“It’s no good, Eve,” he said. “It’s clever, but it won’t sell.”
The lift of her finely delineated eyebrows was only a flicker.
“I don’t understand.”
He held the spent match above an ashtray, corrected its position with an estimating eye, and dropped it for a dead-center hit.
“I’m sure,” he said, “that you poisoned the whisky. “Then, when I was trying to do something for Farrast—as you knew in advance I certainly would be—you rushed out to the pantry and shot Ah Fong. You had the poison bottle in your pocket all ready to drop beside him, and it only took another second to snatch a knife out of a drawer and throw that down beside him too. Who’d make a better fall guy than a Chinese houseboy who was too dead to be able to even try to deny anything?”
For the first time he saw her statuesque calm jarred by a temblor of shock. But even then it was mere as if she winced over a breach of good manners that he had been guilty of.
“I don’t think that’s very funny,” she said primly.
“It wasn’t meant to be.”
“Then the heat must have done something to you.”
“I’m only wondering,” he said, “what would have happened if I’d decided to join Farrast in a Stengah. Would you have let me die with him, and framed the houseboy a trifle differently but still shot him before the police got here? Or would you have delayed me, or upset my glass, and saved me somehow so that I could still be a witness? I’m afraid that’ll always torment me. You’ll never tell me, or if you did, I wouldn’t believe you.”
She laughed, a little faint brittle sound.
“You’re very charming,” she said. “And would you care to tell me what you think I did it for? Am I a Communist agent?’
“That’s one thing I’d never suspect you of. I’m certain you’re strictly in business for yourself. You did it mainly to cover up the poisoning of your husband.”
“Oh. I did that too?”
“Both of them, as a matter of fact.”
Her eyes widened momentarily.
“This is fascinating. It’s a good job I’m not the hysterical type, otherwise I think I’d be screaming.”
“Would you like me to run through it from the beginning?”
“You might as well. I couldn’t be any more baffled than I am now.”
He sat on the arm of a chair and reached over to ease the cylinder of ash off the end of his cigarette.
“I’ll only go back as far as the things I’ve heard about,” he said reflectively. “You were on a world cruise. I’ve no doubt it was a speculative investment. A cruise of that length is expensive enough to guarantee some fairly well-to-do passengers, and ships are renowned incubators of romance. But for some reason that trip wasn’t paying off: by the time you got to Singapore you’d methodically investigated all the prospects, and the right man or the right situation just wasn’t aboard. So you weren’t merely bored—you figured you might still get something out of it by doing some prospecting in port. That’s why you ducked the sightseeing tour and went to the Golf Club. And that’s where you met Donald Quarry, a doctor with an excellent practice, and it was no problem at all for you to knock him dizzy.”
“Thank you.”
“Of course, he was only a stepping-stone. Even a very successful doctor could hardly make enough money to be more than that, to a really ambitious woman. But he was an entree to local society, and a splendid meal ticket until something better came along. And in due course you met Ted Lavis—one of the richest and most successful business men in these parts. So Quarry had to be disposed of. That wasn’t hard. You only had to wait until one of his patients died, which happens regularly even to the best doctors, and then start whispering to your friends about how morbidly depressed he was in spite of the brave front he tried to keep up. Once that idea had been well planted, it was easy for you to steal some morphine from his supplies and switch it for any other shots that he might be taking. And you already knew you could blitz Lavis as soon as it wouldn’t look too blatant—in fact, you’d probably had him on his knees already.”
“After all, there’s not so much competition in these outlandish places.”
“I think you could get almost any man you wanted, anywhere. And you’ve always known it. But you wanted position and money with him. You were heading for the top. Lavis was a prize. You might have been satisfied with him for a long time. But as Farrast said to me, maybe he really was more lucky than brilliant. Anyhow, he suddenly lost everything, in an amazingly stupid way. You were not only disgusted with him for letting you down, but you were convinced that he was a goose who’d never lay another golden egg. Slow poisoning disguised as intestinal troubles was a neat and plausible way to get rid of him. And meanwhile Charles Farrast had shown up on the scene, with a legacy of eighty thousand pounds waiting for him only a few months away.”
