The Saint Around the World (The Saint Series)

by Leslie Charteris

  Farrast picked up the kris and examined it.

  “This’ll make a nice souvenir,” he said.

  “You earned it,” said the Saint, who could seldom withhold approbation when it was due. “When I saw him pull it I thought he had you, but you handled him like a commando.”

  Farrast looked pleased with himself, rather than with the compliment.

  “I told you I could take care of myself.”

  They went outside again. All three Malays had disappeared.

  “Two of ’em are on their way back to the village to tell the story right now,” Farrast said. “I don’t think the pawang’ll have much prestige left when they’ve finished. In fact, I’ll be surprised if he ever shows his face in Pahang again.”

  “Unfortunately,” Simon remarked, “you didn’t get a chance to ask him who he was taking orders from, after all.”

  “Probably it doesn’t matter much now.”

  Farrast squinted up at a haze of dust drifting around the shoulder of the hill. “Those kranis have brought the truck in,” he said. “I hope for their sakes it was full of wood.”

  He started to walk briskly up towards the distillation building, and the Saint tagged quietly along. Farrast swung his cane as if he was enjoying the feel of his recent use of it in retrospect, and would be happy to repeat the experience. His lower lip began to tighten and protrude again.

  The truck had pulled into the loading area in front of the ovens, where the cage-like carts received their cargoes of raw wood. The two kranis were heaving billets from the truck into the last car of a row of previously filled ones. They were Tamils, and they had started the day in white shirts and trousers as befitted their position as supervisors of common labor, but now their clothes were soiled and soaked with sweat. They did not look at Farrast or the Saint, but went on working steadily, with masks of undying resentment on their thin-featured black faces.

  Farrast measured the size of the load they were handling with his eye, and seemed disappointed that he could find no fault with it.

  ‘I’ve good news for you,” he said in English. “I think I’ve fixed the pawang and you’ll have all your men back tomorrow morning. But I don’t want this to happen again. So to make sure you remember what happens when you let ’em get out of hand, I’m going to let you fill in for ’em for the rest of the day. After you finish loading that train we’ll run it in and start cooking, and you can try yourselves out as stokers. Then this afternoon we’ll go back to the coils and tanks that your men were supposed to clean. Between you, you ought to be able to make up some of the time that’s been lost. And I’m going to watch you do it. Unless you’d rather go back to India and look for another job.”

  The two men stood still for long enough to appraise him with inscrutable faces of sweat-glazed jade, and then stolidly resumed their work.

  “Those two speak English as well as I do,” Farrast said carelessly, “but they still need a bit of educating.”

  He found himself a place in the shade, sat down, and played with the captured kris.

  Simon Templar lighted a cigarette and wandered idly around, finding what he could to interest himself. Farrast was plainly no casual conversationalist, and was content to glower intermittently at the toiling kranis and watch for the next excuse to lay a verbal lash across their backs. Simon found himself liking Farrast not one particle better, even though the man had surprised him with a demonstration of physical courage and capability of no insignificant order. It was a revelation that a form of genuine respect could be so sharply limited.

  The Saint endured Farrast’s inexorable dourness until his last three cigarettes were smoked and he could stand it no longer, and then he said, “Eve must still be wondering what happened. I’ll go back and tell her how you smote the ungodly, hip and thigh.”

  “Go ahead,” Farrast said curtly, and glanced at his watch. “I’ll be along soon for tiffin.”

  Eve Lavis was sitting on the verandah with the Maugham book open on her lap. She looked up at Simon with eager but restrained concern.

  “What happened? You’ve been such a long time.”

  “I know, I should have come back before. I was watching them getting ready to run a load of wood through the cook-shop. The pawang was taken care of long ago.”

  He gave her a sufficiently graphic account of one of the few brawls in which he had ever been an entirely superfluous spectator.

  “Farrast was terrific,” he said. “I can be very frank now, and admit that I hadn’t expected that much from him. You know how one tends to think that a guy who makes a lot of threatening noise, which Farrast is rather inclined to, won’t be half so tough when the time comes to deliver. This was an eye-opener. Maybe he was a bit brutal, but he was quick as lightning and he was all guts.”

  “I can’t blame you for not liking him. He’s been quite boorish with you—I can’t think why.”

  “We haven’t exactly become bosom pals yet.” Simon acknowledged tolerantly. “But I’ll give him a testimonial any day for courage. It gave me a rather different slant on his character. You can tell a hell of a lot about a man’s character from a few minutes like those.”

  “You’ve probably had lots of practice.”

