Prelude For War

some crazy idea of making amends by carrying on Kennet's work on her own, and taking some wild vengeance on the gang that used her for a cat's-paw, or else she simply means to blackmail them. And I may be daft, but it seems to me that her scheme might very well combine the two.'

Peter Quentin got up and refilled his glass. He sat down again and looked at the Saint seriously.

'And she's the only link we've got with what's going on?' he said.

'The one and only. Kennet and Windlay are dead, and we shouldn't get anything out of Luker and Company unless we beat it out of them, which mightn't be so easy as it sounds. Meanwhile we're tied hand and foot. We're just sitting tight and twiddling our thumbs while she's playing her own fool game. What should we do? Use her for bait and wait until something happens, with the risk of finding her as useful as John Kennet at the end of it? Or start again and try to cut in from another angle?'

'You tell us,' said Patricia.

There was a pause in the intermittent glugging which had punctuated the conversation from the corner where Mr Uniatz was marooned with his consoling bottle in the midst of the uncharted wilderness of Thought. Mr Uniatz was no longer clear about why his purely sociable contribution to the powwow should have marooned him there, but in his last conscious moment he had been invited to join in thinking about something, and since then he had been submerged in his lonely struggle. Now, corning to the surface like a diver whose mates have suddenly remembered him and pulled him up, the anguished irregularities of his face dis­solved into a radiant beam of heaven-sent inspiration.

'I got it, boss!' he announced ecstatically. 'What we gotta do wit' dis wren is catch her at de aerodrome before she takes off.'

'Before she takes off what?' asked the Saint foggily.

'Before she takes off wit' de compressed whiskey,' said Mr Uniatz proudly, 'De stuff de temperance outfit she's woikin' for t'rows out of de aeroplanes.' Mr Uniatz raised his bottle and washed out his throat with enthusiastic lavish-ness. His eyes glowed with the rapture of achievement. 'Chees, boss, why didden we t'ink of dat before? It's in de bag!'

Simon looked at him for a moment; and then he bowed his head in speechless reverence.

And at that instant the telephone bell rang.

The sound jarred into the silence with a shrill unexpected­ness that jolted them all into an unnatural stillness. There were many people among the Saint's large acquaintance who might have made a casual call at that hour; and yet for some illogical reason the abrupt summons gave him a queer intuitive tightening in his stomach. Perhaps it was the way his thoughts had been running. He lifted his head and looked at the faces of the others, but they were all expressionless with the same formless foreboding.

Simon picked up the phone.

'Hullo,' he said.

'Is that you, Simon darling?' it answered. 'This is Valerie.'

A feathery tingle passed up the Saint's spine and was gone, and with it the tightness in his stomach was gone also. He could not have said exactly how he knew so much. Her voice was quite ordinary, and yet there was an inde­finable tension in it that seemed to make everything quite clear. Suddenly his brain seemed to be abnormally cool and translucent.

'Hullo, darling,' he said evenly. 'And how are you?'

'I'm all right, thanks. . . . Listen, Simon, you remem­ber that cloakroom ticket I asked you to keep for me?'

Simon drew at his cigarette.