Leslie Charteris: The Saint Around the World

“Another clue?”

“Could be. But you must have a description of him.”

She screwed up her eyes a little, concentrating.

“Ordinary height — about five feet ten. Medium build, but quite muscular. The girl with the twins said he was in very fine shape for his age — and please don’t say whatever that vulgar expression is getting ready for, Simon, I think I’ve already heard every possible joke on that subject. He told her he was fifty-three. But a lot of people thought he looked older, because he was half bald, and the fringe of hair that he had left was very gray, and so was his beard—”

“Oh, no,” groaned the Saint. “Not a beaver, too?”

“Not a royal growth. The kind that just carries the sideburns on down around the jawbone until they meet and make a tuft on the chin.”

“Which can be grown in two weeks and change the outline of a face completely. And I was just going to ask you what type of face he had.”

“And I was going to tell you it was round. But I see what you mean. Everyone says he was always smiling — the Jolly Roger business, of course — and that would help his face to look round, too.”

“Mouth?”

“Biggish — the smile would help that, I know, don’t tell me. And of course he had a mustache.”

“Of course. He would. Teeth?”

“Good.”

“Nose?”

She moved her hands helplessly.

“Did you ever try to make the average person describe a nose? It wasn’t a great beak and it wasn’t an Irish pug and it wasn’t broken. It was just a nose.”

“Eyes?”

“Brown. Two.”

Simon Templar unrolled and came up on his feet in an ultimate surge of exasperation.

“God burn and blast it,” he erupted, “do you realize that that adds up to practically nothing at all? A middling-sized guy with strictly conventional features — the greatest physical assets any crook could start with. Everything else could be grown or glued on and shaped and/or dyed or worn as an expression, on this foundation you still haven’t described. We don’t even have a clear picture of his age, except that I’ll bet that it’s less than fifty-three. If you want to do a good job of faking, it’s a lot easier to pretend to be older than younger — as I shouldn’t have to tell a woman. But as for all the spinach on this act…”

He groped around for an illustration, and his gaze lit on a framed photograph on the mantelpiece. He targeted it with a dynamically outthrust forefinger.

“Why,” he said, “I could pin the same shrubbery on that guy, and he’d fit your description.”

“That guy,” she said, out of an icy stillness, “happens to be my husband.”

The Saint stood transfixed, his eyes almost glazed with the fascination of the frabjous idea that his runaway train of thought had gone hurtling into. But she never noticed that teetering instant of thunderstruck rigidity, for within the same full second the telephone began to ring.

She started towards it with a tensely even step, but reached it in a rush.

Simon was beside her as she picked it up. With an arm lightly around her, he pressed his ear to the other side of the receiver.

“Hullo,” she said.

He was inappropriately aware of her hair brushing his cheek and her faint perfume in his nostrils, while he listened to the voice which he could hear thinly but quite clearly through the plastic. It had a forced and unmistakably artificial timbre, with a strong nasal twang.

“Mrs Dayne,” it said, “I’ll let you talk to your husband as soon as Mr Templar has left Bermuda. But if he isn’t on a plane tomorrow, you can consider yourself a widow.”

There was a soft click, and that was all.

The Saint awoke early in the morning, for there had been no further reason to stay up late the night before.

He had made the only possible offer directly their eyes met after she hung up the dead telephone: “I’ll leave tomorrow, of course.”

Her face was a tortured battleground of uncertainty.

“Thank you for making it easy for me!” she said. “Even if you were the best hope I had… But you do understand, don’t you?”

“I do indeed. I know why the parents of kidnaped kids pay ransom. You couldn’t force me to go, but I can’t take advantage of that. However” — his smile was a thing of coldly dazzling deadliness — “I’ll still be working until the last plane leaves.”

He had found out that she had some sleeping pills, and had persuaded her to take one.

“We’re talked out for tonight,” he said. “At least you can be fairly sure that your husband’s alive, and that you’ll hear from him tomorrow. This is your chance to get some rest. Let me do the worrying.”

He had not worried at all, for that was a sterile indulgence of which he was constitutionally incapable. But he had been happy to find that the guest room which had been prepared for him was directly opposite the master bedroom: she had gratefully accepted the suggestion that both doors should be left ajar, and thereafter he had slept with the tranquil self-confidence of a cat. But nothing had disturbed the night, and when he opened his eyes and saw daylight, many things had sorted themselves out in his mind, and he knew that for that period there had been no real danger.

He found his way out of the house and down to the water in the dressing-gown she had lent him — it was so obviously part of a bridegroom’s going-away outfit that the loan seemed like an embarrassing kind of compliment, but he had to take it. It was easy to slip into the almost lukewarm water in a tiny cove on the seaward side of the island without benefit of swimming trunks. He churned back and forth for a while, drifted along the shore to watch the questings of a school of yellow-striped fish, and finally hoisted himself out onto a rock where the sun quickly dried him. In front of him was only the blue Sound, embraced by the main chain of islands and dotted with smaller satellite islands; local folklore claims that the Bermudas are made up of 365 islands, one for every day in the year, but the actual number is much less than half that, and a large number of those have a somewhat slender claim to be counted, being mere outcroppings of coral which have barely managed to raise their heads above high water. Small sailboats, launches, and a couple of the busy ferries that bustle endlessly to and fro to link a dozen landings spaced around the harbor and the Sound, made the view look absurdly like an animated travel-folder picture: no one is ever quite prepared for the fact that Bermuda, more than almost any other highly advertised place, looks so instantly and exactly like its postcards. But after his first appreciative survey, the Saint turned his back on the panorama and concentrated on the humped contours of the island that he was on, trying speculatively to fit them with another geological item which he recalled from a guide-book he had been reading.

After a few minutes he put on the borrowed robe again and walked back up over the close-cropped grass. Near a corner of the formal garden that surrounded the house he came upon the colored caretaker planting an oleander hedge, making a neat row of eighteen-inch cuttings bent over in interlocking arcs with both ends set in the ground, but characteristically looking more like a gravedigger than a gardener.

“Good morning, sir,” he said, with studiously impersonal politeness.

“Good morning.”

Simon paused to light a cigarette. His gaze swept around the panorama again, and from that vantage point he could see more than two-thirds of the private island.

“There’s something I’ve been meaning to ask,” he said. “Exactly how did Mr Dayne leave here when he disappeared? Did he get a phone call first? Or did someone come to see him? Did he say anything when he left?”