The Saint Plays with Fire (The Saint Series)

by Leslie Charteris

  “Go on.”

  The Saint poured out some more coffee.

  “Now let’s go to France. There they have a political, Fascist organisation 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 organisations 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 be just 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 organisation, 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 ‘ists.’ 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 how 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 eye-witnesses 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 has 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 evidence is worth cash to Fairweather and Company. 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 lace. 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 microphone 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 her 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 midflight, like a gong freezing a prize-fighter 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 grey 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 these 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 ransacked. In both places someone was looking for something, and from what you’ve told me the most likely person is you!”

  The Saint sighed.

  “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, than which there is nothing dearer to this chronicler’s hardened heart, it must be admitted that there was some justification for his biased 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 over-ripe prune.

  “What the hell’s the matter with you?” he bayed. “Can’t you even talk anymore?”

  “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 garotted gargle.

  “I’ve no idea why she should h
ave 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 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—”