Prelude for War (12 page)

For a moment there was
sheer homicide in the Saint’s eyes. So that was the net result of his desperate
fight to
block the whitewashing performance
that had been put over
not only under the very nose of justice but
with its vigorous
co-operation. That was the
entire product of the risks he
had
taken and the humiliation to which he had exposed
himself—so that even a sensation-loving press was
inclined
to regard him as having for once
exhibited a somewhat
egregious and
unsophisticated stupidity.

And then he realized that
that must not only be the press,
but the general opinion.
Whitewashing was understandable,
something to whisper and
wink knowingly about; but the
truth that Simon Templar
was convinced of was too much
for them to swallow.
Retired generals, great financiers and
ex-cabinet
ministers couldn’t conspire to cover up murder:
it
was one of those things which simply did not happen.

His flash of rage died into
a hopeless weariness.

“Maybe I like
trouble,” he rasped, and pushed his way
out
of the group.

He had seen Peter and
Patricia coming out. He took
their arms, one on each
side of him, and led them silently
across the road into
the pub opposite.

They took their drinks at
the bar and carried them
over to a quiet corner by
the window. The room was
deserted, and for a while
nobody broke the silence. Patri
cia’s face was struggling
between thunder and tears.

“You were magnificent,
boy,” she said at last. “I could
have
murdered that coroner.”

“But what good could
you do?” Peter asked helplessly.

Simon took out a cigarette
and lighted it with tense,
deliberate fingers. The
bitterness had sunk deeper into him, condensing and coalescing into one
white-hot drop of searing energy from which the savage power of its combustion
was driving with transmuted fierceness through every
inch
of his being. Perhaps he had failed disastrously in
the first
round; but he was still on his feet,
and the marrow of his
bones had turned to iron.
His first pull of smoke came back
between lips that
had settled into a relentless fighting line.

“None,” he said
curtly. “No good at all. But it had to
be
tried. And that lets us out. The rest of the argument
is
a free-for-all with no holds barred.”

“What did you tell
the reporters?” asked Peter.

“Nothing. They didn’t
want telling. They told me. As
far as they’re concerned,
it was all just a routine set up
to gloss over the fact
that the Whiteways gang were all too
busy saving their
own skins to worry about anybody else.
It
was instructive, too, now I come to think about it. I was
wondering how they’d managed to fix that coroner—dumb
as he was. I think I can see it now. They let him think he
was doing just what the reporters thought he was doing,
and of course he was obviously the type who could be
counted on to stand by the old school. Not that it matters
now, anyway. They got their verdict, and the case is offi
cially closed.”

“The fireman said that he found the
key,” Peter observed.

Simon nodded.

“That was the worst
mistake I’ve made so far—I told
Luker the key wasn’t in
the door when I was trying to get
a reaction out of him on the night of
the fire. If he’d over
looked that, he’d ‘ve
had plenty of chances to sling it in through a window afterwards. But I don’t
think even that
really made much difference.”

Peter raised his tankard
again and drank moodily.

Patricia emptied her glass.

She said presently: “I
saw you get hold of your girl
friend, but I didn’t see
you take my clothes off her.”

“It was rather a
public place,” said the Saint. “But she’s
a
nice girl and never goes out with the same man twice unless he’s a millionaire.
Or unless a millionaire asks her
to. Which is why she was running around with
young Ken
net. Fairweather was the
philanthropist who wanted him
led back into the fold, and he was ready
to buy a thousand-
guinea fur coat to see it
done. And Fairweather was the
guy who
arranged for him to come down for the week end.
I got that much—and more.”

The first taut-strung intensity
of his manner was passing
off, giving way before the slow return of the
old exhilarant zest of battle which the other two knew so well. What was
past was past; but the fight went on. And he was
still in it.
He began to feel the
familiar tingle of impetuous vitality
creeping
again along his nerves; and the smoke came again
through the first tentative glimmer of a Saintly smile.

“We were right, boys
and girls,” he said. “Our old
friends
the arms racketeers are on the warpath again:
Luker,
Fairweather and Sangore, just as we sorted them
out,
with Luker pulling the strings and Fairweather and
Sangore
playing ball. The Sons of France are in it, too,
though
I don’t know how. But there’s something big blow
ing
up; and you can bet that whatever it is the arms manu
facturers
are going to end up in the money, even if a few
million
suckers do get killed in the process. Kennet had a
bee
about the arms racket; he’d been scratching around
after
them, and somehow or other he’d got on to some
thing.”

“What was it?”
asked Patricia.

“I wish I knew. But
we’ll find out. It was something to
do with papers and
photographs. Lady Valerie didn’t
remember. She never paid
any attention. The whole thing
bored her. But it provides
the one thing we didn’t have
before—the motive. Whatever
it was, it was dynamite.
It was big enough to mean
that Kennet was too dangerous
to be allowed to go on
living. And he just wasn’t smart
enough or tough enough.
They got him.”

“Somehow,” said
Peter, “I can’t see Fairweather doing
a
job like that.”

