Prelude for War (36 page)

“What are you
doing?” the girl asked fretfully.

“Thinking.” He
turned round empty handed, the pen
back in his pocket.
She had seen nothing. “This seems like
a
good time and place for it.” Again his eyes were narrowed
on her like keen blades of sapphire probing for the first
hint of deception. “And talking of places—what made you
pick on this one to come to?”

“Oh, that was
something else that I thought was pretty
clever
of me. I mean, if you hadn’t been following me,
which
was sort of cheating, you’d never have thought of
looking
for me here, would you ? And it all came to me in
a flash, just like
that,
when I was at the cloakroom in Paddington
.
You see, I had to go
somewhere,
and I couldn’t
go to my flat because everybody knows where that
is, and I knew you and Algy and the Sons of France and every
body else would be looking for me, so I had to
find some
where to hide, and then I
suddenly remembered reading
in a
detective story once that the best place to hide was the
most obvious
place, because nobody ever thought of looking
in
it. So then I thought, well, I was only down here a few
days ago, and lots of awkward things were
happening down
here then, and so
nobody would expect me to come back
here.
So I just got on the first train and came back; and
I got hold of a porter just before the train went
out and
gave him a telegram to send
to Algy and told him if he
wanted to
talk to me any more about these papers he could
put an advertisement in the
Morning Post… .
What’s
the matter?”

The Saint was standing and
gooping at her as if he had
been hit on the back of
the head. It was a few moments
before he recovered his
voice.

“You sent Fairweather
a telegram before the train left?”

“Yes.”

“From
Paddington?”

“Yes. You see——
”

“Never mind what I
see. You poor little blithering
featherhead, can’t
you
see
what you did?”

“Did I do anything
wrong?”

The Saint swallowed.

“No, nothing,” he said. “You
only told him where to look
for you. Haven’t
you realized that your telegram would
be
marked as handed in at Paddington? And do you think
he’s had a house here for all these years without
knowing
that Paddington is the station
where you take off for
Anford? And
don’t you think your telegram is going to remind him about it? And don’t you
think he’s ever read
any detective
stories? And don’t you think that that’s just
the half-witted break he’d credit you with at once from
what he knows of you? He can afford the risk of
being
wrong; but where do you think
is the first place he’s going to look for you, just for luck? You—you female
Uniatz,
you’ve left him a trail a
mile
wide that leads straight to
where
you’re sitting!”

At any other time her
dismay might have been comical. She looked as if she were going to cry.

“D-do you really think
he’ll think of all that?”

“I know damn well
he’ll think of it. Has thought of it.
There may be plenty
of things about him I don’t like, but
he couldn’t be where
he is and be that dumb. And besides,
he has Luker to help
him think.” Simon glanced at his
watch. “By
this time:——
”

He had no need to go into
any further explanations of
what might have happened
by that time. A heavy knock
on the door provided them
for him.

The sound went down into
the Saint’s stomach as if he
had swallowed a lump of
lead. For an instant he felt as
if all the blood stopped
circulating in his veins, and his ears
roared
with the thunder of his own stillness. The knocking
was
so apt, so uncannily instantaneous on its cue, that for
a fraction of a second he seemed to be jarred out of all
power of movement.

And then he was very quiet
and very cool. His glance
whirled over the room: its
masses of furniture provided half-a-dozen hiding places but none of them was
any good.
He took one step aside and looked out
of the window. It
opened on to the High Street, and the
sidewalks were busy with people.

The Saint’s eyes went back
to Lady Valerie, and they
were oddly, incredibly gay. But besides that
reckless humour
they carried something else
that could only be described
here in
page after page of inadequate words. She stared
at him in the frightened continuation of a stupor that had
lasted longer than his own, while his eyes spoke
to her with that queer vague message that awoke no less formless ques
tions and answers in her brain, and the two of
them seemed
to be infinitely alone in
a strange universe of their own where thoughts passed without words; all of
that in an
eternity that could only
have lasted for a moment before
his
lips were shaping inaudible syllables:

“Let them in.”

She got up, and he moved
behind her and stood behind
the door as she opened it,
with his right hand resting lightly
on the butt of his
gun inside the breast of his coat.

A voice said: “Lady
Valerie? May we come in?”

She stammered something and
stepped back. The Saint
felt the edge of the bed
against his knees and sat down
quickly on it. The door,
closing again, disclosed him to the
arrivals at the
same time as it revealed them to him. They
were
the police sergeant whom he had met before, in plain
clothes,
and the constable whose name was Reginald.

4

Whereupon quite a number of
interesting jobs of looking
proceeded to take place in
various directions.

The Saint looked at the two
arms of the law, and his
face broke into an affable and untroubled smile
of welcome.
He took his right hand out of the
breast of his coat with
his cigarette
case in it.

The constable looked at
the Saint, and his mouth sagged
open. He said in a dazed
and dumbfounded sort of voice:
“Gorblimey, it’s
‘im.” Then he went on staring, while his
honest
red face expressed an inward struggle between admi
ration
and duty.

