The Saint Around the World (The Saint Series) Page 2

  “I just wanted to meet a lot of people who liked to have fun,” he said to the newspapers, which (of course with the exception of The Times) could hardly fail to note such goings-on, “and throwing a big party seemed the quickest way to do it.”

  Perhaps because he happened at a time when England, reacting from the longest hangover of post-war austerity that any European country had had to endure, and flexing the muscles of a new self-confidence, was ripe for any hero who struck a dizzy enough contrast with the drab years behind, Mr Ivalot was just what the circulation managers ordered. Although he threw no more parties of such indiscriminate grandiosity as the one which launched him into London’s café society, from then on he never lacked a convivial entourage, about three-quarters of it feminine, for his almost nightly forays into the gayest cabarets and bottle clubs; and in an otherwise dull season the more uninhibited journals were delighted to adopt him as a gratifyingly reliable source of copy.

  The news value of his extravagances was enhanced by an occasional quixotic touch. The celebration of Guy Fawkes Day in London that year was materially enlivened by Roger Ivalot, who drove through the East End in a large truck loaded to the toppling point with fireworks, which he distributed to incredulous urchins on a succession of street corners. Nothing like the resultant bedlam of fire and explosion had been seen in that area since the last visit of the Luftwaffe. And at Christmas he rode through the slums again, this time on a stage coach which he had resurrected from somewhere, accompanied by three music-hall beauties, all of them in Dickensian costumes, tossing bags of candy from a seemingly inexhaustible supply to all the children who turned out to stare.

  “All it took was money,” he told the reporters. “And I’ve a lot of that.”

  He liked making corny jokes of that kind about his improbably cognomen. “I’ve a lot of living to do yet,” was another. But the nickname that stuck, with his enthusiastic endorsement, was “Jolly Roger.” His acceptance was made official by the huge skull-and-crossbones flag which draped his box at the Arts Ball on New Year’s Eve, where he and his whole party appeared in some version of a pirate costume, even though some of the female members had startlingly little material to work with between their top boots and cocked hats. He even tried to adopt the same pattern for his racing colors, to put on a horse he bought which was entered in the Grand National, but here the stewards of the Jockey Club drew the line. Within six months of his debut, he had become practically an institution, and when he announced that he was leaving to have a fling in Paris and continue from there on a trip around the world, a noticeable gloom overspread the bistros.

  “But I’ll be back again in the autumn,” he told his friends consolingly.

  He had always paid cash for everything, even for his biggest parties, so that there had never been an occasion for anyone to inquire into his credit or bank references, but he claimed to be the British Empire’s first uranium millionaire. According to him, he had foreseen the coming boom before the dust had settled on Hiroshima, and had invested in a skillfully selected list of mining enterprises in Africa and Australia. While he was shrewdly secretive about the precise location of his holdings, the soundness of his judgment appeared to be adequately evidenced by the amount of money he had to spend.

  It was in answer to the obvious question of how even a uranium millionaire’s income could survive modern taxation with so little visible injury, that he had explained that he made his legal home in Bermuda, where there was no income tax.

  True to his promise, he had returned in November, and the pattern of his first season had been more or less repeated, with the difference that this time he was already a well-known character with a large if not exactly elite circle of friends. Before the advent of another spring, only the most strong-minded comedians could get through a monologue of any length without hanging some gag on Jolly Roger Ivalot.

  This year, however, Mr Ivalot’s departure was not signalized by a mammoth thirty-six-hour farewell party, as it had been the previous time. In fact, it was first confirmed, after several days of unwonted quiescence, by a solicitor who had been trying to serve him with a summons to appear and defend himself in court. Mr Ivalot, it transpired, had got wind of this project and had strategically taken himself out of jurisdiction, without saying goodbye to anyone.

  “And how many people were discovered holding the bag?” Simon asked, with anticipative relish.

  “Only one that we know of,” Lona Dayne said. “He’d just had one of the usual slip-ups with his Jolly Rogering. One of his girls was going to have a baby—twins, as a matter of fact.”

  “Ah,” said the Saint. “A bag holding people.”

  She let that wilt in an interregnum of withering silence.

  “He didn’t owe anybody—I told you he always paid cash,” she said after the pause. “He hadn’t sold any shares or promoted anything. His furnished flat was paid up to the end of the month. He’d just packed up and gone.”

  The expectant mother, a nominal actress whose gifts sounded more thoracic than thespian, alleged that Mr Ivalot had been promising to marry her for more than a year. But although she had found herself pregnant almost immediately after his return, he had persistently evaded or postponed setting a wedding date; and when he finally proposed a cash settlement of some five thousand pounds as an alternative, it began to dawn upon the poor girl that his love might not be as passionate and deathless as he had proclaimed. By then she was on the verge of her fifth month and an X-ray had shown that she was preparing to endow the world with not one but two little Ivalots. This was the last straw that drove her to issue an ultimatum to the effect that unless Mr Ivalot came through with a wedding ring within a week she would continue their romance through a lawyer. It was not, she explained later to the former Lona Shaw, who interviewed her, that she thought that money could heal a broken heart, and that she felt it her maternal duty to see that her imminent offspring were not left to face a lifetime of illegitimacy with a lousy two thousand five hundred pounds capital apiece, instead of their rightful inheritance of millions.

