The Saint Steps In (The Saint Series)

by Leslie Charteris

  “Why did you pretend to be a reporter?”

  She shrugged.

  “You said it yourself, didn’t you? I’m a mildly enterprising nitwit. So I don’t want everyone to know what a nitwit I am. I suppose I could have made Mr Devan call you up on some excuse and meet you that way, but I try to let him think I’m half-way sane, because, after all, he does work for my father. And if I’d called you up and said I was dying to meet you I was sure you’d just send the house detective after me. So I thought I was being rather clever.” Her face became quite empty and listless. “I guess I wasn’t. I’m sorry.”

  Her vague light eyes studied him for a moment longer, and then she stood up.

  “Anyway, I did get to meet you, just the same, so I think it was worth it…I’ll get out of your way now.”

  He watched her. The curious inward immobility that had seized him when she told him her name had dissolved completely, but imperceptibly, so that he hadn’t even noticed the change. But his brain was fluid and alive again now, as if all the cells in it were working like coordinated individuals, like bees in a hive.

  He said, “Sit down, Andrea, and finish your drink.”

  She sat down, with a surprised expression, as if someone had pushed her. The Saint smiled.

  “After all, you were enterprising,” he murmured, “so I’ll forgive you. Besides, it’s just occurred to me that you might be able to do something for me one of these days.”

  Her eyes opened.

  “Could I? I’d do anything…But you’re just kidding me. Nothing so marvellous as that could ever happen!”

  “Don’t be too sure?”

  “Do you often do that?—I mean, get perfect strangers to help you do things?”

  “Not often. But sometimes. And, anyway, perhaps by that time we won’t be such strangers.”

  “I hope not,” she said softly, and then she blinked. “This isn’t happening to me,” she said.

  He laughed.

  “What do you do—work for Quenco, too?”

  “Oh, no. I’m much too stupid. I just do nothing. I’m a very useless person really. What would you want me to do for you?”

  “I’ll tell you when the time comes.”

  “I hope it’ll be something exciting.”

  “It might be.”

  She leaned forward a little, watching him eagerly.

  “Tell me—why did you think I might be an Axis agent? Were you expecting one?”

  “It wasn’t impossible,” he said carefully.

  “Are you working on some Secret Service job? And those men you had to fight with tonight…No, wait.” She frowned, thinking. Somehow, although she said she was stupid she managed to look quite intelligent, thinking. “Mr Devan only thought of a hold-up. But he knew this girl you rescued—Madeline Gray. You see, I’ve got a memory like a parrot. Her father has an invention. Synthetic rubber. So the Gestapo or whatever it is want to get hold of it. So they think if they can kidnap his daughter they can make him tell. But you’re looking after her, so they don’t get away with it. So you think they’ll be sending somebody to get rid of you. How’s that?”

  He blew a meticulously rounded smoke-ring.

  “It’s not bad.”

  “Is it right?”

  “I can’t answer for all of it. Madeline Gray, yes. Father makes synthetic rubber, yes. Try to kidnap daughter, yes. But who and why—that’s something to make up our minds about slowly.”

  “Is that why you asked if I was an Axis agent or a private crook?” she said shrewdly.

  The shift of his lips and eyebrows was cheerfully noncommittal.

  “Wonderful weather we’ve been having,” he said.

  “But you were looking after her.”

  “I am looking after her,” he said, without a trace of emphasis on the change of tense. She pouted humorously.

  “All right. I mustn’t ask questions.” She finished her drink, and gazed into the empty glass, “Couldn’t we go somewhere and dance?” she said abruptly.

  “No.” He came up off the chair-back that he had been propping himself on. “I’m sorry, but I’ve got to pack a couple of things. And then I’ll be travelling.”

  She stood up.

  “You mean you’re leaving Washington?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then how are we going to get to know each other better?”

  “How does anyone find you?”

  “You can call Daddy’s office in New York. His secretary always knows where we are—he talks to her every day. I’ll talk to her myself and ask her to tell you.”

