The Saint Around the World (The Saint Series) Page 7

  Simon chuckled aloud.

  “I’m beginning to think of you as a soul-mate. But you still haven’t told me how you visualize me in this set-up.”

  “In rather the same way,” she said seriously. “I know it’ll sound ridiculous, but I’ve always been your wildest fan. I started reading about you in my teens, and idolizing you in a silly way. I can’t have altogether grown out of it. When I heard you asking about Clarron in Skindle’s, and heard your name, it just hit me like a mad flash of inspiration. I’d give anything to get even with Teal for the patronizing way he’s talked to me, and I knew you’d sympathize with that, and besides, this case would be a great big feather in my cap. That is—if we could get together…”

  The Saint finished his plate and leaned back. The tranquil glow that he felt was fueled by more subtle calories than a good meal satisfyingly washed down. For his luck, it seemed, was as unchangingly blessed as ever. He had been in England only a few hours, and already the old merry-go-round was rolling at full throttle in his honor. A problem, a pretty girl, and Chief Inspector Teal to bedevil. What more had he ever asked? It was as if he had never been away.

  “You just got yourself soul-hitched, darling,” he said. “Now what’s the music you think we might make together?”

  “I’ve told you everything I know, for a start. But what do you know?”

  “Not another thing. The worthy watchdogs of the Yard undoubtedly spotted my name in a routine check for incoming undesirables, and Teal came huffing out to the airport to warn me to keep my nose clean. I knew that Teal had to be working on some case, even if he is retiring, and whatever it was, I figured I could do a memorable job of lousing it up for him.”

  “You mean you didn’t know about Clarron before?”

  “Teal took it for granted that I did, and let out the name. Then I needled him some more, and he mentioned Maidenhead. That was plenty for me to start on.”

  She stared at him with sober brown eyes, and bit her lip.

  “That’s rather disappointing.”

  “I’ve done plenty with less, in my time,” he said cheerfully. “But you’re still holding something back. What was that about you being the next victim?”

  “Oh. Yes. You see, I’ve got to know him quite well. He thinks I’m a young widow with money.”

  “And that you might be available if only he were free?”

  “That’s right. That’s why I talked the insurance company into letting me rent this cottage, to make it easy. It’s right next door to his house.”

  The Saint raised his eyebrows over the cigarette he was lighting.

  He got up and stood at the window. Looking out at an angle, he still could not see the other house, and he recalled that when they arrived at the cottage he had not clearly seen an adjoining house, since the front of the cottage was well screened with trees; but in the back only a low hedge separated the lawns that went down to the river.

  “I’ve done more than that,” Adrienne said. “Once I got him over here, and pretended to be a bit tight, and more than hinted that when my imaginary husband was ill with pneumonia I’d helped to make sure that he didn’t get over it.”

  “The soul-mate approach again?”

  “It was a trick I read about in a mystery story. But it didn’t work on him. He’s too—what did you call it?—cagey, even to fall for that.”

  A man had come into sight on the next lawn, at first inspecting a stretch of hedge with the diagnostic eye of an amateur gardener, then turning and looking back over it towards the cottage. Then he walked down a little farther and came through an opening in it.

  “We’d better hurry up and think of a new approach that includes me,” said the Saint. “Lover Boy is coming to call.”

  4

  Mr Reginald Clarron’s failure to achieve any notable success on the stage was only due, he would always be convinced, to the cloddish stupidity of the public. About his own outstanding talents he had no doubt whatsoever. Where lesser thespians played their parts for a couple of hours behind the footlights, he could sustain his for twenty-four hours a day, with no help from a script, and sell them to an audience that did not have to be pre-conditioned by the atmosphere of a theater. He prided himself on having every flicker of expression and every inflection of voice under conscious control at every moment. It would be trite to observe that he would have made a formidable poker player: he already was.

