The Saint Around the World

1

“I suppose you wouldn’t be interested in helping me find my husband,” said the blonde.

“Frankly, I’ve heard a lot more exciting propositions,” Simon Templar admitted. “If he doesn’t have enough sense to appreciate you, why don’t we just let him stay lost, and have a ball?”

“But I really want him back,” she said. “You see, we’ve only been married a week, so I haven’t had time to get tired of him.”

Simon sipped his Dry Sack.

“All right,” he said. “Give me a clue. What was it about this bridegroom that impressed you so much, darling?”

“The name,” she said, “is Lona Dayne.”

“Well, that’s unusual, anyway. He must have to listen to a lot of funny cracks about it.”

“Lona Dayne is my name, idiot. Not ‘darling.’  ”

“Oh.”

He regarded her with pleasantly augmented interest. It had been an entirely shallow and stereotyped reaction, he realized, to identify and pigeonhole her so summarily as “the blonde.” Certainly she had the hair, of a tint much paler than straw, which his worldly eye inevitably measured against her light brown eyes and traced back from there to the alchemy of some beauty parlor — but wasn’t it a mere cliché of fiction that expensively rinsed blondes were by contrary definition cheap, while the only good ones owed their coloring solely to a lucky combination of chromosomes? The pretty face and approximately 35-23-35 vital statistics which convention also attributes to blondes appeared to be hers without any important debt to artifice. And she could get away with calling him Idiot, when she smiled in that provocatively intimate way while she said it.

“To me, you’ll still be darling,” he said. “At least, until your husband turns up. I suppose his name is Dayne too.”

“Naturally.”

“You can never be sure, these days.”

“Havelock Dayne.”

“It has rather a corny sound, but I guess his parents loved it.”

“I love your dialogue,” she said dispassionately. “But I wasn’t kidding. You are the Saint, aren’t you?”

Simon sighed. He had heard that question so often, by this time, that he seemed to have used up all the possible smooth, shocking, modest, impudent, evasive, chilling, misleading, or witty answers. Now he could only wish, belatedly, that he had had the forethought to insist on an alias. But while that might have let him enjoy one cocktail party as an anonymous guest, it wouldn’t have fitted in with the project that brought him to Bermuda.

It had been a good party, until then. The Saint had thought it a happy coincidence, for him, that a friend from many years back in Hollywood, Dick Van Hessen, was currently managing a miniature movie studio which had been improbably yet astutely set up in Bermuda to take advantage of tax privileges and lower costs to compete for the American television market. At the Van Hessens’ hillside house was therefore gathered, almost automatically, a useful cross-section of island personalities: the local bankers and bigwigs, the grim and the gay social sets, the press and the professions, the merchants and the dilettantes, and a leavening of working actors and visiting firemen on whom all the others could prove how easily they could mix with celebrities. The Saint’s cool blue eyes drifted down the long verandah that overlooked Hamilton Harbor, but failed to make any pertinent identification among the convivial mob.

“I’ve met so many people tonight, I couldn’t possibly remember half their names,” he confessed disarmingly, and with an unblushing lack of truth. “Does your husband have anything conspicuous about him — like a green mustache, for instance?”

“You haven’t met him tonight. He isn’t here.”

“When did you lose him, then?”

“The day before yesterday.”

“And only married five days at the time, according to what you said. It must have been a hell of a wedding. Did you have any inkling that Havelock was such a dizzy type when you agreed to let him love, honor, and pay the bills?”

“He isn’t at all. He’s lots of fun, of course, but he’s terribly ambitious and earnest too. He’s a lawyer.”

“I’m looking for a lawyer myself,” said the Saint. “Only I want one who’s already embezzled at least five million dollars. Have you known Havelock long enough to notice him flashing a lot of green stuff around?”

“I’m sorry,” she said stiffly. “I suppose I was asking for it. I should have known better. But I don’t think your dialogue is so excruciatingly funny, after all—”

A quiver of her lips spoiled the trenchant ring that her last sentence was phrased for, and she turned away quickly, but not quickly enough for him to miss the blurring of her eyes. He moved even more swiftly to place himself beside her again where she leaned over the verandah railing with her back turned squarely to the incurious crowd.

“Pardon my two left feet,” he said reasonably. “I’m afraid the atmosphere of the place got me. I thought you were playing it strictly chin-up and British, so I was going along with the gag. Let’s start over, if you’re serious.”

She looked at him, blinking hard.

“I am!”

“All right. I know how you’re feeling. I wish I could help. But just plain wandering husbands are a bit out of my line. I expect if you asked a few discreet friends and bartenders — or even the police—”

“But I can’t. I’ve had to cover up — tell everyone he’s laid up with a terrible cold. You’re the first person I’ve told, and I shouldn’t even have done that.”

“Then stop being silly. If he’s lost, he’s lost, and false pride won’t help you find him. Think yourself lucky he isn’t really a case up my alley, for which he’d have to be at least kidnaped or even murdered.”

“That,” she said steadily, “is exactly what I’m afraid of. Or I wouldn’t have talked to you.”

Without any change of expression, the Saint’s bronzed face seemed to become opaque, like a mask from behind which his eyes probed with a sort of rueful cynicism.

“Now I’ll begin to think you’re suffering from too much lurid literature.”

“You’d be wrong,” she said flatly. “Unless I suffered from writing it. Until a week ago, my name was Lona Shaw. Well, that doesn’t mean anything to you. But it would if you’d lived in England lately. I’ve worked for the London Daily Record since I was nineteen, and for the last four years I’ve been their star sob-sister. Do you have any idea how hard-boiled and unhysterical a girl has to be to hold that job on a newspaper like the Record?”

Simon nodded. Suddenly, as if a cloud had passed, the mask of his face was translucent again. It was the only outward sign that he had felt and recognized the icy caress of Destiny’s fingers along his spine.

“Okay.” he said soberly. “I’m sold.”

His gaze nickered over the crowded balcony again, warily conscious of the beginning of one of those unanimous re-shufflings that surge intermittently through the human molecules of every cocktail party, and even more sharply perceptive of the covetous glances of certain males within striking distance who had transparently settled on Lona Dayne as the most intriguing target for tonight and were getting set to cut in at the first opening.

Simon huddled strategically closer to her along the rail.

“I gather you came alone,” he said.

“Yes.”

“Me too. No plans for dinner?”

“No. Fay Van Hessen said I could—”

“She won’t mind. You just made a date with me, darling.”

He put down his glass, took her by the arm, and steered her firmly and skillfully into an eddy that was flowing towards the exit. The frustrated wolf pack was still standing on its heels as they jostled into the line that was babbling thanks and goodbyes.

