The Saint Around the World (The Saint Series) Page 9

  “Go on.”

  “What a wonderful gag, Claud! He passes himself off as his own housekeeper, and creates an identity that a dozen tradesmen and villagers will vouch for—only telling his wife that he can’t find anyone and he’s doing all the housework himself. Being confined to her bed, she never saw him go out or come in in that costume, and they never had visitors. So when she’s found dead, and her jewels are stolen, and Mrs Jafferty has disappeared, it’s so obvious that he doesn’t need much of an alibi. The beetle brains of the CID are so busy combing the country for Mrs Jafferty that they’d never think of anything else.”

  “But what did you do? Teal almost howled.

  “I didn’t stop there. In the top drawer of his dresser I found those gloves he had on, and a small crowbar which is now on the floor of his wife’s bedroom where he used it to jimmy her jewel drawer. No doubt someone would swear Mrs Jafferty bought it. I went to the maid’s room. There were a few clothes and personal articles which a woman like that would have—he was that thorough. And I also found this, which you can bet Mrs Jafferty bought from the local chemist.”

  He produced a small dark bottle from his pocket and handed it over.

  “Believe me, Claud, that was a jolt. I’d hoped to goose him into something rash, but it was meant to be something that I could move in fast and prevent—like perhaps a clonk on the head with that crowbar. And now I was certain that this was the night, with him going to London and Mrs Jafferty supposedly out. But poison…”

  Adrienne Halberd was reading the label on the bottle over Teal’s shoulder, and her face had gone white.

  “She had a lovely plate of Irish stew,” said the Saint remorselessly. “I said, just to clinch it: ‘I bet your cook is an Irish woman.’ ‘Oh, no,’ she said, ‘we haven’t been able to get a cook for weeks. My husband has to do everything, but he does it so well—’ ”

  A sort of inarticulate sob came from the talented husband, and Mr Teal somewhat belatedly remembered an official obligation.

  “Mr Clarron,” he said formally, “it’s my duty to warn you that anything you say will be taken down and may be used in evidence. Now, did you wish to make any statement?”

  “I did it,” Clarron said hopelessly. “Everything. Just as he said.”

  Teal nodded to the constable with the notebook.

  “And the one before?”

  “Yes. I knocked the radio into her bath.”

  “What about the first one—the one who was drowned?”

  “I killed her too,” Clarron said with his head in his hands. “I upset the boat and held her under.”

  Suddenly the girl thrust herself between them.

  “You idiots, all of you!” she cried insubordinately. “We might still save this one. We should be getting a doctor—”

  “Don’t waste his time,” said the Saint. “I tried to break it all to Mrs Clarron, but it was tough going. As you can imagine. She got quite hysterical at one stage, but luckily there was quite a hysterical play on television at the same time, so nobody outside would have noticed much. But at least she lost all her appetite. I took advantage of that to arrange the table as if she’d been eating, and put most of the stew, the wine, and the coffee in other containers, which you can take for analysis if you need it. I got her half-convinced, but I knew she was in no condition to play dead when Reggie came in, even if I could have talked her into trying, and she had to do that if he was to book himself all the way to the gallows. So when I heard his key in the lock, I just gave her a little judo tap on the neck.” Simon smiled apologetically. “She should wake up any minute now, and all she’ll need is an aspirin and a good dinner.”

  As if on cue, a dull moan reached them from the floor above, and Adrienne ran up the stairs.

  9

  It was somewhat later when Teal, Simon, and the girl wound up back at the cottage next door.

  The uniformed men had taken Mr Clarron away, and a nurse had arrived to take charge of his wife. Mrs Clarron had refused to let a doctor be called in with sedatives, but she was quietly and methodically getting drunk, which would eventually have a similar effect. The Saint couldn’t blame her.

  “That’s the one ugly thing left,” he said. “She’s still got to live with the results of Reginald’s first attempt. And I’ll always wonder if it wouldn’t have been kinder to let her eat that stew.”

