Prelude for War

1

"Kennet was a member of the Sons of France?" Simon repeated. "Are you sure?"

"Yes. His mother was French, and he was brought up with French as a second language. He spoke it perfectly. I told you I'd been making inquiries. I've established the fact that he joined the Sons of France six months ago under the name of Jean de la Paix. Incidentally, he was also a member of the French Communist party." Teal went on watching the Saint searchingly and with a glint of malice. "I thought you'd have known that."

The Saint blew a geometrically faultless smoke ring across the table. His face was tranquilly uncommunicative, relieved from blankness only by a faint inscrutable smile; but behind the mask his brain was running like a dynamo.

"I might have guessed," he said.

"Did you?"

"I'm a good guesser. 'Jean de la Paix,' too — he had a sense of humour, after all. And guts. For a registered member of the French Communist party to join the Sons of France at all was guts, and he must have got further than just joining. That would only be another reason why he had to be cremated."

"What was the first reason?"

Simon looked down at his fingernails.

"You want to know a good deal," he said, and looked up again.

"Of course I do."

"Well, so do I." The Saint thought for a while, and made up his mind. "All right, Claud. You asked for it, and you can have it. For about the first time in my life I'll be perfectly frank with you. It'd be worth while if it only meant that I could get on with my job without having to cope with all your suspicions and persecutions as well as my own troubles. But I don't suppose it'll do any good, because as usual you probably won't believe me… You see, Claud, the fact is that I don't know any more than you do."

Teal's face darkened.

"I didn't come here to waste my time—"

"And I don't want you to waste mine. I told you you wouldn't believe me. But there it is. I don't know any more than you do. The only difference is that not being a policeman I haven't got so many great open spaces in my brain to start with, so I don't need to know so much."

Mr Teal's spearmint, under the systematic massage of his molars, became in turn a sphere, an hourglass and something like a short-handled frying pan.

"Go on," he said lethargically. "Make allowances for my stupidity, and tell me how much I know."

"As you like. Let's start with Comrade Luker. As you know, he is the current top tycoon of the arms racket."

"I suppose so."

"Comrades Fairweather and Sangore are his stooges in a couple of British armaments firms which he controls."

"I don't—"

"Call them what you like, and they're still his stooges. Between them, those three are running a combine that practically constitutes a monopoly of the arms industry in this country. Their only job is manufacturing engines and instruments and gadgets that kill people, and the only way they can make good money is in having a good demand for their products. I shall also ask you to grasp the idea that one customer's money will buy as much champagne and caviar as another's, whoever he wants to kill. But under the laws we suffer from there's nothing criminal in any of that — nothing that you could take any professional interest in. If a man gets drunk and kills somebody with his car, it's your job to put him in jail; but if he organizes the killing of several thousand people they make him an earl, and it's your job to stop the traffic when he wants to cross the street. The technical name for that is civilization. Correct?"

"Go on."

The Saint poured out some more coffee.

"Now let's go to France. There they have a political Fascist organization called the Sons of France. It may or may not be illegal. I seem to remember that they passed a law not long ago to ban all organizations of that kind, and the old Croix de Feu was disbanded on account of it. The Sons of France may have found a way to get round the law, or the law may not give a damn, or they may have too much pull already, or something; or they may just be illegal and proud of it, and even if that's the case it's nothing to do with you. It's a matter for the French police."

"I'm listening."

"That's something. Well, from one indication and another it seems pretty clear that Luker is backing the Sons of France. That's natural enough. Dictators always go in for rearmament in a big way, and therefore Fascist regimes are good for business. Besides which, if you can get enough synthetic Caesars thumping their chests and bellowing defiance at each other it won't be long before you have a nice big war, which means a boom for the armourers. But it isn't a crime to finance a political party, or else half the titled people in England would be in the hoosegow. Unless the Sons of France are an illegal organization, in which case it's still a matter for the French police and not for you."

"You haven't got down to Kennet yet," Teal said sluggishly.

"Kennet was a pacifist, a Communist, and all kinds of idealistic — ist. He thought he could do a lot of good by showing up the arms racket. Old stuff. Dozens of people have done it before, and everybody says 'How shocking!' and 'Why can't something be done about it?' and then they go off and forget about it. But Kennet went on. He joined the Sons of France. And by some fluke he must have found out something that really was worth finding out; so he had an accident. But you still can't do anything about it."

"I can do something about wilful murder."

"I did say he was murdered, but that's just what seems obvious to me. I've no evidence at all. We both know Windlay was murdered, but I've no evidence to pin it on any particular person any more than you have. It's no good just saying that whoever did the actual jobs we know that Luker was at the back of them. What are you going to tell a jury? With people like we're dealing with, you'd want an army of eyewitnesses before you could even get a warrant. Even then I don't know if you could get it. They're too big. Look how you've already had the word from up top to lay off the case. British justice is the most incorruptible in the world, so they tell you; but you can always whitewash a crook if he's big enough because it isn't what they call 'in the public interest' that he should be shown up. And look at the circumstances of these Kennet and Windlay cases. It's a million to one that you could never get any conclusive evidence on either of them if you worked until you could tuck your beard into your boots."

Mr Teal rolled the pink wrapping of his chewing gum into a ball and went on rolling it. His china-blue eyes were still unwaveringly inquisitorial.

"I'll agree with some of that up to a point. But you know more than that. You know something else that you're still working on."

"Only one thing." Simon was calm and collected: he had made up his mind to be candid, and he was going through with it — it could do him no harm, only perhaps reduce the complications of Teal's interference. "Kennet fell pretty hard for Lady Valerie Woodchester, who was set on to him by Fairweather to try and steer him off. He talked to her a lot — I don't know how much he told her. And he left some of his evidence in writing. That's why the flat was torn apart when Windlay was murdered. They were looking for it. But it wasn't there. Lady Valerie's got it."

The detective's eyes suddenly opened wide.

