Brighter Buccaneer (14 page)

It certainly looked like a place in which any self-respecting mystery should have died of exhaustion looking for a suitable place to happen. The safe in which the treaty had reposed was the one touch about it that showed any trace of fantasy, for it was sunk in flush with the wall and covered by a mirror, which, when it was opened, proved to be the door of the safe itself, and the keyhole was concealed in a decorative scroll of white metal worked into a frame of the glass which slid aside in cunningly-fashioned grooves to disclose it.

Teal demonstrated its working; and the Saint was interested.

“The burglars don’t seem to have damaged it much,” he remarked, and Teal gave him a glance that seemed curiously lethargic.

“They haven’t damaged it at all,” he said. “If you go over it with a magnifying glass you won’t find a trace of its having been tampered with.”

“How many keys?”

“Two. Whipplethwaite wears one on his watch-chain, and the other is at his bank in London.”

For the first time that day two thin hair-lines of puzzlement cut vertically down between the Saint’s level brows. They were the only outward signs of a wild idea, an intuition too ludicrous even to hint at, that flickered through his mind at the tone of the detective’s voice.

“Whipplethwaite went to church on Sunday morning,” said Teal, with an expressionless face, “and worked over the treaty when he came back. He took it to lunch with him; and then he locked it up in the safe and went upstairs to his room to rest. He was rather taken up with the importance of secrecy, and he had demanded two guards from the local police. One of them was at the front door, where we came in. The other was outside here.”

Teal walked towards the tall windows which filled nearly the whole of one wall of the room. Right in the centre of these windows, on the stone-flagged terrace outside, the back of a seated man loomed against the light like a statuette in a glass case.

Simon had noticed him as soon as they entered the room: he appeared to be painting a scene of the landscape, and as they went through the windows and came out behind him Simon observed that the canvas on his easel was covered with brightly-coloured daubs of paint in various abstruse geometrical shapes. He looked up at the sound of their footsteps, gave the Saint a casual nod, and bowed politely to the detective.

“Well, sir,” he said, with a trace of mockery, “how are the investigations going?”

“We’re doing the best we can,” said Teal vaguely, and turned to Simon. “This is Mr. Spencer Vallance, who was painting exactly where you see him now when the robbery took place. Down there”-he pointed to a grass tennis-court which was cut bodily, like a great step, out of the fairly steep slope below them-“those same four people you see were playing. They’re finalists in the South of England Junior Championships, and they’re staying here as Whipplethwaite’s guests for a week.

“The other constable on guard was supposed to be patrolling the back of the house-we’re at the back now-and at the time when the burglary was committed he was about three-quarters of the way down this slope, with his back to the house, watching the game. In fact, the scene you see is almost exactly the same as it was at half past three yesterday afternoon.”

Simon nodded, and glanced again at Mr. Vallance, who had resumed his interrupted task of painting a neat blue border around a green isosceles triangle on a short brown stalk that was presumably intended to represent a poplar in the foreground. The Art of Mr. Spencer Vallance was so perfectly appropriate to his background that it gave one a sense of shock. One felt that such a preposterous aptness outraged one’s canons of that human inconsistency which we have come to accept as normal. It was like seeing a doorman in Arab costume outside a restaurant called “The Oasis,” and discovering that he really was a genuine Arab. Vallance’s picture was exactly like the house behind it: scientific, hygienic, and quite inhuman.

Simon spent a few seconds trying to co-ordinate the masses of colour on the canvas with the scene before his eyes, which was particularly human and charming. To left and right of him strips of untouched plantation which were probably continuations of the spinney through which they had approached the house flanked the grounds right down beyond the tennis-court to the banks of a stream; while beyond the stream the land rose again up a long curve of hill crowned with a dark sprawl of woods.

“There are two poplars there, Mr. Vallance,” Simon ventured to point out, when he had got his bearings on the picture, and the artist turned to him with an exasperated glare.