“Oh, don’t go yet,” Fay protested. “We’re going to have some food presently.”

“But Lona’s husband might get better tomorrow, and I’d never get her all to myself again,” Simon said with a leer.

“Well, behave yourselves.”

“There should be a taxi waiting below.” Dick Van Hessen said helpfully. “Send him back from wherever you’re going, for the next customers.”

Then they were down the stairs, and the steep narrow driveway, and a taxi was waiting as predicted at the foot of the steep slope where the house perched. Simon put her in and said, “The Caravelle.”

“I ought to go home, really,” she said, “and see if there’s any message.”

“Which I suppose you’ve been doing for the last two days. If you’re out, he could leave a message, couldn’t he?”

“Yes — the caretaker promised he’d be around and listen for the phone.”

“Then you can call in and ask for news later. Meanwhile, you’ve got at least as much right to be out as he has.”

“But—”

A Bermuda taxi is not a vehicle in which to discuss anything confidential. Being derived from any miniature English car by the sole process of attaching a taximeter to the dashboard, the driver and passengers are huddled together as cozily as olives in a jar. The Saint nudged Lona Dayne gently, and pointed expressively at the back of the driver’s head, which he was trying not to bump with his knees.

“What’s this about a caretaker?” he said innocuously. “Aren’t you staying at a hotel?”

“We started in a hotel, of course, but we moved into this house just the day before Hav disappeared. You see, we were talking to the caretaker, and he happened to mention that his boss had just written and told him to try to rent it. The owner lives up in Canada and only comes down here in the winter, then Bob — that’s the caretaker — goes to Canada and takes care of his house there. Usually the house here just stands empty, but it seems as if the owner suddenly decided he might as well make a few dollars out of it. It’s absurdly reasonable, really, and Bob didn’t see why he couldn’t let us have it just for a month, while he’s waiting for someone who wants to take a longer lease. After we saw it, we simply couldn’t turn it down — it’s on a little island all of its own, the sort of thing you dream of. Only if we’d stayed in the hotel, perhaps we’d have been safer… But it’s the most romantic spot…”

Simon let her go on chattering trivialities, preferring to have her overdo it rather than go on with the important subject until they were safe from any uninvited audience, or at least until he knew how seriously they should be thinking of safety. He kept her headed off from any reference to her husband until they were settled at a table in a corner of the terrace overhanging the water, and had ordered a chicken in white wine and a bottle of Bollinger to go with it.

“What am I supposed to be celebrating?” she objected half-heartedly.

“I’m prescribing it to give you a lift, which I think you could use.”

He lighted their cigarettes, and settled his elbows squarely on the table, looking at her with sympathetic but disconcertingly penetrating detachment.

“Now,” he said with sudden bluntness. “What is this all about?”

“Have you heard of Roger Ivalot?”

He winced slightly.

“No,” he said. “And if I had, I wouldn’t believe it.”

“Why?”

“The name sounds even more improbable than your husband’s.”

“If you’d been in England lately—”

“I’m sorry. It’s already established that I’ve been spending my time in the wrong places. Just enlighten my ignorance.”

There was, however, some excuse for regarding anyone who had not heard of Roger Ivalot as benighted, as he soon learned.

In a country which is not by tradition or temperament adapted to the breeding of spectacular playboys, Mr Ivalot had succeeded in racking up a number of probable records. One of these could certainly be claimed for the rocket-like trajectory of his ascent from obscurity. Nobody, in fact, seemed to have known of his existence before the day less than two years ago when he had sent engraved invitations to the entire casts of the three most popular musicals then playing in London, bidding them to a champagne supper and dance in the Dorchester’s biggest private ballroom, for which he also hired the most popular orchestra available. While some of the stars were snooty or suspicious enough to ignore the offer, almost six hundred guests (including several uninvited escorts) showed up to sample the hospitality; and when a somewhat notorious soubrette, professing indignation because no one had been asked to take a champagne bath, peeled off her clothes and had herself showered from bottles held by a flock of eager volunteers, nothing less than the simultaneous outbreak of World War III could have prevented Mr Ivalot becoming a celebrity overnight.

“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.

“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.

“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.

“Now do you get an idea why we couldn’t resist it?” Lona Dayne said.

He nodded, conscious of the associations that must have heightened the strain that she was fighting.

“You’ll both be enjoying it again before long,” he said quietly, “if I’m still any good at these games.”

She turned and walked briskly over to the bar.

“How about a whisky and soda?”

“Thanks. But make mine with water.”

“Going back to your last question,” she said, making herself busy with her back turned, and speaking in a resolutely clear and business-like voice, “I’m certain now that Ivalot always passed as British. You see, one of the things that’s made him so hopelessly hard to trace is that there’s so little real information about him. In the hotels where he stayed, for instance, the only record was the name, Roger Ivalot — address, Bermuda. Only a British subject could have registered like that. If he’d been taken for a foreigner, he’d’ve had to fill out a form with a lot more questions than that, and give a passport number as well. And then we’d either have had more facts to go on, or the police would’ve been leading the hunt for him, for making false declarations.”

“Whereas right now there’s no official interest?”

“I’ve told you, there’s nothing against him except a paternity suit, and that sort of thing doesn’t concern Scotland Yard.”

With a discreet knock, the caretaker entered.

“Will it be all right if I wait in my quarters, ma’am,” he asked respectfully, “until you want me to row Mr Templar ashore?”

Lona Dayne turned with the Saint’s drink in her hand, nonplussed for an instant, and then Simon took it and said calmly, “That won’t be necessary. I’d much rather take you ashore, Lona, to a hotel, where I think you’d be safer than out here.”

“But this is almost like a castle with a moat around it!”

“And anybody who can row, or even swim, can cross a moat. Unless it’s guarded. So if you’re determined to stay here, which you probably are, to be around for any more messages that come in, I’m going to stay and join the garrison.”

She hesitated barely an instant.

“That would be quite wonderful,” she said frankly, and he admired her for not making any half-hearted protests. “Bob, would you make sure that everything’s ship-shape in the spare room before you go to bed? And thank you for waiting up.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

The caretaker withdrew, looking more than ever like an Ethiopian pontiff with a troublesome congregation.

“I’m afraid this shocks him even more than your husband’s disappearing act,” Simon remarked.

“I can’t help that. I’ll be perfectly honest now and admit that I’ve been scared for myself too. But I’d have tried not to tell you if you hadn’t mentioned it first.” She picked up her drink and brought it over to join him. “It’s true, isn’t it — a man in Ivalot’s position might do anything?”