"But—"

"I know," said the Saint wearily. "You're too brilliant, Claud, that's what's the matter with you. I know all about it. So all you've got to do is to go to Lady Valerie and say, 'Where's that stuff that Kennet gave you?' Well, you try it. I have."

"But if she's concealing evidence—"

"Who said she was? She did. To me alone — without witnesses. If you pulled her into court, she could deny every word of it, and you couldn't prove anything different."

"But what is she doing it for?"

"Champagne coupons."

"What?"

"Dough. Geetus. Mazuma. Boodle. Crackle paper. She's in business for the money, the same as I used to be. And she knows that that evidence is worth cash to Fairweather and Co. The only way you could break her down would be to talk her language, which means putting up more cash than the others will, which personally I don't propose to do and you in your job couldn't do." The Saint shook his head. "It's no good, Claud. You still aren't in the running. You can't even go after her and batter her with your sex appeal — not with a figure like yours. You're sunk. Why don't you pack up and go home to chivvying the poor little street bookmakers in Soho, where you can't go wrong?".

Chief Inspector Teal's ruminant jaws continued their monotonous mastication. The logic of the Saint's argument was irrefutable, but there was in Mr Teal an ineradicable scepticism, founded on years of bitter disappointment, that fought obstinately against the premises from which that logic took its flying start. The Saint might for once be telling the truth, but there had been many other occasions when he had been no less plausible when he was lying. All of Mr Teal's prejudices fought back from the dead end to which credulity inevitably led.

"That's all very well," he said doggedly. "But you're still working on something. And when did you stop thinking about money? Suppose you get this evidence — what's going to happen?"

"I wouldn't turn it over to you. I don't imagine it would help you. I only want it to make perfectly sure — to find out just how much there is behind this racket. I could deal with Luker and Company today without it. Mind you I don't want to put any ideas into your head, although there must be lots of room for them, but if Luker for instance should meet with a minor accident, such as falling off the roof of his house into Grosvenor Square—"

The telephone bell rang while the Saint was speaking.

He went over and picked it up while Teal watched him with broody eyes.

Simon said "Hullo," and then his eyebrows lifted. He said: "Speaking… Yes… Yes… Yes…"

Darkness gathered on Teal's face. Something leaden crept into his light blue eyes, like clear skies filling with thunder. Sudden brilliance flashed across them like the snap of lightning as a storm breaks. He came out of his chair like a whale breaking the surface. Surprisingly quick for his adipose dimensions, he plunged across the intervening space and snatched the phone out of Simon's hand.

"Hullo!" he bawled. "Chief Inspector Teal speaking… No, that wasn't me before… Never mind that, go on… What?… What's that?… Yes… Yes… "

An indistinguishable mutter droned on from the receiver, and as Teal listened to it his cherubic round face grew hard and strained. His eyes stayed fixed upon the Saint, hot and jagged with a seethe of violent emotions of which the most accurately identifiable one was wrath rising to the temperature of incandescence. His mouth was a clenched trap in the lurid mauve of his face, which now and again opened just sufficiently to eject a sizzling monosyllable like a blob of molten quartz.

"All right," he bit out at last. "Stay there. I'll be round presently."

He slammed the instrument back on its bracket and stood glaring at the Saint like a gorilla that has just got up from sitting down on a drawing pin.

"Well?" he snarled. "Let's hear what you've got to say about that."

"What have I got to say?" Simon's voice was the honey of spotless innocence. "Well, Claud, since you ask me, it does seem to me that if you're going to turn this place into a club and tell your low friends to ring you up here you oughtn't to mind my having a bit of fun out of—"

"I'll see that you get your fun! So you thought you were taking me in with all that slop you were giving me. You've been… You're…"

"You're getting incoherent, Claud. Take a deep breath and speak from the diaphragm."

Chief Inspector Teal took the deep breath, but it came out again like an explosion of compressed air.

"You heard enough on the telephone—"

"But I didn't. It just looked like getting interesting when you so rudely snatched it away. Apparently one of your minions had been out trying to persecute somebody who wasn't at home."

"I sent a man round to interview Lady Valerie Woodchester," said Mr Teal, speaking like a locomotive ascending a steep gradient. "I thought she might know more than she'd told anyone. No, she wasn't at home. But her maid was, and she'd already been wondering whether she ought to call the police. Apparently Lady Valerie went out last night and didn't come back. When the maid came in this morning, her bed hadn't been slept in, but the whole flat had been turned inside out and there were pieces of rope and sticking plaster on the floor as if someone had been tied up. It looks exactly as if she'd been kidnapped — and if she has been I'll know who did it!"

The Saint had sat down again on the edge of the table. He came off it as if it had turned red hot under him.

"What!" he exclaimed in horrified amazement. "My God, if anything's happened to her—"

"You know damn well what's happened to her!" Teal's voice was thick with the rage of disillusion. "You've told me enough to make that obvious. That's why you were so sure I couldn't get her information! Well, you're wrong this time. I'm going to see that you're taken care of till we find her." Unconsciously Teal drew himself up, as he had done in those circumstances before, if he could only have remembered, so many fruitless times. "I shall take you into custody—"

Perhaps after all, as Mr Teal had so often been driven to believe in his more despondent moments, there was some fateful interdiction against his ever being permitted to complete that favourite sentence. At any rate, this was not the historic occasion on which completion was destined to be achieved. The sound of a bell cut him off in mid-flight, like a gong freezing a prizefighter poised for a knockout punch.

This time it was not the telephone, but a subdued and decorous trill that belonged unmistakably to the front door.

Teal looked over his shoulder at the sound. And as the Saint started to move he moved faster.

"You stay here," he flung out roughly. "I'll see who it is."

Simon sat down again philosophically and lighted another cigarette. His first smoke ring from that new source was still on its way to the ceiling when Mr Teal came back.

After him came Mr Algernon Sidney Fairweather.

