The Saint Around the World

1

The young man at Heathrow was very impersonal, very polite. He looked up from the passport and said, “Oh, yes. Mr Templar. Would you step this way, please, sir?”

Simon Templar followed him obligingly from the reception room in which the other passengers from the plane were being processed. The most respectable citizen receiving an invitation like that, no matter how courteously phrased, could have experienced a sensation of vacuum in the stomach, but to Simon such attention at any port of entry had become almost as routine as a request for his vaccination certificate. For the days when harassed police officers and apprehensive malefactors, not to mention several million happily fascinated readers of headlines, had known him only by the name of The Saint were so far behind as to be almost in the province of archaeologists. And of all the countries on earth which had enjoyed the ambiguous benediction of his presence, England, which had been privileged to be the first to feel the full impact of his outlawry, would probably be the last to forget him.

The Saint was very pleasantly unperturbed by the prospect. In fact, he had been looking forward to it for a long time. And as he strolled into the small office to which he was escorted, and the young man went out again and quietly closed the door, he knew that all his optimism had been justified and that this visit would at least begin as beautifully as he had dared to hope.

He gazed across at the cherubic round face of the man who sat there behind the desk disrobing a stick of chewing gum, and his eyes danced like laughing steel.

“Claud Eustace Teal,” he breathed ecstatically. “My own dream dog. I mean bloodhound. Have you wondered too if we should ever meet again?”

“Good morning, Saint,” Chief Inspector Teal said primly. “What brings you back here?”

“Haven’t you heard? I’m playing two weeks at the Palladium.”

Mr Teal fought for the somnolent authority in his stare. He had fought for it stubbornly ever since he had started waiting for the plane to land, as he had not had to do for many relatively peaceful years. Even five years of war, which had included the fondest ministrations of the Luftwaffe, now seemed in retrospect like a mere ripple in the long interlude of tranquillity with which he had been favored since he last had to cope with the Saint.

Now that vacation in Nirvana might have lasted no longer than since yesterday. He saw the Saint exactly as he had remembered him in nightmares, outrageously looking not a day older, the tall lean figure just as sinewy and debonair, poised with the same insolently vivid grace, the tanned pirate’s face just as keen and reckless, and it was as if the years between had passed over like a flight of birds.

“I’m not doing this because I want to,” Teal said heavily. “The sooner we get the formalities done, the sooner you can be on your way. When someone like you comes back here, we have to ask why.”

“All right, Claud. I really came back on account of you.”

“I said—”

“But I did. Honestly.”

“Why me?”

“I heard you were going to retire.”

Mr Teal’s molars settled into his spearmint like anchors into a bed of sustaining guck. He said, with magnificent stolidity, “How did you manage to hear that?”

“There was a piece in Time, recently, about Scotland Yard. Among some thumbnail sketches of the incumbent hierarchy of beefy brains, your name was mentioned as one of the old-timers shortly to be moved over to the pension list. It’s true, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“They gave you a fine record. All your most celebrated successes. The only big thing they didn’t mention, for some reason, was how you never succeeded in catching me. But I suppose you gave them the information.” Simon surveyed him with affectionate appraisal. “You certainly look wonderful, for an old man, Claud. I’d certainly have recognized you anywhere. The hair a little thinner, perhaps. The jowls a little fuller. The stomach—”

“Just for once,” Teal said grimly, “let’s leave my stomach out of this.”

“By all means,” said the Saint generously. “And it’ll leave a lot of room. After all, how much more convex can a thing be than convex?”

Like a man struggling to hold down a paroxysm of seasickness, Chief Inspector Teal felt all the frustrated bitterness of the old days welling up in him again, all the hideous futility of a score of humiliations brought on by his dutiful efforts to put that impudent Robin Hood behind the bars where every law said that he belonged; and enriching it was the gall of a hundred interviews such as this, in each one of which he had not only been thwarted but made farcically ridiculous. He never could understand how it happened, it was as if the Saint could actually put some kind of Indian sign on him, but it was a black magic that never failed. Normally a man of no small presence and dignity, impressive to his subordinates and respected even by the underworld, Mr Teal could be reduced by a few minutes of the Saint’s peculiar brand of baiting to the borders of screaming imbecility.