  “Perhaps you won’t have to,” Adrienne said. “She told me that the specialists had been talking about another operation that might fix her up.

  The Saint’s eyes lightened.

  “Then maybe it’s not so indecent to celebrate after all. And some celebration certainly seems called for. I suppose you did bring some beer when you thought I’d be waiting when you came back, and Claud and I should drink a parting toast.”

  “You’re forgetting,” Teal said stodgily, “I don’t drink. Fat men didn’t ought to drink.”

  Adrienne made him a cup of tea.

  “The one thing that puzzles me,” Simon said, “is why you took so long to show up at Clarron’s, Claud, after I disappeared from here. Or, put it another way, how you were on his doorstep at the ideal moment.”

  “After you left Heathrow,” Teal said reluctantly, “I came down to the Maidenhead police station and waited for Miss Halberd to get in touch with me. When she reported that Clarron had gone to London, I had a man watch the railway station to let us know when he came back. Then she phoned and told me you’d left, and I hoped you meant it. I came over and joined her here. We were informed as soon as Clarron got off the train, and we started watching his house. I was afraid he might try something desperate soon, after the scare you’d given him, and I could only hope we’d be able to prevent it. As soon as he started screaming, we rushed over.”

  “But you hadn’t spotted that Mrs Jafferty was purely fictitious.”

  “Not yet.”

  “And if I hadn’t been there, you still wouldn’t have been in time to save Mrs Clarron’s life.”

  “We might have been able to get her to a hospital in time.”

  “You wouldn’t. But even if you had, you’d only have been looking for Mrs Jafferty. And even if you’d discovered that she was a phony, you could only have convicted Reginald of attempted murder. It took the fright I threw into him to make him confess everything.”

  “That’s probably true,” Teal said grudgingly. “But it still doesn’t excuse your interfering and taking the law into your own hands.” His voice rose a little. “And one of these days—”

  “Now you’re forgetting,” Simon reminded him gently. “There aren’t going to be any more of these days for you. You’re retiring, and you’ll only read about me in the papers.”

  Chief Inspector Teal swallowed.

  He looked ahead into a vague Elysian vista in which there were no problems, no apprehensions—and no taunting privateer with unquenchable devilment in his eyes and an impudent forefinger pointing like a rapier at his stomach. It would be very restful, and there would be something lacking.

  “That’s right,” said Mr Teal. “I was forgetting.”

  He hauled himself sluggishly to his feet, and put out his hand, and for almost the first time in all those years Simon saw something very like a smile on his round pink apoplectic face.

  “I’m rather glad it ends up this way,” Teal said. He glanced self-consciously around him. “But I’ve still got work to do tonight. And I think Miss Halberd has some apologizing to do which she might rather do in private. The rent’s paid on this cottage to the end of the month,” he added inconsequently. “So if you’ll excuse me—”

  “Damn it, Claud Eustace,” said the Saint, “I’m going to miss you too.”

  THE RELUCTANT NUDIST

  INTRODUCTION

  The narrative calendar now jumps some twenty-three years to a summer in the South of France, when I learned that the Ile du Levant, just a few miles across from the resort where I was staying, was inhabited by nudists—or, as they prefer to be
called, naturists. But more than that, and especially intriguing, was the fact that it was not a “colony” or a club, but simply a public place where nudity was officially tolerated by local ordinance. You didn’t have to be introduced or join anything, you just paid your fare and went over on the regular ferry, you didn’t even have to take any clothes off if you didn’t want to, but you would have no legal complaint if you were shocked by anything you saw.

  The friend who has appeared in many Saint stories under the name of Monty Hayward was vacationing at the same hotel, and he had never seen anything like that, but he professed to be sturdily unshockable and highly curious, so we went over together to have a look.

