Authors: Leslie Charteris
Her brown eyes that smiled so easily were big and deep and unflinching.
“I feel so
guilty,” she said, “for dragging you into it.”
“Don’t worry about it,” he answered carelessly. “If it
hadn’t
been this, it would have been something
else.”
She looked around
the room.
“Isn’t there
any way you could get out?”
He laughed a
little, and got back on his feet.
“If
there were, I wouldn’t be here. I tell you, our Walter
isn’t an amateur.”
But he strolled over to the high embrasure like the one he
had noticed in the other room.
Standing on a chair, he saw that
it
sloped downwards towards the outside, and at the outside
was a heavy steel Venetian shutter. He guessed that the
shelter
was built in the side of the hill
running down to the Sound,
and the
embrasure peeped out through the hillside, providing
natural ventilation but still safe from the blast
of anything
but a direct hit on the opening. The steel shutter was set
solidly
in the concrete, and he took one look
at it and stepped down
with a shrug.
“Why
can’t you tell Quennel that you’ll accept his offer?”
asked Gray. “Then, later on,
you’d have a chance——
”
“Do you imagine they haven’t thought of that?” Simon re
torted patiently. “I think
Quennel meant every word of his
offer, and I think he still means it in spite of everything, and I’m
sure he’d live up to it to the letter; but I’m also sure that
he’d want to be damn certain that I
was the same. I don’t
know what proof or security he’d want—I can think of half a
dozen devices—but it doesn’t matter.
You can take it that it
would be good.”
He stood over
Calvin Gray, poised and quiet and kindly
implacable.
“This is
your problem, not mine,” he said.
The girl sat beside her father again and held his hand.
“You mustn’t
think about me,” she said. “You mustn’t.”
“How can I help it?”
“If you were both tortured to death,” said the Saint inexora
bly, “what good would it
do?”
Calvin Gray covered his eyes.
“Devan
talked to me all afternoon,” he said hoarsely. “He
told me
…
If it was only myself, I could try
…
But
Madeline. I’m not big
enough … And what good would it
do? What
difference would it make? They’ll kill the invention anyway. So why should…” His voice broke, and then rose
suddenly.
“I couldn’t see it. Don’t you understand? I couldn’t!”
“Daddy,”
said the girl.
The
Saint watched for an instant, and then turned away.
On one of the side shelves, beside the playing cards, there
was a score pad and a pencil. He picked
them up. At the top
of the
first sheet he printed in bold capitals: WE MAY BE
OVERHEARD. Then under that he wrote a few quick lines.
He tore off the sheet and
put the pad and pencil back.
Then
he returned to Calvin Gray and put a hand on his
shoulder, and the old man looked up at him hollow-eyed.
“Crying
won’t get you anywhere. This is still a war,” said the
Saint, and handed him the paper he had written on.
The
girl tried to lean over and see; but Simon took her arm
and brought her up to her feet and led
her a few steps away.
He held her by both elbows, facing him, and gazed at her with all the
strength that was in him.
“Some
of this is my fault too,” he said. “If I hadn’t butted
in, it might not have been so
bad.”
Then the door opened, and Walter Devan came in.
He
looked like a sales manager who had left a conference
room at a crucial moment to answer a phone call.
“Well?”
he inquired briskly.
The Saint detached himself leisuredly, and lighted another
cigarette.
“So far as
I’m concerned,” he said, without a flicker of emo
tion, “the answer is still: Nuts.”
“So is mine,” said the girl clearly.
“I’m
sorry,” said Devan; and it sounded like genuine regret.
But he looked at
Calvin Gray.
Gray
got up off the divan. He was unsteady and haggard,
and his eyes burned.
“Mine
isn’t,” he said. “Can you swear to me that if I do
everything you want, nothing will ever
happen to Madeline?”
“Daddy!”
said the girl.
“I
can,” said Devan.
The old man’s hands twisted together.
“Then—I will.”
Devan studied him, not with cheap triumph, but with sturdy
businesslike satisfaction.
“I’ll
get you some paper to write out your process,” he said,
in quite a friendly way. “Is there
anything else you’d like?”
Gray shook his head.
“I
couldn’t write it. It would sound so complicated, and—
I don’t even know if I could concentrate enough …
Please
… Can’t you make it
easy? Mr. Quennel used to be a chem
ist himself, didn’t he? Take me back to my laboratory, I’ll
show
him——
”
“Daddy,” said the girl in torment.
“I’ll show him,” Gray said in a kind of hysterical breathlessness
. “He’ll understand. And he’ll
have it all to himself.
Nothing in writing. Him and me … and nobody’ll ever
know … and Madeline … You
promise?”
“Come back to the house and talk to Mr. Quennel yourself,”
Devan said reasonably.
He took Calvin Gray’s arm and steered him towards the door.
But he never turned his back on the
Saint; and, almost paralytically
,
his right hand stayed with the bulge in his coat pocket where it had been from
the time when he came in.