But now he would not, he must not, let it happen again…

“Yes, I’m retiring,” he said doggedly. “Next week. And since you’ve been away this long, you could have stayed away just a few days longer.”

“But I had to be in on your last performance, Claud. And as soon as you heard I was on this passenger list, bless your old fallen arches, you hurried out here to welcome me and—”

“And tell you, whatever you’re thinking of doing here, if you know what’s good for you, you’ll put if off for at least a week!”

The speech, which had a certain breathlessness built right into it, ended on something like a yelp. Teal had not meant it to. He had meant to speak firmly and masterfully, but somehow it had not come out like that.

“You yelped,” said the Saint.

“I did not!” Teal stopped, and cleared his throat with a violence that almost choked him. “I’m just warning you to behave yourself, and we’ll let bygones be bygones. Is that clear?”

“Of course,” said the Saint earnestly. “In fact, just to prove how forgiving I am, I’m only here to make sure that your career ends in a blaze of glory. I’m going to make sure that you solve your last case — even if I have to do it for you.”

“I don’t need your help.”

“Why, is it going that well?”

“Quite satisfactorily, thank you.”

“You’ve got the goods on him already?”

“It isn’t my business to get the goods on anyone,” Teal said ponderously. “Just the evidence, if there has been a crime.”

“But you’re reasonably sure the guy is guilty?”

“I think so. But proving it is another matter. These Bluebeards are pretty tricky to… But what the devil,” Teal blared suddenly, “do you know about the case?”

“Nothing,” said the Saint blandly. “Except what you’re telling me.”

The detective glared at him suspiciously.

“I don’t believe you.”

“You pain me, Claud. Do you think I’m a liar?”

“I’ve known it for twenty years,” Teal said hotly. “And let me tell you something else. You’re not coming back and getting away with any more of your private acts of what you call justice. If anything happens to Clarron, I’ll know damn well who—”

“Clarron?”

“Or Smith, or Jones, or Tom, or Dick, or Harry!” shouted Teal, and knew just how lame a recovery it was.

Simon lighted a cigarette.

“Clarron,” he murmured. “Well, well. Where is he living right now?”

“I suppose you want me to believe you don’t know that too.”

“Once again,” said the Saint reproachfully, “a more sensitive soul might take offense at your delicate insinuations that I fib.”

Mr Teal made a last frantic clutch at a self-possession which had already assumed some of the qualities of a buttered eel.

“Just let me tell you,” he said in a labored voice, “that if I catch you going anywhere near Maidenhead—”

“Maidenhead?” mused the Saint. “A charming spot. I’ve been wanting to see it again for years. And somebody told me only the other day that an old pal of mine is now running the famous pub there on the river. As a matter of fact, that’s one of the first places I was planning to visit. I might even drive straight out there, and skip London entirely.”

“If you do,” yammered Teal apoplectically, “I’ll—”

His voice strangled incoherently as the Saint’s mocking brows lifted over clear cerulean eyes.

“What will you do, Claud? It’s still a free country, isn’t it? Maidenhead hasn’t been made a Forbidden City. Hundreds of tourists go there without being arrested. I don’t see why you should pick on me… I don’t even see why you should keep me here any longer, if you feel so unfriendly. So may I get my bag from the Customs and breeze along?” The Saint hitched himself lazily off the corner of the desk where he had rested one hip for a while. “But if you do think of some crime to charge me with, I hope you’ll run down and make the pinch yourself. It’ll give the natives a laugh. You’ll find me at Skindle’s.”

2

“You must forgive the wop kind of welcome,” Giulio Trapani said, releasing Simon from an uninhibited bear-hug. “But it is so good to see you again!”

“It’s good to see you,” said the Saint. “And as a contrast with the Scotland Yard treatment I got at the airport, I wouldn’t care if you kissed me.”

He sat at the bar, and Trapani went behind it and brushed the bartender aside.

“I mix it myself,” he said ebulliently. “Whatever you’d like.”

“At this hour, just a pint from the barrel — warm, flat, nourishing, and British. I was thinking about it all the way over on the plane. It may be an acquired taste, but it’s still the only beer in the world that tastes like a meal.”

