The Saint on the Spanish Main (The Saint Series) Page 7

  “All I know,” Herbert Wexall said, “is that I was in my study, reading and signing the letters that I dictated this morning.”

  “And I was getting dressed,” said his wife.

  “So was I,” said Janet Blaise.

  “I guess I was in the shower,” said Reginald Herrick.

  “I was having a bubble bath,” said Pauline Stone.

  “I was still working,” said Astron. “This morning I started a new chapter of my book—in my mind, you understand. I do not write by putting everything on paper. For me it is necessary to meditate, to feel, to open floodgates in my mind, so that I can receive the wisdom that comes from beyond the—”

  “Quite,” Major Fanshire assented politely. “The point is that none of you have alibis, if you need them. You were all going about your own business, in your own rooms. Mr Templar was changing in the late Mr Vosper’s room—”

  “I wasn’t here,” Arthur Gresson said recklessly. “I drove back to my own place—I’m staying at the Fort Montagu Beach Hotel. I wanted a clean shirt. I drove back there, and when I came back here all this had happened.”

  “There’s not much difference,” Major Fanshire said. “Dr Horan tells me we couldn’t establish the time of death within an hour or two, anyway…So the next thing we come to is the question of motive. Did anyone here,” Fanshire said almost innocently, “have any really serious trouble with Mr Vosper?”

  There was an uncomfortable silence, which the Saint finally broke by saying, “I’m on the outside here, so I’ll take the rap. I’ll answer for everyone.”

  The Superintendent cocked his bright eyes.

  “Very well, sir. What would you say?”

  “My answer,” said the Saint, “is—everybody.”

  There was another silence, but a very different one, in which it seemed, surprisingly, as if all of them relaxed as unanimously as they had stiffened before. And yet, in its own way, this relaxation was as self-conscious and uncomfortable as the preceding tension had been. Only the Saint, who had every attitude of the completely careless onlooker, and Major Fanshire, whose deferential patience was impregnably correct, seemed immune to the interplay of hidden strains.

  “Would you care to go any further?” Fanshire asked.

  “Certainly,” said the Saint. “I’ll go anywhere. I can say what I like, and I don’t have to care whether anyone is on speaking terms with me tomorrow. I’ll go on record with my opinion that the late Mr Vosper was one of the most unpleasant characters I’ve ever met. I’ll make the statement, if it isn’t already general knowledge, that he made a specialty of needling everyone he spoke to or about. He goaded everyone with nasty little things that he knew, or thought he knew, about them. I wouldn’t blame anyone here for wanting, at least theoretically, to kill him.”

  “I’m not exactly concerned with your interpretation of blame,” Fanshire said detachedly. “But if you have any facts, I’d like to hear them.”

  “I have no facts,” said the Saint coolly. “I only know that in the few hours I’ve been here, Vosper made statements to me, a stranger, about everyone here, any one of which could be called fighting words.”

  “You will have to be more specific,” Fanshire said.

  “Okay,” said the Saint. “I apologize in advance to anyone it hurts. Remember, I’m only repeating the kind of thing that made Vosper a good murder candidate…I am now specific. In my hearing, he called Reg Herrick a dumb athlete who was trying to marry Janet Blaise for her money. He suggested that Janet was a stupid juvenile for taking him seriously. He called Astron a commercial charlatan. He implied that Lucy Wexall was a dope and a snob. He inferred that Herb Wexall had more use for his secretary’s sex than for her stenography, and he thought out loud that Pauline was amenable. He called Mr Gresson a crook to his face.”

  “And during all this,” Fanshire said, with an inoffensiveness that had to be heard to be believed, “he said nothing about you?”

  “He did indeed,” said the Saint. “He analyzed me, more or less, as a flamboyant phony.”

  “And you didn’t object to that?”

  “I hardly could,” Simon replied blandly, “after I’d hinted to him that I thought he was even phonier.”

  It was a line on which a stage audience could have tittered, but the tensions of the moment let it sink with a slow thud.