The Saint selected a corner of one of the big settees and let himself down into it.

“That depends on how desperate he is — which means, what he has to feel desperate about. You say nobody’s filed any criminal charge against him. So that would mean that he chose to pull up stakes and vanish completely, leaving all the fleshpots that he seems to have thought were fun, just to duck a common paternity suit. But half of those suits are plain ordinary blackmail, anyway — which Jolly Roger seems to have suspected, since he offered a fairly handsome settlement. From the rest of your account, he doesn’t sound like a guy who’d be unduly concerned about his reputation, at any rate with the blue-nosed set. So if the little mother’s price was too high, why didn’t he just get himself a tough lawyer and fight it?”

“You tell me,” she said. “I’ve been going around it all by myself until my head’s swimming.”

“Well, I’d say it suggests that he had something pretty big to hide. I don’t see him being so scared of the lawsuit; but the lawyers would certainly start investigating his means before they got into court, in order to prove how much he could afford to pay, and I’m inclined to think that’s what scared him. Did anyone ever check on these uranium mines he was supposed to have an interest in?”

“Yes, we did. We contacted every Australian and South African mining company that has anything to do with uranium. None of them had ever heard of him, and his name wasn’t on any of their lists of shareholders. But of course, his shares wouldn’t necessarily have to be in his own name.”

“No. But it’s usually only millionaires and big operators who’re concerned about keeping their holdings hidden. According to Ivalot’s story, as you told it, he wasn’t in either category when he bet his shirt on the atomic future. So why would he have bought stocks then under a phony name?”

“Perhaps even in those days he didn’t want to be investigated.”

“Perhaps. But another thing. He must have done something to earn a living and save up a stake before he invested in uranium. While you were doing your research on him, didn’t you ever turn up anything on that background?”

“I tried to, naturally. But I didn’t find out anything. If anyone asked him, he must have managed to dodge the question.”

“So what this all boils down to,” said the Saint, “is that we don’t have one single solid fact about him before he exploded on London like a bomb, and everything you’ve told me except what he actually did in London before witnesses is probably pure fiction.”

“Except that he did have a lot of money.”

“He spent a good deal of money. But not millions. We don’t know how much he had left when he checked out.”

“And he is in Bermuda.”

“Apparently. Which only leads to another question: why? When things got too hot in London, he took a powder. Nothing happened to the gal who was giving him trouble. But here, it’s your husband who disappears. Why?”

She put her clenched fists to her temples.

“What are you driving at?” she pleaded. “You’re only making it seem more hopeless!”

“I have to do this, Lona,” he said steadily. “It’s the dull part of playing detective. First I have to prune off everything that we don’t actually know at all. It isn’t till we’ve trimmed off all the camouflage and confusion that we’ll get a good look at what’s really left. And raising more questions sometimes leads to more answers. For instance, that last one. The two most likely reasons why our boy hasn’t left Bermuda are either a) that he feels better able to cope with things here, or b) that it’s harder for him to leave. I wouldn’t call those sensational clues, but they might come in handy before we’re through.”

She recovered herself again, with a toss of her blonde head something like a dog shaking off water.

“I’m sorry,” she said, smiling very hard. “I must remember, I told you I was tough. What next?”

“Something very important. Do you have a picture of this character?”

“No. That’s what makes it even more impossible.”

“A playboy like that never got his picture taken?”

“Photographers don’t go popping flash bulbs all over the place in England like they do in America, or at least in American films. They’d have to ask his permission, and if he didn’t want any pictures he could get out of it.”

Simon scowled thoughtfully.

“And yet he didn’t care how many people saw him making an exhibition of himself — he did everything to attract attention. Damn it, it doesn’t make sense… Wait a minute, though. Maybe it does. It means he wasn’t afraid of anyone in England recognizing him, but a news photo might go anywhere in the world.”

“Another clue?”

“Could be. But you must have a description of him.”

She screwed up her eyes a little, concentrating.

“Ordinary height — about five feet ten. Medium build, but quite muscular. The girl with the twins said he was in very fine shape for his age — and please don’t say whatever that vulgar expression is getting ready for, Simon, I think I’ve already heard every possible joke on that subject. He told her he was fifty-three. But a lot of people thought he looked older, because he was half bald, and the fringe of hair that he had left was very gray, and so was his beard—”

“Oh, no,” groaned the Saint. “Not a beaver, too?”

“Not a royal growth. The kind that just carries the sideburns on down around the jawbone until they meet and make a tuft on the chin.”

“Which can be grown in two weeks and change the outline of a face completely. And I was just going to ask you what type of face he had.”

“And I was going to tell you it was round. But I see what you mean. Everyone says he was always smiling — the Jolly Roger business, of course — and that would help his face to look round, too.”

“Mouth?”

“Biggish — the smile would help that, I know, don’t tell me. And of course he had a mustache.”

“Of course. He would. Teeth?”

“Good.”

“Nose?”

She moved her hands helplessly.

“Did you ever try to make the average person describe a nose? It wasn’t a great beak and it wasn’t an Irish pug and it wasn’t broken. It was just a nose.”

“Eyes?”

“Brown. Two.”

Simon Templar unrolled and came up on his feet in an ultimate surge of exasperation.

“God burn and blast it,” he erupted, “do you realize that that adds up to practically nothing at all? A middling-sized guy with strictly conventional features — the greatest physical assets any crook could start with. Everything else could be grown or glued on and shaped and/or dyed or worn as an expression, on this foundation you still haven’t described. We don’t even have a clear picture of his age, except that I’ll bet that it’s less than fifty-three. If you want to do a good job of faking, it’s a lot easier to pretend to be older than younger — as I shouldn’t have to tell a woman. But as for all the spinach on this act…”

He groped around for an illustration, and his gaze lit on a framed photograph on the mantelpiece. He targeted it with a dynamically outthrust forefinger.

“Why,” he said, “I could pin the same shrubbery on that guy, and he’d fit your description.”

“That guy,” she said, out of an icy stillness, “happens to be my husband.”

The Saint stood transfixed, his eyes almost glazed with the fascination of the frabjous idea that his runaway train of thought had gone hurtling into. But she never noticed that teetering instant of thunderstruck rigidity, for within the same full second the telephone began to ring.

She started towards it with a tensely even step, but reached it in a rush.

Simon was beside her as she picked it up. With an arm lightly around her, he pressed his ear to the other side of the receiver.

“Hullo,” she said.

