“Talking of suspicious characters,” said the playwright, straw-clutching feverishly, “what did you think of the old man who comes to the door at the beginning of my second act? I’ve wondered if it would be more effective to keep him off the stage a bit longer, to build up the suspense.”
Mr Clarron nodded attentively, and thereafter confined himself admirably to the subject of their meeting. He had sounded most convincing, he thought, in his rehearsal.
He enjoyed his Irish stew. At any moment, he estimated, his wife would be eating hers.
6
“I don’t like it,” Adrienne Halberd said abruptly.
“Now that you’ve told me about those jewels of Mrs Clarron’s, I like it a bit less myself,” Simon admitted. “It just might occur to Lover Boy now to improvise a regular in which she gets bumped off, and try to make it look like my work.”
Her pixie face was almost sullen with concentration.
“I expect you could take care of yourself. I’m talking about that story you cooked up, about some gangster called Bingo Brown being married to his last wife’s black sheep sister, and you being a friend of theirs.”
“It was the best I could do in the few seconds we had.”
“But don’t you see, it might panic him into doing something drastic in a hurry, in the hope of getting away with his loot before you do something to him.”
“That was roughly what I had in mind.”
“But that would be helping to get another wife murdered.”
“When you hinted to him that you’d at least half killed a husband,” Simon said, “mightn’t that just as well have encouraged him to widow himself, knowing you wouldn’t hold it against him?”
“All I hoped was that it might make him talk about it. And then, with a tape recorder—”
“Oh, I know. Just like in a detective story. But maybe he’s read stories too. It might just as well have only encouraged him to get the job over without talking.”
She stared at him resentfully.
“Well, if you’re so smart, how else can you get evidence against his kind of murderer?”
“It isn’t easy, darling. You can only stick close to him and hope that you’re close enough when he tries it again.”
“But you can’t use a human being like…like a sort of live bait!”
“Mrs Clarron isn’t in much more danger, by and large, than she’s been all along. Maybe Reggie is a bit more anxious to get it over, but on the other hand there are now two of us keeping an eye on her. We saw Reggie drive away. I’ve been sitting by this open window ever since, and I have ears like a watchdog. When Reggie or anyone else comes near that house, I’ll know it.”
“But you can’t stay here all night.”
“I can think of worse fates.”
“You might think of some better dialogue.”
“I’m here now,” he said practically. “And I’ll stay for dinner, if I’m invited.”
She stood up and paced restlessly.
“Oh, you can stay. I think you’d better. I’ve got some chops in the fridge.”
“And some more beer?”
“You’ve just drunk the last I had.”
He got up and stretched himself.
“It sounds like a thirsty vigil. While you’re toiling over a hot stove, suppose I run out and buy some more. I’m about out of cigarettes too, anyway.”
She hesitated an instant.
“No, I’ll go,” she said. “I’d rather you stayed here. If anything violent did start to happen next door, I think you’d be more use than I would. But only for brawn, I mean!”
He thought that over for as brief a moment, his quizzical eyes on her, and then he shrugged.
“Okay, Brains,” he said good-humouredly. “Would you like to take my car?”
“I’ve got my own, thanks. I’ll throw on a skirt and be back in a minute.”
It was, of course, easily fifteen minutes before she drove into the tiny garage again, and already she had seen that the Saint’s hired car was no longer outside the cottage.
Even so, she tried frantically to believe for a fraction longer that he might only have moved his car up the road to a less conspicuous place, to make a returning Clarron believe that he had left. She ran into the cottage calling his name, but the empty rooms had no answer.
There was a note stuck on the refrigerator door.
Decided I might only mess things up for you after all, so I pushed off. Thanks, apologies, and good luck.
The signature was a little stick figure with a rakishly tilted halo.
She ran out into the dusk, almost calling his name again. But the only response, she knew, would have been the faint sounds she heard of a radio or television program playing in the house next door. She looked back and up from further down her lawn, and saw the light shining blankly and steadily against the ceiling of an upstairs bedroom window. She rushed back into her cottage and flung herself at the telephone.
