Saint Steps In (11 page)

She opened the front door while he was paying off the driver,
and he carried their bags up the path
of light to the hall and
joined her there.

She called: “Daddy!”

They could hear the taxi’s wheels crunching out off the
gravel, and the hum of its engine
fading down the lane, leaving
them alone
together in the stillness.

“Daddy,” she called.

She went through
an open door into the living-room, and he
put
the bags down and followed her. The room was empty,
with one standard lamp burning beside the piano.

She went out again quickly.

He stayed there, lighting a cigarette and taking in the scene. It was a
livable kind of room, with built-in bookshelves and
plenty of ashtrays and not too fancy chintz covers
on the chairs,
a pleasant compromise between
interior decorating and mas
culine comfort.
There were no signs of violence or disorder,
but there were rumples in various cushions where they had
been sat on since the room was last done over.
There was a pipe
in one of the
ashtrays by the fireplace: he went over and felt the bowl, and it was quite
cold. He wondered how long a pipe bowl would stay warm after it was put down.

A telephone stood on the same table. He picked it up, and
heard the familiar tone of a clear
line. Just to make sure, he
dialed a number at random, and heard the ringing at the
other end, and then the click of the connection, and a
gruffly
sleepy male voice that said
“Yes?”

“This
is Joe,” said the Saint momentously. “You’d better
start thinking fast. Your wife has
discovered everything.”

He hung up, and
turned to Madeline Gray as she came back into the room.

“The
phone is working,” he said casually. “There’s noth
ing wrong with the line.”

“Come with me,” she said.

He took her arm and crossed the hall with her. They looked
into the dining room, sedate and barren
like any dining room
between meals. They went on into the kitchen. It was clean
and spotless, inhabited only by a
ticking clock on a shelf.

“I’ve been here,” she said.

“Would he have had dinner?”

“I
couldn’t tell.”

“What about
servants?”

“We haven’t
had anyone living in for a couple of weeks, and
we weren’t going to do anything about it until I got back from
Washington. Daddy couldn’t have been bothered with
interviewing
them and breaking them in. I got him a girl who used to work for us, who got
married and lives quite close by.
She could
have got him his dinner and cleaned up and gone
home.”

After that there
was a study lined with ponderous and well-
worn
books, and featuring a couple of filing cabinets and a
big desk littered with papers as the principal
movable furni
ture. It was fairly
messy, in a healthy haphazard way.

Simon went to one
of the filing cabinets, and pulled open a
drawer
at random. The folders looked regular enough, to any
one who hadn’t
lived with the system.

He turned from there to glance over the desk. He only saw
a disarray of letters, circulars, cryptic memoranda,
abstruse pamphlets, and assorted manuscript.

“How does it look to you?” he asked.

“About the same as usual.”

“You
must have lived with some of this stuff. Does any of
it look wrong?”

She skimmed through the filing drawer that he had opened,
and turned over some of the papers on
the desk. After that
she still looked blank and helpless.

“I couldn’t possibly say. He’s so hopelessly untidy when he isn’t
being fanatically neat.”

Simon
stared at the desk. He didn’t know Calvin Gray’s
habits, or anything about his work and interests. He
knew that it was perfectly possible to search files and papers without
leaving a room looking as if a
cyclone had gone through it.

Anyway, what
would anyone have been searching for? No
body
would have been expected to keep a precious secret
formula in an open filing cabinet, or sandwiched
between tax
demands and seed catalogs
on top of a desk … And still he
had
that exasperating feeling of underlying discord, of some factor that didn’t
explain itself or didn’t connect, as if he was
trying to force everything into one or two wrong theories,
when there was still a right theory that would
have accom
modated everything, only he had been too blind to see it yet.

“Let’s see everything,” he said shortly.

They
went upstairs and saw bedrooms. Madeline Gray’s
room. Calvin Gray’s room. A couple of guest rooms.
Bath
rooms. Everything looked ordinary and orderly.
It was a nice
well-kept house.

“So he isn’t here,” said the Saint. “There’s no blood
and no
smashed windows and no
dead bodies in any of the closets. He
went out and left the lights on. Why shouldn’t he go out
and
leave the lights
on?”

He didn’t know whether he was trying to console her or
whether he wag arguing with himself. He knew damn well that
it was perfectly simple to kidnap a man without wrecking his
house. You just walked in on him and stuck a gun in
his ribs
and said “Come for a
walk, pal,” and nine times out of ten
that was all the commotion there was going to be.

“There’s
still the laboratory,” she said in a small voice; and
he caught at that for the moment’s
reprieve.

“Why didn’t
you show me that before?”

She
took him out of the house, and they walked by a wind
ing path through tall slender trees whose delicate
upper
branches lost themselves
in the darkness beyond the glow of his pencil flashlight.

