The Saint Around the World (The Saint Series)

by Leslie Charteris

  She swam idly along for a while, drifting towards one side of the bay, and the Saint paddled lazily beside her because it was the most natural thing to do. Presently they were close to a smooth step of rock, and the girl climbed out onto it and sat there, shaking the water out of her yellow hair, like a sea-nymph. After a moment, the Saint pulled himself up beside her.

  “Tell me now what you think,” she said.

  “I’m enjoying myself,” he told her.

  “You should stay a long time.”

  “That’s another matter. This is quite an experience, sort of out of this world—and there aren’t a lot of things I haven’t done. But I was never curious to go to the ordinary kind of nudist colony. There was something that didn’t appeal to me about the secretiveness, about having to join up, and the feeling that you’d be somehow committed to a Cause. I’ve had my own crusades, but I hate being organized. This is different, I admit. This is a lot of people being allowed to do what they want to do, and taking advantage of it, and yet really doing it on their own. But—”

  “You think there is something queer about us?”

  “To be honest, I half expected to see a rather freakish-looking bunch of people. I was wrong about that. As a matter of fact, I’d say that on the whole they’re a hell of a lot better-looking than the average of what you’d find on any ordinary beach. I’m glad there’s a place like this for them, since this is what they want. But as a way of life, it doesn’t mean the same to me that it does to Uncle Waldo.”

  “Then if we are not queer, we are foolish.”

  “Not that, either.” He crossed his arms over his knees and rested his chin on them, frowning into the glare. “Maybe the rest of the world would be a lot better if it learned your kind of tolerance—about minding your own business and letting everyone do what they like as long as they aren’t hurting anyone else. But I couldn’t settle for just that simple Utopia. Perhaps that’s my loss.”

  “At least you don’t despise Mr Oddington for liking it.”

  “Not a bit. I think he’s very lucky to only want what he can have, and to be able to have it.”

  “His nephew despises him.”

  “I’d just say, he disapproves.”

  “He disapproves of me, too.”

  “I don’t think he can figure you out. If it comes to that, I’ve been trying to figure you myself. You speak English very well—”

  “I taught in a school in England for three years.”

  “Then you also have a better than ordinary education. And you have much better than ordinary looks, and an attractive personality. There must be plenty of other things you could do—things that most girls would like better.”

  “But I like it here,” she said simply. “And Mr Oddington likes it. And what he likes, I like even more. Is that so unusual where you come from?”

  He nodded.

  “Sometimes.”

  “Why don’t you say that you think there must be something wrong because he is so much older?”

  “Even if I did, it wouldn’t be any of my business. But you can understand why it might worry George.”

  She looked at him without a trace of the coquettish mischief that played so easily on her face.

  “Mr Oddington is a very good man. He is different from other people in his way, but he does nobody any harm. I have known young men who were not good at all.”

  Simon held her eyes steadily for a few seconds. If anyone had ever predicted that he would one day hold a conversation like that with a sea-nymph sitting on a rock without a stitch on her, he wouldn’t have believed it. This was what you could get for striking up conversations with strangers in bars, he thought.

  He looked back towards the beach where he could see Mr Oddington and his nephew still sitting together. McGeorge was still firmly enveloped in his shirt, while Mr Oddington poked restively at the stones with his spear-gun. It was too far to see any expression on their faces, but the abruptness of an occasional gesture suggested restrained violence in the discussion.

  “I wish you luck,” said the Saint. “But I don’t think George will give you any blessing.”

  “Then,” she said, with a toss of her head, “it’s what you call too bad about him.”

  She stood up, straight and lovely, and then sprang from her toes and arrowed into the water.

  The Saint watched her come up and start swimming towards the shore. The breeze which springs up in the Mediterranean almost every summer afternoon was chasing turbulent riffles even into the sheltered bay; and in the dancing water an increasing number of swimmers, nearly all of them equipped with the diving masks and snorkel breathing tubes without which even a nudist might have felt undressed for Mediterranean swimming in those days, cruised in all directions like a fleet of miniature submarines. Simon stayed on the rock and wondered whether he should follow her, not knowing exactly how he was meant to take her parting retort.

  Then, as her blonde head drew near the beach, she found a footing and came upright with her shoulders clear of the water, and at the same time one of the swimmers near her also stopped and stood. The swimmer pushed his mask up onto his forehead to talk, but even without that distant sight of his face, by the development of his shoulders and the carriage of his head, Simon recognized the same persistent male whose arrival at the cove he had already noticed.

  Even the Saint had a limit to how long he could curb his discretion, and at that point he reached it. No matter if that meeting was entirely accidental or to what extent it might have been engineered, Nadine and the man were talking again, and the Saint had to hear something of it. One word, or even a look passed between them, might be enough to decide whether he would agree or disagree with McGeorge’s estimate of the situation. This time he couldn’t help it if he seemed crudely intrusive. Nothing in the whole set-up was any of his business anyway, but curiosity had always been one of his major vices.

  He dived in and swam towards them, as quickly as he could without too noticeable a churning of water, and keeping his head down as much as possible. But in that way, because of the rustle of water around his ears, he heard nothing until he stopped swimming a yard from them. And then he only heard Nadine say the one word: “Demain.”

