false.

She emptied her coffee cup and finished her brandy. She began to be very busy collecting her accoutrements and dabbing powder on her nose.

"You do say the weirdest things," she remarked. "I'm afraid I must go now. Thanks so much for the dinner. It's been a lovely evening — most of it."

"This is rather early for your bedtime, isn't it?" said the Saint slowly. "Don't you feel well, or are you a little bit scared?"

"I'm scared of getting wrinkles," she said. "I always do when I stay up late. And then I have to spend a small fortune to have them taken out, and that doesn't help a bit, what with one thing and another. But a girl's got to keep her looks even if she can't keep anything else, hasn't she?"

She stood up.

The Saint's hands rested on the arms of his chair. A dozen mad and utterly impossible urges coursed through his mind, but he knew that they were all futile. The whole atmosphere of the place, which had brought her once to a brief fascinating ripeness, was arraigned against him.

A lynx-eyed waiter ceremoniously laid a plate with a folded check on it in front of him.

Simon rose to his feet with unalterable grace and spilled money on to it. He followed her out of the room and out of the hotel, and waited while the commissionaire produced a taxi and placed it before them with the regal gesture of a magician performing a unique and exclusive miracle.

"It's all right," she said. "You needn't bother to see me home."

Through the window of the cab, with the vestige of a sardonic bow, he handed her a sealed envelope.

"You forgot something," he murmured. "That isn't like you, I'm sure."

"Oh yes," she said. "That."

She took the envelope, glanced at it and put it in her bag. It didn't seem to interest her particularly.

She put out her hand again. He held it.

"If—" she began, and broke off raggedly.

"If what?" he asked.

She bit her lip.

"No," she said. "It wouldn't be any good. There's always the But."

"I'll buy it," said the Saint patiently. "What's the answer?"

She smiled at him rather wistfully.

"There isn't any answer. One just thinks, 'If something or other,' and then one thinks, 'But something else,' which makes it impossible," she explained lucidly. "As a matter of fact, I was thinking that you and I would make a marvellous combination."

"And why not?"

She made a little grimace. At that moment, even more inescapably than at any other, she looked as if she was on the point of bursting into tears.

"Oh, go to hell!" she said.

Her hand slipped through his fingers and she sank back into the corner of the cab. It moved away.

Simon Templar stood and watched it until the stream of traffic swallowed it up. And then he said "Hell and damnation!" with a meticulous clarity which caused the commissionaire to unbend in a glance of entirely misdirected sympathy before he resumed his thaumaturgical production of taxis.

2

After which various things happened that Simon Templar would have been very edified to know about.

Mr Algernon Sidney Fairwearher was sitting in the smoke room of his paralyzingly respectable and conservative club finishing an excellent cigar and enjoying a sedate post-prandial brandy and soda and the equally sedate post-prandial conversation of an august bishop, a retired ambassador and a senile and slightly lecherous baronet, when he was summoned to the telephone.

"This is Valerie," said the voice on the wire. "I'm frightfully sorry to bother you and all that, but I rather wanted your advice about something. Do you mind terribly? It's about Johnny."

"What exactly do you want my advice about?" asked Mr Fairweather uncomfortably. "That man Templar hasn't been pestering you again, I hope?"

"No — at least, not exactly," she answered. "I mean, he's quite easy to get on with really, and he simply throws money about, but he does ask rather a lot of questions."

Fairweather cleared his throat.

"The man is becoming a perfect nuisance," he said imperially. "But I think we can deal with him soon enough. I'm glad you told me about it. I'll have a word with the commissioner of police in the morning and see that he's taken care of."

"Oh no, you mustn't do that," she said quickly. "I can. take care of myself all right, and it's rather thrilling to be pestered by a famous character like the Saint. That isn't what I rang you up for. What I wanted was to ask your advice about something Johnny left with me."

"Something Kennet left with you?"

"Some papers he gave me to read only a week or two ago — a great thick wad of them."

Mr Fairweather experienced the curious sensation of feeling the walls close in on him while at the same time the floor and the ceiling began to draw together. Since he was at that moment in a booth which had very little space to spare after enveloping his own ample circumference, the sensation was somewhat horrifying.

It had caught him so completely unprepared that for a few seconds he seemed to have mislaid his voice. A cold perspiration broke out on his forehead. He felt as though he were being suffocated, but he dared not open the door of the booth to let in the air for which his lungs were aching. In fact, he drew it tighter.

"Papers?" he got out hoarsely. "What papers? What were they about?"

"I don't know. Johnny seemed to think they were terribly important; but then he thought so many things were terribly important that I just couldn't keep track of them all. So I didn't even read them."

The inward rush of the walls slackened for a moment. Mr Fairweather managed to snatch a handful of oxygen into his chest.

"You didn't read them?" he echoed weakly. "Well, I'd better have a look at those papers. It's a good thing you told me about them. I'll come round at once."

