Leslie Charteris - Prelude for War

He made the statement in a way that left them no doubt of how they might be implicated if the worst came to the worst. But they were too battered to fight back. His words moved like barbs among the balloons of their self-esteem. They stared at him, curiously deflated, trying to persuade themselves that they were not afraid…

Luker's square, powerful hands lay flat on the blotter in front of him, palm downwards, in a pattern that symbolically and physically and quite unconsciously expressed an instinct of command that held down all opposition. He went on speaking with relentless precision, and with a subtle but incombatable change of manner.

"You, my dear Algy, have certain connections which will enable you to approach the chief commissioner at Scotland Yard. You will use those connections to find out exactly what Templar told the police in Anford, and report to my secretary here as soon as you have the information. I don't think he can have told them anything important, but it will be safer to find out. You," — he turned to General and Lady Sangore — "will go down to Bledford Manor. Since the house is supposed to be shut up, some local policeman may notice that there are people there and become inquisitive. You must be there to reassure him. You need not see the prisoners if it will embarrass you. I myself am going to Paris tonight, and I have arranged for Templar and Lady Valerie to be taken there — it will be easier to question them and dispose of them later on the other side. But there may be a slight delay before they can be moved, and I want you at Bledford as soon as possible as a precaution. You had better leave at once."

He did not consider any further argument. As far as he I was concerned, there was no more arguing to be done. He simply issued his commands. As he finished he stood up, and before any of them could raise any more objections he had walked out of the room.

They sat still for some moments after he had gone, each knowing what was in the minds of the others, each trying to pretend that he alone was still dominant and unshaken.

Fairweather got up first. He pulled out a big old-fashioned gold watch and consulted it with a brave imitation of his old portly pomposity.

"Well," he said croakily, "I must be getting along. Got things to attend to,"

He bustled out, very quickly and busily.

The Sangores looked at each other. Then Lady Sangore spoke.

"It's all that little tart's fault," she said bitterly. "If she'd had any sense or decency at all we shouldn't be in all this trouble now. As for Luker, he ought to be kicked out of every club in London."

"I don't suppose he belongs to every club in London," said General Sangore dully.

His figure, usually so ramrod erect, was bowed and sagging; his shoulders drooped. Suddenly he looked very old and tired and pasty. He seemed bewildered, like a man lost in a chamber of unimaginable horrors; he seemed to be groping through the rusty machinery of his mind for one wheel that would turn to a task for which it had never been designed.

"Once upon a time," said the Saint, "there was a walleyed wombat named Wilhelmina, who lived in a burrow in Tasmania and grieved resentfully over the fact that Nature had endowed her, like all females of the marsupial family, with an abdominal pouch or sac intended for the reception and protection of newborn marsupials. Since," however, the strabismic asymmetry of Wilhelmina's features had always deterred discriminating males of her species from making such advances to her as might have resulted in the production of young wombats, she was easily persuaded to regard this useful and ingenious organ as an indecent excrescence invented by the Creator in a lewd and absent-minded moment, and she soon became the leader of a strong movement among other unattractive wombats to suppress all references to it and to decry its use as sinful and reprehensible, and invariably wore a species of apron or sporran to conceal this obscene conformation of tissue from the world. Now it so happened that one night a purblind male wombat named Widgery, of dissolute habits…"

He was in the scullery of Bledford Manor with Lady Valerie Woodchester. They sat on the hard cold tile floor with their wrists and ankles bound with strong cord. A smear of blood had dried across Simon's face and in spite of his quiet satiric voice his head was aching savagely. Lady Valerie's face was very dirty and her hair was in wild disarray; she also had a headache, and she was in a poisonous temper.

"Oh, stop it!" she burst out jittery. "You've got me into a hell of a nice mess, haven't you? I suppose you enjoy this sort of thing, but I don't. Aren't you going to do something about it?"

"What would you like me to do?" he asked accommodatingly.

"What are they going to do with us?"

He shrugged.

"I'm not a thought reader. But you can use your imagination."

She brooded. Her lower lip was thrust out, her pencilled eyebrows drawn together in a vicious' scowl.

"The damned swine," she said. "I'd like to see them all die the most horrible deaths. I'd like to see them being burnt alive or something, and jeer at them… My God, I wish I had a cigarette… Doesn't it seem ages since we were having dinner at the Berkeley? Simon, do you think they're really going to kill us?"

"I expect their ideas are running more or less along those lines," he admitted. "But they haven't done it yet. What 'll you bet me we aren't dining at the Berkeley again tomorrow?"

"It's all very well for you to talk like that," she said. "It's your job. But I'm scared." She shivered. Her voice rose a trifle. "It's horrible! I don't want to die! I–I want to have a good time, and wear nice clothes, and — and… Oh, what's the good?" She stared at him sullenly in the dimming light. "I suppose you think that's frightful of me. If your girl friend was in my place I expect she'd think this was an awfully jolly party. I suppose she simply revels in being rolled over in cars, and knocked on the head, and mauled about and tied up and waiting to be killed, and all the rest of it. Well, all I can say is, I wish she was here instead of me."

The Saint chuckled. He was not particularly amused, but he didn't want her nerve to crack completely, and he knew that her breaking point was not very far away. "After all, you chose me for a husband, darling. I tried to discourage you, but you seemed to have made up your mind that you liked the life. Never mind. I'm pretty good at getting out of jams."

"Even if we do get out, I expect my hair will be snow white or something," she said miserably.

She blinked. Her eyes were very large and solemn; she looked very childish and pathetic. A pair of big bright tears formed in her eyes and rolled down her cheeks.

"I… I do hate this so much," she whispered. "And I'm so uncomfortable."

"All the same, you mustn't cry," he said. "The floor's damp enough already."

"It couldn't be any damper. So why shouldn't I cry? I can think of dozens of things I'd like to do, and crying's the only one of them I can do. So why shouldn't I?"

"Because it makes you look like an old hag."

She sniffed.

"Well, that's your fault," she said; but she stopped crying. She twisted her head down and hunched up one shoulder and wriggled comically, trying to dry the tears on her blouse. She drew a long shuddering sigh like a baby. She said: "All right, why don't you talk to me about something and take my mind off it? What were you getting so excited about when the car turned over?"

The Saint gazed past her, into one of the corners where the dusk was rapidly deepening. That memory had been the first to return to his mind when he painfully recovered consciousness, had haunted him ever since under the surface of his unconcern, embittering the knowledge of his own helplessness.