He was inappropriately aware of her hair brushing his cheek and her faint perfume in his nostrils, while he listened to the voice which he could hear thinly but quite clearly through the plastic. It had a forced and unmistakably artificial timbre, with a strong nasal twang.

“Mrs Dayne,” it said, “I’ll let you talk to your husband as soon as Mr Templar has left Bermuda. But if he isn’t on a plane tomorrow, you can consider yourself a widow.”

There was a soft click, and that was all.

3

The Saint awoke early in the morning, for there had been no further reason to stay up late the night before.

He had made the only possible offer directly their eyes met after she hung up the dead telephone: “I’ll leave tomorrow, of course.”

Her face was a tortured battleground of uncertainty.

“Thank you for making it easy for me!” she said. “Even if you were the best hope I had… But you do understand, don’t you?”

“I do indeed. I know why the parents of kidnaped kids pay ransom. You couldn’t force me to go, but I can’t take advantage of that. However” — his smile was a thing of coldly dazzling deadliness — “I’ll still be working until the last plane leaves.”

He had found out that she had some sleeping pills, and had persuaded her to take one.

“We’re talked out for tonight,” he said. “At least you can be fairly sure that your husband’s alive, and that you’ll hear from him tomorrow. This is your chance to get some rest. Let me do the worrying.”

He had not worried at all, for that was a sterile indulgence of which he was constitutionally incapable. But he had been happy to find that the guest room which had been prepared for him was directly opposite the master bedroom: she had gratefully accepted the suggestion that both doors should be left ajar, and thereafter he had slept with the tranquil self-confidence of a cat. But nothing had disturbed the night, and when he opened his eyes and saw daylight, many things had sorted themselves out in his mind, and he knew that for that period there had been no real danger.

He found his way out of the house and down to the water in the dressing-gown she had lent him — it was so obviously part of a bridegroom’s going-away outfit that the loan seemed like an embarrassing kind of compliment, but he had to take it. It was easy to slip into the almost lukewarm water in a tiny cove on the seaward side of the island without benefit of swimming trunks. He churned back and forth for a while, drifted along the shore to watch the questings of a school of yellow-striped fish, and finally hoisted himself out onto a rock where the sun quickly dried him. In front of him was only the blue Sound, embraced by the main chain of islands and dotted with smaller satellite islands; local folklore claims that the Bermudas are made up of 365 islands, one for every day in the year, but the actual number is much less than half that, and a large number of those have a somewhat slender claim to be counted, being mere outcroppings of coral which have barely managed to raise their heads above high water. Small sailboats, launches, and a couple of the busy ferries that bustle endlessly to and fro to link a dozen landings spaced around the harbor and the Sound, made the view look absurdly like an animated travel-folder picture: no one is ever quite prepared for the fact that Bermuda, more than almost any other highly advertised place, looks so instantly and exactly like its postcards. But after his first appreciative survey, the Saint turned his back on the panorama and concentrated on the humped contours of the island that he was on, trying speculatively to fit them with another geological item which he recalled from a guide-book he had been reading.

After a few minutes he put on the borrowed robe again and walked back up over the close-cropped grass. Near a corner of the formal garden that surrounded the house he came upon the colored caretaker planting an oleander hedge, making a neat row of eighteen-inch cuttings bent over in interlocking arcs with both ends set in the ground, but characteristically looking more like a gravedigger than a gardener.

“Good morning, sir,” he said, with studiously impersonal politeness.

“Good morning.”

Simon paused to light a cigarette. His gaze swept around the panorama again, and from that vantage point he could see more than two-thirds of the private island.

“There’s something I’ve been meaning to ask,” he said. “Exactly how did Mr Dayne leave here when he disappeared? Did he get a phone call first? Or did someone come to see him? Did he say anything when he left?”

“I’m afraid I have no idea, sir. I’d gone into Somerset to do some shopping, and when I came back Mr Dayne was gone.”

“Well, when you came back, was another of the boats from here over at the landing, besides the one you’d taken?”

“No, sir. Just the one I’d used.”

“Then someone must have come and picked him up in a boat.”

“That must be right, sir.”

The Saint rubbed his chin for a moment.

“By the way,” he said. “I noticed a small Chris-Craft tied up at the dock last night. Is that working?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I think we might use it to run into Hamilton this morning.”

“Yes, sir, of course — to get your ticket.”

Simon’s eyes flickered fractionally.

“How did you know I was going anywhere?”

“Mrs Dayne just told me what happened last night, sir. She’s in the kitchen, fixing breakfast. I’m sorry, sir,” the caretaker said stiffly.

“So am I,” said the Saint briefly, and went on into the house.

He put his head in the kitchen door and asked, “How soon are you serving?”

“In about five minutes, or whenever you’re ready,” she answered, and added, “You’ll find an electric razor in our bathroom.”

“Thanks.”

In well under ten minutes he had shaved, rinsed himself under a shower, dressed, and was sitting down to a platter of perfectly cooked eggs and bacon.

“I see you were brought up right,” he said. “Frying an egg sounds like the easiest job in the world, but I’m always amazed how seldom it’s done properly, without making bubbles in the white and a leathery brown crust underneath. Even in France, the land of the great chefs, nobody has the faintest notion of how to fry an egg.”

“You don’t have to cover up,” she said steadily. “I know how the idea of running away must be hurting you. So I’ve decided that if you think it’s the wrong thing to do, you mustn’t do it — even if I beg you to.”

“I have to make a plane reservation anyhow,” he said. “Has it dawned on you that you’re being watched? I’d never met you till yesterday evening, and yet I was the main thing our pal had on his mind when he phoned you last night.”

Her eyes widened a little.

“You mean Ivalot himself could have been at the Van Hessens’ — or at the restaurant where we had dinner—”

“Not necessarily. He may have an accomplice, or even a gang — we don’t know. But he’s pretty sure to find out whether I’ve booked myself out of here as ordered. Then if his phone call meant anything at all, he’ll be practically forced to wait and see whether I do leave. And maybe I’ll wait and see, too.”

He stared out of the window of the dining alcove with such a preoccupied air that she would have sworn that his thoughts were on anything but the view which it framed, so that it surprised her when he said presently, “This is an even dreamier spot in the daytime. I wonder why the owner doesn’t live here all year round.”

“Perhaps his home in Canada is even nicer.”

“D’you know anything about him?”

“Only that his name is Stanley Parker. And I believe he’s quite elderly. Why do you ask?”

“I’m practising — I’ve got a lot of questions to ask in a hurry today. As soon as we’re finished, I’m going to Hamilton and start in earnest. I guess you’d better come with me so I won’t have to worry about you. We’ll take the speedboat, because it’s quicker than a taxi, and it’ll make it tougher for anyone who’s thinking of tailing us.”