7
Mr Reginald Clarron got off the train at Maidenhead at 10:12 p.m., exchanged greetings and a few trivial words about his trip with the station master, climbed into the car he had parked at the station, and drove home at his normal sedate speed.
He noticed that the strange car which must have been the Saint’s was no longer outside the cottage next door, and thought that his auspices might be even better than he had hoped.
As he unlocked his front door—he was glad he would be spared the necessity of faking a burglarious entrance, with all its possible pitfalls, for of course he had let it be known that Mrs Jafferty had a key—he heard the inexorable voice of a BBC announcer holding forth from the receiver upstairs.
Exactly as he would have done on any similar normal evening, Mr Clarron took pains to hang up his hat in the hall, stick his superfluous umbrella in the stand under it, pull off his gloves and lay them in the calling-card tray. He would not be so foolish as to omit one iota of his habitual routine. He even went into the kitchen, drew himself a glass of water, and drank it, as he always did before he went to bed.
Then he tiptoed up the stairs and softly opened the door of his wife’s bedroom.
The television set was still on, and so was the bedside light, but his wife seemed to be asleep. She lay on her stomach with her face buried in the pillows.
“My love,” Mr Clarron said loudly.
She did not stir.
The table was pushed down towards the foot of the bed. A glance verified that she had eaten and drunk the wine, although the bowl of strawberries had scarcely been touched and the coffee cup was two-thirds full. Using his handkerchief, he lifted the lid of the chafing dish and saw that it had almost been emptied. He put the lid back and returned to the head of the bed.
“My dearest,” he said, and pulled on her shoulder as if to turn her over.
Her weight resisted him with a curious heaviness, and when he let go she fell back limply, without a sound.
Mr Clarron suddenly became a whirlwind of activity, for at this point any lapse of more than a few seconds might have to be accounted for.
He hustled out of the room, across the landing, and into his own bedroom. In the top drawer of his dressing table lay a clean pair of white cotton gloves. As he picked them up and rapidly pulled them on, there was disclosed underneath them a light claw-ended crowbar of the type used for opening small crates—which Mrs Jafferty had purchased a week ago at the local ironmonger’s in the course of her household errands. Mr Clarron hurried back with it to his wife’s bedside.
Her jewels were kept in the top drawer of the bedside table, where she could easily reach them. As a concession to his concern for their safety she had had a combination lock put on it and made a coy secret of the combination, even though he had tried to point out that the drawer was still no stronger than the wood it was made of. He proved this in a matter of seconds with a couple of quick leverings with his crowbar, splintering the front of the drawer out with a pleasantly surprising minimum of noise.
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He pulled out her jewel case, opened it on top of the night stand, and rapidly transferred its contents to his pockets. He let the crowbar lie on the floor where it had fallen. He leaned over his wife, unfastened the clasp at the back of her neck, and pulled the necklace and its sapphire pendant from under her. He picked up her hand to twist the rings off her fingers…He did not know precisely what stopped him, whether it was a movement glimpsed out of the corner of his eye or the faint squeak and stir of air that went with it. But he turned his head, and with that became frozen.
The door of a massive old wardrobe across the room was swinging stealthily open.
The door itself cut off the light of the bedside lamp from what was inside. But the shadowed opening was still not too dark for him to see, and recognize, the bulgingly bovine shape of Mrs Jafferty, the unmistakable mound of her atrociously carrot-tinted hair. Mr Clarron’s intestines seemed to turn into coils of quivering lead, and his lungs sagged through his diaphragm and took all his breath with them. A draught from the North Pole squirmed over his skin and brought out beads of clammy sweat where it touched.
“Faith an’ begorra,” said the broadest brogue outside Killarney, “if it isn’t himself robbin’ the trinkets from his poor darlin’ wife, and her not yet cold from his poison an’ all!”
There was a breaking point even to Mr Clarron’s adamantine self-control. He turned and ran out of the room, screaming.
