Leslie Charteris - The Saint Around the World

Simon drew at his cigarette again meditatively.

“I will if you like,” he said. “You have a fetish about tidiness and correctness, and a phobia about any kind of emotion — both carried to psychopathic extremes. You couldn’t bear to have your reputation soiled with the kind of nastiness you’d have to admit to give them cause to divorce you, and you’d have died rather than go through the scenes that would have been necessary to make them agree to let you divorce them. Murder, to you, was so much less messy.”

She took a cigarette from the tin near her.

“Give me a light, please,” she said.

He struck a match and leaned forward with it. She put her cigarette in the flame and brought it to a steady glow.

“Thank you,” she said, and took the cigarette from her mouth to exhale with an absolutely smooth and tremorless movement.

Her luminous gray eyes dwelt on him with tremendous absorption, while he lighted another cigarette for himself.

“Now,” she said, “about Vernon Ascony.”

“He must have thought all along that there was something not quite kosher about Quarry’s suicide,” said the Saint. “Then, when Ted Lavis was taken sick — not long after losing most of his money — his hunch got stronger. But there was nothing that he could prove, no action that he could take. And he might even be totally wrong. Then I happened to show up in Singapore, and he had a brainstorm. If I spent a little time up here, and there was anything funny going on, I might be able to spot it — if I was looking.”

“And the Maugham story was to make sure you looked.”

“It wasn’t an exact parallel, of course — but that would scarcely have been possible. It was close enough. And maybe it was even better, because if necessary Ascony could always invent some other case and deny that he had you in mind at all… He probably had another angle too. He knew you’d recognize who I was, and he figured you might think I was part of a trap, and that might panic you into making a fatal mistake. Which it did.”

She frowned.

“You mean like finishing Ted off in a hurry before you got here and saw him? Naturally you wouldn’t believe me if I said I didn’t.”

“That was only the start of it, anyway. The important thing is that it gave you a scare when Ascony asked if he could send me, but you were more scared of making it look worse if you tried to get out of it. After a little verbal fencing, and reading the Maugham story this morning, you were sure you were in trouble. So was I, but it was still mostly intuition. And at first I couldn’t decide what was Farrast’s part in the deal. Not even when I heard him go to your bedroom last night.”

She half closed her eyes, with a little shudder of distaste.

“Really,” she said, “are there any lengths you won’t go to?”

“Oh, I don’t think you invited him. Not last night, I mean. You’d never be as crude as that. But he could be. And I’m guessing that started you thinking that he was expendable. But after I saw him in action this morning I’d never buy him as a poisoner, and I said so, and you realized it was no use playing with that idea. So you went ahead with Plan B.”

“I’m quite certain two people never had a conversation like this before,” she said. “But since we’re doing it, you’d better finish. What was this fatal mistake I made?”

Simon picked up the gun he had taken from her a little earlier — it was in its holster slung over the other arm of the chair on which he had thoughtfully perched himself — and toyed with it idly.

“The Ah Fong job was the first one you’ve ever had to do in a hurry,” he said. “And anyhow I got out there too quickly for you to have been able to set the stage with your usual care. That’s why I posted a guard at the pantry door and told him that nobody, not even me — or you — was to go in there or move anything. I’m betting that when the cops go to work they’ll find your fingerprints on the knife Ah Fong was supposed to have attacked you with—”

“Why shouldn’t my fingerprints be on a knife in my own house?”

For the first time her voice seemed to rise a little. “And on the poison bottle beside him—”

“I snatched it out of his hand!”

“I mean only your fingerprints .”

There was an absolute silence.

The Saint had shifted his eyes from her before he spoke, and he did not move them back.

A very long time, an eternity, seemed to pass. His cigarette burned down between his fingers, and he put it out.

At last Eve Lavis said, in a very cool, very even voice, “Would you mind if I had a drink?”

He still did not look at her. It was as if an iron hand closed on his heart. Perhaps after all he was an incurable romanticist. In spite of all the statistics, he preferred to think of crime as men’s business. A beautiful woman should be a damsel in distress, for a knight errant to rescue, or a heroine, to ride squarely side by side with him. No man should ever have to meet one like Eve, so lovely and so damned.

“No,” said the Saint. “Help yourself.”

She stood up, and crossed to the sideboard. He heard her over his shoulder, and the clink of glass and the soft splash of liquid. It made no difference now that the four murders that he knew of were almost certainly not the only ones she had done, that she had very likely started long before she reached Singapore. There was a fathomless pain and anger in him that would never be wholly stilled.

“This,” she said, “is to the only man who ever turned me down.”

He did not turn his head, he could not, even when he heard her fall.

Cowichan Lake was a sheet of silver under a cloudless sky that was slowly warming into blue after the recent pallor of dawn, but rising trout were still dimpling the glassy sheen of the water. Simon Templar had already caught three of them, and four of that size were as many as he wanted for his lunch; he didn’t want to kill one more fish than he could use at that moment, and so he was in no hurry to end his sport by taking the last one. He was really working on the perfection of his cast now rather than trying to take a fish, waiting for a rise no less than twenty yards away from his boat and then trying to place his fly in the exact center of the spreading concentric ripples on the surface, as if in the bull’s-eye of a target.

Somewhere in the distance, so faint at first that it seemed to come from no actual direction, he heard the hum of an airplane engine.

There was nothing intrinsically noteworthy about the sound. Simon permitted himself a moment of detached philosophical astonishment at the random reflection that there could be hardly a corner of the globe left by that time where the sound of an airplane overhead would attract any general attention; in such a few years had man’s domain extended to the stratosphere, and so easily had the miracle been taken for granted. Up there in the heart of Vancouver Island beyond the end of the last trail that could be called a road, a plane was merely commonplace, the most simple and obvious vehicle to convey prospectors, timber surveyors, hunters, and fishermen to the remote destinations of their choice. The fantastic contraption of the Wright Brothers had become the horse and buggy of their grandchildren.

A nice sixty feet away, a young uncomplicated rainbow rose lazily to ingurgitate some insect that had fallen on the surface. Simon picked the tiny vortex of its inhalation as his next mark, and his rod rose and flipped forward again in a flowing rhythm. The line curled and snaked out like a graceful gossamer whip, and at the end of it the artificial fly settled on the water as airily as a tuft of thistledown.