  He was a passably good-looking face without a single distinctive feature, but like a good showman he applied distinction to it with the full cut of his artistically long but carefully brushed gray hair and a pair of glasses with extra heavy black frames, so that a recognizable caricature might have been made of those two items alone with no face shown at all. His figure, at least as far as it was ever displayed to the public, was most commendable for a man of fifty-five, and only a certain fleshiness around the chin betrayed a tendency to embonpoint which skilful tailoring was able to conceal elsewhere.

  He had not batted an eyelid when he heard the name Templar, although instinct told him that there was only likely to be one Templar who might be making inquiries about him. He still could not imagine how that Templar could have become interested in him, but he had read enough to believe that the Saint’s nose for undetected crime verged on the supernatural. Nevertheless, he was not going to let himself be stampeded by the uncomfortable fact, which he believed was the main reason why less astute malfeasors had been the Saint’s easy prey.

  “I can’t imagine what the man can be up to,” he told his wife boldly, for he was clever enough never to create complications for himself with lies or evasions that were not strictly necessary. “I’m quite sure that poor Frances never mentioned a friend called Mrs Brown. The very name is an obvious subterfuge.”

  “I do hope he isn’t after my jewels,” Mrs Clarron said.

  She touched the sapphire pendant that showed in the open neck of her bed jacket, with fingers glittering with diamond and ruby rings. Except for being propped up on pillows, she looked as if she had been decorated for a grand entrance at a first night at the opera.

  Mr Clarron pursed his lips.

  “I don’t want to alarm you, my love, but that’s quite a possibility. I still wish you’d let me put them in a safe deposit for you. To keep fifty thousand pounds’ worth of jewels in the house, these days, is simply asking for trouble.”

  “Please don’t start that all over again, dear,” she pleaded wanly. “They’re insured, aren’t they? And since I can never go out and show them off again, wearing them for you is the only pleasure I’ve got left. I know you can’t understand how a woman feels, but it does make me happy. And they are mine, after all.”

  Mr Clarron stoically refrained from arguing. He had already devoted some of his best performances to that theme, without making any impression on her whimsical obduracy.

  It had been somewhat of a shock to him when, shortly after their marriage, he had discovered that the millionaire’s baubles which she displayed so opulently were not complemented by any proportionate resources in the bank. Her late husband, who had catered to her obsession by showering precious stones on her like a sultan, had apparently mortgaged his business assets so improvidently to do it that after his death they had barely realized enough to pay the inheritance taxes. Not that her value in gems alone was anything to be sneezed at, but it was less than Mr Clarron had been counting on. And her fanatical refusal to let the jewels out of her own custody for a moment had made it plain that nothing but a third widowhood would show him an appreciable profit.

  However, a recent brainstorm had shown him how her jewelry could be made to return a double dividend, and he was quite glad that the original accident he had planned for her had failed and left him the chance to improve on it.

  “Very well, my dear,” he said. “But if he should call here and I happen to be out, you must refuse to talk to him on any pretext.”

  “I wouldn’t dream of it. I’d be completely terrified. And I thin
k you should warn the police about him at once.”

  “Of course, I should have done that already,” he said.

  Looking up from the garden at Adrienne Halberd’s cottage, he was troubled by another consideration. He was forewarned that she had been in the bar at Skindle’s when the Saint was asking about him, but he had no way of knowing what might have developed between them later. With unlimited confidence, he decided to take that bull also by the horns.

  It was a blow under the belt when the girl admitted him at the back door and he instantly saw the lean bronzed man lounging on the couch under the window as if he owned it.

  “I beg your pardon,” he said. “I had no idea you had company.”

  “Don’t be silly, Reggie,” she insisted breezily. “Come on in. We were just talking about you, anyway. This is Mr Templar. I picked him up at Skindle’s. I heard him asking about you there, so we got talking.”

  Mr Clarron’s acting ability and stage presence still somehow stood by him.