He had no idea where he was going or what he was going to do. He stumbled down the stairs in a pure frenzy of planless flight, flight for its own primitive sake, spurred by the unreasoning need to get away anywhere from the impossible incomprehensible thing that he had seen. Out of the house, anywhere, where he could have one moment’s reprieve to encompass the exploding debris of disaster, to try and grab the pieces together and re-shape them into some form that would magically ward off utter catastrophe…
He threw open the front door and plunged solidly into the comfortably cushioned façade of Chief Inspector Claud Eustace Teal.
Mr Teal said, “Oof!”—and caught him as he bounced off, then set him upright in the hall.
“What’s the matter, Mr Clarron?” Teal asked drowsily.
As his torpid bulk evacuated the doorway, it revealed two uniformed men on the step outside.
“My wife,” Clarron babbled. “Dead in her bed! Drawer broken open—her jewels gone! And Mrs Jafferty—”
He broke off there. The first words had come out, incoherently enough, but unhesitatingly, with a kind of reflex assurance made glib by the number of times he had mentally rehearsed just such a speech. But after he had blurted out Mrs Jafferty’s name he did not know how to go on. He had never visualized having to say anything about her in her presence.
Mr Teal, however, did not seem to notice the aposiopesis. He was staring over Mr Clarron’s shoulder, and upwards, with his baby-blue eyes dilating in a most peculiar manner.
“Bejabers,” trumpeted a voice of distilled shamrock, “and if it isn’t me ould friend the fat boy of Scotland Yard, himself, arrivin’ late for the wake as usual.”
Mr Clarron turned, drawn by an awful but irresistible magnetism.
Billowing down the stairs came an exuberant female figure crowned with a bird’s-nest of hideous ginger hair.
“She must have done it,” Clarron chattered hysterically. “I should never have taken her without references. She was hiding up there—”
“Sure, and is that any way for a gentleman to be talkin’, tryin’ to put the blame on an honest workin’ woman? And himself all the time schemin’ to murdher his own wife, the poor soul, an’ run off with his fancy lady next door, who I see sneakin’ in here already to be with him before the body is cold!”
Teal glanced back for a moment, at Adrienne Halberd who was sidling in behind the two constables, and turned back to the staircase with a tinge of purple creeping into his rubicund complexion.
“Take off that ridiculous get-up, Saint,” he roared, “and let’s hear what you think you’re up to!”
“Well, if you insist,” said the Saint meekly. “But I was just starting to get the feel of the part.”
He unbuttoned the old-fashioned black dress, peeled it off, and draped it over the stair rail. Underneath it he wore a kind of upholstered combination garment extending down to his knees and padded in all the necessary places to produce Mrs Jafferty’s voluptuous contours. He took that off and hung it similarly over the rail, where it slid down to join the dress. Completing his descent of the stairs, he removed the orange-colored wig and set it carefully on the banister knob at the bottom.
“It’s Templar!” croaked Mr Clarron. And for one delirious instant he felt inspired, invulnerable. “He did it in that disguise! He was with Mrs Halberd this afternoon when I said I was going to London. She’s probably his accomplice—”
“Miss Halberd,” Teal said precisely, “is a police officer, acting under my orders.”
“As it eventually dawned on me,” said the Saint. “And there never was a Mrs Jafferty, except when Reginald dressed up in that outfit. Instead of trying to dream up the perfect alibi, which has tripped up a lot of bright lads, he dreamed up the perfect scapegoat. And before he has any more attacks of genius, and before I budge from here, I wish someone would go through his pockets, where they’ll find Mrs Clarron’s jewels. And if he has anything to say after that, ask him why he’s wearing those white cotton gloves.”
8
“What do you mean, it eventually dawned on you that I was with the police?” Adrienne Halberd demanded sulkily.
Simon lighted a cigarette.
