Leslie Charteris - Prelude for War

"I shouldn't be surprised," said the Saint thoughtfully.

The sergeant nodded sagely, no doubt squandering a moment on the satisfactory vision of his own name in the headlines. Then he returned to business.

"I'd better just have your name and address, sir, in case you're wanted for the inquest."

Simon felt in his pocket, produced a card, scribbled on it and handed it over.

"That's where I'll be staying for the next few days." He started to move on, and then turned back. "By the way, who was that other fellow — the bloke who looks as if he'd been chopped out of a small piece of cliff?"

"You mean Mr Luker, sir? He often comes down and stays with Mr Fairweather. He's a financier, or something like that, I believe."

"A financier, is he?" said the Saint slowly. "What fun!"

He walked on and climbed into the car with a new load of tangled thoughts. The engine started with a low whirr, and they drove back along the drive and slid round the corner into the road.

Presently the Saint said, inconsequentially: "Next time I go to a fire I'm going to wear some old clothes."

"You're better off than I am," said Patricia. "You've got some other things left. Lady Sangore and Valerie Woodchester between them have just about wrecked my suitcases. Lady Sangore practically told me that all my undies were immoral, but it didn't stop her helping herself to all she wanted. You know the sort. A pillar of the British Empire and underpays her maids."

"I know," said the Saint feelingly. "What about the Woodchester girl?"

"Lady Valerie Woodchester, to be exact. All I know about her is that she picked all my most expensive things and didn't miss once."

"Did either of them tell you how the fire started?"

She shook her head.

"They didn't know. It's an old house, but it had modern automatic fire alarms. All they could tell me was that the alarms went off and everyone came tumbling out of bed. There seems to have been a good deal of confusion. Lady Sangore put the whole thing down to the Communists — but then if she drops a stitch when she's knitting, she puts it down to the Communists. Valerie Woodchester was very peeved because the young Guardsman insisted on rescuing her without giving her time to put on a dressing gown. That's all I got out of her."

"Did you talk to anyone else?"

"Well, that man you were talking to—"

"Luker?"

"Yes. He said he thought it must have been a short circuit in the lighting system. But I couldn't pay much attention while you were in there. You know. I was too busy worrying about whether you were enjoying yourself."

The Saint chuckled absently.

"It was a bit dull at times," he said.

He drove on slowly. His smile faded, and a faint ridge of concentration formed between his brows. It was an insignificant betrayal of what was going on in his mind, for the truth was that he was thinking harder than he had done for a long time.

Patricia watched him without interrupting. She had that rare gift in a woman, the ability to leave a man to his silence, and she knew that the Saint would talk when he was ready. But there was nothing to stop her own thoughts. He had told her nothing; but in a puzzled, bewildered way she knew that he had something startling to tell. The Saint on the trail of trouble had something vivid and dynamic and transfiguring about him, as unmistakable as the quivering transformation of a hunting dog that has caught a new hot scent. Patricia knew all the signs. But now, with no idea of the reason for them, they gave her the eerie feeling of watching a dog bristling before an apparently empty room.

"Which only shows you that you never know," said the Saint presently, as if she should have known everything.

She knew that she would have to draw him out warily.

"They didn't seem to be a very brilliant crowd," she said."I didn't seem to be able to get much more sense out of them than you could."

"I was afraid you wouldn't," he admitted. "Oh no, they're not brilliant. But very respectable. In fact, just about what you'd expect to find at a place like that at the week end. Lady Sangore, the typical army officer's wife, with her husband the typical army officer. Lady Valerie Wood-chester, the bright young society floozie, of the fearfully county huntin'-shootin'-an'-fishin' Woodchesters. Captain Whoosis of the Buffoon Guards, her dashing young male equivalent, probably a nephew or something like that of old Sangore's, invited down to make an eligible partner for Lady Valerie. Comrade Fairweather, the nebulous sort of modern country squire, probably Something in the City in his spare time, and one of the bedrocks of the Conservative party. A perfectly representative collection of English ladies and gentlemen of what we humorously call the Upper Classes. We can find out a bit more about them tomorrow — Peter's been living here long enough now to be able to dig up some extra dirt from the village if he doesn't know it already. But I don't think we'll get anything sensational. People like that live in an even deeper rut than the fellow who goes to an office every morning, although they'd have a stroke if you told them. If only they hadn't invited Comrade Luker…"

"Who is he?"

Simon drew another cigarette to a bright glow from the stump of the last.

"If he's a financier, as the policeman said, and he's the bloke I'm thinking of, I've heard of him. Which is more than most people have done. He moves in a mysterious way."

"Where does he move?"

"In the most distinguished international circles. He hobnobs with foreign secretaries and ambassadors and prime ministers, and calls dictators by their first names. But you never read about him in the newspapers, and there are never any photographers around when he pays his calls. They must like him just because he's such a charming guy. Of course he's one of the biggest shareholders in the Stelling Steel Works in Germany, and the Siebel Arms Factory in France, and the Wolverhampton Ordnance Company in England; but you couldn't be so nasty as to think that that had anything to do with it. After all, he plays no favourites. In the last Spanish revolution, the rebels were mowing down Loyalists with Stelling machine guns just as busily as the government was bopping the rebels with Siebels. It was just about the same in the war between Bolivia and Paraguay, except that the Wolverhampton Ordnance Company was in on that as well — on both sides."

The knot around Patricia's heart seemed to tighten.

"Just one of Nature's altruists," she said mechanically.

"Oh yes," said the Saint, with a kind of deadly and distant cheerfulness. "You couldn't say he was anything but impartial. For instance, he's one of the directors of the Voix Populaire, a French newspaper that spends most of its time howling about the menace of the Italo-German Fascist entente and at the same time he's part owner of the Deutscher Unterricht, which lets off periodical blasts about the French threat to German recovery… At home, of course, he's a staunch patriot. He's one of the most generous subscribers to the Imperial Defence Society, which spends its time proclaiming that Britain must have bigger and better armaments to protect herself against all the European enemies of peace. In fact, the I.D.S. takes a lot of credit for the latest fifteen-hundred-million-pound rearmament programme which our taxes are now paying for. And naturally it's just an unavoidable coincidence that the Wolverhampton Ordnance Company is now working night and day to carry out its government contracts."

"I see," said Patricia; but it was only as if a fog had eddied and parted capriciously, giving her a glimpse of something huge and terrifyingly inhuman looming through shifting veils of mist.

Simon Templar's face was as dark and cold as graven copper.