“While you’re building up this fantastic story,” she said, and now she was patiently coping with a rather tiresome lunatic, “you ought to explain why I have to murder my husbands instead of simply divorcing them.”
Simon drew at his cigarette again meditatively.
“I will if you like,” he said. “You have a fetish about tidiness and correctness, and a phobia about any kind of emotion—both carried to psychopathic extremes. You couldn’t bear to have your reputation soiled with the kind of nastiness you’d have to admit to give them cause to divorce you, and you’d have died rather than go through the scenes that would have been necessary to make them agree to let you divorce them. Murder, to you, was so much less messy.”
She took a cigarette from the tin near her.
“Give me a light, please,” she said.
He struck a match and leaned forward with it. She put her cigarette in the flame and brought it to a steady glow.
“Thank you,” she said, and took the cigarette from her mouth to exhale with an absolutely smooth and tremorless movement.
Her luminous gray eyes dwelt on him with tremendous absorption, while he lighted another cigarette for himself.
“Now,” she said, “about Vernon Ascony.”
“He must have thought all along that there was something not quite kosher about Quarry’s suicide,” said the Saint. “Then, when Ted Lavis was taken sick—not long after losing most of his money—his hunch got stronger. But there was nothing that he could prove, no action that he could take. And he might even be totally wrong. Then I happened to show up in Singapore, and he had a brainstorm. If I spent a little time up here, and there was anything funny going on, I might be able to spot it—if I was looking.”
“And the Maugham story was to make sure you looked.”
“It wasn’t an exact parallel, of course—but that would scarcely have been possible. It was close enough. And maybe it was even better, because if necessary Ascony could always invent some other case and deny that he had you in mind at all…He probably had another angle too. He knew you’d recognize who I was, and he figured you might think I was part of a trap, and that might panic you into making a fatal mistake. Which it did.”
She frowned.
“You mean like finishing Ted off in a hurry before you got here and saw him? Naturally you wouldn’t believe me if I said I didn’t.”
“That was only the start of it, anyway. The important thing is that it gave you a scare when Ascony asked if he could send me, but you were more scared of making it look worse if you tried to get out of it. After a little verbal fencing, and reading the Maugham story this morning, you were sure you were in trouble. So was I, but it was still mostly intuition. And at first I couldn’t decide what was Farrast’s part in the deal. Not even when I heard him go to your bedroom last night.”
She half closed her eyes, with a little shudder of distaste.
“Really,” she said, “are there any lengths you won’t go to?”
“Oh, I don’t think you invited him. Not last night, I mean. You’d never be as crude as that. But he could be. And I’m guessing t
hat started you thinking that he was expendable. But after I saw him in action this morning I’d never buy him as a poisoner, and I said so, and you realized it was no use playing with that idea. So you went ahead with Plan B.”
“I’m quite certain two people never had a conversation like this before,” she said. “But since we’re doing it, you’d better finish. What was this fatal mistake I made?”
Simon picked up the gun he had taken from her a little earlier—it was in its holster slung over the other arm of the chair on which he had thoughtfully perched himself—and toyed with it idly.
“The Ah Fong job was the first one you’ve ever had to do in a hurry,” he said. “And anyhow I got out there too quickly for you to have been able to set the stage with your usual care. That’s why I posted a guard at the pantry door and told him that nobody, not even me—or you—was to go in there or move anything. I’m betting that when the cops go to work they’ll find your fingerprints on the knife Ah Fong was supposed to have attacked you with—”
“Why shouldn’t my fingerprints be on a knife in my own house?”
For the first time her voice seemed to rise a little. “And on the poison bottle beside him—”
“I snatched it out of his hand!”
“I mean only your fingerprints.”
There was an absolute silence.
The Saint had shifted his eyes from her before he spoke, and he did not move them back.
A very long time, an eternity, seemed to pass. His cigarette burned down between his fingers, and he put it out.