“The way you picked me up at Skindle’s was rather determined,” he said. “But I could swallow that temporarily. When you told me you were investigating for an insurance company, I could take that for a while too. There are such things as female private eyes, even if they aren’t very often eyefuls. And when you said you’d been a distant adorer of mine since you were in pigtails, it was piling it up a bit tall, but I could still open my mouth that wide. Weird as it may seem, I have met such crazy gals. But with all that build-up, you’d set yourself a lot to live up to. And soon after you found out that I hadn’t any information to add to what you’d told me, or any definite plan to let you in on, you changed quite startlingly. Gone was the worshiping bug-eyed fan. You became impatient, critical—even caustic. You couldn’t see any merit at all in the idea that I adlibbed on two seconds’ notice when Reggie started to amble over. And it wasn’t such a bad one, either. But it made you almost rude.”
“If I remember,” she said, “you weren’t such a paragon—”
“But I wasn’t trying to sell anything, darling. You had been. And the transformation was just too sudden. A real fan would have thought anything I suggested was marvelous, no matter how screwy or dangerous it sounded. And then I realized something else. This was Claud Eustace’s last big case, and he’d warned me to keep out of it, but I told him I intended to stick my nose in anyway. Yet I came straight to Maidenhead, and none of the local constabulary was around to meet me and back up Teal’s orders. More surprising still, there wasn’t even a vestige of a cop anywhere around here, keeping tabs on Reggie or trying to save Mrs Clarron from being bumped off. So at last I connected. The cop had to be you. Teal had plenty of time to phone you while I was driving down from Heathrow, tell you I was headed for Skindle’s, tell you to pick me up there, rope me, keep me handy. The explanation you had to hatch up between you wasn’t so hard to invent, but I could almost hear the wheels whirring in Teal’s fat head, and see his buttons popping with pride at his own brilliance.”
Chief Inspector Teal thumbed open a tiny envelope of spearmint and mailed the contents in his mouth.
“All right,” he said trenchantly. “But what happened after Miss Halberd left you in her cottage?”
“After she left me to phone you for more advice,” said the Saint smoothly, “I went over those random hunches again and convinced myself. Then I knew I wouldn�
�t have much more time to work on my own, and I really was seriously worried about what my appearance and my story might rush Reggie into doing. And I decided I just had to see if I couldn’t find a clue in his house—which you couldn’t have tried without a search warrant. You know my methods, Claud. Impulsive. So I picked up the phone and called Mrs Clarron, and said I was the local police.”
“Falsely representing yourself to be a police officer,” barked Teal.
“For which I might easily get fined a few pounds,” said the Saint sadly. “I said that Mr Clarron had asked us to keep an eye on her on account of a suspicious character in the neighborhood, and it was really a break when she wasn’t a bit surprised. Reggie had warned her about the Saint. So I asked if we might send a man over to make sure that everything was all right. She said yes, but she couldn’t let him in. I said that was all right, Mr Clarron had left us a key. I moved my car up the road, walked back, and jiggered the lock, which is a very easy one.”
“He broke in,” jabbered Mr Clarron forlornly. “He admits it!”
It was not a very effective effort, considering the heap of jewels from his pockets which one of the constables was laboriously inventorying while the other counted them on to an outspread handkerchief, and Teal glanced at him almost pityingly.
“I told her I wanted to check all the windows,” Simon went on, “which gave me an excuse to roam through the house. I didn’t have to roam far. In Reggie’s bedroom, the first thing that caught my eye was a typical old theatrical trunk. I opened the lid, and right on top was this wig, and underneath it those dowager-size falsies.”
He paused for a dramatic moment which he could not deny himself, releasing a leisured streamer of smoke.
“It was all clear in a bolt of lightning. There was no mistaking that hair—I’d seen Mrs Jafferty at the pub, as Adrienne can tell you. And she’d told me that he was an actor, and once played with a sort of minstrel troupe. And I could see Reggie’s face as I’d met him this afternoon, and of course it was Mrs Jafferty’s, with the powder and rouge and lipstick off and those horn-rimmed glasses added. And I remembered that in those old music-hall skits with a comic charwoman, which Mrs Jafferty had reminded me of nothing else but, the part was nearly always played by a man.”
The Saint Around the World (The Saint Series) Page 8
