“But Mademoiselle Zeult told me that Oddington had already made a will in her favor. So killing him would get McGeorge nowhere.”
“Can you swear that McGeorge knew that? If not, the proof remains that he had motive.”
The muscles in the Saint’s jaw flickered under the skin. It was all presumptive, all circumstantial, and yet under the French criminal code which requires the accused to prove his innocence rather than the prosecution to prove his guilt, it could be a wicked case to beat.
“What happens next?” he asked.
“I have telegraphed to Toulon. I do not have the equipment or qualifications to do any more here. In the morning an Inspecteur of the Police Judiciaire will arrive and take charge. If you wish to help your friend, I would suggest that you send for an attorney.”
“I’m not interested in helping anyone,” said the Saint grimly. “I only knew Monsieur Oddington a few hours, but I liked him very much. If he was murdered, I want someone to go to the guillotine for it.”
The gendarme nodded.
“He was perhaps a little eccentric, but I think everyone loved him. And I am employed to serve justice, monsieur.”
Simon doubled his right fist into a tight knot and ground it slowly into the palm of his left hand. The exasperation that found an outlet in that controlled gesture went all the way up his arms into the muscles of his chest. His eyes were narrowed between a crinkle of hard lines.
It was a cut-and-dried case…and yet something was wrong with it. The instinctive understanding of crime which was his special peculiar gift told him so, brushing aside superficial logic. The infuriating frustration came from trying to pinpoint the flaw. It wasn’t a straightforward problem like listening to a musical recording with in expert ear and spotting one or two false notes that had been played. It was more as if one or two whole instruments were micrometrically off key, playing perfectly consistently as units and yet infinitesimally out of tune, so that the entire performance was elusively discordant.
“There are still inconsistencies,” he said, groping. “I heard McGeorge disagree with his uncle quite openly. Once or twice he was almost rude. He made sarcastic remarks that Monsieur Oddington might easily have resented. Would he have risked that if he was so anxious to stay in his uncle’s good graces?…And about Mademoiselle Zeult. A man who is really infatuated is just as likely to fly into a rage with anyone who says derogatory things about his girl as he is to wonder if they might be true. Perhaps more likely. Why would McGeorge risk running her down so openly when he could have been much more subtle?”
“Perhaps because he was stupid.”
“But just now you thought he was rather clever.”
The gendarme lifted his shoulders and arms and opened his hands in the Latin gesture which says everything and commits itself to nothing.
“The investigation will decide which is true, monsieur.”
“Listen,” said the Saint. “You told me you did a lot of thinking about these things. So I imagine that being the village cop in a place like this is not your idea of a life’s career. You may never have a chance like this again. Instead of waiting for the boys from Toulon to investigate and decide everything, suppose you could hand them a case that was all wrapped up and tied with ribbons. Would that help you to get a transfer to some place where you could find some serious detecting to do?”
The gendarme studied him shrewdly.
“Because I am interested in crime, I know who you are, Monsieur le Saint. I will hear what you suggest, so long as it is not against the law.”
“I only want you to let me play a hunch,” Simon said, “and stand by to cash in on it if it pays off.”
A new exhilaration surged into him like a flood as he walked back to Oddington’s villa in the failing dusk. It was a lift of spirit with no more sober foundation than the fact that at last he had stopped being a spectator and had something to do. But there was an energy of wrath in it too, for he could not think of the death of Waldo Oddington as the mere impersonal data in an abstract problem. It is more common in stories that the murder victim is an evil character whom many people have good reason to hate. In real life, it is more often the well-meaning innocent who has the bad luck to stand in the way of some less worthy person’s greed or ambition, and who dies without even realizing that he had an enemy. But if only villains got knocked off, Simon thought savagely, there wouldn’t be much incentive to try to convict murderers.
He went in at the unlocked door of the villa and fumbled for a light switch inside the living room before he remembered that there was no electricity. He took out his lighter and struck it. From a chair near the terrace, Nadine Zeult looked at him unblinkingly.
“There is a lamp on the table,” she said.
He went over to it, raised the glass chimney, and tilted his lighter. Illumination spread out to fill the room as the lamp flame took over and he adjusted the wick.
The girl continued to watch him without expression. She had put on a plain black dress with only a touch of white at the collar. There were no tears on her cheeks, but her eyes were puffy and shadowed.
“Are you all right?” he said. “The gendarme kept me answering so many questions.”
“What could you tell him?”
“I had a job to convince him that I scarcely know McGeorge at all.”
“Why did he do it?” she said, in a dry and aching monotone. “Why?”
The Saint used his lighter again, on a cigarette. There was still one crevice in which a wedge could be started, which could open a split through which anything might fall. He saw nothing to be gained by waiting another moment to strike there. Win or lose, there would be no better time to try it—the test that Waldo Oddington had agreed to, but which had not been made.
“One thing came out,” he said flatly. “It seems that everybody was wrong about Uncle Waldo—just like they were about your grandfather. He wasn’t a rich man at all. It turns out he didn’t have a dime.”
Her eyes stayed on him so fixedly that they seemed hypnotized. And then, faintly and hollowly, she began to laugh.