2

Mr Fairweather wore a dark suit with a gold watch chain looped across the place where in his youth he might once have kept his waist. He carried a light gray Homburg and a tightly rolled umbrella with a gold handle. He looked exactly as if a Rolls Royce had just brought him away from an important board meeting.

The Saint inspected him with sober admiration mingled with cordial surprise; and neither of those expressions conveyed one per cent of what was really going on in his mind.

"Algy," he said softly, "what have I done to deserve the honour of seeing you darken my proletarian doors?"

"I… er — Um!" said Mr Fairweather, as if he had not made up his mind what else to say. Teal interposed himself between them. "I was just about to take Mr Templar under arrest," he explained grimly.

"You were — Um! Were you? May I ask what the charge was, Inspector?"

"I suspect him of being concerned in kidnapping Lady Valerie Woodchester."

Fairweather started.

"Lady—" He swallowed. "Kidnapped? But—"

"Lady Valerie Woodchester has disappeared, and her apartment has been ransacked," Teal said solidly. "I'm glad you came here, sir. You may be able to give me some information. You knew her well, I believe?"

"Er — yes, I suppose I knew her quite well."

"Did she ever say anything to make you think that she was afraid of anyone — that she considered herself in any sort of danger?"

Fairweather hesitated. He glanced nervously at the Saint.

"She did mention once that she was frightened of Mr Templar," he affirmed reluctantly. "But I'm afraid I didn't pay much attention to it at the time. The idea seemed so— But you surely don't think that anything serious has really happened to her?"

"I know damn well that something has happened to her — I don't know how serious it is." Teal turned on the Saint like a congealed cyclone. "That's what you'd better tell me! I might have known you couldn't be trusted to tell the truth for two minutes together. But you've told me too much already. You told me that Lady Valerie had something you wanted. Now she's disappeared, and her place has been ransacked. Ralph Windlay was murdered, and his flat was ransaked. In both places someone was looking for something, and from what you've told me the most likely person is you!"

The Saint signed.

"Of course," he said patiently. "That's what they call Deduction. That's what they teach you at the Police College. I'm looking for something, and therefore everyone who is looking for something is me."

Teal set his teeth. The suspicions which had been held in check at the beginning of the interview were flooding back on him with the overwhelming turbulence of a typhoon. In all fairness to Mr Teal it must be admitted that there was some justification for his biassed viewpoint. Mr Teal could make allowances for coincidence up to a point; but the swift succession of places and people where and to whom violent things had happened in close proximity to Simon Templar's presence on the scene was a little too much for him. And there was the curdling memory of many other similar coincidences to accelerate the acid fermentation of Mr Teal's misanthropic conclusions. The congenital runaway tendencies of his spleen were aggravated by the recollection of his own recent guilelessness.

"Lady Valerie didn't stay with you very long last night," he rapped. "Why did she leave you so early?"

"She was tired," said the Saint.

"Had you quarrelled with her?"

"Bitterly. I may be old fashioned, Claud, but one thing I will not allow anybody to do is to be rude about my friends. They may have figures like sacks of dough and faces like giant tomatoes, but beauty is only skin deep and kind hearts are more than coronets and all that sort of thing, and just because a bloke is a policeman is no reason why any girl should make fun of him. That's what I told her. I said: 'Look here, Lady Valerie, just because poor old Claud Eustace has fallen arches and a bay window like the blunt end of the Normandie—"

"Will you shut up?" roared the detective.

Simon shut up.

Mr Teal took a fresh grip on his gum.

"Why was Lady Valerie frightened of you?" he barked.

The Saint did not answer.

"Had you been threatening her?"

Simon remained mute. He made helpless clownish motions with his hands.

The detective's complexion was like that of an overripe prune.

"What the hell's the matter with you?" he bayed. "Can't you even talk any more?"

"Of course not," said the Saint. "You told me to shut up. I am an oyster. Will you have me on the half shell, or creamed in white wine?"

Chief Inspector Teal looked as if he had swallowed a large live eel. His stomach appeared to be trying to reject this refractory diet, and he seemed to be having difficulty in keeping it down. His neck swelled with the fury of the struggle.

"Tell me why Lady Valerie was frightened of you," he said in a garroted gargle.

"I've no idea why she should have been," said the Saint. "I'd no idea she was. Why don't you ask Algy? He seems to know all about it. And while you're on the job, what about asking him why he came here and what he thought he was going to do?"

Fairweather sniffed into a white silk handkerchief, tucked it back into his breast pocket and planted himself like a minister in Parliament preparing to answer a question from the Opposition.

"I have not visited Mr Templar before," he said, "and I should not expect to do so again. The reason for my call this morning is quite simple. I had a tentative engagement to lunch with Lady Valerie today, and I rang her up not long ago to confirm it. She was not in, and her maid informed me in some agitation that she had apparently not slept at her apartment last night and had left no message to give a clue to her whereabouts. Knowing that this was an extraordinary departure from her normal habits, I puzzled over it with some seriousness and recalled her mentioning that she was in some fear of Mr Templar, as I have told you. I telephoned again later, and could still hear no news of her; and on my way from the club to the Savoy, where we were to have met, I recollected that she had told me that she was dining with Mr Templar last night. My anxieties at once became graver, and since I was at that moment close to this building, on an impulse — which was perhaps rash in conception but which I now feel to have been very sensibly founded — I instructed my chauffeur to stop, and came up with the intention of—"

"Algy," said the Saint, with profound respect, "I don't wonder you got into the Cabinet. With your gift for making a collection of plain goddam lies sound like an archbishop's sermon, the only thing I can't understand is why they didn't make you prime minister."

Conviction hardened on Mr Teal like the new carapace on a moulted lobster. His eyes held on the Saint with dourly triumphant tenacity.

"I'll tell you why Lady Valerie was frightened of you," he said. "I expect she was thinking of what happened to Kennet and Windlay. She knew you were trying to make trouble for Mr Luker and Mr Fairweather, and since she was a friend of theirs—"

"Was Kennet a friend of theirs?" asked the Saint pungently.

