Prelude for War (32 page)

Simon ducked rapidly into
a waiting room that looked
like the anteroom of a
morgue; but she went straight to
the ticket office selling
tickets for the Reading and Bristol line. He saw her turn away with a ticket
and walk briskly
back towards one of the departure
platforms.

The Saint beelined for the
window she had just left,
but before he could reach
it a large boiled-pink woman with
two bug-eyed
children clinging to her skirts was there in
front
of him. She was one of those women from whom no
booking office ever
seems to be free, who combine with the afflictions of acute myopia and deafness
the habit of keeping
their money in the
uttermost depths of a series of inter
communicating
bags and purses. Simon stood behind her
and fumed on the verge of homicidal frenzy while she
argued with the booking clerk and peered and
fumbled with
placid deliberation
through the interminable succession of Chinese boxes in the last of which her
portable funds were
lovingly
enshrined. A line of other prospective passengers
began to form behind him. Unaware that the world
was
standing still and waiting for
her, the woman began to
count her
change and reopen her collection of private puz
zles to stow it lovingly away, while she went on to cross-
examine the clerk about the freshness of the milk
in the dining car on the train to Torquay. Meanwhile Lady Val
erie had disappeared.

The Saint’s patience came
to an explosive end. He took
hold of the woman by her
raw beefy elbows and removed
her from the window.

“Pardon me,
madam,” he said in a voice that the booking
clerk
was meant to hear. “I’m a police officer, and I’m busy.”

He stuck his head down to
the pigeonhole from which
sixpenny excursion tickets
are doled out at English railway
stations with more grudging
condescension than thousand-
pound notes are passed out
at the Bank of England.

“That young lady who
was here just before your last
customer,” he said.
“Where did she want to go to?”

Fortunately the clerk had a
long memory.

“Anford, sir.”

“Give me a ticket
there—first class.”

Simon slid money under the
grille and turned away, grabbing up his ticket. He shoved past the gaping
queue and col
lared a porter who was mooning by.

“Which is the next
train to Anford, and where does it
go from?” he
snapped.

“Anford, sir?”

“Yes. Anford.”

“Anford,” said
the porter, digesting the name. “Anford.”

“Anford,” said
the Saint gutturally.

“Anford,” said
the porter, keeping his end up without
any
sign of fatigue. “Where would that be, sir?”

“It would be in
Wiltshire. You change at Marlborough.”

“Ar,
Marlborough.” The porter scratched his head.
“Marlborough.
Marlborough. Then it’s a Marlborough
train you’d be
wanting, sir.”

Simon overcame a fearful
impulse to assault him.

“Yes. I could manage
with a Marlborough train.”

“There’s one just
leaving from platform six,” said the
man
laboriously, as though a dark secret were being dragged
out of him, “but I dunno as how you’d have time to catch that
one——
”

The Saint left him to be
his own audience. He was off
like a bolt out of a
crossbow, plunging along towards an ancient smoky board that did its best not
to reveal the
whereabouts of platform six. And while
he was on his
way he was trying to place this new and unexpected destina
tion of Lady Valerie’s. Was she going there because
she
was at Paddington and it was the
first place that came into her head? Or was she subtle enough to think that it
was the
last place where she would be
looked for? Or had she some
positive
purpose? Or
…

Something seemed to go off like a silent bomb inside
the
Saint’s chest. The concussion threw his
heart off its beat,
squeezed all the
air out of his lungs; his legs felt as if the marrow had been sucked out of the
bones. He kept on walk
ing through
nothing but sheer muscular automatism.

There was one thing he had
forgotten, and he had almost
walked straight into it.

A burly man in a dark suit
was pacing bovinely past the
entrance to the platform,
methodically scanning the faces
of all the passengers who
came within his view. He had the
trade marks of Scotland
Yard stamped all over him, and
Simon could have picked him out of a crowd at
five hundred
yards if he had not been too
preoccupied to look for him.
As it
was, another dozen steps would have planted him
squarely on the man’s shinily booted toes.

The alarm had gone out in
earnest. A searingly vengeful
Chief Inspector Teal had
covered every exit from London
that it was in his power
to cover. No doubt there were the
same burly bovine
men at every station in the metropolis.
The
Saint hadn’t a snowflake’s hope in hell of boarding the
train that Lady Valerie had taken. He would be lucky
enough to get out of Paddington without irons on his wrists.

VII

How Simon
 
Templar
 
Conversed with

Sundry
  
Persons,
  
and
 
Police-Constable

Reginald
  
Congratulated
 
Him

S
IMON KEPT ON WALKING
. How he managed it was one of
those
unsung victories of mind over matter; but he kept on.
His
steps remained outwardly unchanged, and to all ordinary
appearances he was still only one of the undistinguished
members of the crowd who scurried to and fro like well-trained movie
extras providing background atmosphere for
the
picture of any busy terminus. None of them knew how
easy
it would have been for him to turn and run like a
hunted
fox.