"But that wouldn't be any good," she said miserably. "You see, I haven't got the papers now. I don't even know where they are.. That's what I wanted your advice about."

The accumulation of seesaw effects was making Mr Fair-weather feel slightly seasick. He was very different from the staid and dignified gentleman who had been drinking a sedate brandy and soda only a few thousand years ago. He mopped his brow.

"You haven't got them?" he bleated shrilly. "Then who has got them?"

"Nobody. At least — it's frightfully difficult trying to tell you all at once. You see, what happened was something like this. John and I had been having a row — the usual old row about you and his father and Mr Luker and all that. I was telling him not to be ridiculous, and he suddenly shoved a great envelope full of papers into my hands and told me to go through them and then say if I still thought he was being ridiculous. Then he stormed out of the place in a fearful rage, and I had lots of things to do, and I couldn't go on carrying a whacking great envelope about with me forever, so I dumped it somewhere and I didn't think any more about it until the other day."

"How do you mean, you dumped it?" squealed Fair-weather, like a soul in torment. "You must have put it somewhere. Where is it?"

"That's just what I don't know," she said. "Of course it must be somewhere; I mean, I didn't just drop it over the side of a bus or anything like that. But I simply can't remember where I had it last. I've got a sort of idea that it might be in the cloakroom at Piccadilly Station, or I may have left it in the cloakroom at the Savoy. In fact, I'm pretty sure I did put it in a cloakroom somewhere."

Fairweather clung to the telephone bracket for support.

"Then you. must have a ticket for it," he pointed out with heart-rending logic. "Why don't you look for the ticket?"

"But I can't," she said plaintively. "It's a terrible bore. You see, if I had a ticket it was probably in my bag, and of course that was lost in the fire with all my other things."

"But—" said Fairweather.

The word "but" is not commonly used to convey the more cosmic intensities of emotion, but Mr Fairweather's pronunciation imbued it with a depth and colour that can rarely if ever have been achieved before. The exasperation of a reasonable man who finds himself in an unreasonable and chaotic universe, the sharp horror of a prisoner on an excavating party who learns that he has kindly been allowed to dig his own grave, the outraged protest of a mathematician to whom has been demonstrated an insuperable fallacy in his proof that two and two make four — all these several shades of travail were summed up and vivified in Mr Fairweather's glorification of the word "but."

"I wondered if it might be a good scheme to get Mr Templar to help me," Valerie went on. "I mean, he seems to have quite a crush on me, so he'd probably be glad to do it if I was nice to him, and he must have had loads of experience at ferreting about and detecting things."

"Grrr," said Mr Fairweather.

If possible, he improved on his performance with the word "but." This time, in one primitive ululation, he added to his symphonic integration of emotions the despairing dolour of the camel whose backbone is just giving way under the final straw, the shuddering panic of the hunted hyena which feels the tiger's fangs closing on its throat, the pitiful expiring gasp of the goldfish which has just been neatly hooked from its bowl by a hungry cat.

"Of course I've been cursing myself for not thinking of it before," said Lady Valerie penitently. "I mean, if those papers really were terribly important, I suppose I ought to have said something about them at the inquest. That's where I'd like your advice. Do you think I ought to ring up Scotland Yard and tell them about it?"

Mr Fairweather had no new depths to plumb. He was a man who had already done all the gamut running of which he was capable.

"Listen," he said with frightfully muted violence. "You must put that idea out of your head at once. The police have no discretion. Think — think of how it might hurt poor Johnny's father. And whatever happens, you mustn't say a word to Templar. You haven't told him about those papers yet, have you?"

"No, not definitely. But you know, I believe he guesses something about them. He's terribly suspicious. Two or three times this evening he asked me if Johnny had ever given me anything to keep for him, or if I knew where Johnny might have kept his private papers. But he can't do anything to me, because I thought I'd better be on the safe side and so I've taken plenty of precautions. You see, Celia Mallard probably knows where I left those papers, and I've written to her about them. She's at Cap d'Ail now, but I'll probably hear from her in a day or two."

"Celia Mallard knows where they are?" moaned Fair-weather. "How the devil does she know?"

"Well, I seem to remember that she was with me when I dumped them, and she's got a perfectly marvellous memory, so she'll probably remember all about it. I told her in my letter that they were worth thousands of pounds, and that the Saint was after them, and so if anything happened to me she was to go straight to the police. That ought to stop the Saint doing anything really awkward, oughtn't it?"

Mr Fairweather's mouth opened. After all his other vicissitudes, he underwent the culminating sensation of having been poured out of a frying pan into an ice-cold bath. The contrast steadied him for a moment; but he shivered.

"I suppose it might," he said. "But what made you say the papers were worth thousands of pounds?"

"I don't know. But I thought, if they really are terribly important, they're bound to be worth a lot of money to somebody, aren't they?" she said reasonably.

