The Saint Around the World (28 page)

“Remember what Charles did to the pawang. It was a setback to the whole Red operation in this district. They were furious, and desperate. They had to show the Malays at once that nobody could beat up a Commie and get away with it. And they’d have given it to you at the same time just because you’d been with Charles.”

“But it wasn’t at the same time. Ah Fong saw Farrast mixing a drink when he took the order for my beer. Why would he think it was any use poisoning the beer, when Farrast would have started his drink before I got mine, and after what happened to him I obviously wouldn’t drink anything?”

“He must have hoped that Charles would wait for you. Or at least he mightn’t have expected Charles to drink so fast. Did you notice how he gulped down most of that drink without stopping? If he’s sipped it like anybody else, there might have been plenty of time for you to get your beer and take a good swig at it before the poison hit Charles.”

Simon lighted his cigarette at last, and took a long drag deep into his lungs. He let the smoke out slowly, looking at her quietly through it. He wanted to print her on his memory like that, sitting with her hands folded placidly in her lap, the dainty symmetries of her figure subtly rounding her blouse, the patrician composure of her intelligent upturned face framed against the silver-ash softness of her hair, all the astounding proud loveliness of her as it had become familiar to him feature by feature. He had never known anyone like her, and he was not likely to again.

“It’s no good, Eve,” he said. “It’s clever, but” it won’t sell.”

The lift of her finely delineated eyebrows was only a flicker.

“I don’t understand.”

He held the spent match above an ashtray, corrected its position with an estimating eye, and dropped it for a dead-center hit.

“I’m sure,” he said, “that you p.oisoned the whisky. Then, when I was trying to do something for Farrast—as you knew in advance I certainly would be—you rushed out to the pantry and shot Ah Fong. You had the poison bottle in your pocket all ready to drop beside him, and it only took another second to snatch a knife out of a drawer and throw that down beside him too. Who’d make a better fall guy than a Chinese house-boy who was too dead to be able to even try to deny anything?”

For the first time he saw her statuesque calm jarred by a temblor of shock. But even then it was more as if she winced over a breach of good manners that he had been guilty of.

“I don’t think that’s very funny,” she said primly.

“It wasn’t meant to be.”

“Then the heat must have done something to you.”

“I’m only wondering,” he said, “what would have happened if I’d decided to join Farrast in a stengah. Would you have let me die with him, and framed the houseboy a trifle differently but still shot him before the police got here? Or would you have delayed me, or upset my glass, and saved me somehow so that I could still be a witness? I’m afraid that’ll always torment me. You’ll never tell me; or if you did, I wouldn’t believe you.”

She laughed, a little faint brittle sound.

“You’re very charming,” she said. “And would you care to tell me what you think I did it for? Am I a Communist agent?’

“That’s one thing I’d never suspect you of. I’m certain you’re strictly in business for yourself. You did it mainly to cover up the poisoning of your husband.”

“Oh. I did that too?”

“Both of them, as a matter of fact.”

Her eyes widened momentarily.

“This is fascinating. It’s a good job I’m not the hysterical type, otherwise I think I’d be screaming.”

“Would you like me to run through it from the beginning?”

“You might as well. I couldn’t be any more baffled than I am now.”

He sat on the arm of a chair and reached over to ease the cylinder of ash off the end of his cigarette.

“I’ll only go back as far as the things I’ve heard about,” he said reflectively. “You were on a world cruise. I’ve no doubt it was a speculative investment. A cruise of that length is expensive enough to guarantee some fairly well-to-do passengers, and ships are renowned incubators of romance. But for some reason that trip wasn’t paying off: by the time you got to Singapore you’d methodically investigated all the prospects, and the right man or the right situation just wasn’t aboard. So you weren’t merely bored—you figured you might still get something out of it by doing some prospecting in port. That’s why you ducked the sightseeing tour and went to the Golf Club. And that’s where you met Donald Quarry, a doctor with an excellent practice, and it was no problem at all for you to knock him dizzy.”

“Thank you.”