At last Eve Lavis said, in a very cool, very even voice, “Would you mind if I had a drink?”
He still did not look at her. It was as if an iron hand closed on his heart. Perhaps after all he was an incurable romanticist. In spite of all the statistics, he preferred to think of crime as men’s business. A beautiful woman should be a damsel in distress, for a knight errant to rescue, or a heroine, to ride squarely side by side with him. No man should ever have to meet one like Eve, so lovely and so damned.
“No,” said the Saint. “Help yourself.”
She stood up, and crossed to the sideboard. He heard her over his shoulder, and the clink of glass and the soft splash of liquid. It made no difference now that the four murders that he knew of were almost certainly not the only ones she had done, that she had very likely started long before she reached Singapore. There was a fathomless pain and anger in him that would never be wholly stilled.
“This,” she said, “is to the only man who ever turned me down.”
He did not turn his head, he could not, even when he heard her fall.
THE SPORTING CHANCE
1
Cowichan Lake was a sheet of silver under a cloudless sky that was slowly warming into blue after the recent pallor of dawn, but rising trout were still dimpling the glassy sheen of the water. Simon Templar had already caught three of them, and four of that size were as many as he wanted for his lunch; he didn’t want to kill one more fish than he could use at that moment, and so he was in no hurry to end his sport by taking the last one. He was really working on the perfection of his cast now rather than trying to take a fish, waiting for a rise no less than twenty yards away from his boat and then trying to place his fly in the exact center of the spreading concentric ripples on the surface, as if in the bull’s-eye of a target.
Somewhere in the distance, so faint at first that it seemed to come from no actual direction, he heard the hum of an airplane engine.
There was nothing intrinsically noteworthy about the sound. Simon permitted himself a moment of detached philosophical astonishment at the random reflection that there could be hardly a corner of the globe left by that time where the sound of an airplane overhead would attract any general attention; in such a few years had man’s domain extended to the stratosphere, and so easily had the miracle been taken for granted. Up there in the heart of Vancouver Island beyond the end of the last trail that could be called a road, a plane was merely commonplace, the most simple and obvious vehicle to convey prospectors, timber surveyors, hunters, and fishermen to the remote destinations of their choice. The fantastic contraption of the Wright Brothers had become the horse and buggy of their grandchildren.
A nice sixty feet away, a young uncomplicated rainbow rose lazily to ingurgitate some insect that had fallen on the surface. Simon picked the tiny vortex of its inhalation as his next mark, and his rod rose and flipped forward again in a flowing rhythm. The line curled and snaked out like a graceful gossamer whip, and at the end of it the artificial fly settled on the water as airily as a tuft of thistledown.
The young trout, perhaps pardonably thinking it had left something unfinished, must have turned in its own length to rectify the omission. The fly went under in another little swirl, and instantly Simon set the hook. He felt his line become taut and alive, and the fish somersaulted into the air, the blade of its body shimmering in the clear morning light.
The drone of the plane had grown rapidly louder, and it seemed to the Saint’s sensitive ear that there was a kind of syncopated unevenness in its pulse. Almost as soon as he had localized it somewhere behind him and to his left it was bearing down lower, but he was too busy for the moment to turn and look at it. For a few minutes he was entirely absorbed in balancing the vigor of the fish against the strength of a filament that one sharp tug would have snapped. The struggle of the fish came through the fragile line and limber rod all the way into his hand, as if he were linked to it by an extended nerve. And the airplane engine roared in an approaching crescendo and then suddenly stopped, but the rush of its wings through the air went on, coming closer still, blending with the whine of a dead propeller and punctuated by an occasional spastic hiccup of erratic combustion. It wooshed over his head suddenly like a gigantic bird, seeming to swoop so low over him that involuntarily he ducked and crouched lower in the boat.
That momentary distraction and the slack that it put into his line were all that the spunky young trout needed. It was gone, with a last flashing leap, to await some other rendezvous with destiny, and Simon ruefully reeled in an unresisting hook as the cause of the trouble touched down a little further on, striking two plumes of spray from the water with its skimming pontoons.