Madeline Gray tensed in a spasmic impulse to go after him; and the
Saint caught her by the shoulders and held her.
The door closed
again.
Simon Templar’s face was like stone.
“You can’t
do anything,” he said.
It was a moment
of interminable stillness.
Then with a fierce irresistible movement, she tore herself
away from him and flung herself down on
the nearest divan,
face
downwards, her face clutched and buried between her
hands. He could see her right hand, the small fingers
clenched
to whiteness as the
knuckles gripped at her temples.
After a while he lighted another cigarette and took to strolli
ng slowly and silently up and down the room.
It
must have been about ten minutes before she turned over
on her back and lay with one fist at
her mouth, staring blankly
up at the ceiling. And only then he thought it might be safe
to speak. And even then, he stood over
her and kept his voice
so low that it
was only just enough to brush her ears.
He said softly:
“Madeline.”
“He didn’t have to do it,” she said tonelessly. “He
didn’t.”
He
said: “Madeline, this is very probably curtains for all
of us, but we don’t have to go alone. I gave him a note.”
“It didn’t make any difference.”
“I
hope it did. I believe it did. I told him what to do.”
She sat up with a
sudden start.
“You told him—what?”
“I told him we could still do something on our way. I told
him to get Quennel over to the
laboratory. And then I said I
was sure that while he was pretending to demonstrate his
process he could put some things
together that would go off
all
at once with a loud noise. And it wouldn’t do any of us any
good, but it would take Quennel along
too, and probably
Devan with
him. And in the end that may be just as impor
tant.” The Saint’s voice was very light, no more than a breath
between iron lips that scarcely moved. “I
sent him to die,
Madeline, but in the
best way that any of us could do it.”
She was on her feet somehow. She was holding his arms by
the sleeves, making little aimless
tugging movements, rocking
a little in a kind of anguish of inarticulacy. Her eyes were flooding
and yet her lips were parted in an unearthly sort of
smile.
“You
did that?” she repeated again and again; and it was
as if something sang through the break in her voice.
“You did
that?”
He nodded.
Then
the door opened, and he turned sharply.
Andrea Quennel came in.
4
She said: “Hullo.”
He looked into
her pale empty, eyes that still gave him noth
ing
back, and put one hand negligently in his pocket, and
said affably:
“Hullo to you.”
“What are
you doing?”
“Rehearsing
a play,” he said.
“Why are you
locked in here?”
He still didn’t know how to take her.
“We
heard that Selznick was looking for us,” he said, “so
we were going to be very inaccessible
and make him double
his
offer.”
“I thought
there was something wrong,” she said. “I’ve seen
silly things happen to people who crossed Daddy
before. I
don’t usually worry,
because I’m not superstitious, but I was
worried about you. So I watched. I saw them carry you out
here.
And that was even after I tried to warn you to be careful
when I left the dining room.”
“So you did,” said the Saint slowly.
“And
then later on Mr. Devan came out of here with a man
I’d never seen before. Then I thought I’d have to
find out what
was going on; but there was still the other man
at the door——”
“What other
man?”
“A sort of
short thick-set man. He’s been here before, with another tall man. Mr. Devan
said they were salesmen. But he didn’t want me to come in.”
“So
what did you do?” The Saint found himself curiously
tense.
“Well, I didn’t see why I shouldn’t go into our own air-raid
shelter if I wanted to. So I pretended
I’d lost an earring.” She
had
been holding her right hand a little behind her, but now she let it slip into
sight. It held an ordinary household ham
mer. “I didn’t know what I might be running into,
so I
brought this with me. So
when he was bending down hunting
around,
I hit him on the head with it and came in.”
The
Saint couldn’t laugh. That would come later … per
haps.
If there were any
laughing afterwards.
He couldn’t think of that at the instant. The simple fact and
its connections backwards and forwards,
and the thin incred
ible
wisp of hope that came with them, struck into his mind
with the complete breadth of a single chord. He found
that he
was gripping Andrea almost brutally by the
shoulders.
“Where is
your father now?”
“He went out with Mr. Devan and that other man. That’s
why I was worried, because they’d said
you’d had a phone call
and
had to go out, but you were hoping to get back so you hadn’t stopped to say
goodbye to me; but I thought if you’d
just passed out why should they bring you out here, and
then
why should they go away
and leave you——
”
“How long ago was this?”
She winced under
the steel of his fingers, and he hardly no
ticed
it.
“About fifteen minutes ago
“
“Show me where to find a car.”
He thrust her towards the door, and flung it open, and was
outside before her. He found himself
in a narrow concrete
corridor. At one
end of it there was a flight of steps running
upwards.
He raced up them, and came out through an open iron door at the top, and almost
tripped over the figure that
lay
outside.
Simon turned him over as he saved himself with one hand
on the ground; and enough light came
through the opening
for him to recognise the
chunky individual who had been Karl
Morgen’s
companion in Washington.