  “Mrs Jafferty told me,” he said, with absolute naturalness. “But frankly, I just can’t place that Mrs Brown you spoke of.”

  “I’m not surprised,” said the Saint. “I didn’t mean to spring it on you quite so bluntly, but Mrs Brown was her sister. Mr Brown is better known to the FBI as Bingo Brown, the racket boss of Baltimore.”

  “The Saint knows all the gangsters, of course,” Adrienne contributed blithely. “He started telling me such fabulous stories about them, I just had to bring him home to hear more.”

  “Indeed?” Mr Clarron’s voice was impeccably distant. “But in this case I’m sure he’s mistaken. My late wife had no sister.”

  “I didn’t expect you’d have heard of her,” said the Saint. “When she took up with Bingo, her family disowned her and agreed never to mention her name. But she was still very fond of your late wife, and ever since that odd accident she’s been pestering Bingo to find out if you were a right guy. So when I happened to run into him just before I was leaving, he asked me to look you up. Of course it’s absurd, but—”

  “I think you have put it in a nutshell, Mr Templar,” Clarron said icily. “But if you want me to discuss this preposterous fabrication, I must do it another time.” He turned to the girl. “I only dropped over, my dear, to ask if you would be home this evening. I have to run up to London on business, and won’t get back until late, and it’s Mrs Jafferty’s night off. I know everything is all right, but I’d just feel happier to know that my wife could call you in an emergency.”

  “Of course,” Adrienne said awkwardly.

  “Thank you, my dear.”

  Mr Clarron bowed to the Saint with courtly frigidity, and walked out without faltering.

  He was immune to panic—the career of a successful Bluebeard calls for cold-blooded qualities that would scarcely be comprehensible to more temperamental murderers. But in much the same way as he had heard of the Saint, and perhaps less critically, he was well-imbued with legends of the implacable code of America’s gangdom.

  He still had not lost his head. He could conceive that the fantastic thing that the Saint had suggested might be true, without actually having to concede that it was. But that only meant that he must delay no longer about setting in motion a plan that he had already worked out to the ultimate detail—had, in fact, already prepared all the mechanical groundwork for.

  If anything, the Saint’s inexplicable and unforeseeable intrusion might even be woven in to its advantage, by such an uncommon genius as his.

  He had realized this with an almost divine supra-consciousness while Adrienne Halberd was still introducing the Saint, and had spoken the essential words without even thinking about them, impelled by nothing but his own infallible instinct.

  Mr Reginald Clarron walked back up the lawn to his own house without the slightest misgiving, concerned solely with the rather tiresome minutiae of killing his third wife that night.

  5

  Although the longest run of any play which Mr Clarron had helped to produce had been four weeks, he could legitimately claim to be a West End producer, and as such he received a continual stream of plays for consideration. The cream of the crop, of course, went first to other producers with a more encouraging record of hits; but Mr Clarron read all that came to him, always on the lookout for anything good enough for a promotion from which he at least would benefit, and always dreaming that someday something would fall into his hands of which he would be the first to see the potentialities, which would rocket him to wealth and prestige overnight.

  From the manuscripts on his desk he selected the one which had lately impressed him the most, and telephoned the author, who lived in London.

  “I really think we might do something with your play, my boy,” he said. “I’d like to discuss just a few minor revisions with you. I don’t get to town very often, but I have to run up this afternoon. Could you manage to have dinner with me?…Fine! Let’s make it rather early—I don’t want to be away from home too long.”

  Then he called his dentist, complained of a maddening toothache, and persuaded the man to squeeze him in for a few minutes at the end of the day.

  Thus he consolidated his reason for leaving his wife alone on what had already been announced as Mrs Jafferty’s evening off. If the dentist could find nothing wrong with his teeth, the pain could always be attributed to neuralgia.