The laboratory had been invisible from the house and the
driveway, and they came on it suddenly
in a shadowy clear
ing—a long white modernistic
building with a faint glow from
inside
outlining the Venetian windows. She led him to the
door, and they went into a tiny hall. A door that
stood ajar on
one side disclosed
tiled walls and a washbasin and shower.

Beyond
the little hall, the laboratory was a long sanitary
barn with a single lamp burning overhead and striking
bright
gleams from glass tubes
and retorts and long shelves of neatly
labeled bottles and porcelain-topped benches and
stranger
pieces of less describable
apparatus. But nothing was broken,
and everything seemed reasonably in order. Only there was
no one there.

“Does this look all right too?” he asked.

“Yes.”

He surveyed the details as meaninglessly as any other lay
man would have surveyed a chemical
laboratory. If you were
going to produce any brilliant observation in a setting like
that, you had to be a master chemist too. And he wasn’t. He
wondered if any detective really ever knew everything, so that he could
immediately start finding incongruities in any kind of
technical setup, like super sleuths always could in stories.

“You could make rubber here?” he said.

“Of course.”

There must have been more doubt in his face than he meant
to have there, or else he just looked
blank because he was
thinking along other lines, or else she also wanted to keep her
mind busy along other lines.

“I could show you now,” she said.

It didn’t seem important, but it was another escape.

“Show me,” he said.

She went and fetched bottles from the shelves. Some of them
were unlabeled. She measured things
in beakers and test tubes.
She carried mixtures to a table where an elaborate train of
processing gear was already set up. She poured a quantity
of
sawdust from an old coffee can into a
glass bowl, lighted a
burner under
it, and began to blend it with various fluids. She
looked as prosaic and efficient and at home as a
seasoned cook
mixing pancakes.

The Saint hitched one hip on to another bench and watched.

It was no use his trying to look wise and intelligent about it.
He had more than the average background of ordinary chemistry,
as he had of a hundred other unlikely subjects, but things
went on in this production line that were utterly
out of his
depth. He saw fluids moving through tubes, and coils and bubbling
in flasks, changing color and condensing and precipitat
ing, and finally flowing into a
small peculiar encased engine
that looked as if it might house some kind of
turbine, from
which came a low
smooth hum and a sense of dull heat. At the
other end of this engine
projected a
long narrow troughed belt
running
over an external pulley; and over this belt began to
creep a ribbon of
the same shiny pale translucent orange-tinted stuff that she had shown him in
the dining room of the Shore-
ham. She tore
off the strip when there was about a couple of
feet of it, and gave it
to him; and he felt it between his fingers
and
stretched it as he had done before. It was still warm, and
smelled a little like wet leather and scorched
wool.

“It seems like
a wonderful thing,” he said. “But it looks a lit
tle more complicated than the bathtub proposition
you were talking about.”

She was methodically stopping the machinery and turning
off burners.

“Not
really,” she said. “In terms of a big industrial plant, it’s
almost so simple that a village plumber could put
it together.”

“But even a simple plant on a large scale costs a lot of
money. Does your father want the WPB
to go into production
on their own, or is he rich enough to start off by himself?”

“We aren’t
quite as rich as that. But if the Government went
into it they’d give us a loan, and it wouldn’t be any problem to
raise the private capital. In fact, we’d probably
have to hire
guards to keep the investors away.” She smiled at him
wanly. “It’s too bad I didn’t meet you before, isn’t it? You could have
come in on the ground floor and made a fortune.”

“I can just see myself at any board meeting,” he said.

Then
they were really looking at each other again, and the
fear was back in her eyes and he was afraid to laugh at it any
more.

“What
do you think has happened?” she asked; and he
straightened up and trod on the butt of his
cigarette.

“Let’s go back to the house,” he said roughly.

They
went out, putting out the lights and closing the door
after them.

As they went through the tall arched tunnel of leaves again
her hand slid into the crook of his
elbow, and he pressed it a
little against
his side from sympathy, but he was still thinking
coldly and from quite a distance. He said: “Did you lock the
door?”
      

“I don’t have the key.”

“When we got to the house, how did you let yourself in?”
     

“
I
just
went in. The door wasn’t locked.”

“Isn’t it ever locked?”
         

“Hardly
ever. Daddy can’t be bothered with keys—he’s al
ways losing them. Besides why should we lock up? We
haven’t
anything worth stealing,
and who’d be prowling around here?”

“You said
things had happened to the laboratory before.”

“Yes,
but it’s got so many windows that anybody could
break in if they really wanted to.”

“So
anybody could have walked in on your father at any
time tonight.”

“Yes.”

There wasn’t any more to say. They went back into the house,
and into the comfortable living-room with the cold pipe in
the
ashtray, and passed the time. He
strummed the piano, and
parodied a
song or two very quietly, and she sat in one chair
after another and watched him. And all the time he
knew
that there wasn’t anything to
do. Or to say, at that moment.