Fairweather said, with solemn and unshakable pomposity: "He was a guest in my house. I think that should be sufficient answer."

Teal nodded implacably.

"You've pulled the wool over my eyes often enough, Templar, but you can't do it this time. What's the use of bluffing? There's enough circumstantial evidence already to put you away for a long time. If you want to be smart you won't make things any worse for yourself. Tell me what's happened to Lady Valerie Woodchester, and you may get off with eighteen months."

The Saint looked at him for several seconds. And then he laughed out loud.

"You poor pin-brained boob," he said.

The detective's face did not change.

"That won't—"

"Won't do me any good?" Simon completed the sentence for him. "Well, I'm not interested. I'm not trying to do myself good — I don't have to. I'm trying to do you some. You need it. Have you gone so completely daft that you've lost your memory? Have you ever known me to threaten, beat up, bump off, or otherwise raise hell with women? Have you ever had even the slightest reason to suspect me of it? But because you're too bat-eyed and pigheaded to see any further than the pimples on the end of your own nose you want to believe that I've turned myself into an ogre for Lady Valerie's special benefit. What you need—"

"I don't need any of—

"You need plenty." The Saint was cool, unflurried, but his curt sentences were edged like knives. "According to some ancient law which it doesn't look as if you'd ever heard of, a man in this country is presumed innocent until he can be proved guilty. Why don't you try being just half as credulous with me as you are with Algy? Because he was once a member of His Majesty's immortal government. You pitiful cretin! In other words, he made his living for years out of making lies sound like sententious platitudes. Have you even started to criticize what he's just told you? Lady Valerie wasn't home, and hadn't been home, when he phoned to check up on a lunch date. 'Knowing that this was an extraordinary departure from her normal habits—' "

"I heard what Mr Fairweather said."

"And you gulped it down! This is the guy who knew Lady Valerie well. He didn't just assume that she'd been out on an all-night party and forgotten to come home. He 'puzzled over it with some seriousness.' Well, I don't want to be unkind about the girl, and I don't even ask you to believe me, but I'll bet you five thousand quid to fourpence that if you check back on her record you'll find that she's often done things like that before. Algy never thought of that. His 'anxieties at once became graver' — so grave that he dropped in here to ask me, a comparative stranger, what I thought about it. And while we're on the subject of lunch dates I'll give you something else. Algy tells you that he had this date with Lady Valerie, and naturally you believe him. Well, he's got his ideas mixed. He didn't have this date — I had it. Now would you like to think that over for yourself, or shall I go on helping you?"

There was a candour, an ardent sincerity in the Saint's voice that would have arrested most listeners. Mr Teal was visibly shaken. In spite of himself a new doubt joined the mad saraband that was taking place in his fevered brain. Certainly he found it hard to believe that the Saint had done any harm to Lady Valerie: even he had to admit that such a crime would have been out of character. On the other hand, he found it equally hard to believe that such obviously respectable members of society as Luker and Fairweather could be involved in any sinister motives. If he arrested the Saint after a speech that carried such conviction, experience indicated that he would probably end up by making himself look highly ridiculous; but on the other hand experience also indicated that he usually ended up by looking quite ridiculous enough when he left the Saint at large. It was one of those situations in which Mr Teal habitually felt himself drowning in the turgid waves of an unfathomable Weltschmerz.

He glowered at Simon with a smouldering malevolence which he hoped helped to disguise: the sinking foundations, of his assurance.

"You're wasting your time," he said, but a keen ear could have detected the first loss of dominance in his voice, like the flattening note of a bell that has begun to crack. "Mr Fairweather's suspicions sound quite reasonable to me."

"Suspicions?" The Saint was lethally sardonic. "Why don't you call them certainties and have done with it? That's what they'd look like to anyone who hadn't got such a one-track mind as yours. So Algy had a date with Lady Valerie for lunch. But he hasn't shown any signs of impatience to push along to the Savoy and see if she's waiting for him. He didn't even go there first and see whether she turned up before he came here to see me. And he still doesn't have to wait and make sure she isn't there before he backs up this charge against me. He knows damn well she isn't going to be there! And how do you think he gets so damn sure about that?"

Teal's mouth opened a little. After a moment he turned his head. And for the first time he looked hard and invitingly at Mr Fairweather.

Mr Fairweather's chins wobbled with the working of his Adam's apple like rolls of soft raspberry jelly.

"Really," he stuttered, "Mr Templar's insinuations are so preposterous — I–I— Really, Inspector, you ought to — to do something to — um—"

"I quite understand, sir." Teal was polite and respectful, but his gum was starting on a new and interesting voyage. "At the same time, if you gave me an explanation—"

"I should think the explanation would be obvious," Fairweather said stuffily. "If your imagination is unable to cope with such a simple problem, the chief commissioner might be interested to hear about it."

Had he been a better psychologist he would have known that that was the last thing he should have said. Mr Teal was still acutely conscious that he was addressing a former cabinet minister, but the set of his jaw took on an obstinate heaviness.

"I beg your pardon, sir," he said, "but the chief commissioner expects me to obtain definite statements in support of my imagination."

"Rubbish!" snorted Fairweather. "If you propose to treat me like a suspected criminal—"

"If you persist in this attitude, sir," Teal said courageously, "you may force me to do so."

Fairweather simply gaped at him.

And a great grandiose galumptious grin spread itself like Elysian honey over Simon Templar's eternal soul. The tables were turned completely. Fairweather was in the full centre of Teal's attention now — not himself. And Fairweather had assisted nobly in putting himself there. The moment contained all the refined ingredients of immortality. It shone with an austere magnificence that eclipsed every other consideration with its epic splendour. The Saint lay back in a chair and gave himself up to the exquisite absorption of its ambrosial glory.

And then the telephone bell rang again.

The Saint sat up; but this time Teal did not hesitate. Still preoccupied but still efficient, almost mechanically he picked up the phone.