  Then Nadine saw him.

  “I wish I’d brought one of those masks,” he said conversationally. “The water here must be wonderful for them.”

  “Yes, it is,” she said.

  She was angry—it was easy to see that, although she had it under control. But whether it was because of the interruption, or because of what had been interrupted, he had no way to tell. He let his feet down to the bottom and stood smiling as if he were unaware of any tension at all, and looked at the other man in such a way that it would have been almost impossible for her to avoid making the introduction.

  “This is Monsieur Pierre Eschards,” she said. “Mr Templar.”

  Eschards extended a hand, flexing his biceps.

  “Enchanté,” he said, but he did not look enchanted. The stare that he gave the Saint was cold and insolent. Then, as if Simon had already passed out of his life again, he turned back to the girl and took her hand. The way he looked at her was quite different in its intensity. “J’attendrai,” he said.

  He touched her fingers to his lips, pulled down his mask, and swam away.

  Nadine followed him a little distance with her eyes, biting her lip.

  Simon took a chance.

  “That’s the fellow you first came to the island with, isn’t it?” he said casually.

  “I suppose Mr Oddington told you.” The frown stayed on her brows. “It makes him very cross that Pierre has come back. He does not even think I should speak to him.”

  “You can’t altogether blame him for that.”

  “Pierre is my cousin. We have known each other since we were children. I cannot suddenly pretend not to know him.”

  “But didn’t you say you were—sort of engaged?”

  “For a while. I cannot undo the past. But
that is all over. It was over when I began to go with Mr Oddington. He should believe that.”

  Simon shrugged.

  “He might find it easier to believe if Pierre stayed away.”

  “I did not ask him to come. He just came here, from Antibes, where he likes to spend the summer. He said that he wanted to see how it was with me. He should have stayed there. It is a much better place for him.”

  “And full of consolations, if you can afford them.”

  She gave him a slow measuring look.

  “There are plenty of rich women who can afford them,” she said.

  It fell into place with a click. The Saint knew now why something about Pierre Eschards had seemed vaguely familiar. He was a type. You could find three or four of his duplicates any day of the season at a place like Eden Roc—sleek and handsome young men, wearing their hair rather esthetically long but with carefully cultivated and tanned physiques, lounging around like well-fed cats, with bold and calculating eyes.

  “But I thought you couldn’t afford to stay here unless you had a job. What attracted him to you?”

  “Everyone thought my grandfather was rich, and would leave me money. But that summer he died, and he had lost it all in the stock market. After that, Pierre was not so much in love. I did not believe it at first, but I know now that he was only waiting for an excuse for us to break up.”

  “But you said he came back to see how it was with you.”

  “I did not say he was not fond of me at all. He said I should not be wasting my life here—that presently Mr Oddington would die, and I would not be so young, but I would have nothing. I told him that Mr Oddington had thought of that in his will, even before we are going to be married…You ask a lot of questions, don’t you?”

  The Saint needed no one to tell him that he had been grilling her almost like a prosecuting attorney, and only a feat of personality had let him get away with it that far. But he couldn’t stop now.

  “I can’t help being interested in people’s problems,” he said disarmingly. “I’m afraid Pierre was rather upset when I butted in. You’d just been telling him something, hadn’t you? I only heard you say, ‘Tomorrow.’ ”

  “I told him that Mr Oddington and I were going to be married tomorrow.”

  Simon raised his eyebrows.

  “Well, congratulations! I didn’t know it was as close as that.”

  “We gave our notice at the Mairie long ago. But only when we went to our siesta this afternoon, he said we must do it tomorrow, while his nephew is still here.”

  “That ought to have made Pierre happy, if he was worried about you. But I thought he looked mad.”

  “He pretends he is still in love with me,” she said slowly. “He says if anything goes wrong I can still come to him. You heard what he said when he left: ‘I shall wait.’ ”

  She did not waver under the Saint’s quietly judicial scrutiny, but the Saint knew exactly how little that could mean. It is only in fiction that no liar can look an interrogator in the eye. But everything she said seemed to hold together—or he had consistently failed to trip her up. He began to feel embarrassed about the impulse that had started him probing at all. Of all the places in the world where he should have been out of range of trouble, let alone looking for it, the Ile du Levant should have been the nearest to a foolproof bet.

  He looked around to see what had happened to George McGeorge and his Uncle Waldo. They were not on the beach where he had last seen them.

  It took him a little while to locate them, and ultimately it was a flash of McGeorge’s white skin that ended the search. The family confab must have ended, with or without a decision, and Mr Oddington had finally succeeded in bullying or cajoling his nephew into the water to join him in trying out the new spear-gun. Whether McGeorge had also been coaxed or coerced into surrendering his last stronghold of modesty could not be determined from there, for both men had waded in above their waists and the surface of the water was choppy enough to interrupt its transparency.

  “Well, if George hasn’t decided to give you his blessing, at least he seems to have called off his sulk for the moment,” said the Saint, with an indicative movement of his head.

  Nadine put a light hand on his shoulder.

