Leslie Charteris - The Saint Around the World

“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.

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.

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.