Prelude For War s-19

by Leslie Charteris

  Figures in a grotesque assortment of deshabille were running across the lawn with the erratic scurrying wildness of flushed rabbits.

  "At least they all seem to have got out," said the Saint.

  He switched off the engine and hitched his legs over the side of the car. Some of the scurrying figures, attracted per­haps like moths by the new blaze of the headlights, had started to run towards them. The first to arrive was a young man who carried a girl over his shoulder. He was large and blond and impressively moustached, and he wore blue-and-green striped pajamas. He dumped the girl on the ground at the Saint's feet, rather like a retriever bringing in a bird, and stood over her for a moment breathing heavily.

  "By Jove," he said. "Oh, by Jove! . . . Steady on, Val, old thing. It's all right now. You're quite safe."

  He put out a hand to restrain her as she tried to get up, but with a quick movement she wriggled away from him and found her feet. She was dark and slender, but not so slender that the transparent nightgown which was her only covering lacked fascinating contours to cling to. The chiffon had slipped aside to bare one white shoulder and her curly hair was in a wild disarray, but even the thoroughly petulant spoiled-child expression that pouted her face could not dis­guise its amazing beauty.

  "All right, all right," she said impatiently. "You've res­cued me now, and I'm very much obliged. But for heaven's sake stop pawing me and find me something to wear."

  She seemed to regard the fire as an event arranged by a malicious fate solely for her own inconvenience. The young man looked somewhat startled.

  "Damn it, Valerie," he said in an injured tone, "do you realize——"

  "Of course she does," said the Saint soothingly. "She knows you're a little hero. She's just being practical. And while we're being practical, do you happen to know whether anybody else is left in the house?"

  The young man turned. He looked at Simon rather blankly, as if taken aback at being interrupted so uncere­moniously.

  "Eh? What?" he said. "I dunno. I fetched Valerie out."

  From the way he said it, one gathered that nobody mat­tered except Valerie.

  Simon patted him on the back.

  "Yes, we know," he said kindly. "We saw you. You're a hero. We'll give you a diploma. But just the same, wouldn't it be a good idea to round up the others and make sure that nobody's missing?"

  Again the young man looked blank and rather resentful. His expression indicated that having done his good deed for the day by rescuing Valerie, he expected to be set apart on a pedestal instead of being ordered about. But there was something about the Saint's cool assumption of command that eliminated argument.

  "Oh, certainly. I see what you mean."

  He moved reluctantly away, and presently people came straggling in from different parts of the lawn and gathered together near Simon's car. There was a tall red-faced man with a white moustache and the stereotyped chutney-and-scotch complexion of a professional soldier, a dour large-bosomed woman in a flannel dressing gown who could have belonged to nobody else, an excited little fat man who came chattering pompously, the guardsmanly youth who had herded them together, and a fourth man who strolled up in the background. The reflection of the fire shone redly in their faces as they assembled in a group with an air of . studied calm which proclaimed their consciousness of be­having like British aristocrats in an emergency.

  Simon looked them over without reverence. He knew none of them by sight, and it was none of his business, but he was the only one present who seemed to have any coher­ent ideas. His voice stilled their chatter.

  "Well," he said, "you ought to know. Are you all here?"

  They glanced at each other in an awed and scared sort of way and then turned and looked frightenedly at the blazing house and back again, as though it were the first time that any of their thoughts had gone beyond their own personal safety.

  Suddenly the voice of the girl in the nightgown sounded shrilly behind Simon.

  "No! They aren't all here! John isn't here! Where's Johnny?"

  There was an awful stillness, in which realization crawled horribly over chalky faces.

  "B-but where can he be?" asked the short fat man in a quavering voice. "He—he must have heard the alarm——"

  The military-looking man turned round and raised his voice in a barrack-square bawl.

  "Kennet!" he shouted. "Kennet!"

  He sounded as if he were bellowing at a slovenly recruit who was late on parade.

