Prelude for War (29 page)

“Tell me why Lady
Valerie was frightened of you,” he
said
in a garroted gargle.

“I’ve no idea why she
should have been,” said the Saint.
“I’d
no idea she was. Why don’t you ask Algy ? He seems
to
know all about it. And while you’re on the job, what
about
asking him why he came here and what he thought
he
was going to do?”

Fairweather sniffed into a
white silk handkerchief, tucked
it back into his breast
pocket and planted himself like a
minister in
Parliament preparing to answer a question from
the
Opposition.

“I have not visited
Mr Templar before,” he said, “and
I
should not expect to do so again. The reason for my call this morning is quite
simple. I had a tentative engagement
to lunch with Lady
Valerie today, and I rang her up not
long ago to confirm
it. She was not in, and her maid
informed me in some
agitation that she had apparently not
slept at her
apartment last night and had left no message
to
give a clue to her whereabouts. Knowing that this was
an
extraordinary departure from her normal habits, I puz
zled
over it with some seriousness and recalled her men
tioning
that she was in some fear of Mr Templar, as I
have
told you. I telephoned again later, and could still hear
no news of her; and on my way from the club to the Savoy,
where we were to have met, I recollected that she had told
me that she was dining with Mr Templar last night. My
anxieties at once became graver, and since I was at that
moment close
to this building, on an impulse—which was
perhaps
rash in conception but which I now feel to have
been very sensibly founded—I instructed my chauffeur to
stop, and came up with the intention of——
”

“Algy,” said the
Saint, with profound respect, “I don’t wonder you got into the Cabinet.
With your gift for making
a collection of plain
goddam lies sound like an archbishop’s sermon, the only thing I can’t
understand is why they didn’t
make you prime
minister.”

Conviction hardened on Mr
Teal like the new carapace
on a moulted lobster. His
eyes held on the Saint with dourly
triumphant tenacity.

“I’ll tell you why
Lady Valerie was frightened of you,”
he
said. “I expect she was thinking of what happened to
Kennet and Windlay. She knew you were trying to make
trouble for Mr Luker and Mr Fairweather, and since she was a friend of
theirs——
”

“Was Kennet a friend
of theirs?” asked the Saint pun
gently.

Fairweather said, with
solemn and unshakable pompos
ity: “He was a guest
in my house. I think that should
be sufficient answer.”

Teal nodded implacably.

“You’ve pulled the
wool over my eyes often enough,
Templar, but you can’t do
it this time. What’s the use of
bluffing? There’s enough
circumstantial evidence already to
put you away for a
long time. If you want to be smart you
won’t
make things any worse for yourself. Tell me what’s
happened
to Lady Valerie Woodchester, and you may get
off
with eighteen months.”

The Saint looked at him for
several seconds. And then
he laughed out loud.

“You poor pin-brained
boob,” he said.

The detective’s face did
not change.

“That won’t——
”

“Won’t do me any
good?” Simon completed the sentence
for
him. “Well, I’m not interested. I’m not trying to do
myself good—I don’t have to. I’m trying to do you some.
You need it. Have you gone so completely daft that you’ve
lost your memory? Have you ever known me to threaten,
beat up, bump off, or otherwise raise hell with women?
Have you ever had even the slightest reason to suspect me
of it? But because you’re too bat-eyed and pigheaded to
see any further than the pimples on the end of your own
nose you want to believe that I’ve turned myself into
an ogre for Lady Valerie’s special benefit. What you
need——
”

“I don’t need any
of——

“You need
plenty.” The Saint was cool, unflurried, but
his
curt sentences were edged like knives. “According to
some ancient law which it doesn’t look as if you’d ever
heard of, a man in this country is presumed innocent until he can be
proved guilty. Why don’t you try being just half
as credulous with me as
you are with Algy? Because he was
once a
member of His Majesty’s immortal government.
You pitiful cretin! In other words, he made his living for
years out of making lies sound like sententious
platitudes.
Have you even started to
criticize what he’s just told you?
Lady
Valerie wasn’t home, and hadn’t been home, when
he phoned to check up on a lunch date. ‘Knowing that
this was an extraordinary departure from her
normal
habits——
‘ “

“I heard what Mr
Fairweather said.”

“And you gulped it
down! This is the guy who knew Lady Valerie well. He didn’t just assume that
she’d been
out on an all-night party and
forgotten to come home. He
‘puzzled over it with some
seriousness.’ Well, I don’t want
to be unkind about the
girl, and I don’t even ask you to
believe me, but
I’ll bet you five thousand quid to fourpence
that
if you check back on her record you’ll find that she’s
often
done things like that before. Algy never thought of
that.
His ‘anxieties at once became graver’—so grave that
he
dropped in here to ask me, a comparative stranger, what
I thought about it. And while we’re on the subject of lunch
dates I’ll give you something else. Algy tells you that he
had this date with Lady Valerie, and naturally you believe
him. Well, he’s got his ideas mixed. He didn’t have this
date—I had it. Now would you like to think that over for
yourself, or shall I go on helping you?”

