Prelude for War by Leslie Charteris Read Free Book Online Page B

good time first, it wouldn’t seem
quite so bad somehow,” she said chokingly. “But he just wouldn’t have a good time. He was much too earnest.”
    “He probably enjoyed
himself in his own way,” said the Saint
consolingly. “But about this fur coat. Where was that coming from?”
    “Oh, that was Mr
Fairweather,” she answered. “Of course
he’s got simply lashings of money; a thousand guineas
is simply nothing to him. You see, he thought it would
be quite a good thing if John became reconciled with his
father and stopped being stupid, and then he thought that
if John was engaged to me—only in a sort of unofficial way,
of course—I could make him stop being stupid. So he bet
me a thousand-guinea fur coat to see if I could do it. So
of course I had to try.”
    “Did you have any
luck?”
    She shook her head.
    “No. He was terribly
obstinate and silly. I wanted him to have a good time
and forget all his stupid ideas, but he just
wouldn’t. Instead of enjoying himself like an ordinary person
he’d just sit and talk to me for hours, and some times
he’d bring along a fellow called Windlay that he lived
with, and then they’d both talk to me.”
    “What did they talk
about?”
    She spread out her hands in
a vague gesture.
    “Politics—you know, stupid things. And he used to talk about a thing called the
Ring, and Mr Luker, and General Sangore, and even his own
father, and say the beastliest things about them.
And there were newspapers, and fac tories, and some
people called the Sons of France ——”
    The Saint was suddenly
very rigid.
    “What was that
again?”
    “The Sons of
France—or something like that. I don’t know
what it was all about and I don’t care. I know he used to
say that he was going to upset everything in a few weeks and make things uncomfortable for everybody, and I used to tell him not to be so damned selfish, because after all what’s the point in upsetting everybody? Live and let live is my motto, and I wouldn’t interfere with other people’s private affairs if they’ll leave mine alone.”
    The Saint put another
cigarette between his lips and steadied his hands round
his lighter.
    “Have you any idea
what he was going to do that was going to upset everybody so
much?” he asked.
    The girl shrugged her slim
shoulders.
    “I don’t know. He had
a lot of papers that he was going to publish and
prove something. And just a week or two ago
he was frightfully excited about some photographs that
he’d got hold of. I don’t know what they were, but both he and Windlay were frightfully worked up about it. But what does it matter, anyway?”  
    3
    Simon Templar filled his
lungs with smoke and let it out again in a trailing
streamer that flowed with the unbroken evenness
of a deep river. The shock that had brought him to
conscious immobility had passed, letting the tenseness ebb
out of his muscles to leave his natural lazy imperturbability apparently
unchanged. But under his effortless and unruffled
poise his brain was thrumming like an intoxicated dynamo.
    He had fished for clues
and he had brought them up in a pail. It didn’t matter
for the moment how they fitted together. Luker and the
Arms Ring; Sangore, formerly of the War Office, how a
director of the Wolverhampton Ord nance Company;
Fairweather, sometime secretary of state for
war, now on the board of Norfelt Chemicals; Kennet the pacifist, the groping
crusader. Papers, exposes, photographs. And
the Sons of France. Whichever way you spilled them, they
fell into some sort of pattern. The drums he had heard such
a short while ago thundered in the Saint’s temples; the
blaring brass shrieked in his ears. He felt as if he were standing on the brink of a breathless precipice, watching the boiling of a hideously parturient abyss. The keen clear zenithal winds of destiny fanned through his hair.
    He was conscious, in a
curiously distant way, that the girl was still talking.
    “I never used to
listen very hard—I was too