He had already observed with approval that, doubtless because of her professional background, she breakfasted with hair and clothes and make-up in shape to face the world as soon as she stood up from the table, and she joined him at the dock with a minimum of delay after their second cups of coffee. The caretaker had the Chris-Craft waiting alongside and was wiping off the seats.

“Do you know the way, sir, or do you wish me to take you?” he inquired disinterestedly.

“I can find it, thanks,” said the Saint. “And you’d better be here in case there are any more messages.”

He pushed the clutch forward and opened the throttle until the light hull was planing. For less than a mile he drove the boat north-east across the Sound, and then he began to veer more to the east, towards Burgess Point and the coastline of Warwick Parish. Lona Dayne twitched his shirtsleeve and pointed.

“Stay as you were, to the left of that island. It’s the shortest way through to Hamilton.”

“I’ve got a call to make on the way,” he explained.

He swung still further to starboard, to miss another larger island that emerged ahead. As they ran along its shore the façade of a Florida Keys fishing village came into view, with the functionally arched roof of an enormous hangar rising above the picturesquely weather-beaten fronts. Simon cut the engine and laid the speedboat skilfully in beside a pier that projected from the strikingly un-Bermudian waterfront.

“This is Darrell’s Island, where our host of last night operates,” he said. “I just want to ask him something — and we haven’t got time to show you how they make TV pictures. I’ll be right back.”

He left her sitting in the boat and disappeared through an opening in the scenery. Having been given the tour once before, on his arrival, he found his way with the faultless recall of a homing pigeon through the partitioned alleys which had miraculously created a modern television picture studio within the shell of an abandoned airport that dated back to those pessimistic days when only seaplanes and flying boats were thought suitable for air travel over water; and Dick Van Hessen looked up defensively as he crashed into the office, and then recognized him with a grin.

“Well! What can we do for you today?”

“You’re busy and I’m in a hurry,” said the Saint, “so I’ll leapfrog the trimmings. All I want is a good lawyer.”

“What? Did she hook you already?”

“Let’s try to build it into a half-hour show — some other time.”

“The one I like best is a fellow named Fred Thearnley,” Van Hessen said. “He’s done a few things for me, and he’s a lot more on the ball than some of ’em.”

“Would you phone him and use your influence to see if he can squeeze a few minutes for me about as soon as I can get there?”

“Sure.”

Simon returned to Lona with an appointment for eleven o’clock. He started up the boat again and sent it skimming through the channel to the left of Hinson’s Island, and then threading between other smaller islands towards the north shore of the gradually narrowing bay, now sheltered between the hills of Pembroke and Paget on either side with the white-sugar roofs and pink-icing walls of fairy-tale candy houses studding their green slopes. He slowed up past the Princess Hotel, a birthday cake moulded in the same style, and stopped and tied up at the Yacht Club dock farther on. He looked at his watch.

“We’ve got plenty of time to do my airline errand first,” he said.

They cut through by the Bank of Bermuda and walked eastwards past the open wharf where the cruise boats berth in the very heart of the city, and up Front Street to the BOAC office. Their last plane left for New York at 4:00 p.m., and he was able to get a seat on it.

The lawyer’s office turned out to be back in the direction they had come from, a few doors from Trimingham’s, which is the biggest department store that the highly conservative proportions of Hamilton have to offer. Simon escorted Lona to its entrance.

“You’ll be as safe here as you could be anywhere, and with all this merchandise to look at, unless you’re a female impersonator you won’t even miss me. Just stay away from the doors, and I’ll find you in about half an hour,” he said, and left her.

Mr Thearnley was a large man put together of ellipsoid shapes, with a florid complexion, very bright baggy eyes, sparse sandy hair, and a mustache of such luxuriant dimensions that it would have provided a more than adequate graft to replace what was lacking from the top of his head. The upper part of him was very correctly dressed in a black alpaca coat, white shirt with starched collar, and dark pin-striped tie; but when he rose from behind his desk to shake hands he revealed that, in conformity with local custom, his lower section was clad only in knee-length shorts and long socks. The effect was inevitably reminiscent of the time-honored farce routine in which the comedian bursts into public view fully dressed except for having forgotten to put on his trousers, but Mr Thearnley was just as unaware of anything hilarious about it.

“Well, Mr Templar,” he said affably, “what can I do for you?”

“Answer some silly questions,” said the Saint, and sat down. “I’m sure you haven’t a lot of time to waste, so I’ll fire them as fast as I can, and I hope you won’t think I’m too blunt… One: do you know another attorney in this town by the name of — ?”

He gave the name of the attorney to whom the solicitors for Mr Ivalot’s concubine had referred their case, which he had found out from Lona Dayne on the way over from Darrell’s Island.

“Only for about thirty years,” Mr Thearnley said with a smile.

“Would you vouch for him without any qualification?”

“Now I’m beginning to think you were serious about asking silly questions.”

“I’ll be more specific. If he were asked to serve papers on somebody in Bermuda who accidentally happened to be a friend of his, would anything induce him to report that he couldn’t find any trace of this defendant?”

Mr Thearnley’s eyes had visibly congealed.

“If the person concerned were a friend of his, he would simply decline the case and give his reason. He would not tell a lie. He is the most ethical man I have the good fortune to know.”

“I’m sorry,” said the Saint. “I don’t know him, and I had to ask that to confirm that a certain person is definitely untraceable here by any ordinary means… Let me try something less delicate: how would anyone here go about getting a passport?”

“A British subject?”

“Yes, of course.”

“He fills out an application, and submits it with a couple of photographs—”

“And a birth certificate?”

“No, that isn’t required. But the form has to be attested by someone who’s known him for a certain number of years. Not just anyone; it has to be someone with a recognized professional standing. A bank manager, a doctor, or a minister, are the usual ones. Or a lawyer.”

Simon lighted a cigarette. It was an effort to subdue a flood tide of excitement that rose higher as one point after another of the framework that he had put together in his mind was tested and the whole structure still remained solid.

“The last one may be the hardest,” he said. “There’s a Canadian by the name of Stanley Parker, who owns a house on a small island, way out towards the other end of Southampton. Do you happen to know anyone who knows him?”

“This is quite a small place,” Thearnley said. “As a matter of fact, I know a little about him myself.”

“How old would you say he was?”

“That’s hard to guess. He’s certainly quite senile.”

The Saint raised his eyebrows.

“As bad as that?”