There was a candour, an
ardent sincerity in the Saint’s
voice that would have
arrested most listeners. Mr Teal
was visibly shaken. In
spite of himself a new doubt joined
the mad saraband
that was taking place in his fevered
brain. Certainly he
found it hard to believe that the Saint
had
done any harm to Lady Valerie: even he had to admit
that
such a crime would have been out of character. On the
other
hand, he found it equally hard to believe that such
obviously
respectable members of society as Luker and
Fairweather
could be involved in any sinister motives. If
he
arrested the Saint after a speech that carried such con
viction, experience indicated that he would probably end
up by making himself look highly ridiculous; but on the
other hand experience also indicated that he usually ended
up by looking quite ridiculous enough when he left the Saint
at large. It was one of those situations in which Mr Teal
habitually felt himself drowning in the turgid waves of an
unfathomable
Weltschmerz.

He glowered at Simon with a
smouldering malevolence which he hoped helped to disguise: the sinking
foundations,
of his assurance.

“You’re wasting your
time,” he said, but a keen ear could
have
detected the first loss of dominance in his voice, like the flattening note of
a bell that has begun to crack. “Mr
Fairweather’s
suspicions sound quite reasonable to me.”

“Suspicions?”
The Saint was lethally sardonic. “Why
don’t
you call them certainties and have done with it?
That’s
what they’d look like to anyone who hadn’t got
such
a one-track mind as yours. So Algy had a date with
Lady
Valerie for lunch. But he hasn’t shown any signs of impatience to push along to
the Savoy and see if she’s wait
ing for him. He didn’t
even go there first and see whether
she turned up before
he came here to see me. And he still
doesn’t have to
wait and make sure she isn’t there before
he
backs up this charge against me. He knows damn well
she
isn’t going to be there!
 
And how do you
think he gets
so damn sure about that?”

Teal’s mouth opened a
little. After a moment he turned his head. And for the first time he looked
hard and invit
ingly at Mr Fairweather.

Mr Fairweather’s chins
wobbled with the working of his
Adam’s apple like rolls of
soft raspberry jelly.

“Really,” he
stuttered, “Mr Templar’s insinuations are
so
preposterous—I—I—
Really, Inspector,
you
 
ought to—to do something to—um——
”

“I quite understand,
sir.” Teal was polite and respectful, but his gum was starting on a new
and interesting voyage.
“At the same time, if
you gave me an explanation——
”

“I should think the
explanation would be obvious,” Fair
weather
said stuffily. “If your imagination is unable to cope
with such a simple problem, the chief commissioner might
be interested to hear about it.”

Had he been a better
psychologist he would have known
that that was the last
thing he should have said. Mr Teal
was still acutely
conscious that he was addressing a former
cabinet
minister, but the set of his jaw took on an obstinate
heaviness.

“I beg your pardon,
sir,” he said, “but the chief com
missioner expects me to
obtain definite statements in support
of my
imagination.”

“Rubbish!”
snorted Fairweather. “If you propose to
treat
me
 
like a
 
suspected
 
criminal——
”

“If you persist in
this attitude, sir,” Teal said cour
ageously,
“you may force me to do so.”

Fairweather simply gaped
at him.

And a great grandiose
galumptious grin spread itself
like Elysian honey over
Simon Templar’s eternal soul. The
tables were turned
completely. Fairweather was in the full
centre
of Teal’s attention now—not himself. And Fair
weather
had assisted nobly in putting himself there. The
moment
contained all the refined ingredients of immor
tality.
It shone with an austere magnificence that eclipsed
every
other consideration with its epic splendour. The Saint
lay
back in a chair and gave himself up to the exquisite
absorption
of its ambrosial glory.

And then the telephone bell
rang again.

The Saint sat up; but this
time Teal did not hesitate.
Still preoccupied but still efficient, almost
mechanically he
picked up the phone.

“Hullo,” he
said, and then: “Yes, speaking… .”

Simon knew that he lied. He
was simply playing back
the trick that Simon had
shown him before. But the cir
cumstances were not quite
the same. This call had come
through on one of those
exceptionally powerful connections
that sometimes
happen, and the raised voice of the speaker at the other end of the line did
everything else that was
necessary to produce a
volume of sound in the receiver
that was faintly but
clearly audible across the room. Quite
unmistakably
it had said: “Is dat you, boss?”

Simon started to get up,
spurred faster than thought
by an irresistible
premonition. But the agitation which had
lent
its penetrating pitch to Mr Uniatz’ discordant voice
was
too quick for him. Hoppy’s next utterance came through
with
the shattering clarity of a radio broadcast.
“Listen,
boss—de goil’s got away!”

3

Teal put down the telephone with a sharp clunk
of concen
trated viciousness. Any reversal
of emotion that he had
suffered before
was a childish tantrum compared with this.
The Saint had not only been on the verge of making a
monkey out of him for the second time in an
hour—he
had lured him on to the brink
of affronting Fairweather in
a way
that might easily have cost him his job into the bargain. Whatever sentient
faculties Mr Teal possessed at that
moment
were merely a curried hash of boiling vitriol. His
face was congested to a deep shade of heliotrope,
but his
nostrils were livid with the
whiteness of a berserk passion
that
would have been fuelled rather than assuaged by
buckets of human blood.