  To his wife he said, “Since I have to make the trip, confound it, I really ought to see the fellow who wrote that play we read last week. I was just talking to him on the phone, and he told me that one of Rank’s men is very excited about it. I’d hate to let it get away, with the picture rights half sold already.”

  “Of course, dear,” she said. “I’ll be perfectly all right, if you’ll fix my table for me like you’ve done before.”

  “No one ever had such a wonderful wife and deserved it less,” he said, with considerable truth.

  The table was a piece of hospital furniture, built like a traveling bridge and high enough to span the bed. A system of ropes and pulleys which he had rigged up enabled her to pull it up to her or push it away as she wished.

  From the kitchen he brought up linen and silver, china and glass, bread and butter, sugar and cream, a bowl of strawberries, a decanter of wine, an electric coffee pot, and an electric chafing dish of Irish stew which she would only have to plug in and heat when she was ready.

  Into the stew he had thoroughly stirred a certain tasteless drug which is much too easily obtainable to be freely mentioned in this connection, which in sufficient quantity induces profound sleep in about half an hour and death shortly afterwards. Taking no chances on a capricious appetite, Mr Clarron had used enough to put away four people.

  “It smells heavenly,” he said, lifting the lid and sniffing. “But I kept some back for my lunch tomorrow, so you needn’t try to save any for me.”

  He made sure that the television set was in the right position for her to watch from the bed—it had a remote control that she could operate from the night stand—made sure that all was in order with the devices that would make it unnecessary for her to be taken to the bathroom, saw that her books and magazines were within easy reach, checked the table again, fluffed up her pillows, and said, “Is there anything else you might possibly need, my love?”

  “Nothing,” she said. “Just hurry back and spoil me some more.”

  Mr Clarron kissed her tenderly on the forehead. He felt pretty good himself. He was giving her the most humane death he could think of, even more peaceful than the lightning extinction of her predecessor. He was glad that he was not callous enough to hurt women. Only his first wife could really have suffered at all in her passing, but he had been quite an amateur then.

  He was in the best of spirits when the young playwright met him at his club.

  “The Irish stew is very good tonight, sir,” said the dining-room steward.

  It seemed almost like an omen.

  “My favorite dinner, and I thought I was going t
o miss it. Not that it could be half as good as Mrs Jafferty’s—our housekeeper,” Mr Clarron explained to his guest. “She makes the best you ever tasted. Of course, she would. Irish as Paddy’s pig, but a marvelous old biddy. They don’t make ’em like that anymore these days.”

  “How long have you had this treasure?” asked the young man perfunctorily.

  “Only three weeks—and believe me, my boy, I sleep with my fingers crossed. We’ve had a bad time with servants. My wife being an invalid makes it especially difficult, it’s bound to make extra work. But Mrs Jafferty never complains. And to think that I came near not hiring her at all.”

  “Really?” said his guest politely.

  “I got her through an agency, you see, but she didn’t have any references. I mean, nothing that I could actually verify. She’d been in her last job for more than twenty years, but then the people had gone off to live in New Zealand and she didn’t want to leave England. She had a glowing letter of recommendation, but of course those can be faked. And even the place where she’d been staying since then, she’d only had a room there for a few days, and she’d been out all the time looking for jobs, so they knew nothing about her. I have to be extra careful, you know, because my wife insists on keeping all her jewels in the house.”

  “A bit risky, isn’t it?” said the other, stifling a yawn.

  “It wasn’t an easy decision to make. But we were getting quite desperate, and if she was as good as the letter said I was afraid of losing her to somebody else while I was waiting for a reply from her last employers in New Zealand. So I decided to take the gamble. And I must say, she seems to be honest to the last halfpenny. I let her do all the shopping, and our bills are the smallest they’ve ever been…By George, though,” Mr Clarron said with a sudden frown, “a suspicious character did turn up in Maidenhead today, asking where I lived. Wouldn’t it be frightful if they were…? Oh, but that’s too far-fetched. But I wish I hadn’t thought of it just now.”