  “All right, from the criminal point of view: suppose Farrast had an enemy, or someone he wanted to get rid of. Farrast would probably challenge him to a fight, or at least give him some token chance to defend himself. Suppose Farrast were a murder suspect. I might believe it if they said he met the victim face to face and shot him down. I wouldn’t believe that he slowly poisoned him to death.”

  She stared at him, her eyes widening fractionally.

  “What an extraordinary thing to say!”

  “Why? Poisoning is the most cowardly kind of murder. No killer feels as sure as a poisoner that he can’t be caught. And it’s the easiest thing to do to someone who trusts him. Even the lowest gangsters have hardly ever sunk to using poison. The victim doesn’t even have a chance to duck.”

  “No, no,” she said, with the nearest he had yet seen her come to impatience. “I mean, why would you ever think of Charles as a murderer?”

  Simon grinned.

  “Force of habit,” he said blandly. “I think of all sorts of people like that. It’s like a game. And maybe the stuff I’ve been reading set me off again.”

  It was a moment more before the shadow of a frown ironed itself out of her forehead and she looked down at the book.

  “Oh, yes, I read your story, and I went on and read several others.”

  He lighted a cigarette.

  “What did you think of it?”

  “It wasn’t bad. And nobody’s poisoned in it, either.”

  “That’s true.”

  “I still can’t imagine what Vernon has on his mind.”

  “Maybe he has his own views on what the policeman in the story ought to have done, or would have done according to regulations, and he wants to have an argument with me.”

  “But what could the policeman do?”

  Simon shrugged.

  “Damn if I know. In that particular case, I don’t even know what I’d do myself. It was such a private, almost humane little murder.”

  “I thought you’d be understanding about that.”

  “I might be. But a callous murder for profit is something else. For instance, take the Bluebeard type. I met one of those not too long ago, in England. He married one woman after another, taking care they had money or insuring them if they didn’t, murdered them in a number of ingenious ways, and after a decent interval went on the woo for the next. It was a completely cold-blooded business operation.”

  “And you couldn’t have any sympathy for him.”

  “I helped to get him hanged,” said the Saint.

  She closed the book and put it on the table, and studied him again with those sober and profound gray eyes.

  “I like you very much,” she said. “You know exactly what you believe and what you’d do about it. If we got to kn
ow each other better we might disagree about lots of things, but we’d always speak the same language.”

  He knew it for as open a promise of eventually more than friendship as any strumpet’s moist mouth and skilfully disarranged skirt, but it was made with such queenly dignity and for such a discreetly indefinite future that even at her last husband’s funeral it would have been in perfect taste.

  “Coming from you, Eve,” Simon said quietly, “I take that as a rare compliment.”

  Farrast came tramping up the steps and kicked the screen door open with an exuberant toe.

  “Well, Eve,” he said, “should I put in for a raise?”

  She stood up, her face lighting with eager appreciation.

  “Simon told me all about it,” she said. “You must have been wonderful.”

  “I told you I’d do it,” Farrast said, flinging down his hat and cane. “And the two kranis are learning how much better it is to keep other people working than have to do it yourself. When the Malays come back tomorrow morning, everything will be running like clockwork again.”

  He was flushed and hot, but the satisfaction of meting out punishment seemed to have finally put him in a good humor.

  “I’m going to have a drink,” he announced, and went to the sideboard.

  Eve turned to the Saint.

  “Aren’t you thirsty?”

  “I could use a cold beer, if you have one.”

  “Of course.”

  She rang the bell on the dining table, and the houseboy came in, took the order, and went out again. Farrast raised his glass.

  “Excuse me if I don’t wait,” he said. “Cheerio.”

  He drank deeply, putting down two-thirds of the highball at one long draft. As he lowered the glass, a strange expression came over his face, and quickly turned into a dreadful grimace. He retched and choked, and then doubled up as if he had been hit in the solar plexus. The glass fell from his hand as he clutched his stomach, and then his knees buckled under him.

  Eve Lavis gave an inarticulate cry.

  Simon sprang forward and rolled Farrast over. Farrast’s muscles were cramped in knotted rigidity, his teeth were clenched, and his lips drawn back from them in a horrible grin. The color of his face was darkening towards purple. Simon tried to force the mouth open so that he could physically induce vomiting, but he knew it was no use.

  5

  “Those devils,” Mrs Lavis said, in a clear unnatural voice.

  Charles Farrast was finished. Technically there might still have been a flutter of pulse or breath to quibble about, but he was dead beyond human reversing. Nevertheless, the Saint went on trying for a few seconds, stubbornly reluctant to give up.

  He heard Eve’s footsteps cross the room, pause, and then pass quickly behind him. The rear screen door slammed.

  Simon looked up, puzzledly. And then from the direction of the cook’s quarters out back he heard a man’s wordless yell, which was instantly cut off by the first of two crashing shots.