"That doesn't follow at all," Fairweather said firmly. "But — er — you know that I'd see you didn't lose by it, in any case. Now, will you let me know directly you hear from Celia Mallard, or as soon as you remember what you did with them? And — um — well, if it's a matter of money, you did tell me once that you needed a car to go with that fur coat, didn't you?"

"How could you?" she said pathetically. "To talk about that fur coat now, and remind me of poor Johnny… Please don't talk to me about it any more; I don't think I can ever bear to hear it mentioned again. You're making me feel dreadfully morbid, Algy, and I've had such a tiring day. I think I'd better ring off now before I break down altogether. Good-bye."

The receiver clicked.

"Wait a minute," Fairweather said suddenly.

There was no answer.

Lady Valerie Woodchester was walking back across the bright modernistic sitting room of her tiny apartment on Marsham Street. She fitted a cigarette into a long holder and picked up the drink that she had put down when she telephoned. Over the rim of the glass she looked across to a small book table where there was propped up the cheap unframed photograph of a dark and not unhappily serious young man.

"Poor old Johnny!" she said softly. "It was a lousy trick they played on you, my dear…"

Mr Algernon Sidney Fairweather jiggled the receiver hook. He took a coin out of his pocket and poised it over the slot; and then he hesitated, and finally put it back in his pocket. He left the booth and made his way to the bar, where he downed a double brandy with very little dilution of soda. His plump cheeks seemed to have gone flabby and his hands twitched as they put down the glass.

Twenty minutes later he was waddling jerkily up and down the carpet of a luxurious room overlooking Grosvenor Square, blurting out his story under a coldly observant scrutiny that made him feel somehow like a beetle under a searchlight.

"Do you believe Her when she says that she's lost this cloakroom ticket?" Luker asked.

He was as calm as Fairweather was agitated. He sat imperturbably behind the huge carved oak desk where he had been writing when Fairweather blundered in and toyed with his fountain pen. The expression in his eyes was faintly contemptuous.

"I don't know what to believe," said Fairweather distractedly. "I — well, thinking it over, I doubt it. I've had enough dealings with her to know what her methods are, and personally I think she's fishing to see how much we're prepared to pay."

"Or how much Templar is prepared to pay," said Luker phlegmatically. "Did you know that she had dinner with him tonight at the Berkeley?"

Fairweather blinked as if he had been smacked on the nose.

"What?" he yelped. His voice had gone back on him again. "But I particularly told her to have nothing more to do with him!"

"That's probably why she did it," Luker replied unsympathetically. "I had an idea that something like this might happen — that's why I've been having them watched. For all you know, he may have put her up to this."

Fairweather swallowed.

"How much do you think she'll want?"

"I don't know. I don't think I care very much. It doesn't seem to be very important. Money is a very temporary solution — you never know how soon you may have to repeat the dose. This cloakroom story may be a myth from beginning to end. She might easily have these papers in her dressing-table drawer. She might easily have no papers at all. Her attitude is the thing that matters; and with this man Templar in the background it would be unwise to take chances." Luker shrugged. "No, my dear Algy, I'm afraid we shall have to take more permanent steps to deal with both of them."

"W-what sort of steps?" stammered Fairweather feebly. "H-how can we deal with them?"

That seemed to amuse Luker. The ghost of a smile dragged at the corners of his mouth.

"Do you really want to know?" he asked interestedly.

"You mean…" Fairweather didn't seem to know how to go on. His collar appeared to be choking him. He tugged at it in spasmodic efforts to loosen it. "I–I don't think so," he said. "I…"

Luker laughed outright.

"There's a sort of suburban piousness about you and Sangore that verges on the indecent," he remarked. "You're just like a couple of squeamish old maids who hold shares in a brothel. You want your money, but you're determined not to know how it's obtained. If anything unpleasant or drastic has to be done, that's all right with you so long as you don't have to do it yourselves. That's how you felt about getting rid of Kennet. Now it's Templar and Lady Valerie. Well, they've got to be murdered, haven't they?"

Fairweather wriggled, as if his clothes were full of ants. His face was glistening with sweat.

"I — Really, I don't—"

"I expect you think I'm excessively vulgar," Luker continued mercilessly. "I've got such a shockingly crude way of putting things, haven't I? I suppose you felt just the same when I offered you a place on the board of Norfelt Chemicals in return for certain items of business when you were secretary of state for war. That's quite all right, my dear fellow. Go home and hare a nice cup of tea and forget about it. There's no need for me to tell you to keep your mouth shut, is there? I know you're a worm, and you know you're a worm, but we won't let anybody else know you're a worm."

Fairweather gobbled.

"Really, Luker," he spluttered indignantly, "I–I—"

"Oh, go away," said Luker. "I've got work to do."

He spoke without impatience; if his voice carried any particular inflection, it was one of good-humoured tolerance. But there was no further argument. Fairweather went.

