The Saint in the Sun (14 page)

There was a leaden feeling in the Saint’s stomach, a sort of dull premonition of a premonition that was too essentially shocking to take complete form suddenly.

“Don’t bet me, or I might have to go to work,” he said mechanically.

“You’ve done your job, old boy. My buggy wasn’t touched. This clot obviously saw your mark on it and got panicked. He knew that if he fooled around with that one, the vengeance of the Saint would land on him.”

“What time was this?”

“About four o’clock in the morning … Ouf! I wonder if I’ll ever get all this dust out of my mouth.”

Simon’s eyes shifted towards the back balcony again. The expensively glamorous Mrs Santander had disappeared, but Godfrey Quillen was still there, finishing a coke from the bottle and paying no immediate attention to anything else.

“Let’s see what we can find to rinse it out,” Simon suggested.

But he started moving towards the dispensing counter without waiting to see who would go with him. But Quillen saw him at once, and awaited his approach with expansive cordiality.

“Hi-yah, pal! This is the pause that refreshes, isn’t it?-letting the back-seat drivers fight it out.”

“Well, it’s no strain on me,” Simon assented amiably. “But I don’t have a wife or a girl friend driving right after some creep has been out in the small hours doing funny things to the hardware.

He knew by the switch of Quillen’s eyes, without turning, that at least one of the Bethells had come with him, and went on: “I suppose you didn’t tell Cynthia about that.”

“Of course not. The poor girl was having the jitters badly enough already. Besides, this mysterious character can only have been a bit nutty. As Peter must have told you, the things he did weren’t clever enough to be likely to cause any real damage.”

“Or else he was being very cunning indeed,” said the Saint. “Suppose there was only one particular car he wanted to wreck. No matter how clever he was about gaffing it, there was always a remote chance that an investigation would show that the accident mightn’t ‘ve been quite accidental. It’s those remote chances that give amateur plotters nightmares. Because the next phase of an inquiry, naturally, would be to ask who could have a motive for wanting that particular car to crash. So that’s where our conspirator becomes a small-time genius. He figures that if it’s established that some screwball was out monkeying with a whole lot of cars, in various ways, the question of motive will be knocked out before it comes up. It’ll just be accepted that this crackpot managed to sabotage one car in a way that unfortunately wasn’t discovered in time.”

“That’s an interesting theory,” said Charlie, who had come up on Simon’s other side. “But what if the night watchman hadn’t been asleep?”

“That wasn’t much of a risk,” Peter scoffed. “It’s ten to one any night watchman would be taking a nap by that time, if he had any sense. Although this one didn’t wake up until the prowler knocked over a couple of empty oil drums, or something like that.”

“Which,” Simon pointed out, “makes the prowler either extremely clumsy, extraordinarily unlucky-or a pretty cool operator. How do you sleep, Godfrey?”

“Me?” Quillen seemed slightly confused. “Like the proverbial top, pal. And spinning a bit, sometimes, especially after a night like last night. Man, those parties were rugged!”

He held his head graphically, and then all the sunny outgoing personality revived again as he said: “And me still waiting for the big race, so I can’t even have a hair of the dog. You’ve done your stuff, haven’t you, Peter? And nobody else has to abstain. Step up, gents, and name it. Take advantage of me.”

Simon eased up to the bar with the others, and took part in the ordering. But it was one of the toughest exercises in restraint that he had ever undertaken. In his mind an hour-glass was running out, and the last grains were pure explosive.

He swirled a shot of Peter Dawson around its crystal rocks, and said: “How about Cynthia?”

“Who?” Quillen said puzzledly. “Why?”

“How does she sleep?”

“Like a log, pal. Worse than me. Every morning I wonder if she’s dead, and I have to try all sorts of things to find out.”

“I don’t know where your room is, but when I came in last night I tripped over some loose matting on the upstairs verandah, and nearly fell flat on my face. I was sure I’d woken up the whole joint.”

“Not us, pal,” Quillen said heartily. “It’d take an atomic bomb to do that.”

Charlie Bethell said, in his diffident way: “I don’t know how serious you meant to be about this prowler, Simon; but if you’re right, it mightn’t be so funny. Do you have any other ideas?”

” ‘A medium-small man’,” Peter quoted. “Can’t you tell us his name?”