“It still isn’t the same as before the war,” Trapani said, setting a tankard before him. “But this is the best you can get.”

“Nothing is ever the same, after enough years,” said the Saint.

He drank deeply and contentedly. The brew still tasted good, without its forebears near enough for easy comparison.

“You’ve made a change too,” he said. “This is a lot more pub than the old Bell at Hurley.”

“Skindle’s, Mr Templar, is a hotel.”

“A good hotel should also be a good pub.”

“I try to make it a good pub too — with trimmings.”

Simon nodded, and glanced out for a moment over the river. It was still early in the season, but it was one of those warm sunny days of almost unbelievable balminess which the climate of Britain can produce as capriciously as it will inevitably snatch them back under a mantle of rain, cold, or fog; and on that pleasant reach of the Thames the skins and punts were moving up and down, drifting with their own portable radio or phonograph music or propelled by vigorous and slightly exhibitionistic young males with girls in bathing suits or print dresses reclining on gay cushions as luxuriously as any Cleopatra on the Nile, exactly as they had done when he was last there; and he thought that some things like that might survive all changes.

A girl came in from the riverside, in shorts, giving away legs that men would have spent money to see across a row of footlights, with dark rumpled hair and the face of a thoughtful pixie; and the Saint turned away again with some reluctance.

“And you,” Trapani was saying eagerly. “How is everything? You didn’t really have any trouble, of course?”

“Not really.”

“And you’re going to relax here and have a good time. I’m so glad that you heard about me and came here. Is there anything you want, anything I can do? You only have to ask me.”

Simon put down his tankard and looked up from it speculatively.

“Well, Giulio, since you mention it — would you happen to know anyone living around here by the name of Clarron?”

“Why, yes. Mr Reginald Clarron. I think his house is on the river, quite near here. I don’t know him personally, but I’ve heard of him.”

Trapani flashed a quick look around the bar. It might have been nothing but the automatic vigilance of a professional host, but Simon noticed it. There were not many customers just then — the girl with the legs who had just come in, who was being served a Martini, two young men in flannels who were drinking Pimm’s Cups, a thin elderly man in a dark suit with the anxious air of a traveling salesman, and a stout middle-aged woman in a respectable high-necked long-sleeved black dress, with a cupola of carroty hair capped with a pie-dish straw hat trimmed with some kind of artificial fruit salad, who was sipping a glass of port in the corner. She looked, Simon thought, like the prototype of every comic housekeeper he had ever seen in vaudeville.

“What sort of a guy is he?” Simon asked.

“A very distinguished-looking gentleman. Very charming, I’ve heard. But he doesn’t go out much. His wife is an invalid. She had a terrible accident a few months ago. But if you know them, I expect you heard about it.”

“Just how did it happen?” Simon evaded innocently.

“They were out shooting together. He put down his gun to help her over a fence, and it went off and shot her. His own gun. They saved her life, but her spine was permanently injured. Of course, he can never forget it. He spends all his time with her.” Trapani had lowered his voice discreetly, and his glance flicked away again for a moment. He leaned over and explained in an undertone, “That woman in the corner is their housekeeper.”

Her ears must have been abnormally sharp, or perhaps it was not too hard to interpret the furtive glance and the lowered voice, but the woman allowed no doubt that she had taken in the whole conversation.

“Indade I am,” she called out in a rich cheerful brogue.

“And a sweeter master an’ mistress I niver worked for. Jist as devoted as if they were on their honeymoon, an’ her so patient an’ forgiving, an’ himself eatin’ his heart out, poor man, with an awful thing like that on his conscience. Begorra, if anyone says a word aginst him, they’ll be answerin’ for it to me.”

“I’ve never heard one, Mrs Jafferty,” Trapani assured her hastily.

“Sure an’ it’d bring tears to the eyes of a potato to see them together, with himself waitin’ on her hand an’ foot, readin’ to her or playin’ cards with her or whativer she has a mind for, an’ bringin’ flowers from the garden ivery day.”

She squeezed herself cumbrously out from behind the little table, picked up a market bag that bulged as bountifully as her figure, and waddled across towards the Saint.

