Leslie Charteris - The Saint Closes the Case

There was much more, stunted across the two middle col­umns of the front page.

This blew in with Roger Conway, of the Saint's very dear acquaintance, who had been rung up in the small hours of that morning to be summoned to a conference; and he put the sheet before Simon Templar at once.

"Were you loose in England last night?" he demanded ac­cusingly.

"There are rumours," murmured the Saint, "to that effect."

Mr. Conway sat down in his usual chair, and produced ciga­rettes and matches.

"Who was your pal—the cross-country expert?" he inquired calmly.

The Saint was looking out of the window.

"No one I know," he answered. "He kind of horned in on the party. You'll have the whole yarn in a moment. I phoned Norman directly after I phoned you; he came staggering under the castle walls a few seconds ago."

A peal on the bell announced that Norman Kent had reached the door of the apartment, and the Saint went out to admit him. Mr. Kent carried a copy of the Evening Record, and his very first words showed how perfectly he understood the Saint's eccentricities.

"If I thought you'd been anywhere near Esher last night——"

"You've been sent for to hear a speech on the subject," said the Saint.

He waved Norman to a chair, and seated himself on the edge of a littered table which Patricia Holm was trying to reduce to some sort of order. She came up and stood beside him, and he slid an arm round her waist.

"It was like this," he said.

And he plunged into the story without preface, for the time when prefaces had been necessary now lay far behind those four. Nor did he need to explain the motives for any of his actions. In clipped, slangy, quiet, and yet vivid sentences he told what he had seen in the greenhouse of the house near Esher; and the two men listened without interruption.

Then he stopped, and there was a short silence.

"It's certainly a marvellous invention," said Roger Conway at length, smoothing his fair hair. "But what is it?"

"The devil."

Conway blinked.

"Explain yourself."

"It's what the Clarion called it," said the Saint; "something we haven't got simple words to describe. A scientist will pre­tend to understand it, but whether he will or not is another matter. The best he can tell us is that it's a trick of so modify­ing the structure of a gas that it can be made to carry a tre­mendous charge of electricity, like a thunder-cloud does— only it isn't a bit like a thunder-cloud. It's also something to do with a ray—only it isn't a ray. If you like, it's something entirely impossible—only it happens to exist. And the point is that this gas just provides the flimsiest sort of sponge in the atmosphere, and Vargan knows how to saturate the pores in the sponge with millions of volts and amperes of compressed lightning."

"And when the goat got into the cloud——"

"It was exactly the same as if it had butted into a web of live wires. For the fraction of a second that goat burnt like a scrap of coal in a blast furnace. And then it was ashes. Sweet idea, isn't it?"

Norman Kent, the dark and saturnine, took his eyes off the ceiling. He was a most unsmiling man, and he spoke little and always to the point.

"Lester Hume Smith has seen it," said Norman Kent. "And Sir Roland Hale. Who else?"

"Angel Face," said the Saint; "Angel Face saw it. The man our friend Mr. Teal assumes to have been one of us—-not hav­ing seen him wagging a Colt at me. An adorable pet, built on the lines of something between Primo Carena and an over­grown gorilla, but not too agile with the trigger finger—other­wise I mightn't be here. But which country he's working for is yet to be discovered."

Roger Conway frowned.

"You think——"

"Frequently," said the Saint. "But that was one think I didn't need a cold towel round my head for. Vargan may have thought he got a raw deal when they missed him off the front page, but he got enough publicity to make any wideawake foreign agent curious."

He tapped a cigarette gently on his thumb-nail and lighted it with slow and exaggerated deliberation. In such pregnant silences of irrelevant pantomime he always waited for the seeds he had sown to germinate spontaneously in the brains of his audience.

Conway spoke first.

"If there should be another war——"

"Who is waiting for a chance to make war?" asked Norman Kent.

The Saint picked up a selection of the papers he had been reading before they came, and passed them over. Page after page was scarred with blue pencillings. He had marked many strangely separated things—a proclamation of Mussolini, the speech of a French delegate before the League of Nations, the story of a break in the Oil Trust involving the rearrangement of two hundred million pounds of capital, the announcement of a colossal merger of chemical interests, the latest move­ments of warships, the story of an outbreak of rioting in India, the story of an inspired bull raid on the steel market, and much else that he had found of amazing significance, even down to the arrest of an English tourist hailing from Man­chester and rejoicing in the name of Pinheedle, for punching the nose of a policeman in Wiesbaden. Roger Conway and Norman Kent read, and were incredulous.

"But people would never stand for another war so soon," said Conway. "Every country is disarming——"

"Bluffing with everything they know, and hoping that one day somebody'll be taken in," said the Saint. "And every na­tion scared stiff of the rest, and ready to arm again at any notice. The people never make or want a war—it's sprung on them by the statesmen with the business interests behind them, and somebody writes a 'We-Don't-Want-to-Lose-You-but-We-Think-you-Ought-to-Go' song for the brass bands to play, and millions of poor fools go out and die like heroes without ever being quite sure what it's all about. It's happened before. Why shouldn't it happen again?"

"People," said Norman Kent, "may have learnt their les­son."

Simon swept an impatient gesture.

"Do people learn lessons like that so easily? The men who could teach them are a past generation now. How many are left who are young enough to convince our generation? And even if we are on the crest of a wave of literature about the horrors of war, do you think that cuts any ice? I tell you, I've listened till I'm tired to people of our own age discussing those books and plays—and I know they cut no ice at all. It'd be a miracle if they did. The mind of a healthy young man is too optimistic. It leaps to the faintest hint of glory, and finds it so easy to forget whole seas of ghastliness. And I'll tell you more. ..."

And he told them of what he had heard from Barney Malone.

"I've given you the facts," he said. "Now, suppose you saw a man rushing down the street with a contorted face, scream­ing his head off, foaming at the mouth, and brandishing a large knife dripping with blood. If you like to be a fool, you can tell yourself that it's conceivable that his face is contorted because he's trying to swallow a bad egg, he's screaming be­cause someone has trodden on his pet corn, he's foaming at the mouth because he's just eaten a cake of soap, and he's just killed a chicken for dinner and is tearing off to tell his aunt all about it. On the other hand, it's simpler and safer to as­sume that he's a homicidal maniac. In the same way, if you like to be fools, and refuse to see a complete story in what spells a complete story to me, you can go home."

Roger Conway swung one leg over the arm of his chair and rubbed his chin reflectively.

"I suppose," he said, "our job is to find Tiny Tim and see that he doesn't pinch the invention while the Cabinet are still deciding what they're going to do about it?"

The Saint shook his head.

For once, Roger Conway, who had always been nearest to the Saint in all things, had failed to divine his leader's train of thought; and it was Norman Kent, that aloof and silent man, who voiced the inspiration of breath-taking genius—or mad­ness—that had been born in Simon Templar's brain eight hours before.