Simon ignored them to look Quillen slowly up and down, and the driver had a sudden inspiration.

“Wait a minute! Could it have been a medium-big woman?”

“It ran away, didn’t it, Peter?” Simon said. “Don’t tell me that even this local Rip Van Winkle couldn’t tell the difference between a man and a woman running.”

“I don’t know how many women he’s chased,” Peter said, “but I expect he’d ‘ve noticed.”

“So if it was a man-“

“Oh, come now,” Quillen protested. “You sound almost ready to buy that bee in Cynthia’s bonnet. I know that Italians are hot-blooded, and all that, but I’ll stand up for Enrico. Whatever the evidence is against him-“

“I don’t know of any,” Simon said gently. “I can imagine someone hoping he’d be a suspect, and trying to build that up on the side. An expert mechanic would be a wonderful fall guy for a job like this. But the evidence says that this prowler ran away, and the watchman couldn’t catch him. I’ve seen Enrico walk, and I don’t think he can run.”

Quillen’s teeth gleamed good-humoredly.

“Well, then, what’s the answer, Sherlock?”

The Saint’s gaze searched the baffling back stretches of the course with aching intensity. He had never felt that so much lost time had to be caught up so fast, but so smoothly. He had taken so long to be convinced that there was anything to be seriously perturbed about, and now he knew that any squandered second might be ticked off in blood. But only the most leisured nonchalance would convince a shrewd adversary that all his last cards were trumps.

“Don’t ask me to be too brilliant,” he said. “I was out rather late myself-as you may imagine.”

“I don’t imagine any more than I have to,” Quillen said cheerfully. “But Teresa does tend to keep one up a bit.”

“However, I did not trip on the matting when I came in.”

“Good for you, pal. But don’t feel guilty. Cynthia and I wouldn’t ‘ve known the difference if you’d knocked over a row of ashcans.”

Simon lighted a cigarette.

“But when I did come home, I felt so good, and the moonlight was so fabulous, that I just couldn’t go in at once. I had to stay out in the balmy air and soak it up. That’s the thing I specially like about the Country Club, as against the other hotels: you’ve got all those rooms overlooking the beach from which you can get straight out into the gardens, or on to a communal balcony with stairs at each end, and you can come and go as you please without having to pass through a formal lobby or be clocked in and out by any hired busybodies. So I was making the most of this, at about four-thirty this morning, when I saw you sneaking in … pal.

It was one of the most outrageous lies he had ever told in his life, but to his immoral credit he achieved it without a waver of expression. It was Godfrey Quillen whose face flushed and fluctuated through a fatal pause.

“I got restless,” Quillen said. “You know, sometimes you get a bit keyed up before a big race. I went outside to smoke a cigarette, so as not to disturb Cynthia-“

“But I thought you slept like a spinning top,” said the Saint innocently, “and nothing less than the crack of doom would wake Cynthia. On the other hand, if she does sleep so soundly, you might get away to do almost anything without her knowing. But why go to such lengths for a cigarette? When I saw you, you were just getting out of a car, which you’d just driven in and parked.” With the basic fiction safely sold, there was no reason not to clinch it with trimmings. “Did you have to drive far enough away so that she wouldn’t hear you strike the match? Were you afraid she’d think you were lighting some Venezuelan oil?”

Quillen’s mouth opened and shut, without saying anything. His eyes went from side to side, from Simon to Charlie and to Peter. His face seemed uncertain whether to laugh or bluster, but it did neither; and that damning indecision was as good as a confession that was irrevocably underlined by each lengthening second of silence.

The silence was only relative, against the background of a thousand nondescript voices and noises, above which came the rising drone of more machinery approaching. Looking over Quillen’s shoulder, Simon saw a dark green car come around the Esso bend into what they call Sassoon’s Straight, which runs a furlong or so behind the box stand and very slightly off parallel to it. Teresa had stolen the lead somewhere in the back reaches. But the white Bristol was still in the running: it came out of the turn next, a couple of lengths behind and swinging a little wide and wild, but gathering itself and pouring on the coal for a screaming pursuit that began eating up the lost ground at an electrifying rate. The Saint’s stroboscopic flash of relief at seeing both cars still rolling winked out as the new picture became as clear and steady to his mind as if he had been sitting beside: Cynthia in the cockpit. He could see with clairvoyant vividness her mouth drawn into a gash, her teeth clenched, her eyes blazing, her knuckles white, her right foot flat on the floor. Furious at having been passed, perhaps goaded even more by some professional trick that Teresa might have used to accomplish it, Cynthia Quillen had simply seen red and was determined to even the score regardless of anything she might have been taught about race driving. One basic tenet of which is that there may be more dangerous places in which to lose one’s temper than at the helm of a hot pan in a road race, but not much is known about them, because the experimenters who discover them seldom survive to describe them.

