Prelude For War

children clinging to her skirts was there in front of him. She was one of those women from whom no booking office ever seems to be free, who combine with the afflictions of acute myopia and deafness the habit of keeping their money in the uttermost depths of a series of inter­communicating bags and purses. Simon stood behind her and fumed on the verge of homicidal frenzy while she argued with the booking clerk and peered and fumbled with placid deliberation through the interminable succession of Chinese boxes in the last of which her portable funds were lovingly enshrined. A line of other prospective passengers began to form behind him. Unaware that the world was standing still and waiting for her, the woman began to count her change and reopen her collection of private puz­zles to stow it lovingly away, while she went on to cross-examine the clerk about the freshness of the milk in the dining car on the train to Torquay. Meanwhile Lady Val­erie had disappeared.

The Saint's patience came to an explosive end. He took hold of the woman by her raw beefy elbows and removed her from the window.

'Pardon me, madam,' he said in a voice that the booking clerk was meant to hear. 'I'm a police officer, and I'm busy.'

He stuck his head down to the pigeonhole from which sixpenny excursion tickets are doled out at English railway stations with more grudging condescension than thousand-pound notes are passed out at the Bank of England.

'That young lady who was here just before your last customer,' he said. 'Where did she want to go to?'

Fortunately the clerk had a long memory.

'Anford, sir.'

'Give me a ticket there—first class.'

Simon slid money under the grille and turned away, grab­bing up his ticket. He shoved past the gaping queue and col­lared a porter who was mooning by.

'Which is the next train to Anford, and where does it go from?' he snapped.

'Anford, sir?'

'Yes. Anford.'

'Anford,' said the porter, digesting the name. 'Anford.'

'Anford,' said the Saint gutturally.

'Anford,' said the porter, keeping his end up without any sign of fatigue. 'Where would that be, sir?'

'It would be in Wiltshire. You change at Marlborough.'

'Ar, Marlborough.' The porter scratched his head. 'Marlborough. Marlborough. Then it's a Marlborough train you'd be wanting, sir.'

Simon overcame a fearful impulse to assault him.

'Yes. I could manage with a Marlborough train.'

'There's one just leaving from platform six,' said the man laboriously, as though a dark secret were being dragged out of him, 'but I dunno as how you'd have time to catch that one——'

The Saint left him to be his own audience. He was off like a bolt out of a crossbow, plunging along towards an ancient smoky board that did its best not to reveal the whereabouts of platform six. And while he was on his way he was trying to place this new and unexpected destina­tion of Lady Valerie's. Was she going there because she was at Paddington and it was the first place that came into her head? Or was she subtle enough to think that it was the last place where she would be looked for? Or had she some positive purpose? Or ...

Something seemed to go off like a silent bomb inside the Saint's chest. The concussion threw his