  Fanshire drew down his upper lip with one forefinger and nibbled it inscrutably.

  “I expect this bores you as much as it does me, but this is the job I’m paid for. I’ve got to say that all of you had the opportunity, and from what Mr Templar says you could all have had some sort of motive. Well, now I’ve got to look into what you might call the problem of physical possibility.”

  Simon Templar lighted a cigarette. It was the only movement that anyone made, and after that he was the most intent listener of them all as Fanshire went on, “Dr Horan says, and I must say I agree with him, that to drive that umbrella shaft clean through a man’s chest must have taken quite exceptional strength. It seems to be something that no woman, and probably no ordinary man, could have done.”

  His pale bright eyes came to rest on Herrick as he finished speaking, and the Saint found his own eyes following others in the same direction.

  The picture formed in his mind, the young giant towering over a prostrate Vosper, the umbrella raised in his mighty arms like a fantastic spear and the setting sun flaming on his red head, like an avenging angel, and the thrust downwards with all the power of those Herculean shoulders…and then, as Herrick’s face began to flush under the awareness of so many stares, Janet Blaise suddenly cried out, “No! No—it couldn’t have been Reggie!”

  Fanshire’s gaze transferred itself to her curiously, and she said in a stammering rush, “You see, it’s silly, but we didn’t quite tell the truth, I mean about being in our own rooms. As a matter of fact, Reggie was in my room most of the time. We were…talking.”

  The Superintendent cleared his throat and continued to gaze at her stolidly for a while. He didn’t make any comment. But presently he looked at the Saint in the same dispassionately thoughtful way that he had first looked at Herrick.

  Simon said calmly, “Yes, I was just wondering myself whether I could have done it. And I had a rather interesting thought.”

  “Yes, Mr Templar?”

  “Certainly it must take quite a lot of strength to drive a spike through a man’s chest with one blow. But now remember that this wasn’t just a spike, or a spear. It had an enormous great umbrella on top of it. Now think what would happen if you were stabbing down with a thing like that?”

  “Well, what would happen?”

  “The umbrella would be like a parachute. It would be like a sort of sky anchor holding the shaft back. The air resistance would be so great that I’m wondering how anyone, even a very strong man, could get much momentum into the thrust. And the more force he put into it, the more likely he’d be to lift himself off the ground, rather than drive the spike down.”

  Fanshire digested this, blinking, and took his full time to do it.

  “That certainly is a thought,” he admitted. “But damn it,” he exploded, “we know it was done. So it must have been possible.”

  “There’s something entirely backwards about that logic,” said the Saint. “Suppose we say, if it was impossible, maybe it wasn’t done.”

  “Now you’re being a little ridiculous,” Fanshire snapped. “We saw—”

  “We saw a man with the sharp iron-tipped shaft of a beach umbrella through his chest. We jumped to the natural conclusion that somebody stuck it into him like a sword. And that may be just what a clever murderer meant us to think.”

  Then it was Arthur Gresson who shattered the fragile silence by leaping out of his chair like a bouncing ball.

  “I’ve got it!” he yelped. “Believe me, everybody, I’ve got it! This’ll kill you!”

  “I hope not,” Major Fanshire said dryly. “But what is it?”

  “Listen,” Gre
sson said. “I knew something rang a bell somewhere, but I couldn’t place it. Now it all comes back to me. This is something I only heard at the hotel the other day, but some of you must have heard it before. It happened about a year ago, when Gregory Peck was visiting here. He stayed at the same hotel where I am, and one afternoon he was on the beach, and the wind came up, just like it did today, and it picked up one of those beach umbrellas and carried it right to where he was lying, and the point just grazed his ribs and gave him a nasty gash, but what the people who saw it happen were saying was that if it’d been just a few inches the other way, it could have gone smack into his heart, and you’d’ve had a film star killed in the most sensational way that ever was. Didn’t you ever hear about that, Major?”

  “Now you mention it,” Fanshire said slowly, “I think I did hear something about it.”

