Prelude for War (31 page)

The tangle he had left
behind him in Park Lane was still
sorting itself out
when he crossed Oxford Street and turned
the
Hirondel to the west.

He felt sure that he knew
what Lady Valerie’s first move,
would be now, and he felt
almost as sure that London would
be the place where she
would make it. Both of the two
most probable routes from
Weybridge to London led through Putney, and he still had time to meet her
there.

He crossed Putney High
Street more decorously than
he had crossed Park Lane,
and backed into a side turning
from which he could watch
the crawling flow of London-
bound traffic and pull out
to join it with the minimum of
delay. The Hirondel stood
there like a great glistening
jewel, and not for the
first time since he had chosen its flamboyant colour scheme the Saint wished
that his tastes
had been more conservative. That
plutocratic equipage,
which drew every eye back
for a second look, would do nothing to simplify his problems. A policeman
strolled by
and studied it with deep interest for
fifty slow-paced yards.
Simon’s heart was in his
mouth, but the constable passed
on without stopping.
Doubtless the alarm which must even
then have been
circulating had not yet reached him. For
ten
minutes the Saint endured a strain that would have
worn
many hardened nerves to shreds; and coupled with
it was the continual
gnawing fear that his guess might after all have been wrong and Lady Valerie
would not come that
way. His tanned face
gave no inkling of his thoughts, but
when
he saw the black Daimler glide past the end of his
side road, with Lady Valerie at the wheel, looking
straight
ahead of her, it was as if a
miracle had happened.

The start of the
Hirondel’s engine was scarcely audible.
Almost
instantaneously he let in the clutch, and cut in to the line of traffic only
two cars behind her. Intent and expres
sionless
as a stalking leopard, the Saint drove on after her.

4

Her first stop was at the
South Kensington post office.
The Saint’s eyes went cold
and brittle when he saw the
Daimler slowing up:
Exhibition Road was too wide and
unfrequented for any car
to be unnoticeable in it. Fortu
nately on that account he
had let himself fall some distance
behind her. He
jammed on the brakes and whipped round
into
Imperial Institute Road, and felt that the gods had
been
kind to him when he saw that she crossed the sidewalk
and
entered the post office without looking round. Clearly it had not occurred to
her that she could have been picked
up by that time.

He made a U turn in the
side road and parked near the
corner. Then, after a
moment’s hesitation, he got out and
walked up towards the post-office
entrance. It was a fool
hardy thing to do,
but a theory was already taking solid
form in his mind. He had used that
trick himself. Mail any
thing you want to
hide, addressed to yourself at a
poste
restante
in any name you
can think of: where could it be
safer
or harder to find?

She came out so quickly
that he was almost caught. He
turned in a flash and
stood with his back to her, taking
out his cigarette
case and deliberating lengthily over his selection of a cigarette. Reflected in
the polished inside of
the case, he saw her cross
the pavement again, still without
looking round, and
get back into the car.

But he had been wrong. As
she came out she was putting
an envelope into her bag,
but it was only a small one— obviously too small and thin to contain such a
dossier as
Kennet must have given her.

His brain leaped to
encompass this reversal. Her cloak
room story must have
been true, then: she had simply given
herself double
cover, mailing the ticket to herself at the
poste
restante.
His imagination bridged the gaps like a
bolt of lightning. Without even turning his head to
check
his observations, without letting himself indulge a
further
instant’s vacillation, he started back towards his
own car.

And in the middle of the
next stride he stopped again as if he had run into an invisible wall.

Where he had left the
Hirondel there was now another car drawn up alongside it—a lean, drab,
unobtrusive car
that hid its speedy lines under a
veneer of studiously sombre
cellulose, a car which to
the Saint’s cognizant eye carried
the banners of the
mobile police as plainly as the sails on
a
full-rigged ship, even before he saw the blue-uniformed
man at the wheel and the other blue-uniformed man who
had got out to examine the Hirondel at close quarters. The
dragnet was out, and this was the privileged one out of the
hundreds of patrol cars that must even then have been
scouring the city for him that had located its gaudy quarry.
If he had waited in the car they would have caught him.

But his guardian angel was
still with him. They must have
arrived only a moment ago,
and they were still too wrapped
up in the discovery of the
Hirondel to have started looking
round for the driver.

The Saint had spun round as
soon as he saw them. He
was between two fires now,
but Valerie Woodchester was
the less formidable. He
whipped out a handkerchief and
held it over the lower part
of his face as he started up the
road again. The Daimler
was pulling out from the curb,
moving on towards
Kensington Gardens. On the opposite
side of the road a
taxi had pulled up to discharge its
freight. Simon
walked over towards it with long space-
devouring
strides that gave a deceptive impression of
having
no haste behind them. He climbed into the offside
door
as the passenger paid his fare.

“Go up towards the
Park,” he said. “And step on it.”