  “I suppose I should try to make him like me,” she said. “If you really do care for people’s problems, I think you could help.”

  She began to walk through the water towards the shore and at an angle towards the other end of the beach where Mr Oddington and McGeorge were. As the water shallowed, her breasts came above it, full and yet taut. The ripples dropped to her hollow waist, then to her hips, and Simon, Templar, wading up beside her, found that he still had to make an occasional conscious effort to keep his attention up to the levels that the philosophy of the island took for granted.

  He disciplined himself to keep looking at Mr Oddington, who had fitted his own diving mask on to McGeorge and was urging him to put his head down in the water and enjoy it. McGeorge also had the spear-gun in one hand, which seemed to be an added liability to a natural clumsiness. He eventually achieved a more or less horizontal position, in which he floundered rather like a drowning beetle.

  “If Uncle Waldo is still a vegetarian, why does he want to spear fish?” Simon wondered idly.

  “For the sport,” she said. “It is not a moral thing, only because he thinks vegetables are better for health. When he catches anything, he gives it—”

  Her voice broke in a gasp.

  Out of the water where McGeorge was thrashing something lanced like a streak of quicksilver, and then froze in the form of a slim shaft of steel that stood rigidly, grotesquely, out of Mr Oddington’s chest. Simon saw it at the same time, very clearly and horribly, before Mr Oddington rolled over and fell with a soggy splash.

  5

  “It is only to be expected that he would say it was an accident,” said the gendarme. “Not many murderers are so ready to follow their victims that they confess at the first moment.”

  The memory of McGeorge’s statement was etched on the Saint’s mind in especially sharp detail, for it had fallen to him to act as interpreter.

  “I haven’t the faintest idea what happened,” McGeorge had said. “I heard him give a sort of yell, and looked up, and there he was with that spear thing sticking in his chest. I dropped the gun and struggled over to him—he was only a couple of yards away—and dragged him out on the beach. The gun came trailing after him because the spear’s attached to it with a short length of line. It must have gone off all by itself.”

  “Were you on good terms with your uncle?” the gendarme had asked.

  “I was very fond of him. But I suppose you’ll soon find out that we’d been having an argument today.”

  “It was about something personal?”

  “Yes.”

  “Yet soon afterwards you were swimming with him, and playing with this arbalète which you had brought him as a present.”

  “The argument was over.”

  “I shall have to ask what it was about.”

  “All right. I’m sure everyone knows that he was going to marry Mademoiselle Zeult. I told him I thought she was only marrying him for his money. He didn’t think so. Finally I suggested a way to settle it. I dared him to tell her that he’d deceived her and he didn’t have any money at all, and see if she still wanted to marry him. If she did, I’d apologize and lick her boots—if she had any. He agreed. In fact, he was so sure of her that he was as happy as if he’d already won a bet. So he insisted on me playing with his toy, as if he wanted to show that he didn’t bear any grudge. He was so eager that I had to give in.”

  Simon could still hear McGeorge’s clipped precise accents and see his blanched tight-lipped face. Without pretending to any inhuman nervelessness, he had handled himself with a cool competence that any lawyer would have applauded, neither evading nor protesting too much. But in spite of that, McGeorge was now locked away somewhere in the building, while the gendarme sat in his
little office scanning the notes he had written in an official ledger in an extraordinarily neat and rapid longhand.

  Simon gave him a cigarette.

  “Do you always treat an accident as if it were a murder?” he inquired.

  “When there are grounds to suspect that it could be, yes,” said the gendarme politely. “That is the law.”

  He was, Simon had gathered, the only civilian officer of the law on the island. He was quite a young man, with a pleasant face, but very serious. He wore a semi-military khaki shirt with informal tan shorts and sandals, but had not gone so far as to try to maintain the dignity of his commission in a G-string. The Saint had not been unhappy to be able to change back into the clothes he had worn on the ferry, and had also brought a grateful McGeorge his trousers; it was twilight now, and cool enough for the light clothing to be no hardship.

  “Figure it to yourself, monsieur,” said the gendarme. “You have a man of some means, because he lives here all the time in a good villa and does not have to work. He has a young girl who is his secretary and housekeeper and no doubt other things. That is all right. But then he is going to marry her. Alors, very soon comes his nephew, who does not want this. That, too, is natural. If the uncle is married, perhaps there is no more money for the nephew. He tries to tell the uncle that the girl is only marrying for money. They argue. At last, they agree on a test. But then, at once, the uncle is so happy that the young man is afraid. The uncle seems to be so sure, that suddenly the nephew thinks that the girl could love the old man after all—such things have happened—and the test will fail, and he will have lost everything. Perhaps, he thinks, an accident would be much more certain. And in his hand he has the weapon. It takes only the touch of a finger.”

  “Just like that, on the spur of the moment.”

  “The thought of murder may have been in his mind before. It needed only the opportunity, the right circumstance, to send a message down his arm to the trigger. A very carefully planned murder may be good, if it succeeds, but the more elaborately it is prepared, the more risk there is that the preparation may be discovered. A murder on impulse can be just as good, and even harder to prove. But it is still murder. I have thought a lot about these things.”