The Saint Around the World (15 page)

“I told him that Mr. Oddington and I were going to be married tomorrow.”

Simon raised his eyebrows.

“Well, congratulations! I didn’t know it was as close as that.”

“We gave our notice at the Mairie long ago. But only when we went to our siesta this afternoon, he said we must do it tomorrow, while his nephew is still here.”

“That ought to have made Pierre happy, if he was worried about you. But I thought he looked mad.”

“He pretends he is still in love with me,” she said slowly. “He says if anything goes wrong I can still come to him. You heard what he said when he left: ‘I shall wait.’”

She did not waver under the Saint’s quietly judicial scrutiny, but the Saint knew exactly how little that could mean. It is only in fiction that no liar can look an interrogator in the eye. But everything she said seemed to hold together—or he had consistently failed to trip her up. He began to feel em-barrassed about the impulse that had started him probing at all. Of all the places in the world where he should have been out of range of trouble, let alone looking for it, the He du Levant should have been the nearest to a foolproof bet.

He looked around to see what had happened to George Mc-George and his Uncle Waldo. They were not on the beach where he had last seen them.

It took him a little while to locate them, and ultimately it was a flash of McGeorge’s white skin that ended the search. The family confab must have ended, with or without a deci-sion, and Mr. Oddington had finally succeeded in bullying or cajoling his nephew into the water to join him in trying out the new spear-gun. Whether McGeorge had also been coaxed or coerced into surrendering his last stronghold of modesty could not be determined from there, for both men had waded in above their waists and the surface of the water was choppy enough to interrupt its transparency.

“Well, if George hasn’t decided to give you his blessing, at least he seems to have called off his sulk for the moment,” said the Saint, with an indicative movement of his head.

Nadine put a light hand on his shoulder.

“I suppose I should try to make him like me,” she said. “If you really do care for people’s problems, I think you could help.”

She began to walk through the water towards the shore and at an angle towards the other end of the beach where Mr. Oddington and McGeorge were. As the water shallowed, her breasts came above it, full and yet taut. The ripples dropped to her hollow waist, then to her hips; and Simon Templar, wading up beside her, found that he still had to make an occasional conscious effort to keep his attention up to the levels that the philosophy of the island took for granted.

He disciplined himself to keep looking at Mr. Oddington, who had fitted his own diving mask on to McGeorge and was urging him to put his head down in the water and enjoy it. McGeorge also had the spear-gun in one hand, which seemed to be an added liability to a natural clumsiness. He eventually achieved a more or less horizontal position, in which he floundered rather like a drowning beetle.

“If Uncle Waldo is still a vegetarian, why does he want to spear fish?” Simon wondered idly.

“For the sport,” she said. “It is not a moral thing, only because he thinks vegetables are better for health. When he catches anything, he gives it–-“

Her voice broke in a gasp.

Out of the water where McGeorge was thrashing something lanced like a streak of quicksilver, and then froze in the form of a slim shaft of steel that stood rigidly, grotesquely, out of Mr. Oddington’s chest. Simon saw it at the same time, very clearly and horribly, before Mr. Oddington rolled over and fell with a soggy splash.

iv

“It is only to be expected that he would say it was an accident,” said the gendarme. “Not many murderers are so ready to follow their victims that they confess at the first moment.”

The memory of McGeorge’s statement was etched on the Saint’s mind in especially sharp detail, for it had fallen to him to act as interpreter.

“I haven’t the faintest idea what happened,” McGeorge had said. “I heard him give a sort of yell, and looked up, and there he was with that spear thing sticking in his chest. I dropped the gun and struggled over to him—he was only a couple of yards away—and dragged him out on the beach. The gun came trailing after him because the spear’s attached to it with a short length of line. It must have gone off all by itself.”

“Were you on good terms with your uncle?” the gendarme had asked.

“I was very fond of him. But I suppose you’ll soon find out that we’d been having an argument today.”

“It was about something personal?”

“Yes.”

“Yet soon afterwards you were swimming with him, and playing with this arbalete which you had brought him as a present.”