“An’ why would you be askin’ about them, sorr — if I may be so bold?”

“A friend of mine said I should look them up, if I happened to be around here,” Simon answered.

He had to think quickly, for this was a little sooner than he had expected to need a ready answer. And her eyes were very sharp and inquisitive.

“I’m on me way home now, sorr, with a bite for their dinner. If you’d be tellin’ me the name, I could tell them what to look forward to.”

“This was a friend of Mr Clarron’s former wife. He mightn’t even remember her. A Mrs Brown.”

“From America, maybe? Mr Clarron’s late wife was an American lady, they tell me.”

“Yes,” said the Saint gratefully. “From New York.”

“And your name, sorr, in case you should be callin’?”

“This is Mr Templar, Mrs Jafferty,” Trapani said.

Simon gazed at him gloomily.

“I’ll tell him you were askin’,” Mrs Jafferty said. “And good day to ye, gentleman.”

She hitched up her bag of groceries and bustled busily out.

“I’m sorry.” Trapani said. “Did I do wrong? You hadn’t told me you wanted to be incognito.”

“Forget it,” said the Saint. “I hadn’t had a chance to. It’s not your fault.”

He emptied his mug and put it down, and Trapani picked it up.

“Another? Or do you feel like some lunch?”

“Mr Templar is having lunch with me,” said the girl with the legs. Simon Templar blinked. He turned, with a cigarette between his lips and his lighter halted in mid-air. Finally, he managed to light it.

“If you say so,” he murmured. “And if Giulio will excuse me.”

“I excuse you and congratulate you,” Trapani beamed.

The girl drained her cocktail and came over, putting out her hand as the Saint stood up.

“I’m Adrienne Halberd,” she said.

“I’d never have recognized you.”

She laughed.

“That may take some explaining. But do you mind if I rush you off? I’m expecting a phone call at home, and I’ve got to get back for it.”

“I’ll see you later,” Simon told Trapani.

She was on her way to the other door, and he followed her.

“I walked over,” she said as they came out in front of the hotel. “But I expect you’ve got a car.”

“That rented job over there.”

They got in, and she said, pointing, “That way, to the right, and I’ll tell you where to turn.”

Simon spun the wheel and relaxed, letting cigarette smoke float from mildly amused lips.

“And now that we’re alone,” he said calmly, “may I ask any questions? Or do we go on playing blindfold chess?”

“All of a sudden? You didn’t argue when I practically kidnapped you.”

“I never argue with legs like yours, darling. But sometimes I ask questions.”

“You are the Saint, aren’t you?”

“True. But my mind-reading gifts have been slightly exaggerated.”

“You were asking about Reggie Clarron.”

“Which should prove that I didn’t know much about him.”

“You knew he’d been married before.”

“An inspired guess. A fat friend of mine happened to tag the name ‘Bluebeard’ on him, rather carelessly, just a few hours ago. Bluebeards, if you remember, don’t get much of a rating with only one wife. It was worth taking a chance on.”

“All right,” she said. “I took a chance on you. He’s only had two so far, I think, but you might help to nail him before he finally manages to kill the third. Not to mention saving the prospective fourth.”

The Saint raised his eyebrows.

“He has one picked out already?”

“Me,” said the girl.

3

The dining alcove was one corner of the living room of her cottage, sharing the row of gaily curtained windows that looked out over the green lawn that sloped down to the river bank. They sat there over some excellent cold roast beef and salad and mustard pickles, and the Saint sipped a tall glass of Guinness.

“He isn’t a mystery man at all,” Adrienne Halberd said. “That’s what makes it so difficult.”

“One of those open-book boys?” said the Saint.

“Absolutely. He went to a good school, where he didn’t get into any particular trouble. Then he became an actor. He never made any hit, but he managed to make a living. He didn’t care much what he did as long as it was something theatrical. He got married the first time when he was twenty-five. He and his wife were both in the chorus of some revue. Later on they joined up with one of those troupes that used to play on the piers at the seaside in the summer. He was about thirty when she got drowned in a boating accident.”

“Why did he wait that long?”

“It wasn’t so long after she’d inherited some money from an uncle in Australia, and right on top of that they’d taken out mutual insurance policies.”

