Leslie Charteris - Prelude for War

"And what are you going to do after you've ditched me?" she asked sulkily. "I suppose you'll go dashing back to your blonde girl friend and tell her how clever you are."

"I don't have to tell her," said the Saint. "She knows."

"Well, you're not as clever as all that," flared the girl in open mutiny. "You heard what I told those two policemen. You didn't deny it then — anything was all right with you so long as it helped you to get away. You — you signed your name to it. And I won't be ditched. If you try to get rid of me now I–I'll sue you for breach of promise!"

Simon steadied himself. Now that the impending thunderstorm had broken, exactly as he had been nerving himself for it, he almost felt better.

"No jury would give you a farthing damages, sweetheart," he said. "As a matter of fact, they'd probably give me a reward for letting you out of an agreement to marry me."

"Oh, would they? Well, we'll see. It's all very well for you to go around breaking thousands of hearts and pushing around all the women you meet like a little Hitler bossing his tame dummies in the Reichstag—"

The car rocked with a force that flung her away from him.

The Saint straightened it up again anyhow. He let go the wheel and thumped his fists on it like a lunatic.

He yodelled. His face was transfigured.

"My God," he yelled, "how did you think of it? Of course that's what it was. That's the answer. The Reichstag!"

She gaped at him, rubbing a bruised elbow where it had hit the door in that wild swerve.

"What's the matter?" she asked blankly. "Have you gone pots or something?"

"The Reichstag!" he whooped deliriously. "Don't you see? That's what Kennet wrote on that bit of paper. REMEMBER THE REICHSTAG!"

He was so dazed with understanding that he had not noticed a big black Packard which had crept up behind them, was hardly aware when it pulled out in the narrow road and raced level with the crawling Daimler. Almost unconsciously he swung in to let it pass.

Lady Valerie looked back over her shoulder and suddenly screamed. With a quick panicky movement she turned and grabbed at the steering wheel and twisted it sharply. From the overtaking car came the crisp high-pitched crack of a gun, and the windscreen splintered in front of Simon's eyes. Then the Daimler lurched madly as its near-side wheels slithered and plunged into a gully at the side of the road. The bank that rose up from there to the bordering hedge seemed to loom directly ahead. Simon felt himself hurled forward helplessly in his seat; the steering wheel struck him a violent blow in the chest and knocked the wind out of him; then he rose into the air as if deprived of weight. Something struck him a fearful blow on the top of the head. Bright lights whirled dizzily before his eyes and faded into a blackening mist of unconsciousness.

Obeying an urgent and peremptory summons, Mr Algernon Sidney Fairweather, Brigadier-General Sir Robert Sangore and Lady Sangore, arrived at Luker's house a little before seven o'clock that evening. They were perturbed and nervous, and their emotions expressed themselves in various individual ways during the ten minutes that Luker kept them waiting in his study.

Nervousness made General Sangore, if possible, a little more military. He tugged at his moustache and frowned out fiercely from under bristling white eyebrows; his speech had a throaty brusqueness that made his every utterance sound like a severe official reprimand.

"Infernal nerve the feller has," he rumbled. "Ordering us about as if we hadn't anything else to do but wait on him. Harrumph! I had a good mind to tell him I was too busy to come."

Lady Sangore was very cold and superior. Her face, which had always borne a close resemblance to that of a horse, became even more superciliously equine. She sat in an even more primly upright attitude than her corsets normally obliged her to maintain, bulging her noble bosom like a pouter pigeon and tilting her nose back as if there were an unpleasant odour under it.

"Yes, you were busy," she said. "You were going to the club, weren't you? Much too busy to attend to business. Ha!" The word "ha" does not do justice to the snort of an irate dragon, but the limited phonetics of the English alphabet will produce nothing better. "You'd better stop being so busy and get your wits about you. Something must be seriously wrong or Mr Luker wouldn't have sent for you like this."

Fairweather twittered. He fidgeted with his hands and shuffled his feet and wriggled; there seemed to be an itch in his muscles that would not let him settle down.

"I don't like it," he moaned. "I don't like it at all. Luker is… Really, I can't understand him at all these days. His behaviour was most peculiar when I told him about the wire I had from Lady Valerie this afternoon. He didn't even sympathize at all with what I went through with that man Templar and that boorish detective. He asked me a few questions and took the wire and rushed off and left me alone in his drawing room, and I just sat there until he sent the butler to tell me to go away and wait till I heard from him."

"I can't think why men get so excited about that girl," said Lady Sangore disparagingly, stabbing her husband, with a basilisk eye.

The general cleared his throat.

"Really, Gwendolyn! You surely don't suspect—"

"I suspect nothing," said Lady Sangore freezingly. "I merely keep my eyes open. I know what men are."

She seemed to have made a unique anthropological discovery.

Fairweather leaned forward, glancing around him furtively as if he feared being overheard.

"There's something I–I must tell you before he comes," he said in a stage whisper. "We… I mean, there's good reason to suspect that Lady Valerie is working with that man Templar against our interests, and unless something is done at once the position may become serious."

"So that's what it is," said Lady Sangore magisterially. "And what's Mr Luker going to do about it? The girl ought to be whipped, that's what I've always said."

Fairweather dropped his voice even lower.

"Last night he — he practically told me he meant to have both of them murdered."

"Good God!" exclaimed General Sangore in a scandalized voice. "But that's ridiculous — absurd! Why, she belongs to one of the best families in England!" He glared about him indignantly. "It's that bounder Templar who's led her astray. He ought to be severely dealt with. Dammit, if I'd ever had him in my regiment…"

He broke off as Luker appeared in the doorway.

Luker stood there for a moment and looked at them one by one. He did not seem in the least disturbed. Perhaps a faint flicker of surprise crossed his face when he saw that Lady Sangore was present, but he made no comment. His dark, well-tailored suit fitted him like a cloth covering squeezed over a marble figure; he looked harder and stonier than ever, as though he would wear it out from the inside. His square rugged features had the insensitive strength of the same stone.

He moved deliberately across the room to his enormous desk, sat down in the swivel chair behind it and faced them with almost taunting expectancy. They looked at each other and avoided his eyes, subdued in spite of themselves into hoping that somebody else would give them a lead.

General Sangore was the first to let himself go.

"What's this story of Fairweather's that you're planning to murder Lady Valerie Woodchester?" he blurted out.

Luker inclined his head unimpressionably.

"So you have heard? That will save some explanations. Yes, it has become very necessary that she and Templar should be eliminated. That is why I sent for you this evening."