Leslie Charteris - The Saint Around the World

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,

Simon Templar was conscious of seconds that crawled by like snails before he regained his voice.

Images unscrambled 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.”