“The argument was over.”

“I shall have to ask what it was about.”

“All right. I’m sure everyone knows that he was going to marry Mademoiselle Zeult. I told him I thought she was only marrying him for his money. He didn’t think so. Finally I suggested a way to settle it. I dared him to tell her that he’d deceived her and he didn’t have any money at all, and see if she still wanted to marry him. If she did, I’d apologize and lick her boots—if she had any. He agreed. In fact, he was so sure of her that he was as happy as if he’d already won a bet. So he insisted on me playing with his toy, as if he wanted to show that he didn’t bear any grudge. He was so eager that I had to give in.”

Simon could still hear McGeorge’s clipped precise accents and see his blanched tight-lipped face. Without pretending to any inhuman nervelessness, he had handled himself with a cool competence that any lawyer would have applauded, neither evading nor protesting too much. But in spite of that, Mc-George was now locked away somewhere in the building, while the gendarme sat in his little office scanning the notes he had written in an official ledger in an extraordinarily neat and rapid longhand.

Simon gave him a cigarette.

“Do you always treat an accident as if it were a murder?” he inquired.

“When there are grounds to suspect that it could be, yes,” said the gendarme politely. “That is the law.”

He was, Simon had gathered, the only civilian officer of the law on the island. He was quite a young man, with a pleasant face, but very serious. He wore a semi-military khaki shirt with informal tan shorts and sandals, but had not gone so far as to try to maintain the dignity of his commission in a G-string. The Saint had not been unhappy to be able to change back into the clothes he had worn on the ferry, and had also brought a grateful McGeorge his trousers: it was twilight now, and cool enough for the light clothing to be no hardship.

“Figure it to yourself, monsieur,” said the gendarme. “You have a man of some means, because he lives here all the time in a good villa and does not have to work. He has a young girl who is his secretary and housekeeper and no doubt other things. That is all right. But then he is going to marry her. Alors, very soon comes his nephew, who does not want this. That, too, is natural. If the uncle is married, perhaps there is no more money for the nephew. He tries to tell the uncle that the girl is only marrying for money. They argue. At last, they agree on a test. But then, at once, the uncle is so happy that the young man is afraid. The uncle seems to be so sure, that suddenly the nephew thinks that the girl could love the old man after all—such things have happened—and the test will fail, and he will have lost everything. Perhaps, he thinks, an accident would be much more certain. And in his hand he has the weapon. It takes only the touch of a finger.”

“Just like that, on the spur of the moment.”

“The thought of murder may have been in his mind before. It needed only the opportunity, the right circumstance, to send a message down his arm to the trigger. A very carefully planned murder may be good, if it succeeds; but the more elaborately it is prepared, the more risk there is that the preparation may be discovered. A murder on impulse can be just as good, and even harder to prove. But it is still murder. I have thought a lot about these things.”

“But Mademoiselle Zeult told me that Oddington had already made a will in her favor. So killing him would get McGeorge nowhere.”

“Can you swear that McGeorge knew that? If not, the proof remains that he had motive.”

The muscles in the Saint’s jaw flickered under the skin. It was all presumptive, all circumstantial; and yet under the French criminal code which requires the accused to prove his innocence rather than the prosecution to prove his guilt, it could be a wicked case to beat.

“What happens next?” he asked.

“I have telegraphed to Toulon. I do not have the equipment or qualifications to do any more here. In the morning an Inspecteur of the Police Judiciaire will arrive and take charge. If you wish to help your friend, I would suggest that you send for an attorney.”

“I’m not interested in helping anyone,” said the Saint grimly. “I only knew Monsieur Oddington a few hours, but I liked him very much. If he was murdered, I want someone to go to the guillotine for it.”

The gendarme nodded.

“He was perhaps a little eccentric, but I think everyone loved him. And I am employed to serve justice, monsieur.”

Simon doubled his right fist into a tight knot and ground it slowly into the palm of his left hand. The exasperation that found an outlet in that controlled gesture went all the way up his arms into the muscles of his chest. His eyes were narrowed between a crinkle of hard lines.

