Prelude For War s-19

by Leslie Charteris

  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 th
at 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.r />
  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. . . .