"Hullo," he said, and then: "Yes, speaking…"

Simon knew that he lied. He was simply playing back the trick that Simon had shown him before. But the circumstances were not quite the same. This call had come through on one of those exceptionally powerful connections that sometimes happen, and the raised voice of the speaker at the other end of the line did everything else that was necessary to produce a volume of sound in the receiver that was faintly but clearly audible across the room. Quite unmistakably it had said: "Is dat you, boss?"

Simon started to get up, spurred faster than thought by an irresistible premonition. But the agitation which had lent its penetrating pitch to Mr Uniatz' discordant voice was too quick for him. Hoppy's next utterance came through with the shattering clarity of a radio broadcast. "Listen, boss — de goil's got away!"

3

Teal put down the telephone with a sharp clunk of concentrated viciousness. Any reversal of emotion that he had suffered before was a childish tantrum compared with this. The Saint had not only been on the verge of making a monkey out of him for the second time in an hour — he had lured him on to the brink of affronting Fairweather in a way that might easily have cost him his job into the bargain. Whatever sentient faculties Mr Teal possessed at that moment were merely a curried hash of boiling vitriol. His face was congested to a deep shade of heliotrope, but his nostrils were livid with the whiteness of a berserk passion that would have been fuelled rather than assuaged by buckets of human blood.

He dug into his hip pocket and dragged out a pair of handcuffs as he lurched across towards the Saint.

"Come on," he said in a voice that could scarcely be recognized as his own. "You can write the rest of it down in Vine Street."

Simon watched him approach while he thought faster than he had ever done since this story began. Why and how Valerie Woodchester had escaped and what momentous consequences that escape might bring after it were questions that had to be crushed out of the activity of his mind. They could be dealt with afterwards; unless he forgot them now, there would be no useful afterwards in which to deal with them.

This was a time when his fluent tongue would be no more use to him — he might as well have tried to argue Niagara to a standstill. From where he stood he could have reached a gun, but that would have been almost as useless. It would certainly have cowed Fairweather; but the paroxysm of cold rage that was propelling Teal across the floor would have kept him walking straight on into it until it blasted him down. And the Saint knew that he would never be capable of using a gun on Claud Eustace Teal for anything more than a bluff. Equally beyond doubt, he knew that he would never be capable of letting himself be handcuffed and taken to Vine Street without knowing how he was going to get out again.

He said: "Wait a minute, Claud. You win. I'll give you Lady Valerie."

It was the only thing he could have said that the detective would even have heard. It stopped Teal a yard from him, with the handcuffs held out.

"Where is she?"

Simon gazed at him with a sad wistful smile.

"It's been a good long scrap and a lot of fun, hasn't it, Claud?" he said. "But I suppose you were bound to come out on top in the end… Oh well, let's make a clean sheet of it while we're at it. Hoppy was getting excited about nothing. Lady Valerie hasn't got away. I took her away myself, only I didn't have time to tell him. She's here in this apartment now, only about half-a-dozen yards away from you."

Teal gawped at him.

"Here?"

"Yes. You didn't think of that, did you? Well, you'll find her perfectly safe and sound, without even a speck of powder brushed off her nose."

"Where?"

"Come through the bedroom and I'll show you."

He turned away with an air of stoical resolution and sauntered steadily towards the door. Teal followed on his heels. Fairweather grasped his umbrella and followed Teal. As they entered the room, where the bed was still disordered from the Saint's recent rising, Simon said: "You've always suspected that I had a collection of secret passages and things here. You were pretty close to the mark, too. This ought to amuse you."

He indicated the door to one side of the bed.

Teal jerked it open. It revealed the interior of a big built-in cupboard in which an assortment of suits from the Saint's unlimited wardrobe hung on a long rail like a file of thin soldiers.

The Saint sat dejectedly on the side of the bed.

"Just push the wall at the end and it opens," he said listlessly.

Teal shoved himself grimly in, shouldering the rank of suits aside. Fairweather stepped up to the door and peered in after him.

What happened next was a succession of startling events of which Mr Fairweather's subsequent recollections were inclined to be confused. It seemed to him that without any warning the back of his collar and the seat of his pants were seized by the grappling mechanism of a kind of bimanual travelling crane. He rose from the ground and moved forward without any effort of his own into the interior of the cupboard, letting out a thin plaintive squeal as he did so. Then his advancing abdomen collided with breathtaking violence with the unyielding posterior of Chief Inspector Teal; the cupboard door slammed behind him; the light overhead went out; darkness descended; there was the sound of a key turning in the lock; and after that there was as much empty and unhelpful silence as Teal's sporadic sputtering of inspired profanity left room for…

Simon Templar moved swiftly out of the bedroom and locked that door also after him.

Now he was in it up to the neck, but he felt only an exuberant elation. As soon as Teal and Fairweather got out, which they must do in a comparatively short time, he would be a hunted man with all the nation-wide networks of the law spread out to catch him; but he only felt as if a burden had been taken off his shoulders. He had lived like that in the old days, when every man's hand was against him and death or ignominious defeat waited for him around every carelessly turned corner, and in those days he had known life at its keenest rapture, with a fullness that men who led safe humdrum existences could never know. Now at least the issues were clean cut and unevadable. Perhaps he had been respectable for too long…

The telephone was ringing again. He picked it up.

"Hi, boss," said Mr Uniatz plaintively. "We got cut off."

"We didn't," said the Saint tersely. "That was your old friend Claud Eustace Teal you were talking to."

There was a long silence.

"Did I hear what you said, boss?"

"I hope so."

"You mean he hears what I said about de goil?"

"Yes."

"But I ask him is he you and he says he is," complained Hoppy, as if appalled by this revelation of the depths of perfidy to which a human being could sink.

Words rose to Simon's lips — short Anglo-Saxon words, colourful and expressive. But what was the use? Dull thudding noises reminiscent of an enraged crocodile lashing its tail in a wooden crate reached him through the walls. His time was short.