“So then he became a capitalist.”

“He still wasn’t so awfully rich, but he moved up a notch. He helped to produce some shows in London, which were mostly flops. But he always got other people to invest with him, so his own money lasted longer than you’d think. He was getting a bit short, though, when he married his second wife.”

“The American?”

“Yes. That was after the war, when the tourists started coming over again. He married her, and they went to America together — after taking out insurance policies for each other. Six months later she was electrocuted. She was lying in the bath listening to a small radio, apparently, and it fell in.”

“Just doing his bit to improve Britain’s dollar balance,” Simon remarked.

“Then it was the same story all over again — a night club, plays, a film company that never produced anything, and some other business schemes. Never anything crooked that you could put your finger on, except that his partners somehow always lost more money than he did. And about a year ago he married the present Mrs Clarron.”

“He sounds like a real cagey operator. At least, until that shooting accident misfired — if we should use the expression.”

She nodded.

“That was when the Southshire Insurance Company got very interested, as I told you. Being stuck three times in a row was a bit too much. Of course it could all be coincidence, but it had to be looked into.”

Simon regarded her appreciatively.

“They’re not so stupid. I’d have taken a long time to spot you as a detective.”

“It’s a new discovery,” she said spiritedly. “They found out that investigators could do a lot more if they didn’t look like investigators, and somebody told them that a woman with brains isn’t obliged to look like a hippopotamus.”

He grinned.

“I must tell Teal that the same could apply to policemen,” he said.

“What does he think about you butting in — or doesn’t he know?”

“Oh, he knows all right, and he disapproves strongly. But there’s nothing he can do about it. I told him that the insurance company stood to lose ten thousand pounds if Clarron managed to get away with killing another wife, and they couldn’t afford to bet that much on Scotland Yard being smart enough to stop him.”

Simon chuckled aloud.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“That’s rather disappointing.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“The soul-mate approach again?”

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

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

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

4

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mr Clarron pursed his lips.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Of course,” Adrienne said awkwardly.

“Thank you, my dear.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

5

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It seemed almost like an omen.

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

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

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

“Really?” said his guest politely.

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

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

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

“Talking of suspicious characters,” said the playwright, straw-clutching feverishly, “what did you think of the old man who comes to the door at the beginning of my second act? I’ve wondered if it would be more effective to keep him off the stage a bit longer, to build up the suspense.”

Mr Clarron nodded attentively, and thereafter confined himself admirably to the subject of their meeting. He had sounded most convincing, he thought, in his rehearsal.

He enjoyed his Irish stew. At any moment, he estimated, his wife would be eating hers.

6

“I don’t like it,” Adrienne Halberd said abruptly.

“Now that you’ve told me about those jewels of Mrs Clarron’s, I like it a bit less myself,” Simon admitted. “It just might occur to Lover Boy now to improvise a regular in which she gets bumped off, and try to make it look like my work.”

Her pixie face was almost sullen with concentration.

“I expect you could take care of yourself. I’m talking about that story you cooked up, about some gangster called Bingo Brown being married to his last wife’s black sheep sister, and you being a friend of theirs.”

“It was the best I could do in the few seconds we had.”

“But don’t you see, it might panic him into doing something drastic in a hurry, in the hope of getting away with his loot before you do something to him.”

“That was roughly what I had in mind.”

“But that would be helping to get another wife murdered.”

“When you hinted to him that you’d at least half killed a husband,” Simon said, “mightn’t that just as well have encouraged him to widow himself, knowing you wouldn’t hold it against him?”

“All I hoped was that it might make him talk about it. And then, with a tape recorder—”

“Oh, I know. Just like in a detective story. But maybe he’s read stories too. It might just as well have only encouraged him to get the job over without talking.”

She stared at him resentfully.

“Well, if you’re so smart, how else can you get evidence against his kind of murderer?”

“It isn’t easy, darling. You can only stick close to him and hope that you’re close enough when he tries it again.”

“But you can’t use a human being like… like a sort of live bait!”