Luker remained sitting at the great carved desk after he had gone. Fairweather's emotional antics had made no impression on him at all. He had no illusions about his associates. He had long been familiar with the partiality that politicians, generals and captains of industry have for squirming out of uncomfortable situations, with an air of being profoundly shocked by what has happened, and leaving somebody else to face the music. But that failing had its own compensation for him. Once started, the more drastic the measures he had to take, the stronger became his hold on them and the more blindly they would have to support him in whatever he did, as his safety became the more necessary to their own safety. The problems that he was considering were purely practical. He sat there, idly turning his fountain pen between his strong square fingers, until he had thought enough; and then he picked up the telephone and began to issue terse, incisive orders.

3

"Did you have a nice dinner?" asked Patricia Holm. "And how was the new candidate for your harem?"

Simon Templar peeled off his coat, unbuttoned his shirt to the waist and deposited himself at a restful angle on the chesterfield under the open windows. Through the curtains came the ceaseless grind of Piccadilly traffic and a stir of sultry air tainted with petrol fumes and grime, too thick and listless to be properly termed a breeze; but in spite of that the spacious apartment in Cornwall House which was the Saint's London headquarters attained an atmosphere of comparative peace and freshness.

"There are mugs of all kinds, but there are very special and superlative mugs who do their mugging in London; and we are it," he said gloomily. "I had a beautiful dinner, thanks. The truites au bleu were magnificent, and the pigeons truffйs in aspic were a dream. The candidate was looking her best, which is pretty good. She went home early. Since then I've been drowning my sorrows at the Cafe Royal."

Patricia contemplated him discerningly.

"The dinner was beautiful, and the candidate was looking her best, and she went home early," she repeated. "What was the matter with her?"

"She wanted her beauty sleep," said the Saint. "After you with that barley water, Hoppy."

He stretched out a long arm and retrieved the bottle of scotch from Mr Uniatz' jealous grasp.

"What Hoppy needs is compressed whiskey, so he could get a bottle into a wineglass," he commented.

"Was it your scintillating conversation that made her yawn?" inquired Peter Quentin. "Or did she have the wrong kind of ideas about what sort of sleep would be good for her beauty?"

Simon splashed soda into his glass and drank meditatively.

"She's an attractive wench," he said. "I like her. She's so innocent and disarming, and as harmless as a hungry shark. The trouble is that if she's not careful she's going to wake up one day and find herself left in a dark alley with her throat cut, and that will be a great pity for anyone with a face and figure like hers."

"Say, where do ya get dat stuff?" demanded Mr Uniatz loudly.

He sat forward on the edge of his chair, his hamlike hands practically obliterating his half-empty glass, with a deep frown corrugating the negligible clearance between his eyebrows and his hair, and his paleolithically roughcast face chopped into masses of fearsome challenge.

Simon raised his head to stare at him. A criticism like that coming from Mr Uniatz, a man to whom any form of mental exercise was such excruciating torture that he had always been dumb with worship before the Saint's godlike ability to think, had something awe-inspiring about it that numbed its audience. It was nothing like a rabbit turning round to bare its teeth at a greyhound. It was more like a Storm Trooper turning round and asking Hitler why he didn't stop strutting around and get wise to himself. For one reeling instant the Saint wondered if history had been made that night, and the whiskey which had for years been flowing in gargantuan quantities down Hoppy's asbestos throat had at long last soaked through to some hidden sensitive section of his entrails.

Mr Uniatz reddened bashfully under the stares that impinged upon him. He was unaccustomed to being the focus of so much attention. But he clung valiantly to his point.

"It sounds like a pipe dream to me, boss," he said.

"Let me get this straight," said the Saint carefully. "I gather that you don't think that Valerie Woodchester runs any risk of getting her throat cut. Is that the idea?"

Mr Uniatz looked about him in dazed perplexity. He seemed to think that everyone had gone mad.

"I dunno, boss," he said, refusing to be sidetracked. "What I wanna know is where do ya get dat stuff?"

"What stuff?" asked Peter faintly.

"De compressed whiskey," said Mr Uniatz.

There was a pregnant silence.

The Saint laid his head slowly back on the cushions and closed his eyes.

"Hoppy," he said solemnly, "I love you. When I die, the word 'Uniatz' will be found written on my heart."

"How about if de goil is selling it, boss?" ventured Mr Uniatz, tiptoeing into the dizzy realms of Theory. "Maybe she's in de racket, too, woikin' for de chemical factory where dey make it."

Simon passed him the whiskey bottle.

"Maybe she is, Hoppy," he said. "It's an idea, anyway. Give yourself some more nourishment while we think it over."

"Didn't you get anything useful out of her?" asked Patricia.

"She held out on me," said the Saint ruefully. "I did my best, but I might have saved myself the trouble. Amazing as it may seem, she wouldn't confide in me. The secrets of her girlish heart are still the secrets of her girlish heart so far as I'm concerned."

