Julius smiled.
“Pardon me again,” he said, “but there is no question of holding Mr Morland in this country.”
It seemed to Simon that a frozen cataract had exploded over his head. The chill of it went down into his bones like a distilled essence from the immemorial bleakness of the dark side of the moon... He wondered how he could ever have been so naive.
“Now you go on,” he said.
“Mr Morland,” Julius explained, enjoying it, “has been persuaded to sign an unlimited power of attorney made out to his daughter. He will now be taken, as quickly as possible, and by various special routes which I need not tell you about, to Germany. There he will be placed in a concentration camp. You have heard about our concentration camps, no doubt. And of course Miss Morland has heard about them too. Valmon at this moment is probably giving her some additional information. And with your co-operation, we have just been able to show her a small sample of the treatment which her father might receive. But that, of course, is entirely up to her. The Gestapo has great powers of discrimination. If Miss Morland is disposed to help and obey all our instructions, I’m sure that her father need not suffer any more inconvenience than if he were confined to a sanatorium.”
It was all there, and the petty details could fill themselves in... Jim and Elmer could be sent away on some pretext, and other demobilised Bundsmen like Nails would take their place — as Julius had said, they were not very imaginative men, and they would not be hard to deal with... Even Hank Reefe might be got rid of, with a little more ingenuity. Jean could get rid of him... Jean would do whatever she was told, with that fear held over her — exactly as he himself had done a much more improbable thing that night.
“All of which,” said the Saint in a very even voice, “is just as beautiful as I might have expected... if you leave me out of it.”
“I’m afraid I was proposing to do that,” said Julius unctuously. “You’ve been very kind to make it so easy for us. I can hardly tell you how much I appreciated the service you did for me a few minutes ago. But you can imagine it for yourself. Without that, if Miss Morland reciprocated your tender feelings, as she probably did, your disappearance might have made her harder to handle. But now that she has seen you flogging her father, with her own eyes, she will not even need convincing that you have been on our side all along. So she will feel even more alone and helpless, and she will be even more amenable.”
It was the rest of the picture, the link that Simon had tried to find in the car when his brain was still out of step — the clinching knowledge that had been foreshadowed when Julius gave that significant inflection to “Mr Templar is one of our best allies.”
The Saint found himself nodding.