“Mrs Clarron isn’t in much more danger, by and large, than she’s been all along. Maybe Reggie is a bit more anxious to get it over, but on the other hand there are now two of us keeping an eye on her. We saw Reggie drive away. I’ve been sitting by this open window ever since, and I have ears like a watchdog. When Reggie or anyone else comes near that house, I’ll know it.”

“But you can’t stay here all night.”

“I can think of worse fates.”

“You might think of some better dialogue.”

“I’m here now,” he said practically. “And I’ll stay for dinner, if I’m invited.”

She stood up and paced restlessly.

“Oh, you can stay. I think you’d better. I’ve got some chops in the fridge.”

“And some more beer?”

“You’ve just drunk the last I had.”

He got up and stretched himself.

“It sounds like a thirsty vigil. While you’re toiling over a hot stove, suppose I run out and buy some more. I’m about out of cigarettes too, anyway.”

She hesitated an instant.

“No, I’ll go,” she said. “I’d rather you stayed here. If anything violent did start to happen next door, I think you’d be more use than I would. But only for brawn, I mean!”

He thought that over for as brief a moment, his quizzical eyes on her, and then he shrugged.

“Okay, Brains,” he said good-humouredly. “Would you like to take my car?”

“I’ve got my own, thanks. I’ll throw on a skirt and be back in a minute.”

It was, of course, easily fifteen minutes before she drove into the tiny garage again, and already she had seen that the Saint’s hired car was no longer outside the cottage.

Even so, she tried frantically to believe for a fraction longer that he might only have moved his car up the road to a less conspicuous place, to make a returning Clarron believe that he had left. She ran into the cottage calling his name, but the empty rooms had no answer.

There was a note stuck on the refrigerator door.

The signature was a little stick figure with a rakishly tilted halo.

She ran out into the dusk, almost calling his name again. But the only response, she knew, would have been the faint sounds she heard of a radio or television program playing in the house next door. She looked back and up from further down her lawn, and saw the light shining blankly and steadily against the ceiling of an upstairs bedroom window. She rushed back into her cottage and flung herself at the telephone.

7

Mr Reginald Clarron got off the train at Maidenhead at 10:12 p.m., exchanged greetings and a few trivial words about his trip with the station master, climbed into the car he had parked at the station, and drove home at his normal sedate speed.

He noticed that the strange car which must have been the Saint’s was no longer outside the cottage next door, and thought that his auspices might be even better than he had hoped.

As he unlocked his front door — he was glad he would be spared the necessity of faking a burglarious entrance, with all its possible pitfalls, for of course he had let it be known that Mrs Jafferty had a key — he heard the inexorable voice of a BBC announcer holding forth from the receiver upstairs.

Exactly as he would have done on any similar normal evening, Mr Clarron took pains to hang up his hat in the hall, stick his superfluous umbrella in the stand under it, pull off his gloves and lay them in the calling-card tray. He would not be so foolish as to omit one iota of his habitual routine. He even went into the kitchen, drew himself a glass of water, and drank it, as he always did before he went to bed.

Then he tiptoed up the stairs and softly opened the door of his wife’s bedroom.

The television set was still on, and so was the bedside light, but his wife seemed to be asleep. She lay on her stomach with her face buried in the pillows.

“My love,” Mr Clarron said loudly.

She did not stir.

The table was pushed down towards the foot of the bed. A glance verified that she had eaten and drunk the wine, although the bowl of strawberries had scarcely been touched and the coffee cup was two-thirds full. Using his handkerchief, he lifted the lid of the chafing dish and saw that it had almost been emptied. He put the lid back and returned to the head of the bed.

“My dearest,” he said, and pulled on her shoulder as if to turn her over.

Her weight resisted him with a curious heaviness, and when he let go she fell back limply, without a sound.

Mr Clarron suddenly became a whirlwind of activity, for at this point any lapse of more than a few seconds might have to be accounted for.

He hustled out of the room, across the landing, and into his own bedroom. In the top drawer of his dressing table lay a clean pair of white cotton gloves. As he picked them up and rapidly pulled them on, there was disclosed underneath them a light claw-ended crowbar of the type used for opening small crates — which Mrs Jafferty had purchased a week ago at the local ironmonger’s in the course of her household errands. Mr Clarron hurried back with it to his wife’s bedside.