  The only answer was the derisive cackle of the leaping flames.

  The large-bosomed woman shrieked. She opened her mouth wide and yelled at the top of her voice, her face contorted with an awful terror.

  "No! No! It's too dreadful. He can't be still in there! You can't have——"

  Her words broke off in a kind of gulp. For a couple of seconds her mouth went on opening and shutting like that of a fish out of water; then, without another sound, she collapsed like an empty sack.

  "She's fainted," somebody said stupidly.

  "So she has," said the Saint witheringly. "Now we all ought to gather round and hold her hands."

  The military man, bending over her, turned up his purple face.

  "By Gad, sir!" he burst out cholerically. "Haven't you——" He stopped. Another thought, overwhelming in its enormity, seemed to have erupted under his nose. He straightened up, glaring at the Saint as if he had just really become aware of his presence for the first time. "Anyway," he said, "what the devil are you doing here?"

  The idea percolated into the brains of the others and brought them back to gaping stillness. And while they were staring in vacuous indignation, the man who had stayed in the background moved to the front. He was short and very broad shouldered, with a square and rather flat face and very sunken shrewd dark eyes. Unlike the others, he was fully dressed. There was no sign of flurry or alarm about him; with his powerful chin and thin straight mouth he looked as solid and impassive as a chunk of granite.

  "Yes," he said, "who are you?"

  Simon met his gaze with cold insouciance. The antago­nism was instant and intuitive. Perhaps it was that that touched the Saint's swift mind with the queer itch of dis­satisfaction that was to lead to so many things. Perhaps it was then that the first wraith of suspicion took nebulous shape in his mind. But there was no time to dwell on the point just then. He only knew that something like a fine thread of steel wove through the plastic outlines of his attitude.

  "At the moment," he said evenly, "I seem to be the only person who isn't behaving like a stuffed owl. Where does this man Kennet sleep?"

  "I don't know," answered the square-built man. "Some­one else will be able to tell you."

  His face was expressionless; his tone was so expression­less as to sound almost ironical. There seemed to be a stony sort of amusement lurking at the back of his deep-set eyes. But that might have been an illusion created by the flicker­ing firelight.

  The girl Valerie supplied the information.

  "He's in the end room on the left—that window there."

  Simon looked.

  The room was at the end of the house which was burning most fiercely—the end close to which the fire had probably started. Under it, the ground floor looked like an open furnace through which the draught from the open windows and the open front door was driving flame in long roaring streamers. The end upper window was about fifteen feet from the ground, and there was no way of reaching it from outside without a ladder.

  The fat little man was wringing his hands.

  "He can't still be there," he wailed. "He must have heard the alarm——"

  "Suppose he got the wind up and fainted or something?" suggested the large young man in the striped pajamas help­fully.

  Simon almost hit him.

  "Do you know where there's a ladder, you amazing oaf?" he demanded.

  The young man blinked at him dumbly. Nobody else answered. They all seemed to be in a fog.

  Simon swung round to Patricia.


  "Do what you can, darling," he said.

  He turned away, and for a moment the others seemed to be held petrified.

  "Stop him," bleated the little fat man suddenly. "For God's sake, stop him! It's suicide!"

  "Hey!" bellowed the puce-faced militarist commandingly. "Comeback!"

  The queenly woman screeched indistinguishably and col­lapsed again,

  Simon Templar heard none of these things. He was halfway across the lawn by that time, racing grimly towards the house.

  3

  The heat from the hall struck him like a physical blow as he plunged through the front door; the air scorched his lungs like a gust from a red-hot oven. At the far end of the hall long sheets of flame were sweeping greedily up a huge pair of velvet curtains. Smaller flames were dancing over a rug and leaping with fiercer eagerness up the blackening banisters of a wide staircase. The paint on the broad beams crossing the high ceiling was bubbling and boiling under the heat, and occasionally small drops of it fell in a scalding rain to take hold of new sections of the floor.

