Leslie Charteris - The Saint Around the World

“And you couldn’t have any sympathy for him.”

“I helped to get him hanged,” said the Saint.

She closed the book and put it on the table, and studied him again with those sober and profound gray eyes.

“I like you very much,” she said. “You know exactly what you believe and what you’d do about it. If we got to know each other better we might disagree about lots of things, but we’d always speak the same language.”

He knew it for as open a promise of eventually more than friendship as any strumpet’s moist mouth and skilfully disarranged skirt, but it was made with such queenly dignity and for such a discreetly indefinite future that even at her last husband’s funeral it would have been in perfect taste.

“Coming from you, Eve,” Simon said quietly, “I take that as a rare compliment.”

Farrast came tramping up the steps and kicked the screen door open with an exuberant toe.

“Well, Eve,” he said, “should I put in for a raise?”

She stood up, her face lighting with eager appreciation.

“Simon told me all about it,” she said. “You must have been wonderful.”

“I told you I’d do it,” Farrast said, flinging down his hat and cane. “And the two kranis are learning how much better it is to keep other people working than have to do it yourself. When the Malays come back tomorrow morning, everything will be running like clockwork again.”

He was flushed and hot, but the satisfaction of meting out punishment seemed to have finally put him in a good humor.

“I’m going to have a drink,” he announced, and went to the sideboard.

Eve turned to the Saint.

“Aren’t you thirsty?”

“I could use a cold beer, if you have one.”

“Of course.”

She rang the bell on the dining table, and the houseboy came in, took the order, and went out again. Farrast raised his glass.

“Excuse me if I don’t wait,” he said. “Cheerio.”

He drank deeply, putting down two-thirds of the highball at one long draft. As he lowered the glass, a strange expression came over his face, and quickly turned into a dreadful grimace. He retched and choked, and then doubled up as if he had been hit in the solar plexus. The glass fell from his hand as he clutched his stomach, and then his knees buckled under him.

Eve Lavis gave an inarticulate cry.

Simon sprang forward and rolled Farrast over. Farrast’s muscles were cramped in knotted rigidity, his teeth were clenched, and his lips drawn back from them in a horrible grin. The color of his face was darkening towards purple. Simon tried to force the mouth open so that he could physically induce vomiting, but he knew it was no use.

“Those devils,” Mrs Lavis said, in a clear unnatural voice.

Charles Farrast was finished. Technically there might still have been a flutter of pulse or breath to quibble about, but he was dead beyond human reversing. Nevertheless, the Saint went on trying for a few seconds, stubbornly reluctant to give up.

He heard Eve’s footsteps cross the room, pause, and then pass quickly behind him. The rear screen door slammed.

Simon looked up, puzzledly. And then from the direction of the cook’s quarters out back he heard a man’s wordless yell, which was instantly cut off by the first of two crashing shots.

The Saint took off from the floor like a sprinter from a crouch, plunged through the rear door, and raced down the covered alley outside, his automatic already out in his hand.

He saw Eve Lavis through the first doorway he came to, and a moment later, as he braked his headlong rush, the picture was completed. The room was a sort of serving pantry, with china cabinets and an icebox. On a table in the center stood an empty beer bottle, and a freshly filled glass on a Benares tray. The houseboy lay on the floor, quite still, with his eyes rolled upwards and two holes marring the front of his immaculate white jacket. Mrs Lavis held her revolver still pointing at him, as though considering whether to fire it again.

“I knew it,” she said in a flat mechanical tone. “I knew it. It came to me one-two-three. It couldn’t have been anyone else. And then if he poisoned the whisky he could have been slowly poisoning Ted all that time, and perhaps he didn’t have ulcers at all. And then if he was poisoning people like that why should he stop there? I could see it all in a flash. I grabbed my gun and ran out here. I caught him red-handed. Just as I thought, he was pouring something into your beer. And when he saw that I’d seen him, he picked up that knife. Look.”

Her gun pointed at a small brown bottle on the floor by the houseboy’s feet, and a kitchen knife near his right hand.

There was a faint scuffling sound from the back of the building, and Eve Lavis turned abruptly and hurried out of the door. Simon went after her. A fat Chinese and a little woman were galloping wildly away down a stretch of slope. From their clothes and appearance, they could only have been the cook and the amah .

Eve raised her revolver.

“I’ll kill them all,” she said coldly.

Simon caught her wrist in a grip of steel.

“You don’t know that they had anything to do with it,” he said. “The boy was the one you caught in the act. They’re probably just scared to death.”

He took the gun away from her without much difficulty. She struggled only very briefly, until her complete helplessness against his strength was obvious. Then she became still, and presently sagged a little against him.

“I’ll be good,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

“Come back to the house,” he said.

As he took her through the rear door again she averted her eyes from the body of Farrast on the floor. Simon let her go, and took a napkin to lay over the man’s congested face. She sat down in a chair and put her hands over her eyes, but it was a rigid gesture suggestive of intense concentration rather than collapse.

Other footsteps came pell-mell to the front of the verandah. The uniformed guard appeared at the top of the steps, with the staring faces of the two kranis a little below and behind him. Simon went and let them in. He recalled what Farrast had said about the Tamils having learned English, and was grateful that he did not have to struggle through a narrative in halting Malay. He stated what he had seen for himself, and what Mrs Lavis had told him, lucidly and concisely; and one of the kranis translated it for the guard. Mrs Lavis did not move or speak.

Then Simon led them through to the back and showed them what was in the serving pantry.

He said to the elder krani , “Tell the guard he is to stay here. He must not go in or touch anything. He is to stand at the door, and he is not to let anyone in for any reason — not even myself or the Memsahib. When he is tired, one of the other guards will take his place. This will go on until the police get here.”

He returned to the house with the two Tamils, and nodded at the body by the sideboard.

“One of you help me take him to his room.”

One of them did so, the other going along to open the door. When they came back, Mrs Lavis was still sitting where they had left her. The only difference was that she had dropped her hands to the arms of the chair. Simon went to a small desk that stood against one wall, found a sheet of paper, and wrote on it briefly but carefully.

“Send this to Major Ascony in Singapore on the railway telegraph. If he can’t come himself, he’ll have someone sent on the next train from Kuala Lumpur or Ipoh.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Do it at once,” Mrs Lavis said.

“Yes, Mem.”

The kranis went out.

Simon paced thoughtfully back, picked up the round yellow tin of cigarettes from the coffee table, and chose one from it.