Leslie Charteris - Prelude for War

"No — at least, not exactly," she answered. "I mean, he's quite easy to get on with really, and he simply throws money about, but he does ask rather a lot of questions."

Fairweather cleared his throat.

"The man is becoming a perfect nuisance," he said imperially. "But I think we can deal with him soon enough. I'm glad you told me about it. I'll have a word with the commissioner of police in the morning and see that he's taken care of."

"Oh no, you mustn't do that," she said quickly. "I can. take care of myself all right, and it's rather thrilling to be pestered by a famous character like the Saint. That isn't what I rang you up for. What I wanted was to ask your advice about something Johnny left with me."

"Something Kennet left with you?"

"Some papers he gave me to read only a week or two ago — a great thick wad of them."

Mr Fairweather experienced the curious sensation of feeling the walls close in on him while at the same time the floor and the ceiling began to draw together. Since he was at that moment in a booth which had very little space to spare after enveloping his own ample circumference, the sensation was somewhat horrifying.

It had caught him so completely unprepared that for a few seconds he seemed to have mislaid his voice. A cold perspiration broke out on his forehead. He felt as though he were being suffocated, but he dared not open the door of the booth to let in the air for which his lungs were aching. In fact, he drew it tighter.

"Papers?" he got out hoarsely. "What papers? What were they about?"

"I don't know. Johnny seemed to think they were terribly important; but then he thought so many things were terribly important that I just couldn't keep track of them all. So I didn't even read them."

The inward rush of the walls slackened for a moment. Mr Fairweather managed to snatch a handful of oxygen into his chest.

"You didn't read them?" he echoed weakly. "Well, I'd better have a look at those papers. It's a good thing you told me about them. I'll come round at once."

"But that wouldn't be any good," she said miserably. "You see, I haven't got the papers now. I don't even know where they are.. That's what I wanted your advice about."

The accumulation of seesaw effects was making Mr Fair-weather feel slightly seasick. He was very different from the staid and dignified gentleman who had been drinking a sedate brandy and soda only a few thousand years ago. He mopped his brow.

"You haven't got them?" he bleated shrilly. "Then who has got them?"

"Nobody. At least — it's frightfully difficult trying to tell you all at once. You see, what happened was something like this. John and I had been having a row — the usual old row about you and his father and Mr Luker and all that. I was telling him not to be ridiculous, and he suddenly shoved a great envelope full of papers into my hands and told me to go through them and then say if I still thought he was being ridiculous. Then he stormed out of the place in a fearful rage, and I had lots of things to do, and I couldn't go on carrying a whacking great envelope about with me forever, so I dumped it somewhere and I didn't think any more about it until the other day."

"How do you mean, you dumped it?" squealed Fair-weather, like a soul in torment. "You must have put it somewhere. Where is it?"

"That's just what I don't know," she said. "Of course it must be somewhere; I mean, I didn't just drop it over the side of a bus or anything like that. But I simply can't remember where I had it last. I've got a sort of idea that it might be in the cloakroom at Piccadilly Station, or I may have left it in the cloakroom at the Savoy. In fact, I'm pretty sure I did put it in a cloakroom somewhere."

Fairweather clung to the telephone bracket for support.

"Then you. must have a ticket for it," he pointed out with heart-rending logic. "Why don't you look for the ticket?"

"But I can't," she said plaintively. "It's a terrible bore. You see, if I had a ticket it was probably in my bag, and of course that was lost in the fire with all my other things."

"But—" said Fairweather.

The word "but" is not commonly used to convey the more cosmic intensities of emotion, but Mr Fairweather's pronunciation imbued it with a depth and colour that can rarely if ever have been achieved before. The exasperation of a reasonable man who finds himself in an unreasonable and chaotic universe, the sharp horror of a prisoner on an excavating party who learns that he has kindly been allowed to dig his own grave, the outraged protest of a mathematician to whom has been demonstrated an insuperable fallacy in his proof that two and two make four — all these several shades of travail were summed up and vivified in Mr Fairweather's glorification of the word "but."

"I wondered if it might be a good scheme to get Mr Templar to help me," Valerie went on. "I mean, he seems to have quite a crush on me, so he'd probably be glad to do it if I was nice to him, and he must have had loads of experience at ferreting about and detecting things."

"Grrr," said Mr Fairweather.

If possible, he improved on his performance with the word "but." This time, in one primitive ululation, he added to his symphonic integration of emotions the despairing dolour of the camel whose backbone is just giving way under the final straw, the shuddering panic of the hunted hyena which feels the tiger's fangs closing on its throat, the pitiful expiring gasp of the goldfish which has just been neatly hooked from its bowl by a hungry cat.

"Of course I've been cursing myself for not thinking of it before," said Lady Valerie penitently. "I mean, if those papers really were terribly important, I suppose I ought to have said something about them at the inquest. That's where I'd like your advice. Do you think I ought to ring up Scotland Yard and tell them about it?"

Mr Fairweather had no new depths to plumb. He was a man who had already done all the gamut running of which he was capable.

"Listen," he said with frightfully muted violence. "You must put that idea out of your head at once. The police have no discretion. Think — think of how it might hurt poor Johnny's father. And whatever happens, you mustn't say a word to Templar. You haven't told him about those papers yet, have you?"

"No, not definitely. But you know, I believe he guesses something about them. He's terribly suspicious. Two or three times this evening he asked me if Johnny had ever given me anything to keep for him, or if I knew where Johnny might have kept his private papers. But he can't do anything to me, because I thought I'd better be on the safe side and so I've taken plenty of precautions. You see, Celia Mallard probably knows where I left those papers, and I've written to her about them. She's at Cap d'Ail now, but I'll probably hear from her in a day or two."

"Celia Mallard knows where they are?" moaned Fair-weather. "How the devil does she know?"

"Well, I seem to remember that she was with me when I dumped them, and she's got a perfectly marvellous memory, so she'll probably remember all about it. I told her in my letter that they were worth thousands of pounds, and that the Saint was after them, and so if anything happened to me she was to go straight to the police. That ought to stop the Saint doing anything really awkward, oughtn't it?"

Mr Fairweather's mouth opened. After all his other vicissitudes, he underwent the culminating sensation of having been poured out of a frying pan into an ice-cold bath. The contrast steadied him for a moment; but he shivered.

"I suppose it might," he said. "But what made you say the papers were worth thousands of pounds?"

"I don't know. But I thought, if they really are terribly important, they're bound to be worth a lot of money to somebody, aren't they?" she said reasonably.