"Never mind," he said. "It's done now. Let me talk to Patricia."

"She ain't got back yet, boss. She goes out in de baby car just now to buy some more scotch, and she is out when dis happens."

"When did it happen?"

"Just two-t'ree minutes back, boss. It's like dis. I am taking lunch up to de wren, and when I go in she says 'Lookit, de rug is boining.' It is boining, at dat. I go out for de extinguisher and squoit it on de fire, and when I have been squoiting it for some time I see de broad has beat it."

"I suppose you'd left the door open for her."

"I dunno, boss," said Mr Uniatz aggrievedly. He seemed to feel that Lady Valerie had taken an unfair advantage of him. "Anyway, de door is open and she has hung it on de limb. I beat it downstairs and I hear a car going off outside, and when I open de door she is lamming out of here wit' your Daimler. So I call you up," said Mr Uniatz, conscientiously completing his narrative.

Simon opened his cigarette case on the telephone table.

"All right," he said crisply. "Now listen. Hell is going to pop over this party, and it's going to pop at you. You'd better get out from under. Stick around till Patricia gets back, and tell her what's happened. Then pile yourself and Orace into the pram and tell her to take you to the station. Buy tickets to Southampton and make enough fuss about it so they'll remember you at the booking office. Come out the other side of the station with the next crop of passengers, walk back to Brooklands, get out the old kite and fly over to Heston. Peter will be there waiting for you. Do just what he tells you. Have you got it?"

"Ya mean we all do dis act?"

"Yes. All three of you. Teal will trace your call as soon as he gets back into action, and Weybridge will be no place for any of you to be seen alive in. You can take the scotch with you, so you won't be hungry. Happy landings."

"Okay, boss."

Simon put his finger on the contact breaker.

He lifted it again and lighted a cigarette while he dialled the number of Peter Quentin's apartment. The dull thudding behind him seemed louder and splintering noises were beginning to blend with it. The Saint blew smoke rings.

"Peter?… Good boy. This is Simon… Nothing, except that a small flock of balloons have gone up… No, but they will. In other words, Claud Eustace was here this morning to sing his theme song, as we expected; and meanwhile our protegee has pulled the bung. Hoppy rang up to tell me about it, and Teal took the call."

There was a pause while Peter assimilated this.

"Which police station are you speaking from, old boy?" he inquired cautiously, at last.

"None of them yet. But I expect they'll all be inviting me as soon as Teal gets out of the wardrobe where I've got him warming up at the moment. And they won't leave you out, either."

"As soon as—"

Peter's voice sounded faint and expiring.

The Saint grinned.

"Yes. Now listen, old son. Pat and Hoppy and Orace will be on their way to Heston with the Monospar at any moment. I've told them to pick you up there. Get on your way and don't leave any tracks behind you. You can take off at once and hop to Deauville; take the train to Paris, and I'll get in touch with you later at the Hotel Raphael."

There was another pause.

"That's all very well," said Peter, "but suppose I don't feel like going abroad?"

"Think how it would broaden your mind," said the Saint. "Don't be heroic, Peter. I'll be harder to catch on my own, and there's nothing for you to do here. I shan't be staying long myself. I've got a pretty sound idea that the last act of this 'ere thrilling mellerdrammer takes place in Paris, and I may want you there. I'll be seeing you."

He rang off before Peter could answer again.

The thundering in the next room was louder still; it could only be a matter of seconds now before the wardrobe door gave way. But the Saint stayed to refill his cigarette case before he went out and caught a descending lift that dropped him swiftly to the basement garage.

He was debonair and unhurried as he stepped into the Hirondel and woke the engine; the fighting vitality that was lilting recklessly through every cell in his body found an outlet only in the sapphire alertness of his eyes and the dynamic economy of his movements and the ghost of an unrepentant smile that lurked in the corners of his mouth… There was the same taxi parked by the curb at the top of the ramp, the same miniature sports car with the driver reading a newspaper spread over the wheel; this time Simon had no Sam Outrell in a following car to help him, but he was unconcerned. He shot past them and turned into Half Moon Street, heading north; in the mirror over the windshield he saw them coming after him. Simon worked his way into Park Lane, cruised up it until he saw a break of no more than half-a-dozen yards in the stream of traffic pounding down towards him, then he swung the wheel and sent the Hirondel screeching through the gap towards the pavement on the wrong side of the road. The cataract of vehicles swerved wildly out to avoid him, flowed on past him with curses and straining brakes, effectively barring the path of his pursuers. Simon bumped the curb, straightened up and crawled round the next corner into Mount Street. A couple of instants later he was whirling away with gathering speed, to zigzag round four more consecutive corners and obliterate the last clue to his direction in the rabbit warren of Mayfair.

The tangle he had left behind him in Park Lane was still sorting itself out when he crossed Oxford Street and turned the Hirondel to the west.

He felt sure that he knew what Lady Valerie's first move, would be now, and he felt almost as sure that London would be the place where she would make it. Both of the two most probable routes from Weybridge to London led through Putney, and he still had time to meet her there.

He crossed Putney High Street more decorously than he had crossed Park Lane, and backed into a side turning from which he could watch the crawling flow of London-bound traffic and pull out to join it with the minimum of delay. The Hirondel stood there like a great glistening jewel, and not for the first time since he had chosen its flamboyant colour scheme the Saint wished that his tastes had been more conservative. That plutocratic equipage, which drew every eye back for a second look, would do nothing to simplify his problems. A policeman strolled by and studied it with deep interest for fifty slow-paced yards. Simon's heart was in his mouth, but the constable passed on without stopping. Doubtless the alarm which must even then have been circulating had not yet reached him. For ten minutes the Saint endured a strain that would have worn many hardened nerves to shreds; and coupled with it was the continual gnawing fear that his guess might after all have been wrong and Lady Valerie would not come that way. His tanned face gave no inkling of his thoughts, but when he saw the black Daimler glide past the end of his side road, with Lady Valerie at the wheel, looking straight ahead of her, it was as if a miracle had happened.