“Well, he gives that impression. It may be partly because he’s had a stroke and can’t even speak. As it happens, the agent who made the sale is a client of mine. I don’t know how Parker heard about it, but he wrote from Canada and said he’d take it and he’d be here with the cash as soon as the deed could be drawn up. The asking price was a bit steep, as usual, because people always expect to do some bargaining, but Parker didn’t haggle at all.”

“How long ago was this?”

“About six years ago. I prepared the conveyance myself, and that’s how I met him, when he came in to sign it. He just grunted and nodded to whatever was said to him, didn’t even read the papers, and scratched his name on the dotted line. Then he handed over a huge envelope full of twenty-dollar bills and waited for us to count them. The agent and myself had to count almost two thousand each. We gave him a receipt, and the keys, and he grunted again and tottered out. My friend’s conscience gave him a bit of trouble after he’d seen the man, because he hadn’t really expected to get the full price, and he wondered if he could be accused of taking advantage of imbecile. I had to tell him that we had no evidence that Parker was non compos mentis, and that a man who carried about twenty thousand pounds in an old envelope might be so rich that he just couldn’t be bothered to argue about the price of anything.”

“Have you ever seen him since?”

“I ran into him once in my dentist’s waiting-room when I was coming out, and once at the airport when I was meeting a plane, I think he must have played hermit out on his island most of the time.”

The Saint stood up.

“I’m very much obliged to you,” he said. “I may be leaving here rather soon, so would you be shocked if I offered to pay cash for this consultation?”

“Tell Dick I’ll stick it on his next bill.” The lawyer also rose, again oblivious of what his naked knees did to his dignity. He seemed to be wavering between two tormenting inward doubts, one as to whether he might have indiscreetly answered too much, the other as to how discreetly he could indulge some curiosity of his own. He said, taking a plunge, “Or we’ll call it all square if you’ll tell me what this is all about.”

“If everything works out, and I’m still here tomorrow, I’ll come back and tell you — that’s a promise.”

“You know,” Thearnley went on, “from the trend of some of your inquiries, I’m rather surprised at one question you haven’t asked.”

“What was that?”

“About Mr Parker’s background.”

“What was it?”

“My friend the estate agent tried to find out something about him, naturally, but all he could find out was that Mr Parker had once been a lawyer, too.”

“These woods seem to be full of them,” said the Saint gravely, and made an exit before Mr Thearnley could decide how to respond to that.

Lona Dayne was dispiritedly trying on shoes when Simon tracked her down in the store, and he had never seen a woman so relieved to be rescued from a bewildered salesman.

“I can’t get used to being dragged around like a doll,” she said edgily, as he marched her back towards the boat. “Where are you taking me now?”

“Back to the island. But I have to make a slight detour, by way of Cambridge Beaches, which is the place where I was staying before I met you.”

Even at that moment, he couldn’t help being amused by the suddenness with which her pique became crestfallen.

“I forgot,” she said in an empty voice. “You’ve got to pack, haven’t you.”

“I want to pick up a gun,” said the Saint. “We’re going to meet Jolly Roger.”

4

Lona Dayne maintained a taut and stubborn silence all the way out to the secluded cottage colony at Mangrove Bay, waited in the boat while he went ashore, and succeeded in prolonging that superhuman self-discipline until they had passed under Watford Bridge again on the way back.

Then at last she said resentfully, “Why do you have to be so mysterious? I think you’re deliberately trying to force me into the part of a stupid ingénue.”

“Darling,” he said, “haven’t you ever read any whodunits? Don’t you know that the detective always acts very mysterious and keeps the big surprise up his sleeve till the last few pages?”

“This isn’t a whodunit.”

“Oh, yes, it is. And I’m not a very experienced detective. So I’ve had to take advantage of my privilege because I haven’t had the nerve to come right out with my theory — in case it turned out to be really as crazy as it sounds, and I ended not only with egg on my face but with ham too.”

“Don’t get coy with me,” she said. “I’m Lona Shaw — remember?”

Simon smiled with his lips closed, his blue eyes narrowed against the brilliant blue of the sea and sky as he turned the speedboat southward and tried to get an exact bearing on the island they had to return to.

“You wouldn’t dare to send your editor a story based on my kind of deductions,” he said. “Nearly all my thinking seems to be negative — a process of clearing away the undergrowth so you can find out where the solid ground is. I’ve seldom heard a story that was so fogged up with false clues. For instance, the accent of the guy who talked to you on the phone last night.”

“It sounded very American to me.”

“And to me. In fact, exaggeratedly American. But what we have to remember is that an accent can be faked. Roger Ivalot sounded English. So an American accent cropping up here sounds like an attempt to confuse things — perhaps to suggest that he has accomplices which he hasn’t got at all. But a man who would play those tricks of dialect might very well have done it before. Therefore Ivalot’s English was probably the first fake. A man who’d lived here for several years should be able to do a very passable imitation — even if he was raised in America.”

“Or Canada.”

“I’m glad you brought that up,” he said. “Did you ever notice how in the stories you quoted, Jolly Roger had his uranium interests in South Africa and Australia — but not a word was said about Canada, where some of the biggest uranium strikes of all have been made? That was an omission that stood out like a flat chest at a beauty contest — if I may scramble a metaphor in midstream. Almost from the moment I heard it, I would have liked to bet that Canada was the one place that our boy would turn out to have his deepest roots in.”

“You’re still keeping the riddles going,” she said sulkily. “That’s all very plausible and clever, but you must have a lot more up your sleeve.”

“But the next step takes me out on a limb. I also say that our boy is a lawyer.”

The frown darkened on her brow.

“Last night you were starting to say something—”

“This script is full of lawyers,” he interrupted quickly. “That’s another confusing feature of it. But it set me thinking about human characteristics. Lawyers are cautious. Lawyers make a technique of procrastination. What does any smart lawyer do when he knows he’s got a very shaky case? He uses every dodge and device in the book to keep getting it postponed and continued and adjourned — because until it actually comes to a court and a verdict, he still hasn’t lost it. Your husband disappeared because our boy thought he had to do something fast and drastic; but after that, he didn’t know how to go on with it. That’s why nothing else happened for two days. Perhaps he hadn’t finally worked anything out until last night, when you got the first message. But then I upset him again by showing up in the act. So when he talked to you later, it was to tell you to get me out of here. Another delay. That’s why I was so sure we were safe last night and today. He’s still stalling for time.”

“So are you,” she said angrily. “Will you tell me just one thing straight?”

He grinned, throttling back as they circled around to the lee side of the private island, and switched off the engine to coast to a perfect dead-stick landing at the dock.

“In a few minutes,” he said. “I have to make a phone call first.”