  “Then it ought to be easy.”

  She hesitated.

  “But where are you going?”

  He thought it over before he answered.

  “I’m going to see Calvin Gray, and I’m taking Madeline with me. I told you I was looking after them. I’d love to go dancing with you, Andrea, but this is business.”

  “Where does he live?”

  “Near Stamford, Connecticut.”

  “We’ve got a place at Westport,” she said lingeringly.

  “Then we might run into each other some time,” he smiled.

  He took her to the door, and after she had gone he came back and poured himself another drink before he went to the telephone. He had to call three or four numbers before he located the man he wanted.

  “Hullo, Ham,” he said. “Simon. Sorry to interrupt you, but I’m going solo for a few days. I want a private plane to go to the nearest field to Stamford. Organise it for me, will you? I’ll be at the airport in an hour.”

  “You don’t want much, do you?’’

  “Only one of those little things you handle so beautifully, Comrade…Oh, and one other thing.”

  “I suppose you’d like Eleanor to come down and see you off.”

  “Get me some dossiers. Anything and everything you can dig up—including dirt. Airmail them to me at General delivery, Stamford. Get the names. Calvin Gray, research chemist. A guy named Walter Devan, who works for Quenco.” Simon lighted a cigarette. “Also Hobart Quennel himself, and his daughter Andrea.”

  He hung up, and sat for several moments, drawing steadily at his cigarette and watching the smoke drift away from his lips.

  Then he went into the bedroom and started packing his bag, humming gently to himself as he moved about. He was travelling very light, and there wasn’t much to do. He had practically finished when the telephone rang again, and he picked it up.

  “Washington Ping-Pong and Priority Club,” he said.

  “This is Madeline Gray,” she said. “Are you still tied up?”

  “No.”

  “Can you come up to see me, or shall I come down?”

  He didn’t need to be as sensitive as he was to feel the unnatural restraint in her voice.

  “Is something going on,” he asked quietly, “or can’t you talk now? Just say Yes or No.”

  “Oh, yes, I can talk. There’s nobody here. I suppose I’m just silly. But…” The pause was quite long. Then she went on, and her voice was still cold and level and sensible. “I’ve been trying to phone my father and let him know we’re coming. But they say there’s no answer.”

  Simon relaxed on the bed and flipped cigarette ash on the carpet.

  “Maybe he’s gone to a movie, or he’s out with the boys analysing alcohol in one of the local saloons.”

  “He never goes out in the evening. He hates it. Besides, he knew I was going to phone tonight. I was going to talk to him as soon as I’d seen Imberline. Nothing on earth could have dragged him out until he knew about that. Or do you think you’ve scared me too much?”

  The Saint lay back and stared at the ceiling, feeling cold needles tiptoeing up his spine and gathering in spectral conclave on the nape of his neck.

  4

  Simon Templar checked his watch mechanically as the Beechcraft sat down on the runway at Armonk airport. One hour and fifteen minutes from Washington was good travelling, even with a useful tailwind, and he hop
ed that his haste hadn’t ground too much life out of the machinery.

  The pilot who was to take the ship back, who hadn’t asked a single question all the way because he had been taught not to, said “Good luck.” Simon grinned and shook hands, and led Madeline Gray to the taxi that he had phoned to meet them.

  As they turned east towards Stamford he was still considering the timetable. They could be at Calvin Gray’s house in twenty minutes. Making about an hour and thirty-five minutes altogether. Only a few minutes longer than one of the regular air lines would have taken to make New York, even if there had been a plane leaving at the same time. Furthermore, he had left no loophole for the Ungodly to sabotage the trip, or to interfere with him in any way before he got to his destination. They couldn’t have intercepted him at any point, because they couldn’t have discovered his route before it was too late.

  As for any other connections that the Ungodly could have used, it would have taken an hour to drive from New York to Stamford, or fifty minutes on a fast train—ignoring such delays as phone calls to start the movement, or the business of getting a vehicle to drive in, or the travelling to and from railroad stations, and the inconsiderate tendency of railroads not to have trains waiting on a siding at all hours ready to pull out like taxis off a rank.

