Leslie Charteris - The Saint Around the World

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.

“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.”