The start of the Hirondel's engine was scarcely audible. Almost instantaneously he let in the clutch, and cut in to the line of traffic only two cars behind her. Intent and expressionless as a stalking leopard, the Saint drove on after her.

4

Her first stop was at the South Kensington post office. The Saint's eyes went cold and brittle when he saw the Daimler slowing up: Exhibition Road was too wide and unfrequented for any car to be unnoticeable in it. Fortunately on that account he had let himself fall some distance behind her. He jammed on the brakes and whipped round into Imperial Institute Road, and felt that the gods had been kind to him when he saw that she crossed the sidewalk and entered the post office without looking round. Clearly it had not occurred to her that she could have been picked up by that time.

He made a U turn in the side road and parked near the corner. Then, after a moment's hesitation, he got out and walked up towards the post-office entrance. It was a foolhardy thing to do, but a theory was already taking solid form in his mind. He had used that trick himself. Mail anything you want to hide, addressed to yourself at a poste restante in any name you can think of: where could it be safer or harder to find?

She came out so quickly that he was almost caught. He turned in a flash and stood with his back to her, taking out his cigarette case and deliberating lengthily over his selection of a cigarette. Reflected in the polished inside of the case, he saw her cross the pavement again, still without looking round, and get back into the car.

But he had been wrong. As she came out she was putting an envelope into her bag, but it was only a small one — obviously too small and thin to contain such a dossier as Kennet must have given her.

His brain leaped to encompass this reversal. Her cloakroom story must have been true, then: she had simply given herself double cover, mailing the ticket to herself at the poste restante. His imagination bridged the gaps like a bolt of lightning. Without even turning his head to check his observations, without letting himself indulge a further instant's vacillation, he started back towards his own car.

And in the middle of the next stride he stopped again as if he had run into an invisible wall.

Where he had left the Hirondel there was now another car drawn up alongside it — a lean, drab, unobtrusive car that hid its speedy lines under a veneer of studiously sombre cellulose, a car which to the Saint's cognizant eye carried the banners of the mobile police as plainly as the sails on a full-rigged ship, even before he saw the blue-uniformed man at the wheel and the other blue-uniformed man who had got out to examine the Hirondel at close quarters. The dragnet was out, and this was the privileged one out of the hundreds of patrol cars that must even then have been scouring the city for him that had located its gaudy quarry. If he had waited in the car they would have caught him.

But his guardian angel was still with him. They must have arrived only a moment ago, and they were still too wrapped up in the discovery of the Hirondel to have started looking round for the driver.

The Saint had spun round as soon as he saw them. He was between two fires now, but Valerie Woodchester was the less formidable. He whipped out a handkerchief and held it over the lower part of his face as he started up the road again. The Daimler was pulling out from the curb, moving on towards Kensington Gardens. On the opposite side of the road a taxi had pulled up to discharge its freight. Simon walked over towards it with long space-devouring strides that gave a deceptive impression of having no haste behind them. He climbed into the offside door as the passenger paid his fare.

"Go up towards the Park," he said. "And step on it."

The taxi swung round in an obedient semicircle and rattled north. As it came round the curve the Saint took a last look at the corner where he had so nearly met disaster. The blue-uniformed man who had got out of the police car was putting his hand on the Hirondel's radiator. He took it away quickly and said something to his companion, and then they both started to look round; but by that time their chance of immortal fame had slipped through their fingers. The Saint buried himself in the corner of the seat, and his cab bowled away on the second lap of the chase.

The policeman at the top of the road was stopping the north-and-south traffic, and the taxi had caught up to within a few yards of the Daimler's petrol tank when he lowered his arm. The driver slackened speed and half turned.

"Where to, sir?"

"Keep going." The Saint sat forward. "You see this Daimler just ahead of you?"

"Yessir."

"There's two quid for you on top of the fare if you can keep behind it."

You may have wondered what happens in real life when the pursuing sleuth leaps into a cab and yells "Follow that car!" The answer is that the driver says "Wot car?" After this has been made clear, if it can be made clear in time to be of any use, he simply follows. He has nothing better to do, anyhow.

Whether he can follow adequately or not is another matter. Simon suffered a short interval of tenterhooked anxiety before he was assured that his guardian angel, still zealously concentrating on its job, had sent him a taxi that was capable of keeping up with most ordinary cars in traffic and a driver with enough cupidity to kick it along in a way that showed that he regarded a two-pound tip as something to be seriously worked for. The whim of a traffic light or a point-duty policeman might still defeat him, but nothing else would.

Simon sat back and relaxed a little.

He had a brief breathing spell now in which to synopsize his thoughts on the recent visit from Comrade Fairweather which had dragged on to such a disastrous denouement. He was sure that the denouement had been no part of Fairweather's design. Fairweather, caught unprepared by Teal's presence and the things that had been going on when he arrived, had simply been improvising from start to finish — exactly as Simon's counterattack had been improvised. What he had really meant to say when he came to Cornwall House had not even been hinted at. But Simon was sure that he knew what had been left unsaid. By that time Bravache and his satellites must have reported to headquarters, and all the ungodly must have known that their plans had done more than go agley. Fairweather would not have been sent to threaten — he was not the type. He had been sent to try diplomacy, possibly the kind in which the balance of power is a bank balance, perhaps more probably the kind which is meant to lead one party to that apocryphal place known to American gangdom as the Spot. Either way, it was a token of the ungodly's increasing interest which gave the Saint a a stimulating feeling of approaching climax. He wished he could have heard what Fairweather really meant to say; but life was full of those unfinished symphonies…

They had slipped through the Park meanwhile and left it at Lancaster Gate. The Daimler threaded through to Eastbourne Terrace and parked there; the Saint's taxi driver, taking his instructions literally, stopped behind it. But luckily there is no vehicle on the streets of London so unlikely to draw attention to itself even by the weirdest manoeuvres as a taxi. Valerie Woodchester did not even look at it twice. She crossed the road and hurried away, heading for the gaunt grimy monstrosity known to long-suffering railway travellers as Paddington Station.

