How Lady Valerie complained about heroes,
and Mr Fairweather dropped his hat
I
"Seeing that time is flying," said Peter Quentin, "and since you have to attend an inquest this morning, I suppose you could use some extra nourishment."
"How right you are," said the Saint. "Some people have no respect for anything. It's a gloomy thought. Even when you're dead, you're liable to be lugged out of the morgue at the squeak of dawn to have your guts poked over by some revoltingly healthy jury of red-faced yokels."
"I like getting you up early," said Patricia. "It seems to lend a sort of ethereal delicacy to your ideas."
Simon Templar grinned and watched Peter nipping the caps from a row of bottles of Carlsberg. As a matter of fact it was nearly ten o'clock, and for half an hour after breakfast they had been sitting in the sun on the porch outside Peter's dining room. Two days had gone by since the fire, and it would have been hard to identify the supremely elegant Saint who sprawled in Peter's most comfortable deck chair with the blistered smoke-blackened scarecrow who had arrived there in the small hours of a certain morning with his grim foreboding.
He took the tall glass that Peter handed him and eyed fit appreciatively.
"And while we're soothing our tender nerves with this ambrosia," he said, "I suppose we'd better just run over what we've found out about these people who roast their week-end guests."
"I might have known I should be let in for this," Peter said moodily. "I ought to have known better than to ask you down. This was the most peaceful place in England before you came near it, but wherever you go something unpleasant happens." He lifted his glass and drank. "However, as usual, I've been doing your dirty work. Our local gossip writer has been snooping and eavesdropping, and will now present his report — such as it is."
He returned to his chair and lighted a cigarette before he went on.
"As you know, the house that provided the fireworks was called Whiteways. The owner is Mr A. S. Fairweather, a gentleman of wealth who is highly respected in local circles. For fifteen years he warmed a seat in the House of Commons as Conservative M.P. for Hamborough, and for one year just before he retired he held the job of secretary of state for war. His abilities must have impressed some people more than they impressed the other members' of that cabinet, because as soon as he retired he was offered a place on the board of the Norfelt Chemical Company, where he has sat ever since. He has a town house in Grosvenor Square, a Rolls Royce, and he has recently subscribed five hundred pounds toward the restoration of our local parish church — which means that he either has, or has not, a ripe sense of humour."
Down by the bottles something stirred. It was something that looked rather like a reconstruction of the Piltdown Man might have looked if it had been first badly mauled with a sledge hammer and then encased in a brilliant check suit.
"I know a guy once what has a chemical factory," announced Hoppy Uniatz, with the happy interest of a big-game hunter who hears the conversation veering round to the subject of big game. "He makes any kind of liquor. Just say de woid, an' it's rye or boigundy wit' all de labels an' everything." A thought appeared to strike him in a vital spot. "Say, maybe we got something, boss. Maybe dis guy Fairwedder is in de same racket."
The Saint sighed.
Between Simon and Peter there was the understanding of men who had fought shoulder to shoulder in many battles. Between Simon and Hoppy Uniatz there was no such bond, since Nature, by some unfortunate oversight, had neglected to provide Mr Uniatz with any more gray matter than was required for the elementary functions of eating, drinking and handling firearms. He was at once the joy and despair of Simon's life; but his dumb devotion to what he regarded as the positively supernatural genius of the Saint was so wistful that Simon had never had the heart to let him go.
"No, Hoppy," he said. "That stuff only burns your throat. The Norfelt product burns you all over."
"Chees," said Mr Uniatz admiringly. "Where do ya git dis stuff?"
"It's dropped from aeroplanes," explained Peter. "In large containers weighing about six hundred pounds each."
Mr Uniatz looked worried.
"But what happens when dey hit de ground?"
"They break," said Peter. "That's the whole idea. Think it over, Hoppy, while I go on with my gossip column."
He refreshed himself again and continued:
"Brigadier-General Sir Robert Sangore has stayed with Fairweather before. During his last visit he delivered a stirring address to the Church Lads' Brigade, in which Comrade Fairweather takes a benevolent interest. He warned them particularly against Socialists, Communists, and Pacifists, and told them that the Great War was a glorious spree for everyone who fought in it. He graduated from Sandhurst in the year Dot, served all over the place, got into the War Office in 1917 and stayed there until 1930, when he retired to become a director of the Wolverhampton Ordnance Company. He is an officer, a gentleman and a member of the Cavalry Club."
"Lady Valerie Woodchester," said Patricia, "is the spoiled darling of London Society. She uses Mond's Vanishing Cream, Kissabel Lipstick, and Charmante Skin Tonic. She goes to all the right places at all the right times, and she has her photograph in the Bystander every week. She has also stolen all my best clothes."
"Don't worry about that, darling," said the Saint reassuringly. "I'll take them off her."
Pat made a face at him.
"That wouldn't surprise me a bit," she said calmly.
"The young hero who rescued Lady Valerie," resumed Peter, when order had been restored, "is Captain Donald Knightley of the Dragoon Guards. He has a fine seat on a horse and a set of membership cards to all the best night clubs. That's all I could find out about him… And that only leaves John Kennet, the man who didn't fit in anywhere."