The sergeant looked at the
Saint and stiffened. He looked slightly frightened, but his uneasiness was
clearly subservi
ent to his sense of responsibility. He
planted himself more
firmly on his by-no-means-ethereal feet, as if
bracing himself
to deal with trouble.

Then another thought seemed
to cross his mind, distract
ing him. He tried to
resist it, but it grew stronger. He
frowned. He looked
at Lady Valerie again, rather per
plexedly.

Lady Valerie looked at him
and twitched a rather weak and uncertain little smile. Then she looked at the
Saint.

The Saint looked at her.
His face was cheerfully com
posed, but his eyes said
again, for her alone, the same
things that they had said
when the two of them had looked
at one another before he
told her to open the door. It was
as if they met her
with a challenge, a suggestion, a request,
a
mocking invitation, a sardonic query, anything but a plea;
and yet no other eyes on earth could have pleaded more
compellingly. And now she understood some things that
she had not understood before.

She looked at the sergeant
again.

The sergeant looked at the
constable.

The constable looked at the
sergeant, not very intelligently, perhaps, but with a dawning grasp of what
was troubling his superior’s mind.

Both of them looked at the
Saint.

Both of them looked at
Lady Valerie.

Both of them looked at the
Saint once more.

The sergeant scratched his
head.

“Well, I dunno,”
he announced helplessly. “There must
be
somethink barmy about this.”

Simon had his cigarette
case open. He took out a cigarette.

“What’s on your mind,
brother?” he inquired amiably.

The sergeant took another
look round, and apparently
could only come to the same conclusion. As if
in token of
surrender, he took off his hat.

“Well sir, it’s like
this. Just a few minutes ago we received
a
message from Scotland Yard saying as you’d kidnapped
Lady
Valerie Woodchester, an’ she’d escaped from you,
an’
they ‘ad reason to believe she might ‘ave come here
to
Anford, an’ you might be arfter ‘er to try an’ kidnap
‘er
again, an’ we was to endeavour to trace ‘er an’ afford
her
every protection, an’ if we found you hanging about
there
was a warrant for your arrest. Well, we tried the
hotels
first, and as soon as we rang up ‘ere they told us that Lady Valerie ‘ad just come
in and taken a room. So I come
along to see if she’d like
to make a statement an’ if she
wanted a man to look
arfter ‘er, an’ now you’re here with
“er, and …
Well,” said the sergeant, plugging his initial
thesis,
“there must be somethink barmy about it.”

“There’s a warrant
for my arrest?” Simon ejaculated.
“What
on earth is it for?”

“Kidnapping Lady
Valerie. An’ obstructing the police in
the
execution of their duty.”

Simon had wondered how Mr
Teal would officially
describe being locked up in a wardrobe with an
ex-cabinet
minister.

“Good Lord,” he
said, “does it look as if Lady Valerie
was
excited about being rescued?”

“That,” said the
sergeant, with lugubrious finality, “is
wot
looks so barmy.”

The Saint grinned and
leaned back.

“Are you sure somebody
hasn’t been pulling your leg?”
he suggested.

“I dunno. If anybody
has, ‘e’ll be sorry he ever tried it before I’ve finished with ‘im. But it
sounded all right, just
like the regular
communications we ‘ave from the Yard
when there’s
anythink doing.” The sergeant turned his dis
appointedly
bewildered eyes back to the girl.
“Did
Mr Tem
plar kidnap you, miss?” he asked, like a drowning man clutching at
the last straw.

Lady Valerie looked at the
Saint again and back to the
two policemen.

Simon put his cigarette
between his lips and drew at it
very slowly.

“Why,” she said,
“that’s the funniest thing I ever heard!”

There was a silence in
which no pins could have been heard
dropping because
nobody was dropping pins. The sergeant
scratched
another part of his head and squeezed little
wedges
of coagulated dandruff from under his fingernails.
He
looked as unhappy as any public servant must look
when
confronted by a situation that fails to follow the dot
ted
line. Simon took his cigarette out of his mouth and
trickled
the smoke out in a long leisured streamer through
the unaltered quizzical
curve of his lips. His gaze rested
contemplatively
on Lady Valerie as her glance returned to
him. She looked coy and
complacent, like a puppy that has
got away with
an unguarded plate of foie gras canap
é
s.
It
was left to the constable to make the first constructive con
tribution. An expression of mingled relief and
pride had
ironed the wrinkles out of
his countenance when he heard
Lady
Valerie’s confirmatory denial: quite plainly he had
been making a dutiful effort to convince himself
that the
Saint had actually been
caught more or less red handed,
but he
had never really made it stick hard enough to be able to let go of it, and it
was distinctly cheering to him
to be
absolved from the strain of continuing to hold it down.
Now he was free to indulge in his own theories, and
the
solution came to him with
dazzling simplicity.