Prelude for War (38 page)

VIII

How
Kane Luker Called a Conference,

and
Simon Templar Answered Him

O
BEYING
an
urgent and peremptory summons, Mr Algernon
Sidney
Fairweather, Brigadier-General Sir Robert Sangore and Lady Sangore, arrived at
Luker’s house a little before
seven o’clock that evening.
They were perturbed and nerv
ous, and their emotions
expressed themselves in various individual ways during the ten minutes that
Luker kept them
waiting in his study.

Nervousness made General
Sangore, if possible, a little
more military. He tugged
at his moustache and frowned
out fiercely from under bristling white
eyebrows; his speech
had a throaty
brusqueness that made his every utterance
sound like a severe official reprimand.

“Infernal nerve the
feller has,” he rumbled. “Ordering us about as if we hadn’t anything
else to do but wait on
him. Harrumph! I had a good
mind to tell him I was too busy to come.”

Lady Sangore was very cold
and superior. Her face,
which had always borne a
close resemblance to that of a
horse, became even more
superciliously equine. She sat
in an even more primly
upright attitude than her corsets
normally obliged her
to maintain, bulging her noble bosom
like a pouter pigeon
and tilting her nose back as if there
were an unpleasant
odour under it.

“Yes, you were
busy,” she said. “You were going to the
club,
weren’t you? Much too busy to attend to business.
Ha!”
The word “ha” does not do justice to the snort of
an irate dragon, but the limited phonetics of the English
alphabet will produce nothing better. “You’d better stop
being so busy and get your wits about you. Something must
be seriously wrong or Mr Luker wouldn’t have sent for
you like this.”

Fairweather twittered. He
fidgeted with his hands and
shuffled his feet and
wriggled; there seemed to be an itch
in his muscles that
would not let him settle down.

“I don’t like
it,” he moaned. “I don’t like it at all. Luker
is
…
Really, I can’t understand him at all these days.
His
behaviour was most peculiar when I told him about
the
wire I had from Lady Valerie this afternoon. He didn’t even sympathize at all
with what I went through with that
man Templar and
that boorish detective. He asked me a
few questions and
took the wire and rushed off and left
me alone in his
drawing room, and I just sat there until
he
sent the butler to tell me to go away and wait till I heard
from him.”

“I can’t think why men
get so excited about that girl,” said Lady Sangore disparagingly,
 
stabbing her husband,
with a basilisk eye.

The general cleared his
throat.

“Really, Gwendolyn!
You surely don’t suspect——
”

“I suspect
nothing,” said Lady Sangore freezingly. “I merely keep my eyes open.
I know what men are.”

She seemed to have made a
unique anthropological discovery
.

Fairweather leaned forward,
glancing around him furtively
as if he feared being
overheard.

“There’s something I—I
must tell you before he comes,”
he said in a stage
whisper. “We
…
I
mean, there’s good
reason to suspect that Lady Valerie is
working with that
man Templar against our interests, and
unless something
is done at once the position may
become serious.”

“So that’s what it
is,” said Lady Sangore magisterially. “And what’s Mr Luker going to
do about it? The girl ought
to be whipped, that’s what
I’ve always said.”

Fairweather dropped his
voice even lower.

“Last night he—he
practically told me he meant to have
both of them
murdered.”

“Good God !”
exclaimed General Sangore in a scanda
lized voice.
“But that’s ridiculous—absurd! Why, she
belongs
to one of the best families in England!” He glared
about him indignantly. “It’s that bounder Templar who’s
led her astray.
He
ought to be severely dealt with. Dammit,
if I’d ever had him in my regiment …”

He broke off as Luker appeared
in the doorway.

Luker stood there for a
moment and looked at them
one by one. He did not seem
in the least disturbed. Perhaps
a faint flicker of
surprise crossed his face when he saw that
Lady
Sangore was present, but he made no comment. His
dark,
well-tailored suit fitted him like a cloth covering
squeezed
over a marble figure; he looked harder and stonier
than
ever, as though he would wear it out from the inside.
His
square rugged features had the insensitive strength of the same stone.

He moved deliberately
across the room to his enormous desk, sat down in the swivel chair behind it
and faced them with almost taunting expectancy. They looked at each other and
avoided his eyes, subdued in spite of themselves into
hoping
that somebody else would give them a lead.

General Sangore was the
first to let himself go.

“What’s this story of
Fairweather’s that you’re planning
to murder Lady
Valerie Woodchester ?” he blurted out.

Luker inclined his head
unimpressionably.

“So you have heard?
That will save some explanations.
Yes, it has become
very necessary that she and Templar
should be
eliminated. That is
why I sent for you this eve
ning.”

“Well, if you think
we’re going to take part in any
damned murder plots,
you’re damned well mistaken,” stated
General
Sangore hotly. “I never heard of such—such infer
nal
impudence in my life!”

He glanced at his wife as
if for approval. Lady Sangore’s
lips were tightly
compressed; her eyes were glittering.