It was a thin racking laughter, almost soundless, that shook her whole body and yet had nothing to do with mirth.
“So you are just like the others,” she said. “I expect you would believe that I wanted someone to kill him. Perhaps even that I somehow helped to arrange it. I thought better of you. Oh, you fool!” She stood up suddenly, straight and quivering. “Let me show you something.”
She crossed the room to the desk and jerked open a drawer. If she had brought out a gun he would hardly have been surprised, she was shaken with such an intensity of passion, but instead it was only a cheap cardboard file that she spilled out on the top of the desk. The papers scattered under her hands as she skimmed through them, until she found what she wanted. She brought it back and thrust it at him.
“Read that!”
Simon took it. It was on a chastely discreet letterhead that said only “INFINITE ENTERPRISE CORPORATION,” above the address, with the words engraved even smaller in the left-hand corner: “Office of the Chairman.” He read:
Dear Uncle Waldo:
Please forgive me for being a bit late with the enclosed check for your usual quarterly allowance. I’ve had to do a lot of traveling lately, and I somehow lost touch with my personal calendar. I hope this hasn’t inconvenienced you too much.
Regarding your wish to own the villa you are now renting, I’d like to advance you the price, and agree that it might be an economy in the long run, but in view of the rumors about the French Navy’s plans for the island, don’t you think we should wait a little longer until you’re sure the investment won’t be jeopardized…?
There was more of it, but the Saint’s eyes were already plunging to the foot of the page, where it ended:
Your affectionate nephew,
George
Simon Templar was conscious of seconds that crawled by like snails before he regained his voice.
Images unscr
ambled themselves and reassembled in their proper place as if a complex of distorting prisms that overlaid them had been snatched away.
“Of course,” he said huskily, almost to himself. “May God forgive me if I ever let myself think in clichés again. In books it’s always the rich uncle and the no-good pampered nephew whose only idea of a career is to keep putting the bite on Uncle. So everything that George said, I had to take the wrong way. I couldn’t even hear him properly when he told me how fond his mother was of Uncle Waldo, and how she’d made George promise practically on her death-bed that he’d try to be like a son to the old boy. I was too clogged-up in the brain to be able to remember that there could also be such a thing as a penniless uncle with a rich nephew.”
“Yes,” Nadine said, with the resentment still burning in her voice. “George is very rich. Waldo told me all about him. He buys and sells companies and manipulates shares. He is called some kind of boy wonder in finance.”
“My second feeble-minded fatuity,” Simon went on scarifying himself ruthlessly. “Because George is young, and snotty, and stuffy, and in every way the type of jerk I long to stick pins into, it never dawned on me that he could be fabulously brilliant in some racket of his own. Or that anyone I personally disliked could be extravagantly loyal and generous to his family.”
“He was. Very generous.”
“But when you came along, he wanted to be sure that he wasn’t going to be fleeced at second hand, by way of Uncle Waldo. You can’t blame him for wondering what he might have had to bail Uncle Waldo out of.”
“Waldo could have told him in a minute that I knew everything, and that we wanted nothing extra from him.”
“But you’ve seen what George’s personality is like. I can imagine how it would rub Uncle Waldo the wrong way. Only he couldn’t show it—he had to try to keep George happy, instead of it being the other way around. But when George proposed that corny and pretty insulting test, Uncle Waldo must have nearly bust a gut. It would have been a crime to tell him then that you already knew. It was much more fun to look forward to seeing George’s red face when you told him yourself.”
“So,” she said, “now you believe me.”
He nodded.
“That was my third blind spot. When one sees a pretty young girl like you with a man of over sixty, it’s so easy to think of another cliché. I humbly apologize.”
She gazed at him for a long time, while the last of the fire slowly died down in her and was spent.
“It isn’t your fault,” she said in a low voice. “It would be hard for you to understand. But I told you how I had been disgusted with young men, through Pierre—and perhaps others. I loved Waldo—no, not in the romantic way that you would think of love, but with a full heart. With him I felt protected, and safe, and sure, and that was right for me.”
The Saint lowered his eyes to the piece of paper which he still held, and after a moment got it back in focus.
“Who else knew about this?” he asked.
“No one,” she said. “He told me, because that was his kind of honesty. But he did not want anyone else to know, because that was his one harmless little pride, to let it be thought that what he had was his own.”
“And when you told Pierre that Waldo had made you his heiress—”
“It was partly to try to stop Pierre bothering me, and partly to build up Waldo. Pierre is the last person to whom I could tell the truth. How he would sneer!”
Simon’s cigarette reminded him of itself when it burned his fingers. He crushed the stump into an ashtray.
The door opened at the front of the house, and Pierre Eschards came through the archway. He had on a pair of very short shorts that displayed his muscular thighs, and a dark mesh shirt open to the waist. His hair glistened with brilliantine. He gave the Saint a glance that barely condescended to recognition, and went straight across to Nadine and put an arm around her.
“I could not go to bed without being sure that you were all right,” he said in French. “Is there anything I can do?”
“No.” she said quietly.