Peter clicked his tongue.

"You've met her four times now, and she hasn't confided in you," he said in accents of distress. "You must be losing your touch. They don't usually hold out so long."

"What do you mean by 'they'?" demanded the Saint unblushingly.

"He means your harem candidates," said Patricia. "The wild flowers that droop shyly at you from the hedges as you pass by. This one must be pretty tough if she still hasn't given way to your manly charms."

Simon reached for a cigarette and flicked his thumbnail thoughtfully over a match.

"She's tough, all right," he said. "But I don't know how tough. She'll need all she's got to sit in on this game. She's sitting in, and I'm still wondering whether she really knows what the stakes are. There was one time tonight when I thought we were going to get somewhere, but she closed up again and went home."

"You started to get somewhere, then," said Peter.

The Saint nodded.

"Oh yes, I started. But I didn't finish, so we might just as well forget about it. She knows something, though — I found that out, even if she didn't admit it. But she's going to play her own hand; and so she'll probably get her throat cut, as I was saying. It makes everything very difficult."

He sat up in an access of unruly energy, and his blue eyes went over them with an almost angry light.

"God damn it," he said quietly, "it's a complete and perfect setup — with only the foundation missing. I've worked it all out a dozen times since we talked it over at Anford, and I expect you have, too. We'll run over it again if you like, and get it all in one piece."

"All right," said Peter. "You run over it. We like hearing you listen to yourself."

"Here it is, then. We've got our friend Luker, the arms wangler. He's on a job. In this case he's in on it with a couple of his stooges named Sangore and Fairweather — two highly esteemed gentlemen with complete faith in their own respectability but completely under his thumb for any dirty work he wants to put in. Also vaguely related is Lady Valerie, a sort of spare-time entraоneuse for Fairweather. Okay. On the other side you have well-meaning but not very agile professional pacifists Kennet and Windlay. Somehow or other they dig up inside information about the job Luker is on. This is where their lack of agility shows up. They threaten exposure unless Luker drops it. Okay. Luker has no intention of dropping it. The first move is through Fairweather, to sic Lady Valerie on to Kennet and see if she can seduce him from his irritating ideals. This fails. Lady Valerie is therefore used for the last time to lure Kennet down to Whiteways for a conference, where he meets with a fortunate accident. The coroner, a staunch friend of the aristocracy, is probably persuaded that Kennet was caught in a drunken stupor, and keeps the inquest nicely hamstrung to save scandal. Everything goes off smoothly; and meanwhile Windlay is mysteriously murdered, apparently by some prowling thug. Okay again."

"And so soothing," said Peter. "Especially for the corpses."

"Unfortunately this isn't quite the end of it. The ungodly haven't found Kennet's incriminating evidence. Meanwhile Kennet has been partly overcome by Lady Valerie, at least enough to give her a little information about this evidence — either what it is, or where it is, or something. We now come to Lady Valerie's psychology."

"I thought we should come to that eventually," said Patricia.

Simon threw a cushion at her.

"She's not a bad kid, really," he said. "But she likes having a good time, and she has an almost infantile ability to rationalize anything that helps to get her what she thinks is a good time, to her own entire satisfaction. Nor is she anything like so dumb as she tries to make out. When Kennet meets with a highly suspicious accident and Windlay is just obviously murdered, it wakes her up a bit — possibly with a certain amount of help from my own blundering bluntness. And maybe she even feels a genuine remorse. From the symptoms, I should say she did. She's absent-mindedly gone just a little further than she'd ever have gone if she knew exactly what she was doing, and done something really nasty. She also realizes that it's given her some sort of hold over Fairweather and the others. But she still doesn't want to confide in me. She's paddling her own canoe. And as far as I can see there are only two ways she can be heading. Either she's got some crazy idea of making amends by carrying on Kennet's work on her own, and taking some wild vengeance on the gang that used her for a cat's-paw, or else she simply means to blackmail them. And I may be daft, but it seems to me that her scheme might very well combine the two."

Peter Quentin got up and refilled his glass. He sat down again and looked at the Saint seriously.

"And she's the only link we've got with what's going on?" he said.

"The one and only. Kennet and Windlay are dead, and we shouldn't get anything out of Luker and Company unless we beat it out of them, which mightn't be so easy as it sounds. Meanwhile we're tied hand and foot. We're just sitting tight and twiddling our thumbs while she's playing her own fool game. What should we do? Use her for bait and wait until something happens, with the risk of finding her as useful as John Kennet at the end of it? Or start again and try to cut in from another angle?"

"You tell us," said Patricia.