  “Well,” Gresson said, “what if it happened again this afternoon, to someone who wasn’t as lucky as Peck?”

  There was another of those electric silences of assimilation, out of which Lucy Wexall said, “Yes, I heard about that.” And Janet said, “Remember, I told you about it! I was visiting some friends at the hotel that day, and I didn’t see it happen, but I was there for the commotion.”

  Gresson spread out his arms, his round face gleaming with excitement and perspiration.

  “That’s got to be it!” he said. “You remember how Vosper was lying under the umbrella outside the patio when we started playing touch football, and he got sore because we were kicking sand over him, and he went off to the other end of the beach? But he didn’t take the umbrella with him. The wind did that, after we all went off to change. And this time it didn’t miss!”

  Suddenly Astron stood up beside him, but where Gresson had risen like a jumping bean, this was like the growth and unfolding of a tree.

  “I have heard many words,” Astron said, in his firm gentle voice, “but now at last I think I am hearing truth. No man struck the blasphemer down. The arrow of God smote him, in his wickedness and his pride, as it was written long ago in the stars.”

  “You can say that again,” Gresson proclaimed triumphantly. “He sure had it coming.”

  Again the Saint drew at his cigarette and created his own vision behind half-closed eyes. He saw the huge umbrella plucked from the sand by the invisible fingers of the wind, picked up and hurled spinning along the deserted twilight beach, its great mushroom spread of gaudy canvas no longer a drag now but a sail for the wind to get behind, the whole thing transformed into a huge unearthly dart flung with literally superhuman power, the arrow of God indeed. A fantastic, an almost unimaginable solution, and yet it did not have to be imagined because there were witnesses that it had actually almost happened once before…

  Fanshire was saying, “By Jove, that’s the best suggestion I’ve heard yet—without any religious implication, of course. It sounds as if it could be the right answer!”

  Simon’s eyes opened on him fully for an instant, almost pityingly, and then closed completely as the true and right and complete answer rolled through the Saint’s mind like a long peaceful wave.

  “I have one question to ask,” said the Saint.

  “What’s that?” Fanshire said, too politely to be irritable, yet with a trace of impatience, as if he hated the inconvenience of even defending such a divinely tailored theory.

  “Does anyone here have a gun?” asked the Saint.

  There was an almost audible creaking of knitted brows, and Fanshire said, “Really, Mr Templar, I don’t quite follow you.”

  “I only asked,” said the Saint imperturbably, “if anyone here had a gun. I’d sort of like to know the answer before I explain why.”

  “I have a revolver,” Wexall said with some perplexity. “What about it?”

  “Could we see it, please?” said the Saint.

  “’I’ll get it,” said Pauline Stone.

  She got up and left the room.

  “You know I have a gun, Fanshire,” Wexall said. “You gave me my permit. But I don’t see—”

  “Neither do I,” Fanshire said.

  The Saint said nothing. He devoted himself to his cigarette, with impregnable detachment, until the voluptuous secretary came back. Then he put out the cigarette and extended his hand.

  Pauline looked at Wexall, hesitantly, and at Fanshire. The Superintendent nodded a sort of grudging acquiescence. Simon took the gun and broke it expertly.

  “A Colt .38 Detective Special,” he said. “Unloaded.” He sniffed the barrel. “But fired quite recently,” he said, and handed the gun to Fanshire.

  “I used it myself this morning,” Lucy Wexall said cheerfully.

  “Janet and Reg and I were shooting at the Portuguese men-of-war. There were quite a lot of them around before the breeze came up.”

  “I wondered what the noise was,” Wexall said vaguely.

  “I was coming up the drive when I heard it first,” Gresson said, “and I thought the next war had started.”

  “This is all very int’resting,” Fanshire said, removing the revolver barrel from the proximity of his nostrils with a trace of exasperation, “but I don’t see what it has to do with the case. Nobody has been shot—”

  “Major Fanshire,” said the Saint quietly, “may I have a word with you, outside? And will you keep that gun in your pocket so that at least we can hope there will be no more shooting?”

