Leslie Charteris - The Saint Around the World

“I’m sorry,” Mrs Lavis said. “I went off the deep end for a few minutes. I won’t do it again.”

Her face was again stoically controlled, her eyes dry and clear and unwavering.

“That’s all right,” he said. “The stiff upper lip can get slightly petrified if it never lets up.”

“It was just too much,” she said. “Ted swore by that boy Ah Fong. It was so true what you said about poisoning, how mean it is. To think that Ah Fong could have been bringing him poisoned food and drinks day after day, watching him suffer and waste away, all the time pretending to be so sympathetic…”

“You’re quite sure he was doing that?”

“If Ted was being poisoned, it’ll show in an autopsy, won’t it?”

“Probably.” Simon looked around for a match. “But if Ah Fong took so long over your husband, being so subtle, and trying to make it look like natural causes, why did he suddenly decide to knock off Farrast in one dose that nobody could mistake for anything but what it was?”

“Remember what Charles did to the pawang . It was a setback to the whole Red operation in this district. They were furious, and desperate. They had to show the Malays at once that nobody could beat up a Commie and get away with it. And they’d have given it to you at the same time just because you’d been with Charles.”

“But it wasn’t at the same time. Ah Fong saw Farrast mixing a drink when he took the order for my beer. Why would he think it was any use poisoning the beer, when Farrast would have started his drink before I got mine, and after what happened to him I obviously wouldn’t drink anything?”

“He must have hoped that Charles would wait for you. Or at least he mightn’t have expected Charles to drink so fast. Did you notice how he gulped down most of that drink without stopping? If he’d sipped it like anybody else, there might have been plenty of time for you to get your beer and take a good swig at it before the poison hit Charles.”

Simon lighted his cigarette at last, and took a long drag deep into his lungs. He let the smoke out slowly, looking at her quietly through it. He wanted to print her on his memory like that, sitting with her hands folded placidly in her lap, the dainty symmetries of her figure subtly rounding her blouse, the patrician composure of her intelligent upturned face framed against the silver-ash softness of her hair, all the astounding proud loveliness of her as it had become familiar to him feature by feature. He had never known anyone like her, and he was not likely to again.

“It’s no good, Eve,” he said. “It’s clever, but it won’t sell.”

The lift of her finely delineated eyebrows was only a flicker.

“I don’t understand.”

He held the spent match above an ashtray, corrected its position with an estimating eye, and dropped it for a dead-center hit.

“I’m sure,” he said, “that you poisoned the whisky. “Then, when I was trying to do something for Farrast — as you knew in advance I certainly would be — you rushed out to the pantry and shot Ah Fong. You had the poison bottle in your pocket all ready to drop beside him, and it only took another second to snatch a knife out of a drawer and throw that down beside him too. Who’d make a better fall guy than a Chinese houseboy who was too dead to be able to even try to deny anything?”

For the first time he saw her statuesque calm jarred by a temblor of shock. But even then it was mere as if she winced over a breach of good manners that he had been guilty of.

“I don’t think that’s very funny,” she said primly.

“It wasn’t meant to be.”

“Then the heat must have done something to you.”

“I’m only wondering,” he said, “what would have happened if I’d decided to join Farrast in a stengah . Would you have let me die with him, and framed the houseboy a trifle differently but still shot him before the police got here? Or would you have delayed me, or upset my glass, and saved me somehow so that I could still be a witness? I’m afraid that’ll always torment me. You’ll never tell me, or if you did, I wouldn’t believe you.”

She laughed, a little faint brittle sound.

“You’re very charming,” she said. “And would you care to tell me what you think I did it for? Am I a Communist agent?’

“That’s one thing I’d never suspect you of. I’m certain you’re strictly in business for yourself. You did it mainly to cover up the poisoning of your husband.”

“Oh. I did that too?”

“Both of them, as a matter of fact.”

Her eyes widened momentarily.

“This is fascinating. It’s a good job I’m not the hysterical type, otherwise I think I’d be screaming.”

“Would you like me to run through it from the beginning?”

“You might as well. I couldn’t be any more baffled than I am now.”

He sat on the arm of a chair and reached over to ease the cylinder of ash off the end of his cigarette.

“I’ll only go back as far as the things I’ve heard about,” he said reflectively. “You were on a world cruise. I’ve no doubt it was a speculative investment. A cruise of that length is expensive enough to guarantee some fairly well-to-do passengers, and ships are renowned incubators of romance. But for some reason that trip wasn’t paying off: by the time you got to Singapore you’d methodically investigated all the prospects, and the right man or the right situation just wasn’t aboard. So you weren’t merely bored — you figured you might still get something out of it by doing some prospecting in port. That’s why you ducked the sightseeing tour and went to the Golf Club. And that’s where you met Donald Quarry, a doctor with an excellent practice, and it was no problem at all for you to knock him dizzy.”

“Thank you.”

“Of course, he was only a stepping-stone. Even a very successful doctor could hardly make enough money to be more than that, to a really ambitious woman. But he was an entree to local society, and a splendid meal ticket until something better came along. And in due course you met Ted Lavis — one of the richest and most successful business men in these parts. So Quarry had to be disposed of. That wasn’t hard. You only had to wait until one of his patients died, which happens regularly even to the best doctors, and then start whispering to your friends about how morbidly depressed he was in spite of the brave front he tried to keep up. Once that idea had been well planted, it was easy for you to steal some morphine from his supplies and switch it for any other shots that he might be taking. And you already knew you could blitz Lavis as soon as it wouldn’t look too blatant — in fact, you’d probably had him on his knees already.”

“After all, there’s not so much competition in these outlandish places.”

“I think you could get almost any man you wanted, anywhere. And you’ve always known it. But you wanted position and money with him. You were heading for the top. Lavis was a prize. You might have been satisfied with him for a long time. But as Farrast said to me, maybe he really was more lucky than brilliant. Anyhow, he suddenly lost everything, in an amazingly stupid way. You were not only disgusted with him for letting you down, but you were convinced that he was a goose who’d never lay another golden egg. Slow poisoning disguised as intestinal troubles was a neat and plausible way to get rid of him. And meanwhile Charles Farrast had shown up on the scene, with a legacy of eighty thousand pounds waiting for him only a few months away.”

“While you’re building up this fantastic story,” she said, and now she was patiently coping with a rather tiresome lunatic, “you ought to explain why I have to murder my husbands instead of simply divorcing them.”