"Yes," said the Saint thoughtfully. "The man who didn't fit in. And he seems to have been the most important one of all."
Patricia made a sharp restless movement.
"Are you sure?" she said, as if she was still fighting against conviction. "After all, if Fairweather has been in Parliament, he may have got friendly with Kennet's father—"
"I wouldn't argue. The old man may be a bit bothered about his aitches now and again, and he may still pretend that he belongs to the Labour party, but he joined the national government at the right time so of course all the duchesses love him because they know his heart must be in the right place. If it had been the old man, it might have been all right. But it wasn't. It was young Kennet. And young Kennet was a pacifist, an anti-blood-sporter, an anti-capitalist, an anti-Fascist and the Lord knows what not; and he once said publicly that his father had proved to be the arch-Judas of the working classes. Well, there may be all sorts of harmless reasons why a fellow like that should have been invited to join that congregation of worshippers of the golden calf, but you must admit that he still looks like the ideal burnt offering."
There was a silence, in which the only interruption was the sound of Mr Uniatz cautiously uncorking his private bottle of Vat 69, while their thoughts went on.
Peter said: "Yes. But that isn't evidence. You've been very mysterious all this time, but you must have something more definite than that."
"I'll give you four things," said the Saint.
He stood up and leaned against one of the pillars of the porch, facing them, very tall and dark and somehow deadly against the sunlit peace of the garden. Their eyes were drawn as if by a magnet.
"One: Kennet's door was locked."
Patricia stared at him.
"So you mentioned," Peter said slowly. "But if everybody who locked a door—"
"I can only think of two kinds of people who'd lock their bedroom doors when they were staying in a private house," said the Saint. "Frightened virgins and — frightened men."
"Maybe he was expecting a call from Lady Valerie," suggested Patricia half heartedly.
"Maybe he was," agreed the Saint patiently. "But if that made him lock his door, he must have been a very undiscriminating young man. And in any case, that's only half of it. He not only locked his door, but he took the key out of the lock. Now, even assuming that anyone might lock a door, there's only one reason for taking the key out of the lock. And that's when you realize that an expert might be able to turn the key from the outside — in other words, when you're really thinking hard along the lines of a pretty determined attempt to get at you."
"He might have been tight when he went to bed," Peter pointed out. "That would account for almost any weird thing he did. And besides that, it might account for him not hearing the fire alarm."
"It might," said the Saint bluntly. "But while you're at it, why don't you think of the other possibility? Suppose he didn't lock the door at all. Suppose somebody else did?"
They were silent again.
"Go on," said Patricia.
Simon looked at her.
"Two: during all the time we were there, did you see any signs of a servant?"
"It might have been their night out."
"Yes. And with a house that size, there must have been several of them. And Fairweather let them all go out together, on a Saturday night, when he had a house full of week-end guests. And Valerie Woodchester cooked the dinner, and Lady Sangore washed the dishes. Why don't we make up some more brilliant theories? Maybe the servants were all burnt in the fire, too, only nobody thought of mentioning it."
Peter sipped his beer abstractedly.
"What else?"
"Three: when we arrived, every door and window that I could see on the ground floor was wide open. Let me try and save your brains some of this fearful strain. Maybe that was because everybody who heard the alarm rushed out through a different window. Or maybe it was because they always went to bed with the ground-floor windows open so that if any burglars wanted to drop in they wouldn't have to break the glass. Of course that's much more likely than that somebody wanted a good draught to make sure that the fire would burn up nice and fast."
This time there was no comment.
"Point four," said the Saint quietly, "is only Luker. The man who ties Sangore and Fairweather together. And the man who perfectly represents the kind of bee that Kennet had in his bonnet… Do you really think I'm insane, or doesn't it all seem like too many coincidences even to you?"
They didn't answer. Incredulity, a traditional habit of mind, even in spite of the years that they had spent in wild pursuit of the fantastic visions that steered the Saint's iconoclastic path, struggled desperately against the implications of belief. It would have been so much easier, so much more soothing, to let suspicion be lulled away by the uncritical rationalizations of ingrained convention, when to accept what the Saint argued meant something so ominous and horrible that the mind instinctively recoiled from dwelling on it. But it seemed as if the unclouded sunlight darkened behind the Saint's tall, disturbing figure while the echoes of his last words ran on through their protesting brains.
Mr Uniatz removed the neck of the bottle from his mouth with a faint squuck. The intermediate stages of the conversation had left as dim a blur on his consciousness as a discourse on the quantum theory would have left on an infants' class in arithmetic; but he had been told to think something over and he had been bravely obeying orders, even though thinking was an activity which always gave him a dull pain behind the eyes.
"Boss," he said, in a sudden wild bulge of inspiration, "I got it. It's some temperance outfit."
Simon blinked at him. There were occasions when the strange processes that went on inside the skull of Mr Uniatz were too occult even for him.
"What is?" he asked fearfully.
"De guys in de aeroplanes."
Simon clutched his head.
"What guys?"
"De guys," explained Mr Uniatz proudly, "who break de bottles of liquor."