The Saint Closes the Case

'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 chem­ical 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 Exchange, 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 dis­trust? 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 glo­riously simple. And now it's happened—or happening. . . . And behind it all is the one man in the world with the necessary 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 sup­posed 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 am­bitions—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 expressionlessness, 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, ap­pealed 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 careless 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 be­ing 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 accepted the Saint's suggestion, and toyed lazily