It was a cut-and-dried case … and yet something was wrong with it. The instinctive understanding of crime which was his special peculiar gift told him so, brushing aside superficial logic. The infuriating frustration came from trying to pinpoint the flaw. It wasn’t a straightforward problem like listening to a musical recording with an expert ear and spotting one or two false notes that had been played. It was more as as if one or two whole instruments were micrometrically off key, playing perfectly consistently as units and yet infinitesi-mally out of tune, so that the entire performance was elusively discordant.

“There are still inconsistencies,” he said, groping. “I heard McGeorge disagree with his uncle quite openly. Once or twice he was almost rude. He made sarcastic remarks that Monsieur Oddington might easily have resented. Would he have risked that if he was so anxious to stay in his uncle’s good graces?… And about Mademoiselle Zeult. A man who is really infatuated is just’ as likely to fly into a rage with anyone who says derogatory things about his girl as he is to wonder if they might be true. Perhaps more likely. Why would Mc-George risk running her down so openly when he could have been much more subtle?”

“Perhaps because he was stupid.”

“But just now you thought he was rather clever.”

The gendarme lifted his shoulders and arms and opened his hands in the Latin gesture which says everything and commits itself to nothing.

“The investigation will decide which is true, monsieur.”

“Listen,” said the Saint. “You told me you did a lot of thinking about these things. So I imagine that being the village cop in a place like this is not your idea of a life’s career. You may never have a chance like this again. Instead of waiting for the boys from Toulon to investigate and decide everything, suppose you could hand them a case that was all wrapped up and tied with ribbons. Would that help you to get a transfer to some place where you could find some serious detecting to do?”

The gendarme studied him shrewdly.

“Because I am interested in crime, I know who you are, Monsieur le Saint. I will hear what you suggest, so long as it is not against the law.”

“I only want you to let me play a hunch,” Simon said, “and stand by to cash in on it if it pays off.”

A new exhilaration surged into him like a flood as he walked back to Oddington’s villa in the failing dusk. It was a lift of spirit with no more sober foundation than the fact that at last he had stopped being a spectator and had something to do. But there was an energy of wrath in it too, for he could not think of the death of Waldo Oddington as the mere impersonal data in an abstract problem. It is more common in stories that the murder victim is an evil character whom many people have good reason to hate. In real life, it is more often the well-meaning innocent who has the bad luck to stand in the way of some less worthy person’s greed or ambition, and who dies without even realizing that he had an enemy. But if only villains got knocked off, Simon thought savagely, there wouldn’t be much incentive to try to convict murderers.

He went in at the unlocked door of the villa and fumbled for a light switch inside the living-room before he remembered that there was no electricity. He took out his lighter and struck it. From a chair near the terrace, Nadine Zeult looked at him unblinkingly.

“There is a lamp on the table,” she said.

He went over to it, raised the glass chimney, and tilted his lighter. Illumination spread out to fill the room as the lamp flame took over and he adjusted the wick.

The girl continued to watch him without expression. She had put on a plain black dress with only a touch of white at the collar. There were no tears on her cheeks, but her eyes were puffy and shadowed.

“Are you all right?” he said. “The gendarme kept me answering so many questions.”

“What could you tell him?”

“I had a job to convince him that I scarcely know Mc-George at all.”

“Why did he do it?” she said, in a dry and aching monotone. “Why?”

The Saint used his lighter again, on a cigarette. There was still one crevice in which a wedge could be started, which could open a split through which anything might fall. He saw nothing to be gained by waiting another moment to strike there. Win or lose, there would be” no better time to try it— the test that Waldo Oddington had agreed to, but which had not been made.

“One thing came out,” he said flatly. “It seems that everybody was wrong about Uncle Waldo—just like they were about your grandfather. He wasn’t a rich man at all. It turns out he didn’t have a dime.”

Her eyes stayed on him so fixedly that they seemed hypnotized. And then, faintly and hollowly, she began to laugh.