There was a pause in the intermittent glugging which had punctuated the conversation from the corner where Mr Uniatz was marooned with his consoling bottle in the midst of the uncharted wilderness of Thought. Mr Uniatz was no longer clear about why his purely sociable contribution to the powwow should have marooned him there, but in his last conscious moment he had been invited to join in thinking about something, and since then he had been submerged in his lonely struggle. Now, corning to the surface like a diver whose mates have suddenly remembered him and pulled him up, the anguished irregularities of his face dissolved into a radiant beam of heaven-sent inspiration.

"I got it, boss!" he announced ecstatically. "What we gotta do wit' dis wren is catch her at de aerodrome before she takes off."

"Before she takes off what?" asked the Saint foggily.

"Before she takes off wit' de compressed whiskey," said Mr Uniatz proudly, "De stuff de temperance outfit she's woikin' for t'rows out of de aeroplanes." Mr Uniatz raised his bottle and washed out his throat with enthusiastic lavish-ness. His eyes glowed with the rapture of achievement. "Chees, boss, why didden we t'ink of dat before? It's in de bag!"

Simon looked at him for a moment; and then he bowed his head in speechless reverence.

And at that instant the telephone bell rang.

The sound jarred into the silence with a shrill unexpectedness that jolted them all into an unnatural stillness. There were many people among the Saint's large acquaintance who might have made a casual call at that hour; and yet for some illogical reason the abrupt summons gave him a queer intuitive tightening in his stomach. Perhaps it was the way his thoughts had been running. He lifted his head and looked at the faces of the others, but they were all expressionless with the same formless foreboding.

Simon picked up the phone.

"Hullo," he said.

"Is that you, Simon darling?" it answered. "This is Valerie."

A feathery tingle passed up the Saint's spine and was gone, and with it the tightness in his stomach was gone also. He could not have said exactly how he knew so much. Her voice was quite ordinary, and yet there was an indefinable tension in it that seemed to make everything quite clear. Suddenly his brain seemed to be abnormally cool and translucent.

"Hullo, darling," he said evenly. "And how are you?"

"I'm all right, thanks… Listen, Simon, you remember that cloakroom ticket I asked you to keep for me?"

Simon drew at his cigarette.

"Of course," he said, without hesitation. "It's quite safe."

"That's good," she said. "You see, I'm afraid I've got to have it back at once. I'm awfully sorry to be such a nuisance, but it's frightfully important. I mean, could you bring it round right away? It's all frightfully thrilling, but I'll tell you all about it when you get here. Can you possibly manage it?"

"Easily," he said. "I was just looking for something useful to do."

"You know where I live, don't you?"

"I should think so. I looked it up in the phone book as soon as I got back to town, and I've just been waiting for an invitation."

"Well, you've got one now. And listen. Nobody must know you're coming to see me. I'll tell you why afterwards."

"No one shall even guess where I've gone," said the Saint, with his eyes on Patricia. "I'll be over in ten minutes."

"Thanks so much, darling," she said. "Do hurry."

"I will."

He laid the phone gently back on its bracket, and stood up. The dance of his blue eyes was as if he had been asleep all the evening and had just become awake. He had no more doubts or problems. All the dammed-up, in-turned energy with which he had been straining was crystallized suddenly into the clean sharp leap of action. He was smiling.

"Did you get that, souls?" he said.

"She wants to see you," said Patricia. "Am I supposed to get excited?"

"She wants more than that," he said. "She wants a cloakroom ticket which she gave me to keep for her — which she never gave me. She wants it at once; and nobody's to know where I've gone. And somebody was listening on the wire all the time to make sure she said all the right things. So I don't see how I can refuse the date." The Saint's smile was dazzlingly seraphic. "I told you something was bound to happen, and it's starting now!"

4

"Excuse me a minute while I get into my shooting clothes," he said.

He vanished out of the nearest door; but the room had hardly had time to adapt itself to his disappearance when he was back again. The Saint could always make a professional quick-change artist look like an elderly dowager dressing for a state ball, and when he was in a hurry he could do things with clothes that bordered on the miraculous. He came back in a gray lounge suit whose sober hue had no counterpart in the way he wore it, which was with all the peculiarly rakish elegance that was subtly infused into anything he put on. His fresh shift was buttoned and his tie was tied, and he was feeding a fully charged magazine into the butt of a shining Luger.

"You're not really going, are you?" asked Patricia hopelessly.

She knew when she said it that it was a waste of words, and the scapegrace slant of his brows was sufficient answer.

"Of course not, darling," he said. "These are my new pajamas."

"But you're doing just what they want you to do!"

"Maybe. But do they know that I know it? I don't think so. That phone call was as straightforward as a baby's prayer — to the guy who was checking up on it. Only Valerie knows that she never gave me a cloakroom ticket, and she knows I know it. She's on the spot in her own flat, and that was the only way she could tip me off and call for help. Do you want me to stay home and knit?"

Patricia stood up. She kissed him.

"Be careful, boy," she said. "You know I look terrible in black."

