Leslie Charteris - The Saint Around the World

The story was called “Footprints in the Jungle.” As he started on it he had a vague recollection of having read it before, and as he went on it all came back to him. It was about a woman whose lover, with her encouragement, murdered her husband, and then married her.

When he went out on the verandah he carried the book with him. Eve Lavis was sitting at the coffee table in the living area, sipping a cup of tea. She looked up with a ready smile and said, “Good morning. Did you sleep all right?”

“Like a baby. No, that’s wrong. Babies wake up at ungodly hours, bawling their heads off. I didn’t.”

She was wearing light tan jodhpurs and a pastel yellow shirt, and her ash-blonde hair was pulled plainly back and tied with a yellow ribbon on the nape of her neck. It made her look even younger than the day before. Her gray eyes were clear and unshadowed.

“I don’t need to ask you how you feel,” he said. “You look merely wonderful.”

“I can’t help that. But I’m afraid it shocks you.”

“It shouldn’t. I ought to know better than anyone that death seems a little less important each time you see it.”

“You mean that this isn’t the first husband I’ve lost and I’m getting hardened to it.”

“Well, Ascony did mention the doctor. But he didn’t go into any details.”

“Dr Quarry,” she said. “Donald Quarry. He committed suicide.”

“You don’t have to talk about it.”

“I don’t mind. You’re curious, aren’t you? It’s natural. I was on a cruise boat that stopped here. It suddenly came over me that if I had to make one more sightseeing trip with the same crowd of people saying the same things about everything I’d go out of my mind. I decided to drive out to the Golf Club and ask if they’d let me play a round and be by myself for the first time for weeks. But I met Donald on the first tee and we played the round together, and then we had drinks, and he asked me to dinner, and it was something at first sight, I suppose, and when the cruise boat went on I wasn’t on it. We were married for two years. And then he did an operation that went wrong and his patient died. I don’t know why, but he got very depressed and thought he was no good any more, and soon afterwards he took a shot of morphine and put himself to sleep. I think I cried a little that time.”

Simon looked down the hill, across the railroad tracks to the dense greenness that reached back towards a horizon of blue haze. The damp air still had a deceptively spring-like freshness.

“The first time is always the worst, isn’t it?” he said.

“You really do understand,” she said.

“If you won’t accuse me of going back on our pact, Mrs Lavis, I think you may be the most remarkable woman I’ve ever met.”

She was pleased, and did not pretend to hide it.

“I’m glad you came here,” she said. “And I think you could drop the ‘Mrs Lavis’ stuff. Do you mind if I call you Simon?”

“I was waiting for a chance to suggest it, Eve.”

She put a hand on the teapot to test its temperature.

“Would you like a cup of tea? It’s still hot.”

“I’d rather have breakfast. I’m the horribly healthy type.”

She glanced at a clock across the room.

“We’ll give Charles another five minutes, and then I’ll ring for it, whether he’s here or not.”

He was still trying to visualize her in bed with Farrast. There was nothing prurient about the effort, it was more like an exercise in abstract mathematics. Intellectually, he had no doubt left that his assumption was correct, but to translate it into a picture that he could believe emphatically was a form of confirmation that eluded him. Could that invulnerable air-conditioned poise really melt in the warm confusion of sex, abdicating its pedestal to lie with a cheaply handsome spoiled wilful and surely less than fascinating mortal like Charles Farrast?

“Isn’t he up yet?” Simon asked.

“Good heavens, yes. We literally get up at the crack of dawn here. Ketchil makan , and out to get the coolies started at six o’clock. Then back to breakfast after everything’s running.”

He still had the book in his hand as he sat down beside her, and he put it down on the table in front of him.

“I didn’t know how long it might be till breakfast, and I didn’t know I’d have better company,” he explained.

She leaned a little towards him to look at the title.

“Maugham,” she said. “I don’t think I know that one. Is it new?”

“No, it’s a collection. Ascony lent it to me.”

“Vernon? I never thought of him as the bookish type.”

“He said there was a story in it that he’d like to get my reaction to.”

“Really? Which one?”

“A thing called ‘Footprints in the Jungle.’  ”

She passed him a tin of cigarettes and took one herself.

“What’s it about?”

“Well, Maugham never does go in for very sensational plots, and this one certainly isn’t the newest one in the world. It’s about a woman whose husband is murdered, supposedly by robbers, and soon afterwards she marries his best friend, and the presumption is that they were the ones who actually arranged to knock off Hubby.”

She took a light from the match he held, without a wrinkle in her smooth brow. She was enjoying a civilized conversation, nothing more.

“It isn’t exactly original, is it?”

“It’s all in the writing. He makes you see them as quite ordinary people that you might meet anywhere, instead of monsters out of another world.”

“But I wonder why Vernon wanted your opinion of it.”

“The inside story is supposedly told by a police chief,” he said. “The policeman finds enough evidence to be fairly convinced that they did it, but he also knows that he could never get enough to stand any chance of convicting them. So he’s never done anything about it.”

She met his gaze with level untroubled eyes. “I wonder if Vernon has a problem of that kind and can’t make up his mind what to do. But I can’t imagine Vernon not being able to make up his own mind about anything. But of course, if he didn’t have enough evidence, there’s nothing he could do anyway, is there?”

Simon shrugged.

“He didn’t tell me anything, and I didn’t read the story until this morning.”

“I’ll have to read it myself.” She glanced at the clock, and stood up. “Let’s not starve ourselves any longer.”

She went to the dining table and rang the silver hand-bell that stood in front of her place, but they had hardly settled themselves when Farrast stomped up the front steps and shouldered blusterily through the screen door. “Sorry if I’m late,” he said perfunctorily.

He sailed a terai hat into an armchair as he marched through to the table and sat himself down heavily, his boots scraping the floor. He had the kind of complexion on which sunburn never loses all its redness, and it seemed more inflamed now, perhaps because he was warm. His khaki shirt was already wilted and clinging.

“Trouble?” Eve Lavis asked.

“Plenty,” Farrast said. “And I’m going to make more.”

“You’ll be able to do it better with a good breakfast under your belt,” she said practically.

It was a good breakfast, staunchly British, with bacon and eggs and sausages and toast and marmalade and strong tea to wash it down, as was to be expected, for that is one tradition on which no proper Colonial even in the remotest outpost of the Empire would make any concession to local cuisine. At other meals he may without protest eat bird’s-nest soup or stewed buffalo hump, and may even become an addict of semi-incandescent curries, but breakfast under the British flag is incorruptible from Hampstead to Hong Kong.