  The Saint took off from the floor like a sprinter from a crouch, plunged through the rear door, and raced down the covered alley outside, his automatic already out in his hand.

  He saw Eve Lavis through the first doorway he came to, and a moment later, as he braked his headlong rush, the picture was completed. The room was a sort of serving pantry, with china cabinets and an icebox. On a table in the center stood an empty beer bottle, and a freshly filled glass on a Benares tray. The houseboy lay on the floor, quite still, with his eyes rolled upwards and two holes marring the front of his immaculate white jacket. Mrs Lavis held her revolver still pointing at him, as though considering whether to fire it again.

  “I knew it,” she said in a flat mechanical tone. “I knew it. It came to me one-two-three. It couldn’t have been anyone else. And then if he poisoned the whisky he could have been slowly poisoning Ted all that time, and perhaps he didn’t have ulcers at all. And then if he was poisoning people like that why should he stop there? I could see it all in a flash. I grabbed my gun and ran out here. I caught him red-handed. Just as I thought, he was pouring something into your beer. And when he saw that I’d seen him, he picked up that knife. Look.”

  Her gun pointed at a small brown bottle on the floor by the houseboy’s feet, and a kitchen knife near his right hand.

  There was a faint scuffling sound from the back of the building, and Eve Lavis turned abruptly and hurried out of the door. Simon went after her. A fat Chinese and a little woman were galloping wildly away down a stretch of slope. From their clothes and appearance, they could only have been the cook and the amah.

  Eve raised her revolver.

  “I’ll kill them all,” she said coldly.

  Simon caught her wrist in a grip of steel.

  “You don’t know that they had anything to do with it,” he said. “The boy was the one you caught in the act. They’re probably just scared to death.”

  He took the gun away from her without much difficulty. She struggled only very briefly, until her complete helplessness against his strength was obvious. Then she became still, and presently sagged a little against him.

  “I’ll be good,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

  “Come back to the house,” he said.

  As he took her through the rear door again she averted her eyes from the body of Farrast on the floor. Simon let her go, and took a napkin to lay over the man’s congested face. She sat down in a chair and put her hands over her eyes, but it was a rigid gesture suggestive of intense concentration rather than collapse.

  Other footsteps came pell-mell to the front of the verandah. The uniformed guard appeared at the top of the steps, with the staring faces of the two kranis a little below and behind him. Simon went and let them in. He recalled what Farrast had said about the Tamils having learned English, and was grateful that he did not have to struggle through a narrative in halting Malay. He stated what he had seen for himself, and what Mrs Lavis had told him, lucidly and concisely; and one of the kranis translated it for the guard. Mrs Lavis did not move or speak.

  Then Simon led them through to the back and showed them what was in the serving pantry.

  He said to the elder krani, “Tell the guard he is to stay here. He must not go in or touch anything. He is to stand at the door, and he is not to let anyone in for any reason—not even myself or the Memsahib. When he is tired, one of the other guards will take his place. This will go on until the police get here.”

  He returned to the house with the two Tamils, and nodded at the body by the sideboard.

  “One of you help me take him to his room.”

  One of them did so, the other going along to open the door. When they came back, Mrs Lavis was still sitting where they had left her. The only difference was that she had dropped her hands to the arms of the chair. Simon went to a small desk that stood against one wall, found a sheet of paper, and wrote on it briefly but carefully.

  “Send this to Major Ascony in Singapore on the railway telegraph. If he can’t come himself, he’ll have someone sent on the next train from Kuala Lumpur or Ipoh.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Do it at once,” Mrs Lavis said.

  “Yes, Mem.”

  The kranis went out.

  Simon paced thoughtfully back, picked up the round yellow tin of cigarettes from the coffee table, and chose one from it.

  “I’m sorry,” Mrs Lavis said. “I went off the deep end for a few minutes. I won’t do it again.”

  Her face was again stoically controlled, her eyes dry and clear and unwavering.

  “That’s all right,” he said. “The stiff upper lip can get slightly petrified if it never lets up.”

  “It was just too much,” she said. “Ted swore by that boy Ah Fong. It was so true what you said about poisoning, how mean it is. To think that Ah Fong could have been bringing him poisoned food and drinks day after day, watching him suffer and waste away, all the time pretending to be so sympathetic…”

  “You’re quite sure
he was doing that?”

  “If Ted was being poisoned, it’ll show in an autopsy, won’t it?”

  “Probably.” Simon looked around for a match. “But if Ah Fong took so long over your husband, being so subtle, and trying to make it look like natural causes, why did he suddenly decide to knock off Farrast in one dose that nobody could mistake for anything but what it was?”

  “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’d 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.