Peter Quentin finished his drink and rose. He buttoned his coat with a deep sigh.

"I suppose this is the end of our chance of a night's rest," he said pessimistically. "I ought to have stayed in Anford." He saluted Patricia. "Will you excuse Hoppy and me if we trot along to take care of the dragons while your problem child is striking attitudes in front of the heroine? We don't want anything to happen to him — it would make life so horribly quiet and peaceful."

Simon stopped at the door.

"Just a minute," he said. "There may be policemen and other emissaries of the ungodly prowling around outside. We'd better not take chances. Will you call down to Sam Outrell, Pat, and tell him to meet me in the garage?"

As they rode down in the elevator he felt the springy elation of the moment spreading its intoxication through his muscles. The lucid swiftness of his mind ran on, constructing a clear objective framework of action in which he moved with unhurried precision with each step unerringly laid out a fraction of time before he reached it.

Down in the basement garage Sam Outrell, the janitor, was waiting for him when the elevator doors opened, with a look of placid expectancy on his pleasant bucolic face. He fell in at the Saint's side as Simon walked across to where the Hirondel stood waiting in its private bay.

"Goin' out on business again, sir?" he queried, with the imperturbation of many years of experience of the Saint's unlawful occasions.

"I hope so, Sam." The Saint cocked his legs over the side while Peter and Hoppy climbed into their own seats. "I don't want to stage a big demonstration, but you might just do a quiet job of obstructing if anyone's waiting for us. Take your own heap and follow me up the ramp, and see that you stick tight on my tail. When I wave my hand, swing across the road and stall your engine. I'll only want two or three minutes."

The exhaust purred as he touched the starter. He pulled the Hirondel out to the foot of the ramp and held it there, warming the engine, until he saw Outrell's car behind him. Then he let in the clutch and roared up the slope, with the other car following as if it were nailed to his rear fenders.

At the top he whipped round in a screaming turn out into the narrow street that ran by the back of Cornwall House. There was a taxi parked close by the garage entrance and a small sports car with a man reading a newspaper in it standing just behind; both of them might have been innocent, but if they were it would do them no harm to be obstructed for a few minutes.

The Saint raised one hand just above his head and made a slight movement.

He heard the squeal of Sam Outrell's brakes behind him, and grinned gently to himself as he locked the wheel for another split-arch turn into Half Moon Street. The snarl of the engine rose briefly, lulled, and then settled into a steady drone as they nosed into Piccadilly, shot across the front of a belated bus and went humming down the west-ward slope towards Hyde Park Corner.

Peter Quentin settled deep into his seat and turned to Hoppy.

"I hope your insurance policies are all paid up, Hoppy," he said.

"I ain't never had none," said Mr Uniatz seriously. "I seen guys what try to sell me insurance, but I t'ought dey was all chisellers." He brooded anxiously over the idea. "Do ya t'ink I oughta get me some, boss?"

"I'm afraid it's too late now," said Peter encouragingly. "But perhaps it doesn't matter. You haven't got a lot of wives and things lying around, have you?"

Mr Uniatz scratched his head with a row of worried fingers.

"I dunno, boss," he said shyly. "Every time I get married I am not t'inking about it very much. So I never know if I have got married or not," he said, summarizing his problem with a conciseness that could scarcely have been improved upon.

Peter pondered over the exposition until he felt himself getting slightly giddy, when he decided that it would probably be safer to leave it alone. And the Saint spun the wheel again and sent the Hirondel thundering down Grosvenor Place.

"When you two trollops have finished gloating over your sex life," he said, "you'd better try to remember what happens when we get to Marsham Street."

"But we know," said Peter, carefully continuing to refrain from looking at the road. "Don't we, Hoppy? If we ever get there alive, which is very unlikely, we jump about in the foreground and try to attract the bullets while the beauteous heroine swoons into Simon's arms."

Simon squeezed the car through on the wrong side of a crawling taxi which was hogging the centre of the road, and while he was doing it he neatly swiped Peter's cigarette with his disengaged hand.

"That's something like the idea; except that as usual you'll be in the background. I'm just building on probabilities, but I think I've got it pretty straight. Two or more thugs will be in possession. When I ring the bell, one of them will come to the door. They can't all open it at once, and at least one of them will probably be busy keeping Valerie quiet, and in any case they won't want any noise that they can avoid. Besides, they'll be expecting me to walk in like a blindfolded lamb. Now, I think it can only break two ways. Either the warrior who opens the door will open it straight on to a gun…"

He went on, sketching possibilities in crisp, comprehensive lines, dictating move and counter-move in quick sinewy sentences that strung the strides of a supreme tactician together into a connected chain on which even Hoppy Uniatz could not lose his grip. It might all seem very simple in the end, but in that panoramic grasp of detail lay the genius that made amazing audacities seem simple.

"Okay, skipper," Peter said soberly, as the car swooped into Marsham Street. "But don't forget you're responsible to Hoppy's widows and my orphans."