  This fair and sporting warning was her gravest mistake, for Mr Ivalot had promptly elected to vanish rather than contest the suit.

  A lawyer with a fat contingency fee in prospect was not to be so easily discouraged. He promptly forwarded the papers to an attorney in Bermuda, with the request that they be served on Mr Ivalot there. And that was when the blow fell that punctured a fabulous legend and at the same time paradoxically inflated an otherwise routine scandal into the sensation of the year. For according to the advice that came back to London, nobody in Bermuda—no attorney, bank, real estate agency, newspaper, or any individual who had been questioned—had ever heard of Mr Roger Ivalot, nor was he listed in any official registry or directory.

  “In fact, he never had been here,” said the Saint.

  “That’s what I couldn’t quite swallow.” Lona Dayne said. “I thought it out this way. The Bermuda thing came out when somebody asked him about taxes. It seemed to me that that question might really have taken him by surprise. He had to have an answer quickly, and a good one, without having too much time to think about it or what it might lead to. But what he suddenly realized was that it might occur to the authorities to start investigating anyone who was throwing money around as lavishly as he was, in the hope of catching a tax dodger, and from what’s come out since he obviously couldn’t risk being investigated. He had to head that inquiry off right away. But how likely would he be to come up with Bermuda unless he knew a lot about it? I kept on thinking about that.”

  Simon nodded appreciatively.

  “That’s pretty sharp thinking. Most people wouldn’t have known about that tax angle. But if he’d run into someone who really lived here—”

  “There wasn’t too much risk of that. You wouldn’t find many people with a home in Bermuda visiting England in the winter. But he might very easily have run into someone who’d visited here, so he had to be ready to talk about the place like a
native. Which still made it look as if he must have spent a lot of time here, at least.”

  The mystery of Mr Ivalot had all the earmarks of a monumental swindle, but it became even more baffling as weeks went by without anyone turning up who claimed to have been swindled. That is, with the exception of the pregnant starlet, whose loss was debatable, and her plight and the cruelly clouded future of her two still unborn little bastards became a matter of popular concern and the grist of many columns of tear-squeezing prose for Lona Shaw.

  “And you came here to go on milking it?” Simon asked.

  “Well, not quite. You see, I met Havvie”—the Saint managed to suppress a shudder—“when he was in England last year on his holiday, and he’d been after me with letters and telephone calls to marry him ever since, and we really did get on awfully well together, so eventually I said yes. Then I had to get leave from the Record, and I’ve always been a thrifty type, so I sold them the idea that I ought to stay on salary if I came here and went on trying to dig up something about Ivalot. Then I only had to tell Havvie that I’d set my heart on a honeymoon in Bermuda, and everything was fine.”

  “You’ve given me a new concept of romance,” murmured the Saint.

  Her recital of the saga of Jolly Roger Ivalot, somewhat less succinct than it has been recapitulated here, had taken them all the way through dinner and dessert, and now they were sitting over Benedictine and coffee. Once again he lighted cigarettes for them.

  “What was your plan of campaign when you got here?”

  “We gave out a story to the local papers that the Record had unearthed a terrific clue which was expected to flush Ivalot from his cover within two or three days. I suppose that was before you got here, or you’d have read it.”

  “I guess it was. But if I’d read it, I’d have thought it was rather an old wheeze.”

  “It might still have scared Ivalot, if he was here,” she said. “I hoped it might tempt him to try to make a deal, or—”

  “Or something more violent?”

  “That’s what Havvie was afraid of.”

  “He should have been. The rivers and ponds are full of amateurs who’ve had that kind of brilliant idea—anchored in concrete blocks.”

  “That’s why he’s in trouble now,” she said bitterly. “He’s taking my place.”

  “How?”

  “He wouldn’t let me take the risk. He insisted that if there were going to be any games like that, he was going to play the reporter and draw the fire. He said that nobody here would know Havelock Dayne as an attorney from Philadelphia, and nobody would associate Mrs Dayne with Lona Shaw, and if there was going to be any rough stuff he could take care of himself better than I could, and if there was any real detecting to do I might find out a lot more if nobody knew I was more than an ordinary dizzy bride. He was terribly intense about it, and in some ways he made a bit of sense too, and I didn’t want to start off our married life with a quarrel, so I let him have his way. And that’s why this has happened to him.”

  “I still don’t know just what has happened,” said the Saint.

  She took a gulp from her glass.

  “The day before yesterday, I went into Hamilton after lunch, to do some shopping. Havvie decided he’d rather stay home and fish. When I got back, about five, he’d left a note. Here it is.”

  She produced it from her purse. It was crumpled and smeared from many readings.

  Fantastic break on Jolly Roger. This is It! Must get after it at once or he’ll get away. Don’t worry even if I don’t get home tonight. Love and XX.

  H.

  “You’re sure he wrote this?” Simon asked automatically.