“Maybe he didn’t.
Maybe Sangore didn’t, either. But
Kennet died—very
conveniently. They knew about it. Prob
ably
Luker did it himself. I can just see him telling them—
‘Leave
it to me.’ “

“He was taking a big
risk.”

“What risk? It would
have been a cinch; except for the
pure fluke that I
happened to come along. You saw how
the inquest went.
There were a dozen ways he could have done it. Kennet could have been poisoned,
or strangled, or
had his throat cut or his skull
cracked: almost anything
short of chopping him up
would have left damned little
evidence on a body that
had been through a fire like that.
He could even have
been just knocked out and locked in
his room and left
there for the fire to do the rest. We’ll
never
know exactly how it was done, and we’ll never be able
to
prove anything now; but I know that they murdered
him. And I’m going to
carry on from where Kennet left off.
You can
take your own choice, but I’m in this now—up to
the neck.”

They sat looking at him,
and in their ears echoed the
faint trumpets of the
forlorn ventures in which they had
followed him without question so many
times before.

Patricia smiled.

“All right,
boy,” she said; “I’m with you.”

“If he’s made up his
mind to get murdered, I suppose you can’t stop him,” Peter said
resignedly. “Anyway, if
they put him in another
fire we shan’t have to pay for a
cremation. But what does
he think he’s going to do ?”

Simon stood up and looked at the clock on the
wall.

“I’m going to
London,” he said. “I found out from the
girl friend that Kennet
lived with another Bolshevik named
Windlay,
who was in on the party with him. So I’m going
to try and get hold of
him before anyone else has the same
idea. And
I’ve wasted enough time already. If you two
want to be useful, you can
try and keep tabs on the White
ways outfit
while I’m away. Be good, and I’ll call you
later.”

He waved to them and was gone, in a sudden
irresistible
urge of action, and the room
seemed curiously drab and
lifeless
after he had gone. They had one more glimpse of
him, at the wheel of the Hirondel, as the great car snaked
past the window with a spluttering roar of power;
and
then there was only the fading
thunder of his departure.

The Saint drove quickly.
When he was in a hurry, speed
limits were merely a
trivial technicality to him; and he was in a hurry now. He did not like to
dwell too much on the thought of how desperate his hurry might really be. His
effortless touch threaded the car through winding roads
and obstructing traffic with the deftness of an engraver
etching an intricate pattern; the rush of the wind beating
at his face and shoulders assuaged some of his hunger for
primitive violence; the deep-throated drone of the exhaust was an
elemental music that matched his mood. The clean-
cut
activity of driving, the concentration of judgment and
the
ceaseless play of fine nerve responses absorbed the fore
front of mechanical consciousness, so that another part of
his mind seemed to be set free, untrammelled by dimension,
outside of time, to roam over the situation as he knew it and
to try to probe into the future where it was leading. It was
ninety-five miles from Anford to Notting Hill, and the clock
on the dashboard told him that he made the distance in one
hour and twenty-five minutes; but the ground that his
mind covered in the same time would have taken much
longer to account for.

The arrival in Notting Hill
brought him back to reality.
He stopped beside a postman
who directed him to Bala
clava Mansions, and when
he caught sight of the building
he was obliged to admit to
himself that he might have been
unduly harsh with Lady
Valerie. It actually did look like
an Awful Place,
being one of those gloomy and architec
turally arid concoctions
of sooty stucco to which the London
landlord
is so congenially prone to attach the title of
“Mansions,” presumably in the hope of persuading the
miserable tenant that luxury is being poured into
his humble
lap. Just inside the front
door a number of grubby and almost indecipherable scraps of paper pinned and
pasted
to the peeling wall gave
instructions for locating those of
the
inhabitants who were still sufficiently optimistic to
believe that anyone might have any interest in
finding them.
From one of those
pathetically neglected emblems of stub
born
survival Simon ascertained that John Kennet and
Ralph Windlay had been the joint occupants of the rear
ground-floor flat on the right.

He went through the
cheerless dilapidated hall and raised
his hand to knock on
the indicated door. And in that posi
tion he stopped,
with his knuckles poised, for the door was
already
ajar.

The Saint scarcely paused
before he pushed it open with
his foot and went in.

“Hullo there,”
he called; but there was no answer. It
did
not take him any time to discover why. He had come
through
into the one all-purpose room of which the habita
ble
part of the flat was composed; and when he saw what was in it he knew that his
fear had been justified, that he
had indeed wasted too much
time. Ralph Windlay was
already dead.

3

A bullet fired at close
range had helped to shorten his
life, and had done it
without making a great deal of mess. He lay flat on his back hardly a yard
inside the doorway,
with his arms spread wide and his mouth
stupidly open.
Lady Valerie’s description of him was
quite recognizable.
He still wore his glasses. He couldn’t
have been much more
than twenty-five, and his pale thin
face looked as if it might
once have been
intellectual. The only mark on it was a
black-rimmed
hole between the eyes; but his head lay in the
middle
of a sticky dark red mess on the threadbare carpet,
and
Simon knew that the back of his skull would not be
nice
for a squeamish person to look at.