“My dear sir, what people like you want isn’t an artist-it’s a photographer. There are millions of blades of grass on that lawn, and you’d like me to draw every one of them. What I paint,” said Spencer Vallance magnificently, “is the Impression of Poplar. The Soul of all Poplars is expressed in this picture, if you had the eyes to see it.”

Mr. Vallance himself was the very antithesis of his art, being a small straggly man with straggly hair and a thin straggly beard. His clothes hung about him shapelessly; but his scrawny frame was obviously capable of so much superb indignation under criticism that Simon thought it best to accept the rebuke in all humility. And then Chief Inspector Teal took the Saint’s arm and urged him firmly down the slope away from temptation.

“I’d better tell you what happened from our point of view,” said the detective. “At twenty minutes to four the constable who was out here turned around and started to walk back towards the house. He had been watching the tennis for about a quarter of an hour. You might remember that all this time both the back and the front of the house had been covered, and nothing larger than a field mouse could have come through the plantation at the sides without making a noise that would certainly have attracted attention.

“The constable noticed that Vallance was not at his easel, and the windows of Whipplethwaite’s study behind were open -he couldn’t remember if they had been open before. Of course, he thought nothing of that. I don’t think I mentioned that Vallance is also staying here as a guest. Then, just as the constable reached the top of the slope, Vallance came staggering out of the study, holding his head and bellowing that he’d been sandbagged. He was working at his painting, it appeared, when he was hit on the head from behind and stunned; and he remembered nothing more until he woke up on the floor of the study.

“The constable found a sandbag lying on the terrace just behind Vallance’s stool. He went into the study and found the safe wide open. The theory, of course, would be that the robber dragged Vallance inside so that his body would not attract attention if the constable looked around.”

Teal’s voice was as detached and expressionless as if he had been making his statement in court. But once again that uncanny premonition flashed through the Saint’s mind, rising ridiculously from that odd-sounding subjunctive in the detective’s last sentence. Simon lighted a cigarette.

“I gather that Vallance is Lady Whipplethwaite’s guest,” he said presently.

Teal was only slightly surprised. “That is correct. How did you know?”

“His art fits in too perfectly with the house-and you said she was very progressive. I suppose he’s been investigated?”

“This is Lady Whipplethwaite’s statement,” he said, taking out a notebook. “I’ll read it to you.”

” ‘I first met Mr. Vallance in Brisbane fifteen years ago. He fell in love with me and wanted to marry me, but I refused him. For five years after that he continued to pester me, although I did my best to get rid of him. When I became engaged to Sir Joseph he was insanely jealous. There was never anything between us that could have given him the slightest grounds for imagining that he had a claim on me. For a few years after I was married he continued to write and implore me to leave Sir Joseph and run away with him, but I did not answer his letters.

” ‘Six months ago he wrote to me again in London, apologizing humbly for the past and begging me to forgive him and meet him again, as he said he was completely cured of his absurd infatuation. I met him with my husband’s consent, and he told me that he had been studying art in Paris and was getting quite a name among the Moderns. I liked his pictures, and when he begged me to let him paint me a picture of our house to give me I asked him down to stay, although Sir Joseph was very much against it. Sir Joseph has never liked him. They have had several heated arguments while he has been staying with us.’ “

Teal closed the notebook and put it away. “As soon as the theft was discovered,” he said, “Sir Joseph wanted me to arrest Vallance at once, and I had a job to make him see that we couldn’t possibly do that without any evidence.”

They had reached a rustic seat at the end of the tennis-court, Teal rested his weight on it gingerly, and produced a fresh packet of chewing gum.

“Our problem,” he said, gazing intently at the tennis players, “is to find out how the man who opened the safe got in here-and got out again.”

Simon nodded quietly. “The tennis players would hardly make any difference,” he remarked. “They’d be so intent on their game that they wouldn’t notice anything else.”

“And yet,” said Teal, “the man who did it had to pass the constable in front or the constable at the back-and either of them should have seen him.”

“It sounds impossible,” said the Saint; and the man beside him put a slip of gum in his mouth and masticated stolidly.

“It does,” Teal said, without moving a muscle.