“That girl ought to
be well whipped,” she repeated.

Luker stroked his chin
thoughtfully. His manner was
mild and patient. He spoke
in the calm and reasonable tone
of a man who states facts
that cannot be disputed.

“I fear that whipping
would scarcely be sufficient,” he
remarked.
“We are not playing schoolroom games. Let me
remind
you of the circumstances. All of you are aware, I
believe,
that the French patriots have planned a coup d’etat
for
tomorrow which if it is resisted may lead to a Fascist
revolution.”

His gaze passed
questioningly over them and arrived
last at
Fairweather. Fairweather dithered.

“Yes … That is, I
may have heard rumours of it. I
know nothing about it
officially.”

“During this change of
governments a number of people
will quite definitely be
killed,” said Luker cold-bloodedly.
“Would
you call that a murder plot?”

“Of course not,”
boomed the general authoritatively.
“That’s quite a
different matter. That’s political. It’s the
same
as war. Anyhow, as Fairweather says, we don’t know anything about it—not
officially.”

“If the plot should
fail, and if all the details should be
discovered,
I’m afraid we could not plead our official ignor
ance,”
Luker replied smoothly. “You see, before he was
killed
young Kennet gave certain papers to Lady Valerie.
You
know what was among them. She placed these docu
ments,
unread, in a cloakroom—from what has happened
since
it seems likely that they were at Paddington. If we
could have recovered
them it would have been all right; even
if
she had seen the one vital thing, I don’t think she would have understood. I
tried to make arrangements to deal with her and Templar last night, but those
arrangements miscar
ried. Templar
then appears to have kidnapped her. She
escaped, returned to London and presumably recovered the
papers from where she had left them. From the
telegram
Fairweather showed me I
suspected she might have gone
to
Anford. I sent two men down in a fast car. They reported
to me by telephone that she was at the Golden
Fleece and
that Templar had arrived
soon after her.”

“Probably they
arranged to meet there,” put in Lady
Sangore.
“I always knew she was a hussy. Whatever hap
pens
to her, she’s brought it on herself.”

“That thought will
doubtless console her greatly,” Luker
observed.
“However, Fairweather had meanwhile been
stupid
enough to show Lady Valerie’s telegram to a detec
tive
who was with him when it arrived. Much later Scotland
Yard
apparently also guessed, or discovered, that she had
taken
a train to Anford. They must have telephoned the
Anford
police, because two officers arrived at the Golden
Fleece
and went upstairs. I don’t know what Templar told
them,
and I don’t think he can have said anything about the documents which by that
time he must have read,
because not long afterwards
the officers came out with
Templar and Lady Valerie,
all apparently on the most
friendly terms, and
allowed them to get into a car and
drive away. My men
overtook them on the road, carrying
out my orders to
recover the papers, to capture Templar and Lady Valerie alive if possible and
to hold them until
I gave instructions how they were to be
disposed of.”

There was a stricken
silence while Luker’s point forced
itself home. This
time Fairweather was the first to regain
his
voice.

“But—but—for goodness
sake, Luker, really, you can’t
murder a girl!”

“Why not?” Luker
inquired blandly.

Sangore appeared to grope
in darkness for an answer.

“It … Well,
dammit, man—it simply isn’t done,” he
;aid feebly.

Luker laughed. There was
nothing hearty about his laughter. It was a silent, terrifying performance, as
if a
stone image had quaked with unholy mockery.

“You gentlemen of
England, with your pettifogging con
ventions and your
arrogant righteousness and your old
school ties; you
whitewashed dummies,” he sneered. “You
don’t
care what dirty work is done so long as you don’t
have to know about it
‘officially’; you don’t care how many
people
are murdered so long as you can call it warfare,
or dignify it with the adjective ‘political.’ You don’t mind
helping to start a civil war in France, in which
it’s quite
certain that numbers of
girls will be killed, do you?”

“I tell you that’s
different,” stormed the general. “Why
—why,
we’ve had civil wars in England!”

He said it as if that fact
proved that civil wars must be
all right.

“Very well,”
Luker went on. “And you didn’t object to
murdering
Kennet and Windlay, did you ?”

Fairweather said hoarsely:
“We had nothing to do with
that. In fact, I told you
——”

Lady Sangore’s face looked
flabby. The powder cracked on her cheeks as her mouth worked. She stammered:
“You —you—I never knew——”

“No doubt, like the
others, you attributed those deaths
to divine
intervention,” said Luker sarcastically. “I’m sorry
to disillusion you. I gave orders for Windlay to be killed. I
strangled Kennet myself and started the fire under his room.
Your husband and Fairweather knew I was going to do it;
you yourself guessed. Therefore at this moment you are all
of you already accessories to the crime of murder unless
you at once
communicate your knowledge to the police. Of
course
if you do that you may find it hard to explain your
silence at the inquest, but the telephone is here
on my desk
if any of you would care
to use it.”