Leslie Charteris - Prelude for War

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

"You swine!" she whispered.

"I'm sorry," he said cynically.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She shook her head.

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

She stopped, frowning. He held his breath.

"But what?" he prompted.

"Nothing," she said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Her eyes widened.

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

"Just that," he said.

She laughed. Her laughter sounded a trifle false.

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

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

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

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

She stood up.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She put out her hand again. He held it.

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

"If what?" he asked.

She bit her lip.

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

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

She smiled at him rather wistfully.

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

"And why not?"

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

"Oh, go to hell!" she said.

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

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

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

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

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

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