  The Superintendent stared at him for several seconds, and at last unwillingly got up.

  “Very well, Mr Templar.” He stuffed the revolver into the side pocket of his rumpled white jacket, and glanced back at his impassive chocolate sentinel. “Sergeant, see that nobody leaves here, will you?”

  He followed Simon out on to the verandah and said almost peremptorily, “Come on now, what’s this all about?”

  It was so much like a flash of a faraway Scotland Yard Inspector that the Saint had to control a smile. But he took Fanshire’s arm and led him persuasively down the front steps to the beach. Off to their left a tiny red glow-worm bunked low down under the silver stars.

  “You still have somebody watching the place where the body was found,” Simon said.

  “Of course,” Fanshire grumbled. “As a matter of routine. But the sand’s much too soft to show any footprints, and—”

  “Will you walk over there with me?”

  Fanshire sighed briefly, and trudged beside him. His politeness was dogged but unfailing. He was a type that had been schooled from adolescence never to give up, even to the ultimate in ennui. In the interests of total fairness, he would be game to the last yawn.

  He did go so far as to say, “I don’t know what you’re getting at, but why couldn’t it have been an accident?”

  “I never heard a better theory in my life,” said the Saint equably, “with one insuperable flaw.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Only,” said the Saint, very gently, “that the wind wasn’t blowing the right way.”

  Major Fanshire kept his face straight ahead to the wind and said nothing more after that until they reached the glow-worm that they were making for and it became a cigarette-end that a constable dropped as he came to attention.

  The place where Floyd Vosper had been lying was marked off in a square of tape, but there was nothing out of the ordinary about it except some small stains that showed almost black under the flashlight which the constable produced.

  “May I mess up the scene a bit?” Simon asked.

  “I don’t see why not,” Fanshire said doubtfully. “It doesn’t show anything, really.”

  Simon went down on his knees and began to dig with his hands, around and under the place where the stains were. Minutes later he stood up, with sand trickling through his fingers, and showed Fanshire the mushroomed scrap of metal that he had found.

  “A .38 bullet,” Fanshire said, and whistled.

  “And I think you’ll be able to prove it was fired from the gun you have in your pocket,” said the Saint. “Also you’
d better have a sack of sand picked up from where I was digging. I think a laboratory examination will find that it also contains fragments of bone and human flesh.”

  “You’ll have to explain this to me,” Fanshire said quite humbly.

  Simon dusted his hands and lighted a cigarette.

  “Vosper was lying on his face when I last saw him,” he said, “and I think he was as much passed out as sleeping. With the wind and the surf and the soft sand, it was easy for the murderer to creep up on him and shoot him in the back where he lay. But the murderer didn’t want you looking for guns and comparing bullets. The umbrella was the inspiration. I don’t have to remind you that the exit hole of a bullet is much larger than the entrance. By turning Vosper’s body over, the murderer found a hole in his chest that it can’t have been too difficult to force the umbrella shaft through—obliterating the original wound and confusing everybody in one simple operation.”

  “Let’s get back to the house,” said the Superintendent abruptly.

  After a while, as they walked, Fanshire said, “It’s going to feel awfully funny, having to arrest Herbert Wexall.”

  “Good God!” said the Saint, in honest astonishment. “You weren’t thinking of doing that?”

  Fanshire stopped and blinked at him under the still distant light of the uncurtained windows.

  “Why not?”

  “Did Herbert seem at all guilty when he admitted he had a gun? Did he seem at all uncomfortable—I don’t mean just puzzled, like you were—about having it produced? Was he ready with the explanation of why it still smelled of being fired?“

  “But if anyone else used Wexall’s gun,” Fanshire pondered laboriously, “why should they go to such lengths to make it look as if no gun was used at all, when Wexall would obviously have been suspected?”

  “Because it was somebody who didn’t want Wexall to take the rap,” said the Saint. “Because Wexall is the goose who could still lay golden eggs—but he wouldn’t do much laying on the end of a rope, or whatever you do to murderers here.”