The taxi swung round in an
obedient semicircle and rat
tled north. As it came
round the curve the Saint took a last
look at the corner
where he had so nearly met disaster. The
blue-uniformed
man who had got out of the police car was
putting
his hand on the Hirondel’s radiator. He took it
away
quickly and said something to his companion, and
then
they both started to look round; but by that time their
chance of immortal fame had slipped through their fingers.
The Saint buried himself in the corner of the seat, and
his cab bowled away on the second lap of the chase.

The policeman at the top
of the road was stopping the
north-and-south traffic,
and the taxi had caught up to
within a few yards of the
Daimler’s petrol tank when he
lowered his arm. The driver
slackened speed and half
turned.

“Where to, sir?”

“Keep going.”
The Saint sat forward. “You see this
Daimler
just ahead of you?”

“Yessir.”

“There’s two quid for
you on top of the fare if you can keep behind it.”

You may have wondered what
happens in real life when
the pursuing sleuth leaps
into a cab and yells “Follow that
car!”
The answer is that the driver says “Wot car?” After
this has been made clear, if it can be made clear in time
to be of any use, he simply follows. He has nothing better
to do, anyhow.

Whether he can follow
adequately or not is another mat
ter. Simon suffered a
short interval of tenterhooked anxiety before he was assured that his guardian
angel, still zealously
concentrating on its job,
had sent him a taxi that was capable of keeping up with most ordinary cars in
traffic and a
driver with enough cupidity to kick it
along in a way that
showed that he regarded a two-pound
tip as something to be seriously worked for. The whim of a traffic light or a
point-
duty policeman might still defeat him, but nothing
else
would.

Simon sat back and relaxed
a little.

He had a brief breathing
spell now in which to synopsize
his thoughts on the recent
visit from Comrade Fairweather
which had dragged on to
such a disastrous denouement.
He was sure that the
denouement had been no part of
Fairweather’s design.
Fairweather, caught unprepared by
Teal’s presence and
the things that had been going on when
he
arrived, had simply been improvising from start to
finish—exactly
as Simon’s counterattack had been improvised. What he had really meant to say
when he came to
Cornwall House had not even been hinted
at. But Simon
was sure that he knew what had been
left unsaid. By that
time Bravache and his
satellites must have reported to
headquarters, and all the
ungodly must have known that
their plans had done more
than go agley. Fairweather
would not have been sent
to threaten—he was not the type.
He had been sent to try
diplomacy, possibly the kind in
which the balance of power
is a bank balance, perhaps
more probably the kind
which is meant to lead one party
to that apocryphal place
known to American gangdom as
the Spot. Either way, it
was a token of the ungodly’s increas
ing interest which
gave the Saint a a stimulating feeling
of
approaching climax. He wished he could have heard
what
Fairweather really meant to say; but life was full of
those
unfinished symphonies… .

They had slipped through
the Park meanwhile and left
it at Lancaster Gate. The
Daimler threaded through to
Eastbourne Terrace and
parked there; the Saint’s taxi
driver, taking his
instructions literally, stopped behind it.
But
luckily there is no vehicle on the streets of London so
unlikely to draw attention to itself even by the weirdest
manoeuvres as a taxi. Valerie Woodchester did not even
look at it twice. She crossed the road and hurried away, heading for
the gaunt grimy monstrosity known to long-suffering railway travellers as
Paddington Station.

Simon unpacked himself from
the depths of the cab into
which he had instinctively
retreated. He hopped out and poured two pound notes and some silver into the
driver’s
palm.

“Thanks, Rupert,”
he said. “Pull down the street a little
way
and stick around for a bit—I may want you again.”

He scooted on after Lady
Valerie. She was out of sight when he rounded the next corner after her, but
the station
was the only place she could have been
going into. He even
knew what part of the station she would
make for.

He stood inside the first
entrance he came to and let his eyes probe around the gloom of the interior. It
was
so long since he had travelled by rail that he had
almost
forgotten the gruesome efficiency with which London
rail
way terminals prepare the arriving voyager for the
discom
forts of his coming journey. The station, proudly
ignoring
the march of civilization, had not
changed in a single mater
ial detail since he last
saw it, any more than it had proba
bly changed since
the days when trains were preceded by a
herald
waving a red flag. There were the same dingy skylights overhead, opaque with
accumulated grime; the same
naked soot-blackened
girders; the same stark soot-blackened
walls
splashed with lurid posters proclaiming the virtues
of
Bovril and the bracing breezes of Weston-super-Mare;
the same filthily
blackened floors patterned with zigzag trails
of
moisture where some plodding porter had passed by with
a rusty watering can on a futile mission of
dampening down
the underfoot layers
of dirt; the same bleak “refreshment”
rooms with cold black marble counters and buzzing flies
and unimaginative ham sandwiches in glass cases
like
museum specimens; the same faint
but pervading smell of
stale soot,
stale humanity, and (for no apparent reason)
stale horses. Somewhere in that gritty grisly monument to
the civic enterprise of twentieth-century London
he knew
he would find Lady Valerie
Woodchester; and presently he
saw
her, looking amazingly trim and clean among the sweat
ing mobs of holiday-departing trippers, coming away
from
the direction of the checkroom.
And now she carried a
bulky manila
envelope in one hand.