Prelude For War

back on its bracket and stood glaring at the Saint like a gorilla that has just got up from sitting down on a drawing pin.

'Well?' he snarled. 'Let's hear what you've got to say about that.'

'What have I got to say?' Simon's voice was the honey of spotless innocence. 'Well, Claud, since you ask me, it does seem to me that if you're going to turn this place into a club and tell your low friends to ring you up here you oughtn't to mind my having a bit of fun out of ——'

'I'll see that you get your fun!  So you thought you were taking me in with all that slop you were giving me. You've been . . . You're . . .'

'You're getting incoherent, Claud. Take a deep breath and speak from the diaphragm.'

Chief Inspector Teal took the deep breath, but it came out again like an explosion of compressed air.

'You heard enough on the telephone——'

'But I didn't. It just looked like getting interesting when you so rudely snatched it away. Apparently one of your minions had been out trying to persecute somebody who wasn't at home.'

'I sent a man round to interview Lady Valerie Woodchester,' said Mr Teal, speaking like a locomotive ascend­ing a steep gradient. 'I thought she might know more than she'd told anyone. No, she wasn't at home. But her maid was, and she'd already been wondering whether she ought to call the police. Apparently Lady Valerie went out last night and didn't come back. When the maid came in this morning, her bed hadn't been slept in, but the whole flat had been turned inside out and there were pieces of rope and sticking plaster on the floor as if someone had been tied up. It looks exactly as if she'd been kidnapped—and if she has been I'll know who did it!'

The Saint had sat down again on the edge of the table. He came off it as if it had turned red hot under him.

'What!' he exclaimed in horrified amazement. 'My God, if anything's happened to her——'

'You know damn well what's happened to her!' Teal's voice was thick with the rage of disillusion. 'You've told me enough to make that obvious. That's why you were so sure I couldn't get her information! Well, you're wrong this time. I'm going to see that you're taken care of till we find her.' Unconsciously Teal drew himself up, as he had done in those circumstances before, if he could only have remembered, so many fruitless times. 'I shall take you into custody——'

Perhaps after all, as Mr Teal had so often been driven to believe in his more despondent moments, there was some fateful interdiction against his ever being permitted to com­plete that favourite sentence. At any rate, this was not the historic occasion on which completion was destined to be achieved. The sound of a bell cut him off in mid-flight, like a gong freezing a prizefighter poised for a knockout punch.

This time it was not the telephone, but a subdued and decorous trill that belonged unmistakably to the front door.

Teal looked over his shoulder at the sound. And as the Saint started to move he moved faster.

'You stay here,' he flung out roughly. 'I'll see who it is.'

Simon sat down again philosophically and lighted another cigarette. His first smoke ring from that new source was still on its way to the ceiling when Mr Teal came back.

After him came Mr Algernon Sidney Fairweather.

2

Mr Fairweather wore a dark suit with a gold watch chain looped across the place where in his youth he might once have kept his waist. He carried a light gray Homburg and