  He had tried to explain some of this to the girl while they were flying.

  “If anything has happened to Daddy,” she said now, “there were people there already.”

  “Then whatever happened has happened already,” he said, “and nobody on earth could have caught up with it. I thought of phoning somebody to go out from New York, but they mightn’t have gotten here any sooner than we have. I could have phoned the Stamford Town Police, but what could we have told them? So the telephone doesn’t answer. They’d have said the same as I said. By the time we’d gotten through all the arguing and rigmarole, it could have been almost as late as this by the time they got started. If they ever got started.

  “Maybe I’m just imagining too much,” she said.

  He didn’t know. He could just as easily have been imagining too much himself. He had spent a lot of time trying to get his own mind straight.

  He said, because it helped to crystallise his ideas to talk aloud, “The trouble is that we don’t even know who the Ungodly are, or what they’re working towards…Suppose they were private crooks. An invention like this could be worth a fortune. They’d want to get the formula—just for dough. All right. They might kidnap you, so that they could threaten your father with all kinds of frightful things that might happen to you if he didn’t give them the secret. They might kidnap him, and try to torture it out of him.”

  He felt her flesh tighten beside him.

  “But there have also been these accidents you told me about. Wrecking his laboratory. Sabotage. It’s a nice exciting word. But where would it get them—in the end?”

  She said, “If they were spies—”

  “If they were spies,” he said, “they wouldn’t be blowing up a laboratory. They might break into it to see what they could see. But they wouldn’t destroy it, because they want the work to go on. They just want the results. And if they wanted to kidnap you or your father to squeeze a formula out of you with horsewhips and hot irons—they’d have tried it long before this. You wouldn’t have been hard to snatch.”

  “Well,” she said, “they could just be saboteurs. They warned me not to try and see Mr Imberline. They might just want to stop us getting anywhere.”

  “Then both of you would have been crated and under grass by this time,” he said cold-bloodedly. “Killing is a lot easier than kidnapping, and when you get into the class of political and philosophical killers you are talking about a bunch of babies who never went to Sunday School. That’s the whole thing that stops me. What goes with this pulling of punches—this bush-league milquetoast skullduggery?”

  He went on nagging his mind with that proposition while the taxi turned up the Merritt Parkway and presently branched off again to the right up a meandering lane that brought them to a stone gateway and through that up a short trim drive to the front of a comfortably spacious New England frame house. He had a glimpse of white shingled walls and green shingled roofs and gables as the taxi’s headlights swept over them, and he saw that there were lights behind some of the curtains. For a moment her hand was on his arm, and he put his own hand over it, but neither of them said anything.

  She opened the front door while he was paying off the driver, and he carried their bags up the path of light to the hall and joined her there.

  She called, “Daddy!”

  They could hear the taxi’s wheels crunching out off the gravel and the hum of its engine fading down the lane, leaving them alone together in the stillness.

  “Daddy!” she called.

  She went through an open door into the living-room, and he put the bags down and followed her. The room was empty, with one standard lamp burning beside the piano.

  She went out again quickly.

  He stayed there, lighting a cigarette and taking in the scene. It was a livable kind of room, with built-in bookshelves and plenty of ashtrays and not too fancy chintz covers on the chairs, a pleasant compromise between interior decorating and masculine comfort. There were no signs of violence or disorder, but there were rumples in various cushions where they had been sat on since the room was last done over. There was a pipe in one of the ashtrays by the fireplace; he went over and felt the bowl, and it was quite cold. He wondered how long a pipe bowl would stay warm after it was put down.

  A telephone stood on the same table. He picked it up, and heard the familiar tone of a clear line. Just to make sure, he dialled a number at random, and heard the ringing at the other end, and then the click of the connection, and a gruffly sleepy male voice that said, “Yes?”