He laid his rod down and lighted a cigarette, looking the seaplane over in more detail as it coasted towards the nearby shore. It was painted a dark gray that was almost black, its lines were not those of any make that he could identify, and it seemed to carry no identification numbers or insignia of any kind—he made those basic observations in approximately that sequence, although in less sharply punctuated compartments than the summary suggests.
Also it had definite engine trouble, as had been hinted by the irregular thrumming sound of its approach and the bronchitic coughs it had emitted as it glided down. Now the propeller was turning again, making strained uneven revolutions with recoils and pauses in between: the pilot was forcing it with the starter, but the motor refused to fire. Already the seaplane had lost the momentum of its landing speed; it needed power to steer and taxi even on the water, but it was not producing any, and a breeze that had barely started to ripple the smoothness of the lake was beginning to waft it sideways in undignified but inexorable impotence.
The Plexiglas canopy opened, and the pilot squirmed out and wriggled down onto one of the pontoons. He reached under into a trapdoor in the plane’s sternum and hauled out a light anchor with a line already attached and let it drop with a splash, and presently the plane stopped drifting and slewed around at the end of the line with its nose pointed aloofly at the playful zephyr.
The pilot stood on the pontoon and looked around with a kind of studied nonchalance, almost pointedly refraining from more than a glance in the direction of Simon Templar in his skiff. It was as if he intended to disclaim in advance even the suggestion of an appeal for help—as if, in fact, he would have denied that anything was wrong.
If that was the way he wanted it, Simon was in no hurry eit
her. He snipped off the fly which the escaped trout had mauled severely in the tussle, and concentrated profoundly over the selection of another from the assortment in his pocket case. Finally he settled on one with gray hackles, a red body, and a yellow-brown wisp of tail, and began to tie it on to his leader with leisured care.
There was no outward change in his demeanour, any more than there is any visible change in the exterior of a radio when it is switched on. But already the mysterious circuits which had made the Saint what he was had awakened to silently busy life, telling him with dispassionate certainty that even in those last few moments, with no more overt symptoms than the facts which have just been narrated, the delicate tendrils of adventure had made contact with him again, even in that placid Shangri-La of the Northwest.
From the city of Vancouver on the west coast of Canada it was two hours and a quarter by ferry to Nanaimo on the east coast of Vancouver Island, from Nanaimo it was a roundabout sixty miles to where the Cowichan Lake road ended at the Youbou lumber settlement; beyond that, it was almost ten more miles by boat to the cove near the northwest tip of the lake where Simon Templar had been fly-casting when the gray-black seaplane swooped down to shatter the peace of the spring morning with its spluttering engine and drag him rudely back out of his own brief moment of tranquillity. Even there at the very edge of outright wilderness, it seemed, the Saint’s destiny could not spare him for long. Adventure was still as near as it had ever been. It was only up to him whether he should answer or ignore its beckoning finger.
But of course it was no accident that the invitation met with him there. The first pass had been made weeks ago, on the other side of the Pacific.
2
At the Raffles Hotel in Singapore, Major Vernon Ascony, the Assistant Commissioner of Police, said, “It isn’t coming through here, old boy. If it were, I couldn’t help getting a whiff of it. I personally don’t believe it’s even coming from India. From what I hear, the new governments of India and Pakistan have pretty well snuffed it out. And I don’t think it’s coming down from Indo-China either. We’d have been bound to find a link somewhere along the route. I just don’t think it’s our pidgin at all. But you can’t tell that to the international bigwigs. They’re still stuck with the ideas they got from Fu Manchu. Drugs are peddled by sinister Orientals, Singapore is one of the Orient’s gateways, therefore this must be one of the ports it clears from. So when an unusual amount of the stuff turns up in Los Angeles or Toronto, this here is one of the most likely places it came from. Then everyone wants to know why I don’t bloody well personally put a stop to it.”
The Saint Around the World (The Saint Series) Page 23