“Pauvre petite.” His lips brushed the top of her head. “But you are young. It will pass. You must not let it spoil the rest of your life. And when you want me to help you forget, I shall be at your service.”
The Saint put McGeorge’s letter down with the other papers strewn on the desk, slipping it sideways so that it would not be staring anyone in the face. All the rest of what he had to do seemed suddenly so straightforward.
“I was just going to tell Nadine the latest development,” he said, now speaking in fluent French himself. “There are no fingerprints of McGeorge’s on the spear-gun that shot Oddington.”
They both turned to him with sharply widening eyes.
“Fingerprints?” Eschards repeated. “But of course there would not be any. It was in the water.”
“A greasy fingerprint wouldn’t wash off so quickly,” said the Saint. “And where people are using sun-tan oil, they usually have greasy fingers. There were other fingerprints on the gun, but none of his. And because he was new here and afraid of a burn, he had oil all over him.”
There were times when the Saint’s facility of invention was almost incredible, but now he was hardly touching its resources. It was more like describing things that came to his mind by extrasensory perception, which were separated from actuality only by a slight displacement of time and would soon become authenticated facts even if he took the liberty of anticipating them.
“Then they have not searched well enough,” Eschards said. “In any case, why do they want fingerprints? The spear that killed Oddington was attached to the gun by a cord, so it was not fired from any other gun.”
“But the gun was not attached to McGeorge,” Simon said calmly. “In his statement, McGeorge said that when his uncle was shot, he dropped the gun he was holding and went to help him. The gun was pulled in afterwards by the cord. Now, there are many arbalètes exactly like that, because the experts consider it the best. Suppose somebody with an identical gun swam beside McGeorge and shot his Uncle Waldo, and then, when McGeorge let go his gun, exactly as one could expect, and went to help his uncle, this other person grabbed McGeorge’s gun and swam away with it under water—it would look, as if McGeorge did it. And even McGeorge might believe that he had had an accident, n’est-ce pas?”
Nadine said, “But the water was so clear—”
“No,” said the Saint. “If you remember, it had turned a little choppy.”
“But it is absurd anyway,” Eschards broke out. “Who else would have a reason to do that?”
Simon shrugged.
“That may be harder to answer. But the first thing is to find the other gun. My guess is that the man who did it would have hidden it somewhere around the beach, because with his guilty conscience he would be nervous about being seen with the same type of gun so soon after the killing. If we find it, it will have McGeorge’s fingerprints on it besides the other man’s, and that will be the proof. I came here to borrow a flashlight, and I’m going back to search.”
“Tonight?” Eschards objected. “You will find nothing. Wait till tomorrow, and I will help you.”
“By tomorrow the murderer may have gone back himself and taken it away.” Simon addressed himself to the girl. “Is there a flashlight here?”
Nadine seemed to be straining to read his eyes.
“Yes,” she said. “In the top drawer on the left.”
Simon took it out and tested it.
“Just wish me luck,” he said, with a brief grin at them both, and went out quickly.
He walked out on the road over which Mr Oddington had led him so happily that afternoon, not dawdling but not rushing it. The night was full of a massed chirping of cicadas that could have practically drowned any other sound further from his ears than his own footsteps; but he was not worried until he had turned off the road on the side path, and picked his way rather gingerly down the steepening slope, and come out at last on the
narrow trail that edged down the sheerest stretch of the final cliff. That was where he heard the tiny scuff of sound that he had steeled himself to wait for, exactly where he had expected it, and he twisted to one side as something grazed the side of his head and thudded with sickening heaviness into the blackness beyond.
Then a weight clamped on his shoulders and an arm around his neck, and he was borne irresistibly down, but he was set for it, and he dropped the flashlight and threw all his strength into turning so that at the last instant it was his assailant who hit the rocky path first and the Saint was on top and cushioned. The attacker had the strength of a young lion, but the Saint was powered by a cold fury such as few crimes had ever aroused in him, a pitiless hate that could only be slaked by doing personal violence to the wanton destroyer of one simple happy man. He got one forearm solidly across his opponent’s throat, clamping the neck to the ground, and drove his fist like a reciprocating piston into the upturned face…
“Ça suffit,” said the gendarme.
With a flashlight in his hand, he forced himself between the Saint and another potential corpse, and metal clicked on the wrists of the man underneath.
“I told you this was where someone would jump me, if my scheme worked out,” said the Saint exultantly. “I only had to be found at the bottom there with my skull caved in on a rock, and it would look as if I slipped and fell in the dark. Another fortunate accident. Shall we really hunt for that other spear-gun now, or wait till tomorrow?”
“I saw him following you, and then I saw him attack you.” said the gendarme judicially. “That requires a motive, and there is only one that is plausible.”
“You have the rest of it,” Simon said. “It was only the kind of impulse, or inspiration, that you spoke of this afternoon, but he saw how to kill Monsieur Oddington so that McGeorge would surely be convicted of it, and therefore would not be able to inherit anything. And in that way Nadine would become rich, and he was sure that after a while he would be able to win her again and marry her.”
The Saint Around the World (The Saint Series) Page 13