  “Unless it’s an absolutely perfect forgery. And it would’ve had to be done by someone who knew that he always signed his letters to me with just an ‘H.’ ”

  Simon handed the note back, and for perhaps the first time that evening his face was completely grave, without even a give-away trace of mockery in his eyes.

  “And since then you haven’t heard another word?”

  “Nothing.” The task and distraction of drawing the complete background for him had sustained her so far, but now he could see her straining again to keep emotion from getting the upper hand. “That is, unless…I’ve got to call home now.”

  “Go ahead.”

  He finished his liqueur, his coffee, and his cigarette, with epicurean attention to each, holding his mind in complete detachment until she came back; and presently she was at the table again, but not sitting down, her face pale in the subdued lamplight and her hands twisting one over the other.

  “We’ve got to go to the house at once,” she said, in a low shaky voice. “Or I must. There’s been a message. Not Havvie. Someone who said he’ll call again, until he gets me. And he said I mustn’t talk to anyone, if I want my husband back.”

  2

  The island lay less than a hundred yards off shore, out in the Sound. Simon judged that they were somewhere in the middle of the deep horseshoe curve that is the approximate profile of the southwestern end of Bermuda, where the segmented chain of land curls all the way back over itself like a scorpion’s tail. From the tiny landing-stage just below the road, where a taxi had dropped them off, he could clearly see the outlines of the white rain-catcher roof of the house that crowned a hillock which might have been an acre overall. Overhead electric wires bridged the distance to the island by means of two intermediate poles standing in the water, and below the place where the wires took off from the little landing-stage was an ordinary bell-push which Lona Dayne pressed with her finger. Almost at once a floodlight went on over a dock on the island opposite them, and a man came down and got into one of the skiffs that was tied up there and began to row over to them.

  “Usually we’d leave the dinghy we came ashore in tied up here,” she said. “But since I’ve been alone, Bob insists on ferrying me back and forth. I’m sure he doesn’t believe I can row a boat.”

  “How much does he know about all this?” Simon asked.

  “About as much as I’ve told you. Except that he still thinks my husband is really the reporter, like everyone else here. But obviously I couldn’t tell him the story I’ve been telling everyone else, about Havvie being in bed with a cold.”

  “Why is he still caretaking, even though you’ve rented the house?”

  “There are servants’ quarters where he sleeps, and he still does the gardening. He sort of goes with the place.”

  “And you mean to say he hasn’t spread this juicy bit of gossip all over Bermuda?”

  “Wait till you meet him!’ ”

  That was only a matter of moments. The man shipped his oars as the skiff glided in, and stood up to catch and hold on to a ring bolt set in the concrete of the landing-stage.

  “Has there been another call?” Lona Dayne demanded frantically, while he was still steadying the boat alongside.

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Did you tell me everything they said, on the phone?”

  The caretaker looked up at the Saint, through plain gold-rimmed spectacles which combined with a bony severity of jaw and the total hairlessness of his shiny black cranium to give him the air of some kind of African archdeacon.

  “That was the message, ma’am,” he answered. “Not to talk to anyone.”

  “Simon, this is Bob Inchpenny,” Lona said. “Bob, this is Mr Templar. I’d already told Mr Templar everything, before you gave me that message.”

  “Oh yes, ma’am.”

  The caretaker regarded Simon with even more critical reserve, and the Saint realized how ridiculous the suggestion that this man might be a wellspring of idle gossip must have sounded to anyone who knew him. Simon had seldom encountered a Negro who bore himself with such an austere and almost overpowering dignity.

  They got into the dinghy, and the caretaker picked up the oars and began to row stolidly back to the island.

  “What did he sound like, this person who telephoned?” Lona asked.

&n
bsp; “Sort of muffled, like he was disguising his voice.”

  “Couldn’t you guess anything about him?” Simon persisted. “For instance, what nationality would you say he was?”

  The colored man pondered this for several strokes, with portentous concentration.

  “I’d say he might be an American, sir.”

  The Saint turned to Lona.

  “You must have heard almost everything about Jolly Roger. Did you ever hear what he sounded like?”

  “Not exactly. It must have been pretty ordinary English. If he’d sounded like an American, I’m sure it would’ve been mentioned.”

  Simon was still thinking that over when they reached the island dock. He stepped out and gave her a hand, and let her lead him up the alternations of steps and meandering path that wound up the slope to the house.

  The living-room that she took him into was very large, but so cunningly broken up that it seemed to consist entirely of inviting corners. The formal center was an enormous fireplace flanked by a pair of huge but cozy couches; on one side of them was a spacious alcove that contained a sideboard and a modest dining table, and on the other side a bay that was almost completely walled with bookshelves encircling a built-in desk, while yet a third wing suggested relaxed entertainment with a door-sized bar niche and the cabinets and speaker fronts of a hi-fi sound system and the slotted shelves of an impressive library of records. And between all those mural features there was still room for several stretches of full-length drapes, now drawn out in neatly extended folds but promising windows for unlimited sunlight and air in the daytime. It was a room which, in far more than adequate justification of its name, asked to be lived in, offering every adjunct to a kind of timeless tranquillity that could make calendars superfluous.