  Again it was a rare and illuminating experience, and a useful addition to our anecdotage, although before we had been on the beach very long we were as naked as the most devoted (as proved by their area of sun-tan) habitués. The habitués, obviously, had developed an imperviousness to the stares of the voyeurs, who were undoubtedly numerous; but just because of this we both felt a sort of moral compulsion to disassociate ourselves at least in costume from the more conspicuous peeping Toms.

  I did not then and have not since become a convert to the faith of Nudism. What this confession leads up to is only that out of the exploratory trip with Monty emerged, eventually, a Saint story titled “The Reluctant Nudist,” which was first published in The Saint Magazine and subsequently in the collection The Saint Around the World.

  As I have often asserted, I have written very few stories which were not documented by my own personal researches, in pursuit of which authenticity I have never spared myself any peril or hardship…

  Leslie Charteris (1965)

  1

  “When do you start taking your clothes off?” Simon Templar asked, with a faint hint of malice.

  George McGeorge wriggled unhappily inside his pastel blue silk shirt and sharply creased slacks. Between the crown of his stylish Panama and the soles of his immaculate suede shoes, he was almost conspicuously a young man to whom the ministrations of tailor and haberdasher were more than ordinarily important. His rather vapidly good-looking face took on a tinge of pink under its urban pallor.

  “Not before everyone else does, anyway,” he said.

  “Never mind about anyone else,” Simon persisted. “I think it would give Uncle Waldo a big glow to see that you were entering into the spirit of the thing right from the start.”

  “In that case, he’d be still more bucked if I could introduce you in your birthday suit too, and tell him that I’d even made another convert on the way over.”

  “That wasn’t in the deal, George. I offered to come with you as moral support and as an interested observer—not as a sort of trophy. And because it sounded like one of the few places left in the world where I could feel reasonably sure of not getting mixed up in some sort of crime. I’m banking on the idea that nudists couldn’t carry around much stuff worth stealing, and that murder is a lot more difficult where it would be such a problem to conceal a weapon.”

  “The closer I get to it,” Mr McGeorge said darkly, “the more I wish one of ’em would strangle Uncle Waldo.”

  The Saint grinned, and gazed with tranquil anticipation at the islands spread before the bow of the little ferry. There were three of them to be seen, the fourth member of the group being just below the western horizon; reading from right to left he could identify, from an earlier glance at a map, the small hump of Bagaud, the much larger bulk of Port-Cros, and finally, the longest and most easterly, the Ile du Levant, which was their destination. Lying in a corner of the Mediterranean which is still virtually terra incognita to the American tourist army, whose Riviera extends no further west than the outskirts of Cannes, they are known to prosy official cartographers as the Iles d’Hyères, but to the more flowery-minded authors of travel brochures as the Golden Isles; while one of them, to a still more specialized public, stands for the closest approximation to the Garden of Eden to be found within the borders of civilization.

  For this island of about six miles in length and roughly a mile and a quarter in average width, which is separated by only nine miles of water from the unglamorized but busy little Provençal resort of Le Lavandou, is the beneficiary of an official dispensation which remains unique among the local ordinances of Europe.

  “You see,” Mr McGeorge had explained it, “over there it’s perfectly legal for anyone—I mean women as well as men—to go around in a sort of triangular fig-leaf effect, and nothing else.”

  This happened at the bar of the Club at Cavalière, the most exclusive hostelry on that stretch of the coast, where they had drifted into one of those usually sterile bar-stool conversations to which this was to prove a notable exception.

  “Oh,” said the Saint. “A kind of semi-nudist colony.”

  “Not even semi,” the other said. “That’s only in the village. When they go swimming, they’re allowed to take everything off. And the point is, it isn’t a colony or a club. It isn’t private property, and you don’t have to belong to anything, or join anything. Anybody can go there. And you don’t even have to take off your hat if you don’t want to. It’s just that there’s no law against taking off practically everything if you like—and from the pictures I’ve seen, most of them seem to like.”