At that moment the fantastic idea that had been creeping round the Saint’s mind sprang into incredulous life. “Good God! Teal-you don’t mean —”

“I don’t mean anything,” said Teal in the same toneless voice. “I can’t possibly tell you any more than I’ve told you already. If I mentioned that Whipplethwaite was badly hit in the Doncaster Steel Company’s crash three months ago-that a Cabinet Minister’s salary may be a large one, but you need a lot more than that to keep up the style that the Whipplethwaites like to live in-I should only be mentioning things that have nothing to do with the case. If I said that the man who could open that safe without damaging it in any way would be a miracle worker, I’d only be theorizing.”

Simon’s cigarette had gone out, but he did not notice it.

“And I suppose,” he said, in a slightly strained voice-“just taking an entirely mythical case-I suppose that if the details of that treaty got about, the Powers would know that there’d been a leakage? I mean, if there was only one man through whom the leakage could have occurred, he’d have to cover himself by staging some set of circumstances that would account for it without hurting his reputation?”

“I suppose so,” agreed Teal formally. “Unfortunately there’s no Third Degree in this country, and when you get into high places you have to walk very carefully. Sometimes we’re set almost impossible tasks. My orders are to avoid a scandal at any cost.”

The Saint sat quietly, taking in the full significance of that astounding revelation that was so much more momentous for having been made without any direct statement. And, as he looked up at the house in a kind of breathlessness, he visualized the scene.

There was no space for secret passages in such an edifice as that; but for reasons known only to the architect a sun balcony on the first floor, built over the study, was linked with the ground by two flying buttresses on either side of it that angled down on either side of the study windows like gigantic staircases of three-foot steps. He could see the podgy figure of Sir Joseph Whipplethwaite creeping out with exaggerated caution, like a rhinoceros walking on tiptoe, and surveying the scene below. He saw the man clambering down the steps of the flying buttress, one by one, hampered by the sandbag clutched in one hand … saw him creeping up behind the unconscious artist … striking that single clumsy blow. With a scapegoat whom he disliked so heartily ready to be accused, why should he think he ran any risk?

“I know what you think of our abilities at the Yard,” Teal was saying, in the same passionless way. “But we do get ideas sometimes. What you don’t make allowances for is the fact that in our position we can’t act on nothing more substantial than a brilliant idea, like detectives do in stories.”

He was chewing monotonously, with his cherubic blue eyes fixed expressionlessly on the flying white ball on the court. “I think that if the treaty could somehow be recovered and put back where it was taken from, the guilty man would have to confess. An adventurer in a story, I suppose, might kidnap the suspected person and force him to say where it was hidden; but we can’t do that. If anything like that happened in real life and the kidnapper was caught, he’d be for it.

“By the way, Whipplethwaite will be driving back from London this evening. He has a green Rolls Royce, number XZ9919. … I expect you’ve had enough of this, haven’t you?”

The detective stood up; and for the first time in a long while he looked at the Saint again. Simon had rarely seen those baby blue eyes so utterly sleepy and impassive.

“Yes-it’s about time for my morning tankard of ale,” Simon murmured easily.

They strolled slowly back to the house.

“That’s Joseph’s room-the one with the balcony-is it?” Simon asked idly.

Teal nodded. “Yes. That’s where he was lying down.”

“Does he suffer from indigestion?”

The detective flashed a glance at him. “I don’t know. Why?”

“I should like to know,” said the Saint.

Back in the house, he asked to be shown the dining-room. On the sideboard he discovered a round cardboard box carefully labelled-after the supererogatory habit of chemists- “The Pills.” Underneath was the inscription: “Two to be taken with water after each meal, as required.”

The Saint examined the tablets, and smiled gently to himself.

“Now could I see the bathroom?”

A very mystified Mr. Teal rang for the butler, and they were shown upstairs. The bathroom was one of those magnificent halls of coloured marble and chromium plate which the most modern people find necessary for the preservation of their personal cleanliness; but Simon was interested only in the cupboard over the washbasin. It contained an imposing array of bottles, which Simon surveyed with some awe. Sir Joseph was apparently something of a hypochondriac.