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like, and get it all in one piece."
"All right," said Peter. "You run over it. We like hear-ing you listen to
yourself."
"Here it is, then. We've got our friend Luker, the arms wangler. He's on a
job. In this case he's in on it with a couple of his stooges named Sangore and
Fairweather two highly esteemed gentlemen with complete faith in their own
respec-tability but completely under his thumb for any dirty work he wants to
put in. Also vaguely related is Lady Valerie, a sort of spare-time entraneuse
for Fairweather. Okay. On the other side you have well-meaning but not very
agile professional pacifists Kennet and Windlay. Somehow or other they dig up
inside information about the job Luker is on. This is where their lack of
agility shows up. They threaten exposure unless Luker drops it. Okay. Luker
has no intention of dropping it. The first move is through Fairweather, to sic
Lady Valerie on to Kennet and see if she can seduce him from his irritating
ideals. This fails. Lady Valerie is therefore used for the last time to lure
Kennet down to Whiteways for a conference, where he meets with a fortunate
accident. The coroner, a staunch friend of the aristocracy, is probably
persuaded that Kennet was caught in a drunken stupor, and keeps the inquest
nicely ham-strung to save scandal. Everything goes off smoothly; and meanwhile
Windlay is mysteriously murdered, apparently by some prowling thug. Okay
again."
"And so soothing," said Peter. "Especially for the corpses."
"Unfortunately this isn't quite the end of it. The ungodly haven't found
Kennet's incriminating evidence. Meanwhile Kennet has been partly overcome by
Lady Valerie, at least enough to give her a little information about this
evidence either what it is, or where it is, or something. We now come to Lady
Valerie's psychology."
"I thought we should come to that eventually," said Patricia.
Simon threw a cushion at her.
"She's not a bad kid, really," he said. "But she likes having a good time, and
she has an almost infantile ability to rationalize anything that helps to get
her what she thinks is a good time, to her own entire satisfaction. Nor is she
anything like so dumb as she tries to make out. When Kennet meets with a
highly suspicious accident and Windlay is just obviously murdered, it wakes
her up a bit possibly with a certain amount of help from my own blundering
bluntness. And maybe she even feels a genuine remorse. From the symptoms, I
should say she did. She's absent-mindedly gone just a little further than
she'd ever have gone if she knew exactly what she was doing, and done
something really nasty. She also realizes that it's given her some sort of
hold over Fairweather and the others. But she still doesn't want to confide in
me. She's paddling her own canoe. And as far as I can see there are only two
ways she can be heading. Either she's got some crazy idea of making amends by
carrying on Kennet's work on her own, and taking some wild vengeance on the
gang that used her for a cat's-paw, or else she simply means to blackmail
them. And I may be daft, but it seems to me that her scheme might very well
combine the two."
Peter Quentin got up and refilled his glass. He sat down again and looked at
the Saint seriously.
"And she's the only link we've got with what's going on?" he said.
"The one and only. Kennet and Windlay are dead, and we shouldn't get anything
out of Luker and Company unless we beat it out of them, which mightn't be so
easy as it sounds. Meanwhile we're tied hand and foot. We're just sitting
tight and twiddling our thumbs while she's playing her own fool game. What
should we do? Use her for bait and wait until something happens, with the risk
of finding her as useful as John Kennet at the end of it? Or start again and
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try to cut in from another angle?"
"You tell us," said Patricia.
There was a pause in the intermittent glugging which had punctuated the
conversation from the corner where Mr Uniatz was marooned with his consoling
bottle in the midst of the uncharted wilderness of Thought. Mr Uniatz was no
longer clear about why his purely sociable contribution to the powwow should
have marooned him there, but in his last conscious moment he had been invited
to join in thinking about something, and since then he had been submerged in
his lonely struggle. Now, corning to the surface like a diver whose mates have
suddenly remembered him and pulled him up, the anguished irregularities of his
face dis-solved into a radiant beam of heaven-sent inspiration.
"I got it, boss!" he announced ecstatically. "What we gotta do wit' dis wren
is catch her at de aerodrome before she takes off."
"Before she takes off what?" asked the Saint foggily.
"Before she takes off wit' de compressed whiskey," said Mr Uniatz proudly, "De
stuff de temperance outfit she's woikin' for t'rows out of de aeroplanes." Mr
Uniatz raised his bottle and washed out his throat with enthusiastic
lavish-ness. His eyes glowed with the rapture of achievement. "Chees, boss,
why didden we t'ink of dat before? It's in de bag!"
Simon looked at him for a moment; and then he bowed his head in speechless
reverence.
And at that instant the telephone bell rang.
The sound jarred into the silence with a shrill unexpected-ness that jolted
them all into an unnatural stillness. There were many people among the Saint's
large acquaintance who might have made a casual call at that hour; and yet for
some illogical reason the abrupt summons gave him a queer intuitive tightening
in his stomach. Perhaps it was the way his thoughts had been running. He
lifted his head and looked at the faces of the others, but they were all
expressionless with the same formless foreboding.
Simon picked up the phone.
"Hullo," he said.
"Is that you, Simon darling?" it answered. "This is Valerie."
A feathery tingle passed up the Saint's spine and was gone, and with it the
tightness in his stomach was gone also. He could not have said exactly how he
knew so much. Her voice was quite ordinary, and yet there was an inde-finable
tension in it that seemed to make everything quite clear. Suddenly his brain
seemed to be abnormally cool and translucent.
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