  “Zat is right.” Raymond Vidal, proprietor and host of the Club, who had been listening, chimed in with genially expansive corroboration. “It was about nineteen ’undred twenty, zat two docteurs from Paris, named Durvilie, very serious men, wish to bring people to be cured by ze sun, and zey start to make ze village which zey call Héliopolis. And so zat ze patient can get ze most sun wiz ze least clozing, ze ayrrange a tolérance from ze Commune of Hyères, so zat no one ’as to wear more zan ze slip minimum. But it is all quite open. It is very beautiful, very natural. You should go zaire and see it.”

  “I have to go there,” said Mr McGeorge, with no echo of enthusiasm, “to see my uncle.”

  He looked like a young man who should have an uncle—preferably one with a considerable fortune, a strong sense of family responsibility, and no wife or offspring of his own. Without some such source of bounty, one would only have felt sorry about his prospects in a callously competitive world. He was the first specimen that Simon had encountered in many years of a type that he had thought was virtually extinct—the spoiled butterfly of good family, a good education which had left no mark on anything but his accent, of ingenuous snobbery, impeccable manners, cultivated indolence, a gift for fairly amusing and decorative frivolity, and absolutely no conception of a world which did not revolve around the smartest clubs, the most fashionable resorts, and the most glittering parties. How he had ever managed to navigate himself that far from the languid eddies of the Croisette and the Cap d’Antibes was already a mystery, and that such a creature could have a personal link, however tenuous, with a place like the Ile du Levant, was an anomaly that no inveterate student of oddities could casually pass up.

  The Saint signed to the bartender for some more Peter Dawson.

  “Tell me about this uncle,” he begged, with fascinated sympathy.

  “He lives there,” said McGeorge, in the same tone in which he might have admitted that his uncle was addicted to cheating at cards.

  2

  Mr Waldo Oddington, Simon learned, patiently probing for information as he would have extracted morsels of succulence from the shell of a cracked crab, was the brother of McGeorge’s mother, and by this time McGeorge’s only surviving kin. Brother and sister had been deeply attached to each other, in spite of Mr Oddington’s lifelong record of eccentricities, and one of the late Mrs McGeorge’s last injunctions to her son had been that he should never forget that blood was thicker than water, and that in his veins the Oddington strain of fluid was a full fifty per cent represented. George McGeorge had dutifully tried to live up to this, encouraging his uncle to regard him almost as the son which Mr Oddington, a bachelor, had never begotten for himself; although one gathered that this
had been no easy task for a young man of Mr McGeorge’s highly developed respect for certain conventions.

  “He’s spent his life getting one bee after another in his bonnet. About the first time I can remember him visiting us, when I was a kid, he insisted on having the bed taken out of his room and sleeping on the floor. Said it was the only way to have a healthy backbone. He thought it was disgraceful that Mother was letting me sleep on a mattress and ruin my spine. Another time he had a theory that expectant mothers would have a much easier time if they went around for the last few months on all fours. He got in a bit of trouble when he started telling this to perfectly strange women that he saw in the street. He’s had a fling at vegetarianism, theosophy, yoga, folk dancing, and trying to live in a tree. Of course, he started going to nudist camps years ago. Then he finally heard about this Ile du Levant. Naturally he had to go and see it, and he’s been living there ever since. At last he’s found the one place where he can lead what he calls a normal civilized life and never needs to put any clothes on even to go out and buy a stamp. That would be fine as far as I’m concerned, if only he hadn’t asked me to visit him.”

  “Do you have to go?”

  “I’ve put it off as long as I can, but I can’t make it so obvious that I’d hurt the old codger’s feelings.”

  Simon could well understand that the feelings of a certain class of old codger are customarily treated with the utmost consideration. Not letting it sound too obvious, he remarked, “At least it sounds like a nice inexpensive fad. Or wouldn’t that make any difference?”

  “Well, he doesn’t have to worry too much about money.” McGeorge seemed a little embarrassed and anxious to change that subject. “But lately his letters have been full of some French girl who appears to be living with him, and I’ve wondered if she’s thinking of hitching on to a good thing.”