The Saint Closes the Case (7 page)

He left the sentence unfinished; and for a few
seconds no
one spoke.

Then Roger Conway stirred intently.

“What do you say?” he asked.

The Saint looked at him.

“I say,” he answered, “that
this is our picnic. We’ve always
known—haven’t we?—at the back of our minds,
dimly, that
one day we were bound to get our big show. I say that this
is
the cue. It might have come in any one of a dozen different ways; but it
just happens to have chosen this one. I’ll sum
marise… .”

He lighted a fresh cigarette and hitched
himself further on to the table, leaning forward with his forearms on his knees
and the fine, rake-hell, fighting face that they all, knew and
loved made
almost supernaturally beautiful with such a light
of debonair
daredevilry as they had never seen before.

“You’ve read the story,” he said.
“I grant you it reads like a
dime novelette; but there it is,
staring you in the face, just
the same. All at once, in both England and
America, there’s some funny business going on in the oil and steel and chem
ical
trades. The amount of money locked up in those three
combines must be
nearly enough to swamp the capitals of any
other bunch of
industries you could name. We don’t know exactly what’s happening, but we do
know that the big men,
the secret moguls of Wall Street and the
London Stock Ex
change, the birds with the fat cigars and the names in
-heim
and
-stein,
who juggle the finances of this cockeyed world, are
moving on
some definite plan. And then look at the goods they’re on the road with. Iron
and oil and chemicals. If you know any other three interests that’d scoop a
bigger pool out
of
a really first-class war, I’d like to hear of them… . Add on
Barney Malone’s spy story. Haven’t you realised
how touchy
nations are, and how easy
it really would be to stir up dis
trust?
And distrust, sooner or later, means war. The most
benevolent and peaceful nation, if it’s
continually finding
someone else’s
spies snooping round its preserves, is going
to make a certain song and dance about it. Nobody before
this has thought of doing that sort of thing on a
large scale—
trying to set two
European Powers at each other’s throats with
a carefully wangled
quarrel—and yet the whole idea is so glo
riously
simple. And now it’s happened—or happening… .
And behind it all is the one man in the world with
the neces
sary brain to conceive a
plot like that, and the influence and
qualifications
to carry it through. You know who I mean. The
man they call the Mystery Millionaire. The man who’s sup
posed to have arranged half a dozen wars before, on
a minor
scale, in the interests of
high finance. You’ve seen his name
marked
in red in those newspapers every time it crops up. It
fits into the scheme in a darn sight too many
ways—you can’t
laugh that off. Dr.
Rayt Marius.
…”

Norman Kent suddenly spun his cigarette into
the fireplace.

“Then Golter might fit in——
”

Conway said: “But the Crown Prince is
Marius’s own
Crown Prince !”

“Would that mean anything to a man like
Marius?” asked the Saint gently. “Wouldn’t that just make things
easier for
him? Suppose
…”

The Saint caught his breath; and then he took
up his words
again in a queerly soft and dreamy voice.

“Suppose Marius tempted the Crown
Prince’s vanity? The
King is old; and there have been rumours that
a young nation is calling for a young leader. And the Prince is ambitious.
Suppose
Marius were able to say: ‘I can give you a weapon
with which you can conquer
the world. The only price I make is that you should use it… .’ “

They sat spellbound, bewildered, fascinated.
They wanted to
laugh that vision away, to crush and pulverise and
annihilate
it with great flailing sledge-hammers of rational
incredulity.
And they could find nothing to say at all.

The clock ticked leaden seconds away into
eternity.

Patricia said breathlessly: “But he
couldn’t——
”

“But he could!”

Simon Templar had leapt to his feet, his right
arm flung
out in a wild gesture.

“It’s the key!” he cried. “It’s
the answer to the riddle! It
mayn’t be difficult to nurse up an
international distrust by
artificial means, but a tension like that
can’t be as fierce as a
genuine international hatred. It’d want a much
bigger final
spark to make it blaze up. And the Crown Prince and his
am
bitions—and Vargan’s invention—they’d make the spark!
They’re
Marius’s trump card. If he didn’t bring them off his
whole scheme might be
shipwrecked. I know that’s right!”

“That man in the garden,” whispered
Patricia. “If he was
one of Marius’s men——”

“It was Marius!”

The Saint snatched a paper from the table,
and wrung
and smashed it out so that she could see the photograph.

Bad as had been the light when they had found
themselves
face to face with the original, that face could never
have been
mistaken anywhere—that hideous, rough-hewn, nightmare ex
pressionlessness,
like the carved stone face of a heathen idol.

“It was Marius… ,”

Roger Conway came out of his chair.

“If you’re right, Saint—I’ll believe
that you didn’t dream
last night——
”

“It’s true!”

“And we haven’t all suddenly got
softening of the brain—
to be listening to these howling, daft
deductions of
yours——
”

“God knows I was never so sure of
anything in my life.”

“Then——
”

The Saint nodded.

“We have claimed to execute some sort of justice,” he
said.
“What is the just thing for us to
do here?”