  “This is Joe,” said the Saint momentously. “You’d better start thinking fast. Your wife has discovered everything.”

  He hung up, and turned to Madeline Gray as she came back into the room.

  “The phone is working,” he said casually. “There’s nothing wrong with the line.”

  “Come with me,” she said.

  He took her arm and crossed the hall with her. They looked into the dining-room, sedate and barren like any dining-room between meals. They went on into the kitchen. It was clean and spotless, inhabited only by a ticking clock on a shelf.

  “I’ve been here,” she said.

  “Would he have had dinner?”

  “I couldn’t tell.”

  “What about servants?”

  “We haven’t had anyone living in for a couple of weeks, and we weren’t going to do anything about it until I got back from Washington. Daddy couldn’t have been bothered with interviewing them and breaking them in. I got him a girl who used to work for us, who got married and lives quite close by. She could have got him his dinner and cleaned up and gone home.”

  After that there was a study lined with ponderous and well-worn books, and featuring a couple of filing cabinets and a big desk littered with papers as the principal movable furniture. It was fairly messy, in a healthy haphazard way.

  Simon went to one of the filing cabinets, and pulled open a drawer at random. The folders looked regular enough, to anyone who hadn’t lived with the system.

  He turned from there to glance over the desk. He only saw a disarray of letters, circulars, cryptic memoranda, abstruse pamphlets, and assorted manuscript.

  “How does it look to you?” he asked.

  “About the same as usual.”

  “You must have lived with some of this stuff. Does any of it look wrong?”

  She skimmed through the filing drawer that he had opened, and turned over some of the papers on the desk. After that she still looked blank and helpless.

  “I couldn’t possibly say. He’s so hopelessly untidy when he isn’t being fanatically neat.”

  Simon stared at the desk. He didn’t know Calvin Gray’s habits, or anything about hi
s work and interests. He knew that it was perfectly possible to search files and papers without leaving a room looking as if a cyclone had gone through it.

  Anyway, what would anyone have been searching for? Nobody would have been expected to keep a precious secret formula in an open filing cabinet, or sandwiched between tax demands and seed catalogues on top of a desk…And still he had that exasperating feeling of underlying discord, of some factor that didn’t explain itself or didn’t connect, as if he was trying to force everything into one or two wrong theories, when there was still a right theory that would have accommodated everything, only he had been too blind to see it yet.

  “Let’s see everything,” he said shortly.

  They went upstairs and saw bedrooms. Madeline Gray’s room. Calvin Gray’s room. A couple of guest rooms. Bathrooms. Everything looked ordinary and orderly. It was a nice well-kept house.

  “So he isn’t here,” said the Saint. “There’s no blood and no smashed windows and no dead bodies in any of the closets. He went out and left the lights on. Why shouldn’t he go out and leave the lights on?”

  He didn’t know whether he was trying to console her or whether he was arguing with himself. He knew damn well that it was perfectly simple to kidnap a man without wrecking his house. You just walked in on him and stuck a gun in his ribs and said “Come for a walk, pal,” and nine times out of ten that was all the commotion there was going to be.

  “There’s still the laboratory,” she said in a small voice, and he caught at that for the moment’s reprieve.

  “Why didn’t you show me that before?”

  She took him out of the house, and they walked by a winding path through tall slender trees whose delicate upper branches lost themselves in the darkness beyond the glow of his pencil flashlight.

  The laboratory had been invisible from the house and the driveway, and they came on it suddenly in a shadowy clearing—a long white modernistic building with a faint glow from inside outlining the Venetian windows. She led him to the door, and they went into a tiny hall. A door that stood ajar on one side disclosed tiled walls and a wash-basin and shower.

  Beyond the little hall, the laboratory was a long sanitary barn with a single lamp burning overhead and striking bright gleams from glass tubes and retorts and long shelves of neatly labelled bottles and porcelain-topped benches and stranger pieces of less describable apparatus. But nothing was broken, and everything seemed reasonably in order. Only there was no one there.