She walked speechlessly beside him up to the house. But now she realized that he was enjoying himself, and she would not give him the satisfaction of making her protest again.

While he was dialing a number, he said, “To give you something to go on with — does anything ring a bell with you about a man who’s excessively self-conscious about names?”

Without a word, she turned and went over to the bar cupboard.

He said to the telephone, “Mr Van Hessen, please. This is Mr Templar.”

He put his hand over the mouthpiece and said, “Another thing. Weren’t you surprised that a character like our boy, who was so anxious that you shouldn’t talk to anyone, would leave such a melodramatic warning with anyone who answered the phone, like your caretaker?”

The only reply was a heavily restrained clinking of glassware.

He said to the phone, “Oh, Dick. Glad I caught you. Have you gotten to know anyone in the police higher up than a traffic cop?… Good. And do you have one of the Company boats there?… Better still. Will you please call this Inspector, and persuade him to let you pick him up and bring him out to Parker’s island right away — you know, where the Daynes are staying. I mean as quickly as you can get here, I can’t call him myself, because if I gave my name he’d think someone was pulling his leg… No, I don’t want to say any more on the phone, but this is the most serious thing I ever asked you… Okay, feller. Thanks.”

He hung up.

Lona Dayne was standing beside him with a glass in her hand.

“A nice drop of sherry before lunch?” she suggested sweetly.

He took it.

“Is it poisoned?”

“If it was, no jury would convict me.”

He moved to the end of one of the davenports, studied it for a couple of seconds in relation to the doors into the room, and slid a blue-black automatic out of his hip pocket and behind a cushion.

“Tell me one thing,” he said. “If I’m quoting you correctly, you were talking to this caretaker, and his boss had just told him to try and rent the place. But how did you happen to meet him and be talking to him in the first place?”

She raised a glass of her own to her lips, holding it with a tense care that just failed to be completely casual.

“I’ve been waiting for that,” she said. “This house must have something to do with it, of course.”

“How did you meet Bob?”

“He came to see us at the hotel, the same day our story came out in the papers. He said that he once worked for a Mr Rogers here, who threw a lot of wild parties, which he couldn’t forget — you’ve seen what a strait-laced type he is. With that coincidence of names, he wondered if it could be the man we were looking for. But his description didn’t fit anywhere — his Mr Rogers was very tall and thin with a big hooked nose. Then it was after we’d ruled that out that he went on talking about his house and the island… Please,” she said, with her voice suddenly rising a sharp third, “don’t say how half-witted you’re thinking we must have been—”

He was at the telephone again, and did not even seem to have heard her.

“Did you ever see this trick?” he inquired.

He took off the handset, and dialed four numbers, and put the handset back again. Immediately, the telephone began to ring. He let it ring a few times, and then picked up the handset again.

“If you know the right combination, you can make any telephone ring like an incoming call,” he said. “But do you know where all the extensions are in this house? It could be done from any of them.”

He hung the instrument up and turned away.

“Once upon a time,” he said, “there was an attorney in Toronto named Robert Parker Illet. He was born and educated in England, but taken to Canada after his parents died in a flu epidemic and raised there by a maternal uncle. Seven years ago he was hardly middle-aged, but he’d built an inspiring reputation. It was so good, in fact, that he had a wide-open chance to embezzle five million dollars, with no more trouble than writing a few checks. I told you I was looking for him when we first met, but I don’t think you took me seriously.”

She stared at him with her chin dropping and her mouth and eyes equally open, temporarily stunned out of any vestige of poise.

“Plenty of lawyers have had chances like that,” he went on, “but this one grabbed it. He packed the loot in a couple of suitcases, in cash and bearer bonds, and vanished into the blue. When I heard about the case a few months ago, I decided to go after him like I’d go on a treasure hunt. First, because he’d been gone so long without being caught, I figured he must have gone further than the United States. But where could he go without a passport? Spies have forged passports; big-time international crooks can get ’em; but a previously respectable attorney wouldn’t have any idea where to buy one. That narrowed it down to Central America and the West Indies. I found out that he didn’t speak any Spanish, and I decided that that might have made him leerier of the Latin countries. Most people — even policemen — automatically think of the banana republics as the perfect place for a crook to hide, but I can tell you that there’s nothing so conspicuous down there as an obvious gringo. However, that still left plenty of British islands. But then I found out that Illet had spent a couple of vacations here, and it was the only one he seemed to have visited. I bet on another hunch that this man might be most likely to head for a place that he knew a little about, where he could melt as quickly as possible into the local scene, rather than a place that’d be totally strange to him, and I decided to start sniffing around here first.”

“But if he’d been here even as a tourist, there’d be people who might remember him!”

“Not in the identity he was going to create. He had another lawyer’s trait: patience. With five million bucks sowed away, he didn’t have to rush out and start splurging. Even if he laid low for ten years, it’d be like earning half a million a year, tax free, which was a lot better than he could’ve done legitimately. My guess is that he originally planned to hibernate at least until the statute of limitations ran out, when he’d be absolutely in the clear. In a nice house like this, with his books and his records, it shouldn’t have been too hard to take. Of course he couldn’t have much social life, but some men don’t mind that. I expect he went to church regularly, though. An innocent unsuspecting minister would be the easiest person for him to cultivate who’d be qualified to endorse a passport application after knowing him for several years — and he had to get a passport eventually, to go to places like London and Paris where he could make the playboy splash that he’d always secretly dreamed of.”

Simon had moved over to the corner of the chesterfield again. He put his half-empty glass down in precarious balance on the back, and lighted a cigarette.

“Unfortunately,” he said, “our boy’s good resolutions weren’t quite equal to the strain. He stood it for several years, but counting over all that spinach that he couldn’t spend, and thinking about the rip-roaring times he could have with it, his patience finally ran out before the statute of limitations would have let him thumb his nose at the law. He had to break down and treat himself to one preliminary fling, and in the role and disguise of Roger Ivalot he thought he could get away with it. He did too. But then, like dopes who experiment with dope, he found it was habit-forming. Six months later he had to go back for more. And before that encore was over, he found himself threatened with a lawsuit which he knew damn well could make all his castles in the air end up like iron balloons. That was the reason he couldn’t stay and right it. And you know now why he couldn’t take it on the lam in the same way from Bermuda: this is where he has his only other identity, and he’s stuck with it. You can’t create those things overnight.”

“But if he’d got a passport here in the name of Ivalot,” she objected, “we’d have found a record of him in no time.”