  The Saint hardly checked for an instant before he went on. He dodged across the hall like a flitting shadow and leapt up the stairs four at a time. Fire from the banisters snatched at him as he went up, stung his nostrils with the smell of his own scorching clothes.

  On the upper landing the smoke was thicker. It made his eyes smart and filled his throat with coughing; his heart was hammering with a dull force that jarred his ribs; he felt an iron band tightening remorselessly around his tem­ples. He stared blearily down the corridor which led in the direction he had to go. Halfway along it great gouts of flame were starting up from the floor boards, waving like monstrous flowers swaying in a blistering wind. It could only be a matter of seconds before the whole passage would plunge down into the incandescent inferno below.

  The Saint went on.

  It was not so much a deliberate effort as a yielding to instinctive momentum. He had no time to think about being heroic—or about anything else, for that matter. In that broiling nightmare a second's hesitation might have been fatal. But he had set out to do something, knowing what it might mean; and so long as there was any hope of doing it his only idea was to go on. He kept going with nothing to carry him on but the epic drive of a great heart that had never known what it was to turn back for the threat of danger.

  He came out in a clear space on the other side of the flames, beating the sparks from his sleeves and trousers. Open doors and glimpses of disordered beds on either side of the passage showed where various rooms had been has­tily vacated; but the door of the room at the very end was closed. He fell on the handle and turned it.

  The door was locked.

  He thundered on it with fists and feet.

  "Kennet!" he shouted. "Kennet, wake up!"

  His voice was a mere harsh croak that was lost in the hoarse roar of the fire. It brought no answer from behind the door.

  He drew back across the corridor, braced himself momen­tarily and flung himself forward again. Hurled by the muscles of a trained athlete, his shoulder crashed into the door with all the shattering force of one hundred and seventy-five pounds of fighting weight behind it, in an impact that shook every bone in his body; but he might just as well have charged a steam roller. The floor might be cracking and crumbling under his feet, but that door was of tough old English oak seasoned by two hundred years of history and still untouched by the fire. It would have taken an axe or a sledge-hammer to break it down.

  His eyes swept it desperately from top to bottom. And as he looked at it, two pink fingers of flame curled out from underneath it. The floor of the room was already taking fire.

  But those little jagged fangs of flame meant that there was a small space between the bottom of the door and the floor boards. If he could only push the key through so that it fell on the floor inside he might be able to fish it out through the gap under the door. He whipped out his pen­knife and probed at the keyhole.

  At the first attempt the blade slipped right through the hole without encountering any resistance. The Saint bent down and brought his eye close to the aperture. There was enough firelight inside the room for him to be able to see the whole outline of the keyhole. And there was no key in it.

  For one dizzy second his brain whirled. And then his lips thinned out, and a red glint came into his eyes that owed nothing to the reflections of the fire.

  Again he fought his way incredibly through the hellish barrier of flame that shut off the end of the corridor. The charred boards gave ominously under his feet, but he hardly noticed it. He had remembered noticing something through the suffocating murk on the landing. As he beat out his smouldering clothes again he located it—a huge medieval battle-axe suspended from two hooks on the wall at the top of the stairs. He measured the distance and jumped, snatching eagerly. The axe came away, bringing the two hooks with it, and a shower of plaster fell in his face and half blinded him.

  That shower of grit probably saved his life. He slumped against the wall, trying to clear his streaming eyes; and that brief setback cheated death for the hundredth time in its long duel with the Saint's guardian angel. For even as he straightened up again with the axe in his hands, about twenty feet of the passage plunged downwards with a heart-stopping crash in a wild swirl of flame, leaving nothing but a gaping chasm through which fire roared up in a fiendish fountain that sent him staggering back before its intolerable heat. The last chance of reaching that locked room was gone.

  A great weariness fell on the Saint like a heavy blanket pressing him down. There was nothing more that he could do.