“Of course, he was only a stepping-stone. Even a very successful doctor could hardly make enough money to be more than that, to a really ambitious woman. But he was an entree to local society, and a splendid meal ticket until something better came along. And in due course you met Ted Lavis— one of the richest and most successful business men in these parts. So Quarry had to be disposed of. That wasn’t hard. You only had to wait until one of his patients died, which happens regularly even to the best doctors, and then start whispering to your friends about how morbidly depressed he was in spite of the brave front he tried to keep up. Once that idea had been well planted, it was easy for you to steal some morphine from his supplies and switch it for any other shots that he might be taking. And you already knew you could blitz Lavis as soon as it wouldn’t look too blatant—in fact, you’d probably had him on his knees already.”

“After all, there’s not so much competition in these outlandish places.”

“I think you could get almost any man you wanted, anywhere. And you’ve always known it. But you wanted position and money with him: you were heading for the top. Lavis was a prize. You might have been satisfied with him for a long time. But as Farrast said to me, maybe he really was more lucky than brilliant. Anyhow, he suddenly lost everything, in an amazingly stupid way. You were not only disgusted with him for letting you down, but you were convinced that he was a goose who’d never lay another golden egg. Slow poisoning disguised as intestinal troubles was a neat and plausible way to get rid of him. And meanwhile Charles Farrast had shown up on the scene, with a legacy of eighty thousand pounds waiting for him only a few months away.”

“While you’re building up this fantastic story,” she said, and now she was patiently coping with a rather tiresome lunatic, “you ought to explain why I have to murder my husbands instead of simply divorcing them.”

Simon drew at his cigarette again meditatively.

“I will if you like,” he said. “You have a fetish about tidiness and correctness, and a phobia about any kind of emotion— both carried to psychopathic extremes. You couldn’t bear to have your reputation soiled with the kind of nastiness you’d have to admit to give them cause to divorce you, and you’d have died rather than go through the scenes that would have been necessary to make them agree to let you divorce them. Murder, to you, was so much less messy.”

She took a cigarette from the tin near her.

“Give me a light, please,” she said.

He struck a match and leaned forward with it. She put her cigarette in the flame and brought it to a steady glow.

“Thank you,” she said, and took the cigarette from her mouth to exhale with an absolutely smooth and tremorless movement.

Her luminous gray eyes dwelt on him with tremendous absorption, while he lighted another cigarette for himself.

“Now,” she said, “about Vernon Ascony.”

“He must have thought all along that there was something not quite kosher about Quarry’s suicide,” said the Saint. “Then, when Ted Lavis was taken sick—not long after losing most of his money—his hunch got stronger. But there was nothing that he could prove, no action that he could take. And he might even be totally wrong. Then I happened to show up in Singapore, and he had a brainstorm. If I spent a little time up here, and there was anything funny going on, I might be able to spot it—if I was looking.”

“And the Maugham story was to make sure you looked.”

“It wasn’t an exact parallel, of course—but that would scarcely have been possible. It was close enough. And maybe it was even better, because if necessary Ascony could always invent some other case and deny that he had you in mind at all … He probably had another angle too. He knew you’d recognize who I was, and he figured you might think I was part of a trap, and that might panic you into making a fatal mistake. Which it did.”

She frowned.

“You mean like finishing Ted off in a hurry before you got here and saw him? Naturally you wouldn’t believe me if I said I didn’t.”

“That was only the start 6f it, anyway. The important thing is that it gave you a scare when Ascony asked if he could send me; but you were more scared of making it look worse if you tried to get out of it. After a little verbal fencing, and reading the Maugham story this morning, you were sure you were in trouble. So was I; but it was still mostly intuition. And at first I couldn’t decide what was Farrast’s part in the deal. Not even when I heard him go to your bedroom last night.”

She half closed her eyes, with a little shudder of distaste.

“Really,” she said, “are there any lengths you won’t go to?”

“Oh, I don’t think you invited him. Not last night, I mean. You’d never be as crude as that. But he could be. And I’m guessing that started you thinking that he was expendable. But after I saw him in action this morning I’d never buy him as a poisoner, and I said so, and you realized it was no use playing with that idea. So you went ahead with Plan B.”