Simon unpacked himself from the depths of the cab into which he had instinctively retreated. He hopped out and poured two pound notes and some silver into the driver's palm.

"Thanks, Rupert," he said. "Pull down the street a little way and stick around for a bit — I may want you again."

He scooted on after Lady Valerie. She was out of sight when he rounded the next corner after her, but the station was the only place she could have been going into. He even knew what part of the station she would make for.

He stood inside the first entrance he came to and let his eyes probe around the gloom of the interior. It was so long since he had travelled by rail that he had almost forgotten the gruesome efficiency with which London railway terminals prepare the arriving voyager for the discomforts of his coming journey. The station, proudly ignoring the march of civilization, had not changed in a single material detail since he last saw it, any more than it had probably changed since the days when trains were preceded by a herald waving a red flag. There were the same dingy skylights overhead, opaque with accumulated grime; the same naked soot-blackened girders; the same stark soot-blackened walls splashed with lurid posters proclaiming the virtues of Bovril and the bracing breezes of Weston-super-Mare; the same filthily blackened floors patterned with zigzag trails of moisture where some plodding porter had passed by with a rusty watering can on a futile mission of dampening down the underfoot layers of dirt; the same bleak "refreshment" rooms with cold black marble counters and buzzing flies and unimaginative ham sandwiches in glass cases like museum specimens; the same faint but pervading smell of stale soot, stale humanity, and (for no apparent reason) stale horses. Somewhere in that gritty grisly monument to the civic enterprise of twentieth-century London he knew he would find Lady Valerie Woodchester; and presently he saw her, looking amazingly trim and clean among the sweating mobs of holiday-departing trippers, coming away from the direction of the checkroom. And now she carried a bulky manila envelope in one hand.

Simon ducked rapidly into a waiting room that looked like the anteroom of a morgue; but she went straight to the ticket office selling tickets for the Reading and Bristol line. He saw her turn away with a ticket and walk briskly back towards one of the departure platforms.

The Saint beelined for the window she had just left, but before he could reach it a large boiled-pink woman with two bug-eyed children clinging to her skirts was there in front of him. She was one of those women from whom no booking office ever seems to be free, who combine with the afflictions of acute myopia and deafness the habit of keeping their money in the uttermost depths of a series of intercommunicating bags and purses. Simon stood behind her and fumed on the verge of homicidal frenzy while she argued with the booking clerk and peered and fumbled with placid deliberation through the interminable succession of Chinese boxes in the last of which her portable funds were lovingly enshrined. A line of other prospective passengers began to form behind him. Unaware that the world was standing still and waiting for her, the woman began to count her change and reopen her collection of private puzzles to stow it lovingly away, while she went on to cross-examine the clerk about the freshness of the milk in the dining car on the train to Torquay. Meanwhile Lady Valerie had disappeared.

The Saint's patience came to an explosive end. He took hold of the woman by her raw beefy elbows and removed her from the window.

"Pardon me, madam," he said in a voice that the booking clerk was meant to hear. "I'm a police officer, and I'm busy."

He stuck his head down to the pigeonhole from which sixpenny excursion tickets are doled out at English railway stations with more grudging condescension than thousand-pound notes are passed out at the Bank of England.

"That young lady who was here just before your last customer," he said. "Where did she want to go to?"

Fortunately the clerk had a long memory.

"Anford, sir."

"Give me a ticket there — first class."

Simon slid money under the grille and turned away, grabbing up his ticket. He shoved past the gaping queue and collared a porter who was mooning by.

"Which is the next train to Anford, and where does it go from?" he snapped.

"Anford, sir?"

"Yes. Anford."

"Anford," said the porter, digesting the name. "Anford."

"Anford," said the Saint gutturally.

"Anford," said the porter, keeping his end up without any sign of fatigue. "Where would that be, sir?"

"It would be in Wiltshire. You change at Marlborough."

"Ar, Marlborough." The porter scratched his head. "Marlborough. Marlborough. Then it's a Marlborough train you'd be wanting, sir."

Simon overcame a fearful impulse to assault him.

"Yes. I could manage with a Marlborough train."

"There's one just leaving from platform six," said the man laboriously, as though a dark secret were being dragged out of him, "but I dunno as how you'd have time to catch that one—"

The Saint left him to be his own audience. He was off like a bolt out of a crossbow, plunging along towards an ancient smoky board that did its best not to reveal the whereabouts of platform six. And while he was on his way he was trying to place this new and unexpected destination of Lady Valerie's. Was she going there because she was at Paddington and it was the first place that came into her head? Or was she subtle enough to think that it was the last place where she would be looked for? Or had she some positive purpose? Or…

Something seemed to go off like a silent bomb inside the Saint's chest. The concussion threw his heart off its beat, squeezed all the air out of his lungs; his legs felt as if the marrow had been sucked out of the bones. He kept on walking through nothing but sheer muscular automatism.

There was one thing he had forgotten, and he had almost walked straight into it.

A burly man in a dark suit was pacing bovinely past the entrance to the platform, methodically scanning the faces of all the passengers who came within his view. He had the trade marks of Scotland Yard stamped all over him, and Simon could have picked him out of a crowd at five hundred yards if he had not been too preoccupied to look for him. As it was, another dozen steps would have planted him squarely on the man's shinily booted toes.

The alarm had gone out in earnest. A searingly vengeful Chief Inspector Teal had covered every exit from London that it was in his power to cover. No doubt there were the same burly bovine men at every station in the metropolis. The Saint hadn't a snowflake's hope in hell of boarding the train that Lady Valerie had taken. He would be lucky enough to get out of Paddington without irons on his wrists.