Leslie Charteris - Prelude for War

"D-do you really think he'll think of all that?"

"I know damn well he'll think of it. Has thought of it. There may be plenty of things about him I don't like, but he couldn't be where he is and be that dumb. And besides, he has Luker to help him think." Simon glanced at his watch. "By this time—"

He had no need to go into any further explanations of what might have happened by that time. A heavy knock on the door provided them for him.

The sound went down into the Saint's stomach as if he had swallowed a lump of lead. For an instant he felt as if all the blood stopped circulating in his veins, and his ears roared with the thunder of his own stillness. The knocking was so apt, so uncannily instantaneous on its cue, that for a fraction of a second he seemed to be jarred out of all power of movement.

And then he was very quiet and very cool. His glance whirled over the room: its masses of furniture provided half-a-dozen hiding places but none of them was any good. He took one step aside and looked out of the window. It opened on to the High Street, and the sidewalks were busy with people.

The Saint's eyes went back to Lady Valerie, and they were oddly, incredibly gay. But besides that reckless humour they carried something else that could only be described here in page after page of inadequate words. She stared at him in the frightened continuation of a stupor that had lasted longer than his own, while his eyes spoke to her with that queer vague message that awoke no less formless questions and answers in her brain, and the two of them seemed to be infinitely alone in a strange universe of their own where thoughts passed without words; all of that in an eternity that could only have lasted for a moment before his lips were shaping inaudible syllables:

"Let them in."

She got up, and he moved behind her and stood behind the door as she opened it, with his right hand resting lightly on the butt of his gun inside the breast of his coat.

A voice said: "Lady Valerie? May we come in?"

She stammered something and stepped back. The Saint felt the edge of the bed against his knees and sat down quickly on it. The door, closing again, disclosed him to the arrivals at the same time as it revealed them to him. They were the police sergeant whom he had met before, in plain clothes, and the constable whose name was Reginald.

Whereupon quite a number of interesting jobs of looking proceeded to take place in various directions.

The Saint looked at the two arms of the law, and his face broke into an affable and untroubled smile of welcome. He took his right hand out of the breast of his coat with his cigarette case in it.

The constable looked at the Saint, and his mouth sagged open. He said in a dazed and dumbfounded sort of voice: "Gorblimey, it's 'im." Then he went on staring, while his honest red face expressed an inward struggle between admiration and duty.

The sergeant looked at the Saint and stiffened. He looked slightly frightened, but his uneasiness was clearly subservient to his sense of responsibility. He planted himself more firmly on his by-no-means-ethereal feet, as if bracing himself to deal with trouble.

Then another thought seemed to cross his mind, distracting him. He tried to resist it, but it grew stronger. He frowned. He looked at Lady Valerie again, rather perplexedly.

Lady Valerie looked at him and twitched a rather weak and uncertain little smile. Then she looked at the Saint.

The Saint looked at her. His face was cheerfully composed, but his eyes said again, for her alone, the same things that they had said when the two of them had looked at one another before he told her to open the door. It was as if they met her with a challenge, a suggestion, a request, a mocking invitation, a sardonic query, anything but a plea; and yet no other eyes on earth could have pleaded more compellingly. And now she understood some things that she had not understood before.

She looked at the sergeant again.

The sergeant looked at the constable.

The constable looked at the sergeant, not very intelligently, perhaps, but with a dawning grasp of what was troubling his superior's mind.

Both of them looked at the Saint.

Both of them looked at Lady Valerie.

Both of them looked at the Saint once more.

The sergeant scratched his head.

"Well, I dunno," he announced helplessly. "There must be somethink barmy about this."

Simon had his cigarette case open. He took out a cigarette.

"What's on your mind, brother?" he inquired amiably.

The sergeant took another look round, and apparently could only come to the same conclusion. As if in token of surrender, he took off his hat.

"Well sir, it's like this. Just a few minutes ago we received a message from Scotland Yard saying as you'd kidnapped Lady Valerie Woodchester, an' she'd escaped from you, an' they 'ad reason to believe she might 'ave come here to Anford, an' you might be arfter 'er to try an' kidnap 'er again, an' we was to endeavour to trace 'er an' afford her every protection, an' if we found you hanging about there was a warrant for your arrest. Well, we tried the hotels first, and as soon as we rang up 'ere they told us that Lady Valerie 'ad just come in and taken a room. So I come along to see if she'd like to make a statement an' if she wanted a man to look arfter 'er, an' now you're here with" er, and… Well," said the sergeant, plugging his initial thesis, "there must be somethink barmy about it."

"There's a warrant for my arrest?" Simon ejaculated. "What on earth is it for?"

"Kidnapping Lady Valerie. An' obstructing the police in the execution of their duty."

Simon had wondered how Mr Teal would officially describe being locked up in a wardrobe with an ex-cabinet minister.

"Good Lord," he said, "does it look as if Lady Valerie was excited about being rescued?"

"That," said the sergeant, with lugubrious finality, "is wot looks so barmy."

The Saint grinned and leaned back.

"Are you sure somebody hasn't been pulling your leg?" he suggested.

"I dunno. If anybody has, 'e'll be sorry he ever tried it before I've finished with 'im. But it sounded all right, just like the regular communications we 'ave from the Yard when there's anythink doing." The sergeant turned his disappointedly bewildered eyes back to the girl. "Did Mr Templar kidnap you, miss?" he asked, like a drowning man clutching at the last straw.

Lady Valerie looked at the Saint again and back to the two policemen.

Simon put his cigarette between his lips and drew at it very slowly.

"Why," she said, "that's the funniest thing I ever heard!"

There was a silence in which no pins could have been heard dropping because nobody was dropping pins. The sergeant scratched another part of his head and squeezed little wedges of coagulated dandruff from under his fingernails. He looked as unhappy as any public servant must look when confronted by a situation that fails to follow the dotted line. Simon took his cigarette out of his mouth and trickled the smoke out in a long leisured streamer through the unaltered quizzical curve of his lips. His gaze rested contemplatively on Lady Valerie as her glance returned to him. She looked coy and complacent, like a puppy that has got away with an unguarded plate of foie gras canapés . It was left to the constable to make the first constructive contribution. An expression of mingled relief and pride had ironed the wrinkles out of his countenance when he heard Lady Valerie's confirmatory denial: quite plainly he had been making a dutiful effort to convince himself that the Saint had actually been caught more or less red handed, but he had never really made it stick hard enough to be able to let go of it, and it was distinctly cheering to him to be absolved from the strain of continuing to hold it down. Now he was free to indulge in his own theories, and the solution came to him with dazzling simplicity.