“I’m quite certain two people never had a conversation like this before,” she said. “But since we’re doing it, you’d better finish. What was this fatal mistake I made?”

Simon picked up the gun he had taken from her a little earlier—it was in its holster slung over the other arm of the chair on which he had thoughtfully perched himself—and toyed with it idly.

“The Ah Fong job was the first one you’ve ever had to do in a hurry,” he said. “And anyhow I got out there too quickly for you to have been able to set the stage with your usual care. That’s why I posted a guard at the pantry door and told him that nobody, not even me—or you—was to go in there or move anything. I’m betting that when the cops go to work they’ll find your fingerprints on the knife Ah Fong was sup-posed to have attacked you with–-“

“Why shouldn’t my fingerprints be on a knife in my own house?”

For the first time her voice seemed to rise a little.

“And on the poison bottle beside him–-“

“I snatched it out of his hand!”

“I mean only your fingerprints.”

There was an absolute silence.

The Saint had shifted his eyes from her before he spoke, and he did not move them back.

A very long time, an eternity, seemed to pass. His cigarette burned down between his fingers, and he put it out.

At last Eve Lavis said, in a very cool, very even voice: “Would you mind if I had a drink?”

He still did not look at her. It was as if an iron hand closed on his heart. Perhaps after all he was an incurable romanticist. In spite of all the statistics, he preferred to think of crime as men’s business. A beautiful woman should be a damsel in distress, for a knight errant to rescue, or a heroine, to ride squarely side by side with him. No man should ever have to meet one like Eve, so lovely and so damned.

“No,” said the Saint. “Help yourself.”

She stood up, and crossed to the sideboard. He heard her over his shoulder, and the clink of glass and the soft plash of liquid. It made no difference now that the four murders that he knew of were almost certainly not the only ones she had done, that she had very likely started long before she reached Singapore. There was a fathomless pain and anger in him that would never be wholly stilled.

“This,” she said, “is to the only man who ever turned me down.”

He did not turn his head, he could not, even when he heard her fall.

THE SPORTING CHANCE

i

Cowichan Lake was a sheet of silver under a cloudless sky that was slowly warming into blue after the recent pallor of dawn, but rising trout were still dimpling the glassy sheen of the water. Simon Templar had already caught three of them, and four of that size were as many as he wanted for his lunch: he didn’t want to kill one more fish than he could use at that moment, and so he was in no hurry to end his sport by taking the last one. He was really working on the perfection of his cast now rather than trying to take a fish, waiting for a rise no less than twenty yards away from his boat and then trying to place his fly in the exact center of the spreading concentric ripples on the surface, as if in the bullseye of a target.

Somewhere in the distance, so faint at first that it seemed to come from no actual direction, he heard the hum of an air- | plane engine.

There was nothing intrinsically noteworthy about the sound. Simon permitted himself a moment of detached philosophical astonishment at the random reflection that there could be hard-ly a corner of the globe left by that time where the sound of an airplane overhead would attract any general attention; in such a few years had man’s domain extended to the strato-sphere, and so easily had the miracle been taken for granted. Up there in the heart of Vancouver Island beyond the end of the last trail that could be called a road, a plane was merely commonplace, the most simple and obvious vehicle to convey prospectors, timber surveyors, hunters and fishermen to the remote destinations of their choice. The fantastic contraption of the Wright Brothers had become the horse and buggy of their grandchildren.

A nice sixty feet away, a young uncomplicated rainbow rose lazily to ingurgitate some insect that had fallen on the surface. Simon picked the tiny vortex of its inhalation as his next mark. and his rod rose and flipped forward again in a flowing rhythm. The line curled and snaked out like a graceful gossamer whip, and at the end of it the artificial fly settled on the water as airly as a tuft of thistledown.

The young trout, perhaps pardonably thinking it had left something unfinished, must have turned in its own length to rectify the omission. The fly went under in another little swirl, and instantly Simon set the hook. He felt his line become taut and alive, and the fish somersaulted into the air, the blade of its body shimmering in the clear morning light.