Conway did not answer, and the Saint turned
to meet Norman Kent’s thoughtful eyes; and then he knew that they were
both
waiting for him to speak their own judgment.

They had never seen the Saint so stern.

“The invention must cease to be,”
said Simon Templar.
“And the brain that conceived it, which could
recreate it—
that also must cease to be. It is expedient that one man
should
die for many people… .”

3. How Simon Templar returned to Esher,

and decided to go there again

This was on the 24th of June—about three
weeks after the
Saint’s reply to the offer of a free pardon.

On the 25th, not a single morning paper gave
more than
an inconspicuous paragraph to the news which had filled
the
afternoon editions of the day before; and thereafter nothing
more at
all was said by the Press about the uninvited guests at Vargan’s demonstration.
Nor was there more than a passing reference to the special Cabinet meeting
which followed.

The Saint, who now had only one thought day
and night,
saw in this unexpected reticence the hand of something dangerously
like an official censorship, and Barney Malone, ap
pealed to, was so
uncommunicative as to confirm the Saint in
his forebodings.

To the Saint it seemed as if a strange
tension had crept into
the atmosphere of the season in London. This
feeling was
purely subjective, he knew; and yet he was unable to laugh
it
away. On one day he had walked through the streets in care
less
enjoyment of an air fresh and mild with the promise of
summer, among people
quickened and happy and alert; on
the next day the clear skies had
become heavy with the fear of
an awful thunder, and a doomed generation
went its way
furtively and afraid.

“You ought to see Esher,” he told
Roger Conway. “A day
away from your favourite bar would do you
good,”

They drove down in a hired car; and there the
Saint found
further omens.

They lunched at the Bear, and afterwards
walked over the
Portsmouth Road. There were two men standing at the end
of the
lane in which Professor Vargan lived, and two men
broke off their
conversation abruptly as Conway and the Saint
turned off the main
road and strolled past them under the
trees. Further down, a third man hung
over the garden gate
sucking a pipe.

Simon Templar led the way past the house
without glancing at it, and continued his discourse on the morrow’s probable
runners; but a sixth sense told him that the eyes of the man at the gate
followed them down the lane, as the eyes of the two
men at the corner had
done.

“Observe,” he murmured, “how
careful they are not to
make any fuss. The last thing they want to do
is to attract
attention. Just quietly on the premises, that’s what they
are.
But if we did anything suspicious we should find ourselves be
ing very
quietly and carefully bounced towards the nearest
clink. That’s what
we call Efficiency.”

A couple of hundred yards further on, on the
blind side of
a convenient corner, the Saint stopped.

“Walk on for as long as it takes you to
compose a limerick
suitable for the kind of drawing-room to which you would
never be
admitted,” he ordered. “And then walk back. I’ll be
here.”

Conway obediently passed on, carrying in the
tail of his eye a glimpse of the Saint sidling through a gap in the hedge into
the fields
on the right. Mr. Conway was no poet, but he ac
cepted the Saint’s
suggestion, and toyed lazily with the lyrical
possibilities of a
young lady of Kent who whistled wherever she went. After wrestling for some
minutes with the problem of bringing this masterpiece to a satisfactory
conclusion, he
gave it up and turned back; and the Saint returned
through
the hedge, a startlingly immaculate sight to be seen coming
through a
hedge, with a punctuality that suggested that his estimate of Mr. Conway’s
poetical talent was dreadfully accurate
.

“For the first five holes I couldn’t put
down a single putt,”
said the Saint sadly, and he continued to
describe an entirely
imaginary round of golf until they were back
on the main
road and the watchers at the end of the lane were out of
sight.

Then he came back to the point.

“I wanted to do some scouting round at
the back of the
house
to see how sound the defences were. There was a sixteen-
stone seraph in his shirtsleeves pretending to garden, and an
other little bit of fluff sitting in a deck chair
under a tree read
ing a newspaper.
Dear old Teal himself is probably sitting in
the bathroom disguised as a clue. They aren’t taking any more
chances!”

“Meaning,” said Conway, “that
we shall either have to be
very cunning or very violent.”

“Something like that,” said the
Saint.

He was preoccupied and silent for the rest of
the walk back
to the Bear, turning over the proposition he had set
himself
to tackle.

He had cause to be—and yet the tackling of
tough proposi
tions was nothing new to him. The fact of the ton or so of
official majesty
which lay between him and his immediate ob
jective
was not what bothered him; the Saint, had he chosen
to turn his professional attention to the job,
might easily
have been middleweight
champion of the world, and he had a poor opinion both of the speed and fighting
science of police
men. In any case,
as far as that obstacle went, he had a vast
confidence in his own craft and ingenuity for circumventing
mere massive force. Nor did the fact that he was
meddling with the destiny of nations give him pause: he had once, in
his quixotic adventuring, run a highly successful
one-man
revolution in South America,
and could have been a fully ac
credited
Excellency in a comic-opera uniform if he had
chosen. But this problem, the immensity of it, the colossal
forces
that were involved, the millions of tragedies that might
follow one slip in his enterprise … Something in
the
thought tightened tiny muscles
around the Saint’s jaw.