Cynthia was recklessly feeding her horses all the gas they needed to overtake the Maserati, and they were doing it at a rate which drew a vague kind of communal shout from the crowd. But to anyone who could make an educated estimate of the ballistic and dynamic factors involved, it was a performance to bring a cold sweat to the palms. For all straights come to an end; and this one ended at the extreme northeast tip of the course with two approximately right-angled turns which reversed it like a broad hairpin to run back into the starting and finishing stretch. At Cynthia’s rate of acceleration she could pass Teresa, all right; but in doing it she would build up a velocity that no braking system might be able to cut down again fast enough to navigate the next corner against the immutable drag of centrifugal force … even without any mechanical failure.

“He needn’t ‘ve gone to all that trouble,” Peter said, as if half hypnotized. “They’ll kill each other anyhow.”

“We’d better stop the race,” Charlie said, with quiet tenseness.

“You talk to the stewards,” Simon snapped.

It may have been a somewhat superfluous directive, for Charlie was already turning towards the press box. But the Saint had a chill fear that even that procedure might be too slow-might perhaps be already too late. At this stage in his career he had become a trifle diffident about some of the more flamboyant performances which he once found irresistible. But this was one situation in which what could be literally called a grandstand play seemed to be forced on him.

With an almost instantaneous assessment of the physical and formal obstacles between him and the track via the nearest stairway, he swung his long legs over the nearest balcony rail and dropped an easy ten feet to the ground between some only moderately startled camp followers. With hardly a pause in motion he raced through an empty pit stall and across the open tarmac to the assortment of signal flags in their row of sockets beside the starter’s box. He grabbed the red one which means “The race has been stopped”, and in his other hand the yellow one which says “Caution”, and stepped out into the track, waving them both frantically.

Even so, he was only just in time to get an acknowledging lift of one of Teresa Montesino’s green-gloved hands as the Maserati streaked by and he saw its brakes begin to smoke.

But the Bristol did not follow; and as he moved farther out into the fairway, ignoring the frenzied injunctions of the P-A system, his heart sank as he saw a car of a different color swooping down towards the bridge, while in the distance a few tiny figures could be seen running like perturbed ants towards some undiscernible center of fascination behind the far turn.

“The biggest joke of it is,” Peter commented later, “that if Cynthia ‘d tried to make that turn, at the speed she was going, she’d ‘ve been practically certain to spin out and roll over and probably break her neck. But that loose nut on the steering arm just happened to fall off in the straight, and she already had the brakes on as hard as she could, and when she tried to turn the wheel nothing happened at all, and so she went ploughing right on off the track into a lot of soft sand that stopped her like a feather pillow. Well, almost. Anyway, if Godfrey hadn’t been so bloody clever, she’d probably be stone cold dead in de market, instead of just nursing a few bruises.”

“That should make him feel a lot better,” said the Saint. “What else will he have to worry about?”

“Oh, the stewards and some other people had quite a talk with him,” Charlie said impersonally. “It isn’t the sort of thing we want a lot of publicity about. He’ll be leaving the island on the next plane-but I don’t think Cynthia will be with him.”

“Or Mrs Santander either,” Brenda put in. “You may think you were awfully discreet, but I bet the story’s all over Nassau before midnight.”

“You’ve got to admit he was no piker,” Peter mused. “It even shook me a bit when we found the Montesino gal’s steering fixed the same way, except that hers was still holding by half a thread. One more rough corner, and she could ‘ve been another wreck. The kind of sabotage that even a first-class mechanic mightn’t spot-and him pretending he didn’t know one end of an engine from the other. If it hadn’t been for this suspicious Templar character, he might ‘ve got rid of all his problems in one happy afternoon.”