Ever since the first few hectic moments of the ride they had been running with the cutout closed, and the dying of the engine was scarcely perceptible as Simon turned the switch.

After the last turn they had slid up practically in silence to their destination, which was one of a row of modern apartment buildings that had not long ago transformed the topography of that once sombre district. One or two other cars were parked within sight, but otherwise the street seemed quiet and lifeless. Simon glanced up at the crossword design of light and dark windows as he stepped out of the car and crossed the pavement, with some attention to the softness of his footsteps, for he knew well how sounds could echo to the upper windows of a silent street at that hour of the night. He said nothing to the others, for all the ground had been covered in advance in his instructions. He read off the apartment number from the indicator in the empty lobby, and an automatic elevator carried them up to the top floor. The Saint was as cool as chromium, as accurate and self-contained as a machine. He left the elevator doors open and waited until Peter and Hoppy had taken up their positions flattened against the wall on either side of the door; then he put his knuckle against the bell.

There was an interval of perhaps ten seconds, then the door opened.

It opened, according to the Saint's first diagnosis, straight on to an awkward-looking silenced revolver in the hand of the stocky ape-faced man who unfastened the latch.

"Come in," he said.

Blank astonishment, anger and incredulity chased themselves over the Saint's face — exactly as they were expected to chase themselves.

"What's the idea of this?" he demanded wrathfully. "And who the hell are you, anyway?"

"Come in," repeated the man coldly. "And put your hands up. And hurry up about it, before I give you something."

The Saint put his hands up and went in. But he went in with his shoulder blades sliding along the door, so that the other was momentarily cut off from it. Then the man had to turn his back to the doorway when he started to close the door, so as to keep Simon covered at the same time. And that was part of the clockwork of the Saint's preorganized plan. Simon gave the signal with a gentle cough; and over the man's shoulder appeared the intent face of Peter Quentin, soundlessly, with a stiff rubber blackjack raised. There was a subdued clunk, and the man's eyes went comically glassy.

At that instant other things happened with the smooth timing of a well-rehearsed conjuring trick. The Saint's hands dropped like striking falcons on to the ape-faced man's gun, bent the wrist inwards towards the elbow, whipped the revolver out of the suddenly powerless fingers. Simultaneously Peter Quentin was moving aside, to be replaced by Hoppy Uniatz, whose massive paws closed on the man's throat in a gorilla grip faster than Peter himself could have put away his blackjack and taken the same hold. Meanwhile Peter slid round the man's side, received the revolver as Simon detached it and jammed the silencer into the man's ribs. It was all done with a glossy perfection of teamwork that would have dazed the eye of the beholder if there had been any beholder present, all within the space of a scant second; and then the Saint was talking into the man's ear.

"One whisper out of you, and they'll be able to thread you on a flagpole," he said. Then he stepped back a few inches. "Okay, Hoppy — let him breathe."

The crushing grasp of Mr Uniatz fingers slackened just sufficiently to allow a saving infiltration of air. The delicately judged blow of the rubber blackjack had deadened the ape-faced man's brain for just long enough to allow the subsequent manoeuvres to take place without stunning him permanently. Now he stared at the Saint with squeezed-out eyes in which there was a pallor of voiceless fear.

"Talk very quietly," said the Saint, in that ghostly intonation which barely travelled a hands breadth beyond the ears of its intended audience. "What was supposed to happen next?"

"I was to take you in there — there's two chaps want to see you."

Simon's glance had already covered the tiny hall. The three doors that opened off it were all closed; the ape-faced man had indicated the centre one.

"Good enough," said the Saint. "Let's carry on as if nothing had happened."

He passed his own automatic to Peter, took away the silenced revolver, spilled the shells out into his palm and dropped them into Hoppy's pocket, then thrust the empty weapon back into the hand of its owner.

"Cover me with it and carry on," he ordered. "When we go in there, leave the door open. And remember this: my friends will be watching you from outside. If you breathe a word or bat an eyelid to let your reception committee know that everything isn't going according to plan, and any bother starts — you'll be the first dead hero of the evening." The Saint's voice was as caressing as velvet, but it was as cold and unsentimental as a polar sea. "Let's go."

He turned his back and sauntered over to the middle door; and the ape-faced man, urged on by a last remembrancing prod from the muzzle of the murderous gun which Mr Uniatz had by that time added to the displayed collection of artillery, lurched helplessly after him.

Simon turned the handle and entered the room with his arms raised. On one side Lady Valerie Woodchester was roughly tied to a chair, and one of the two men there was bending over her with a hand clamped over her mouth. The other man stood on the opposite side of the room with a cigarette loosely held in one hand and a small automatic levelled in the other.

The Saint's eyes rambled interestedly over the scene.

"What ho, souls," he drawled. "And how are all the illegitimate sons of France tonight?".