But that would have
singled him out at once. His only hope was to retain the anonymity which had so
far given
him divine protection. Quietly,
evenly, without a trace of excitement, the Saint walked on, turning in a
gradual curve
that took him imperceptibly further
away from the watching
detective and finally
reversed his direction entirely without ever including an abrupt movement that
would have caught
anyone’s eye. Icy needles danced over his skin, but he com
pleted the manoeuvre without a tremor. He knew that
the
detective had seen him and was looking at him; as he headed
back towards the nearest exit, he could feel the
man’s eyes
boring into the back of his
neck… .

God who in His infinite
wisdom has ordained that all
respectable English
citizens shall go for their holidays to the same places at the same time chose
that moment to let
a fresh horde of tourists loose in the
station. Hot, sun blis
tered, multitudinous,
clutching their bags and parcels and
souvenirs and
progeny, they swarmed around the Saint and
swallowed
him up. Simon had never been glad of such in
undations
before, but he was so grateful for that one that he
could have embraced
each individual member of the motley
mob. He
let himself be carried along by the spate of human
ity, and it held him in its midst and swept him
through the
exit he had been making
for, and the rearguard jammed in
the
doors behind him with a hearty unanimity that could
scarcely have
impeded pursuit more effectively if it had been
organized.

Simon did not wait to see
what happened. Perhaps the
detective who had seen him
was still not certain of his identification; perhaps he had at last made up his
mind and was even then trying to struggle through the crowd; but in either
event the Saint had no desire to linger. As soon as he
was
outside he set off at the speed of a racing walker, and
felt as if he only began to breathe again when he had crossed
Eastbourne Terrace with no sounds of a hue and cry behind
him.

His taxi driver was still
optimistically waiting, and he
opened the nearest door as
he saw the Saint approach.

Simon smiled and shook his
head.

“Sorry,” he said,
“but I just came to tell you you needn’t
wait
any more.”

“Orl right,
guv’nor.”

The driver looked dejected.

Simon tucked a
ten-shilling note into the front of his coat.

“On your way. And have
a drink with me when they
open.”

“That I will,
guv’nor,” said the man less glumly. “And
I
‘opes I see you again.”

The Saint stood on hot
bricks until the cab turned the
next corner and passed out
of sight.

Then he got into the
driving seat of the Daimler.

It was his own car,
anyway, although the taxi driver
might not have appreciated
that. And by the grace of good
angels it was a car that he
had always used for various
nefarious purposes, and
therefore it had been registered in a
number of different
names but never in his own. It was one car whose number plates the mobile
police would not be
watching for. Perhaps more cogently
than any of those
things, it was the only car at his
immediate disposal. It was
not what he would have
chosen for what he had to do,
but he could not choose.

Lady Valerie had left the
keys in the switch and the
engine was nicely warm.
The Saint was away in four sec
onds after his taxi
disappeared.

And on a trip like he had
to make every second was
vital. And he had to waste
precious scores of them, feeling his way westwards out of London by devious and
unfre
quented back streets. The same dogged efficiency that
had
covered the railway stations was sure to have
stationed
watchers on the main traffic arteries
leading out of London,
but the labyrinthine ways
of London and its suburbs are
so many that it would have
been impossible to cover every
outlet. And Simon Templar
had an encyclopedic memory
for maps that would have
staggered a professional cartographer. It was a gift that he had developed and
disciplined
for years against just such
contingencies as this. He drove
through back streets and
suburban avenues and afterwards
through country lanes, and
did not join a main road until he
came into
Bracknell.

Then he gave the Daimler
its head to the last mile an
hour that could be squeezed
out of it.

He drove with one eye on
the road and the other switching between the speedometer and the dashboard
clock. To
race an express train in the Hirondel
was nothing, but to
attempt it in that sedate and
dowager-worthy limousine was
something else.
Mathematically it came out to be simply
and flatly impossible.
But Anford was a one-horse village on
an
antiquated single-track branch line over which trains
shuttled back and forth with no great respect for
time
tables and never at even official
intervals of less than an hour. The odds were all against Lady Valerie catching
an
immediate connection; and that
uncertain margin of delay
at
Marlborough was all that the Saint could hope to race
against.

A few days ago he had
taken the Hirondel from Anford
to London in an hour and
twenty-five minutes. Risking his
neck at least once in every two miles, he
stopped the Daimler
at Anford Station in
three minutes under two hours.

He jumped out and went in.

It took him a little while
to find a timetable. Eventually
he located one, pasted to
a board on the wall and smudged and roughened with the trails of many grubby
fingers that had painstakingly traced routes across its closely printed acreage
before him. With difficulty he analyzed the eye-
aching
maze of figures with which railway companies strive
so
nobly to preserve the secret of their schedules. The train which Lady Valerie
had caught should have reached Marl
borough thirty-five
minutes ago; and there was a connection
to
Anford listed for three minutes later.