Leslie Charteris - Prelude for War

"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 the 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 mid-flight, like a gong freezing a prizefighter 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.

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 gray 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 those 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 ransaked. In both places someone was looking for something, and from what you've told me the most likely person is you!"

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.