  He dropped the battle-axe and stumbled falteringly down the blazing stairs. There was no more battle now to keep him going. It was sheer blind automatism rather than any conscious effort on his part that guided him through another inferno to come reeling out through the front door, an amazing tatterdemalion outcast from the jaws of hell, to fall on his hands and knees on the terrace outside. In a dim faraway manner he was aware of hands raising him; of a remembered voice, low and musical, close to his ear.

  "I know you like warm climates, boy, but couldn't you have got along with a trip to Africa ?"

  He smiled. Between him and Patricia there was no need for the things that other people would have had to say. They spoke their own language. Grimy, dishevelled, with his clothes blackened and singed and his eyes bloodshot and his body smarting from a dozen minor burns, the Saint smiled at her with all his old incomparable impudence.

  "I was trying to economize," he said. "And now I shall probably catch my death of cold."

  Already the cool night air, flowing like nectar into his parched lungs, was beginning to revive him, and in a few minutes his superb resilience would do the rest. He reviewed his injuries more systematically, and realized that com­paratively speaking he was almost miraculously unscathed.

  The thing that had come nearest to downing him was the smoke and fumes of the fire; and the effects of that were dispersing themselves like magic now that he could breathe again without feeling as if he were inhaling molten ash.

  He cocked an eye at the stolid country policeman who was holding his other arm.

  "Do you have to be quite so professional, Reginald?" he murmured. "It makes me feel nervous."

  The constable's hold relaxed reassuringly.

  "I'd get along and see the doctor, sir, if I was you. He's in the lodge now with Lady Sangore."

  "Is that the old trout's name ? And I'll bet her husband is at least a general." The Saint was starting to get his bearings, and his legs began to feel as if they belonged to him again. He searched for a cigarette. "Thanks, but Lady Sangore can have him. I'd rather have a drink. I wonder if we could get any co-operation from the owner of this jolly little bonfire?"

  "You mean Mr Fairweather, sir? That's him, coming along now."

  While Simon had been inside the house, a number of other people had arrived on the scene, and another police­man and a sergeant were loudly ordering them to stan
d back. Paying no attention to this whatever, they swarmed excitedly round the Saint, all talking at once and completely frustrating the fat little Mr Fairweather, who seemed to be trying to make a speech. The voice of the general rose above the confused jabber like a foghorn.

  "A fine effort, young man. A splendid effort, by Gad 1 But you shouldn't have tried it."

  "Tell the band to strike up a tune," said the Saint shortly. "Did anybody find a ladder?"

  With his strength rapidly coming back, he still fought against admitting defeat. His face was hard and set and the blue in his eyes was icy as he glanced over the group.

  "A ladder wouldn't be much use now," said a quiet voice. "The flames are pouring out of his window. There isn't a hope."

  It was the square-jawed man who spoke; and again it seemed to Simon that there was a faint sneer in his dark eyes.

  The Saint's gaze turned back to the house; and as if to confirm what the other had said there came from the blaze a tremendous rumbling rending sound. Slowly, with massive deliberation, the roof began to bend inwards, sagging in the middle. Faster and faster it sagged; and then, with a shattering grinding roar like an avalanche, it crumpled up and vanished. A great shower of golden sparks shot upwards and fell in a brilliant rain over the lawns and garden.

  "You see?" said the square man. "You did everything you could. But it's lucky you turned back when you did. If you had reached his room, the chances are that you'd never have got back."

  Simon's eyes slanted slowly back to the heavy-set power­ful face.

  It was true that there was nothing more that he could do. But now, for the first time since the beginning of those last mad minutes, he could stop to think. And his mind went back to the chaotic questions that had swept through it for one vertiginous instant back there in the searing stench of the fire.

  "But I did reach his room," he answered deliberately. "Only I couldn't get in. The door was locked. And the key wasn't in it."

  "Really?"

  The other's tone expressed perfunctory concern, but his eyes no longer held their glimmer of cold amusement. They stared hard at Simon with a cool, analytical steadiness, as if weighing him up, estimating his qualities and methodically tabulating the information for future reference.