“So he didn’t,” said the Saint. “He didn’t become Ivalot until after he’d landed in England — after a couple of weeks which he’d spent in any small flat growing those fast chin-whiskers and the other fuzz you’ve described, which in turn would have been after an overnight stop in a back-street hotel which he left very early before anybody was up in the morning, so they wouldn’t notice how different he looked after he made his first personality change.”

“Then how did he leave here?”

“Under the name he was known here by. Didn’t I ask you to notice his complex about names? ‘Ivalot’ was outrageous, but he took the bull by the horns and disarmed everybody by making jokes about it. To his corny sense of humor, his other name must have been just as funny. For a man who was going to ease into a fortune the slow patient way, what could be more apt than the old-English-sounding name of Inchpenny?”

The door from the dining area to the kitchen swung gently open, making a very muted creak, but Simon Templar did not jump. He turned his head almost lazily, and smiled cordially at the man standing there. He heard Lona Dayne gasp at the sight of the gun in the caretaker’s hand, but the Saint declined to bat even the proverbial eyelash.

“I was wondering how much longer this would take you, Bob,” he murmured. “But there — that would be the legal training again. You wouldn’t tip your hand till the very last moment, when you knew I had every loose end tied together and you were an utterly dead duck.”

“You really do mix your metaphors horribly,” Illet said primly. “But I must admit your thinking was quite brilliant. And so was Mrs Dayne’s, up to a point.”

Simon glanced sympathetically at the blonde, but she was still striving heroically to recover from her last relapse.

“This is Mr Robert Parker Illet, the legal weasel I was talking about,” he explained kindly. “The Stanley Parker who bought this place, I imagine, is the ancient uncle who brought him up — now in his second childhood, and a convenient stooge for an operation like buying this house. But it was our boy who had all the fun out of it: as the caretaker, he could have the same use of it without anyone bothering him. You were looking for him as Jolly Roger Ivalot, the playboy of Piccadilly. You were never even close to recognizing him as Bob Inchpenny, the colored caretaker and apparent candidate for churchwarden.”

Illet came slowly across the room, holding his gun very competently.

“You were rather lucky yourself,” he said. “If you hadn’t met Mrs Dayne, I don’t think you’d have recognized me.”

Simon observed him with critical detachment.

“It’s one of the best jobs of blackface I ever saw,” he conceded. “You were smart to shave your head all over — nobody would notice whether your hair was kinky or not, and you didn’t risk showing a margin on your skin made-up. You were lucky to have brown eyes and rather thick lips to begin with — but who ever looks at a Negro and wonders if he could be a white man in disguise? You only made one conventional mistake. For some strange reason, four out of five crooks who take an alias don’t seem to be able to shake off the habit of their original initials. That’s where you started to click with me the minute I met you.”

“It’s a pity you’re so clever,” Illet said, coming closer. “I’m going to search you now, and I hope you won’t do anything silly, but I’ll warn you that I was a commando in the last war.”

Simon drew at his cigarette, deeply enough to inhale enough fumes for a smoke-ring, but keeping his elbows away from his body and his hands ingratiatingly above his shoulders, while Illet felt his pockets and around his waist and under his arms.

“Havelock Dayne never left this island, did he?” said the Saint. “A lot of this rock is hollow — I was remembering a couple of spots where they take tourists, Leamington Cave and Crystal Cave, over near the Castle Harbour. I think one thing that may have helped sell you on this place is that there’s a lovely little private cave right under our feet.”

“There’s a door to it in the basement,” Illet said, stepping back. “Mr Dayne is there now.”

“Alive?” Simon inquired, rather carefully.

“Certainly. You remarked very observantly that I’m cautious. It was as easy to chain him up there alive as to kill him. And if anything had gone wrong, the penalty for kidnaping here is much lighter than for murder. I hope I can keep you and Mrs Dayne alive, too — until I’m quite sure that everyone’s given you up and it’s safe to kill you.”

The Saint shrugged.

“Well, that’s almost friendly,” he drawled. “We’d better get going, because that policeman you heard me send for should be here very soon. May I finish my drink? And did they teach you this in the commandos—”

He reached for the glass he had put down, but in the same movement he bumped clumsily against the couch with his knee. The glass tilted and began to fall. His hand followed it frantically, but somehow veered off and dived behind the cushion. It came out again instantly, with his automatic in it, and without even a fragmentary pause he shot Mr Ivalot Inchpenny Illet — having taken everything into consideration — only through the right forearm.

5

There was no difficulty about finding the entrance to the cave — it was a locked door in the cellar which the “caretaker” had once told Lona Dayne led only to a store room in which Mr Parker kept a lot of old trunks full of personal papers. Nor was there any additional problem about finding Havelock Dayne, by way of a crooked tunnel that sloped down into a limestone cavern of quite spacious dimensions considering the size of the island that covered it. It must have been discovered long ago in the course of excavating for a rainwater cistern; but however Illet had come to hear of it, he had evidently envisaged an emergency use for it, in his prudent way, for the iron ring set in concrete to which the missing bridegroom was attached by a long chain was no antique but had certainly not been installed within the past week.

Mr Dayne was dirty and unshaven, but looked as if he would be fairly personable when he was cleaned up. He revealed no physical damage, but he had been badly frightened, and was correspondingly indignant when he realized that there was nothing more to be frightened about. He seemed to be a very serious-minded young man, who did not regard being chained in a cave for three days and nights as an amusing adventure.

“This settles it — you’re resigning from that goddam newspaper right away,” was one of the first things he said.

“We’ll talk about that as soon as I’ve cabled this one last story,” said his bride, with what a more experienced spouse would have identified at once as ominous serenity.

Simon Templar was less interested in various other things that they had to say to each other than he was in a couple of large mildewed valises which he located in another corner of the cave. They were not locked, and when he opened the lids he knew that he had never seen so much cash all in one place at one time.

“Here are those personal papers you were told about,” he murmured. “If this episode had gone exactly the way I was dreaming when I took up the trail, and I weren’t involved now with you respectable citizens, I suppose I’d have left Jolly Roger trussed up upstairs just as he is now, but with only my Saint drawing chalked on his bald head for a souvenir, and I’d still be gone with the boodle before the cops got here — if I’d ever even sent for them. And now all I can do is hope for a lousy few hundred thousand dollars’ reward.”

“If you helped yourself to a few handfuls in advance,” Lona said, “we’d never tell anyone. Would we, Havvie?”

An infinitesimal, scarcely perceptible spasm passed over the Saint’s face, as at the twinge of an old wound.

“I wonder if Mrs Havelock Ellis called her husband that,” he said in suddenly appalled conjecture, but neither of them was even listening to him again.