Her jewels were kept in the top drawer of the bedside table, where she could easily reach them. As a concession to his concern for their safety she had had a combination lock put on it and made a coy secret of the combination, even though he had tried to point out that the drawer was still no stronger than the wood it was made of. He proved this in a matter of seconds with a couple of quick leverings with his crowbar, splintering the front of the drawer out with a pleasantly surprising minimum of noise.

He pulled out her jewel case, opened it on top of the night stand, and rapidly transferred its contents to his pockets. He let the crowbar lie on the floor where it had fallen. He leaned over his wife, unfastened the clasp at the back of her neck, and pulled the necklace and its sapphire pendant from under her. He picked up her hand to twist the rings off her fingers… He did not know precisely what stopped him, whether it was a movement glimpsed out of the corner of his eye or the faint squeak and stir of air that went with it. But he turned his head, and with that became frozen.

The door of a massive old wardrobe across the room was swinging stealthily open.

The door itself cut off the light of the bedside lamp from what was inside. But the shadowed opening was still not too dark for him to see, and recognize, the bulgingly bovine shape of Mrs Jafferty, the unmistakable mound of her atrociously carrot-tinted hair. Mr Clarron’s intestines seemed to turn into coils of quivering lead, and his lungs sagged through his diaphragm and took all his breath with them. A draught from the North Pole squirmed over his skin and brought out beads of clammy sweat where it touched.

“Faith an’ begorra,” said the broadest brogue outside Killarney, “if it isn’t himself robbin’ the trinkets from his poor darlin’ wife, and her not yet cold from his poison an’ all!”

There was a breaking point even to Mr Clarron’s adamantine self-control. He turned and ran out of the room, screaming.

He had no idea where he was going or what he was going to do. He stumbled down the stairs in a pure frenzy of planless flight, flight for its own primitive sake, spurred by the unreasoning need to get away anywhere from the impossible incomprehensible thing that he had seen. Out of the house, anywhere, where he could have one moment’s reprieve to encompass the exploding debris of disaster, to try and grab the pieces together and re-shape them into some form that would magically ward off utter catastrophe…

He threw open the front door and plunged solidly into the comfortably cushioned façade of Chief Inspector Claud Eustace Teal.

Mr Teal said, “Oof!” — and caught him as he bounced off, then set him upright in the hall.

“What’s the matter, Mr Clarron?” Teal asked drowsily.

As his torpid bulk evacuated the doorway, it revealed two uniformed men on the step outside.

“My wife,” Clarron babbled. “Dead in her bed! Drawer broken open — her jewels gone! And Mrs Jafferty—”

He broke off there. The first words had come out, incoherently enough, but unhesitatingly, with a kind of reflex assurance made glib by the number of times he had mentally rehearsed just such a speech. But after he had blurted out Mrs Jafferty’s name he did not know how to go on. He had never visualized having to say anything about her in her presence.

Mr Teal, however, did not seem to notice the aposiopesis. He was staring over Mr Clarron’s shoulder, and upwards, with his baby-blue eyes dilating in a most peculiar manner.

“Bejabers,” trumpeted a voice of distilled shamrock, “and if it isn’t me ould friend the fat boy of Scotland Yard, himself, arrivin’ late for the wake as usual.”

Mr Clarron turned, drawn by an awful but irresistible magnetism.

Billowing down the stairs came an exuberant female figure crowned with a bird’s-nest of hideous ginger hair.

“She must have done it,” Clarron chattered hysterically. “I should never have taken her without references. She was hiding up there—”

“Sure, and is that any way for a gentleman to be talkin’, tryin’ to put the blame on an honest workin’ woman? And himself all the time schemin’ to murdher his own wife, the poor soul, an’ run off with his fancy lady next door, who I see sneakin’ in here already to be with him before the body is cold!”

Teal glanced back for a moment, at Adrienne Halberd who was sidling in behind the two constables, and turned back to the staircase with a tinge of purple creeping into his rubicund complexion.

“Take off that ridiculous get-up, Saint,” he roared, “and let’s hear what you think you’re up to!”

“Well, if you insist,” said the Saint meekly. “But I was just starting to get the feel of the part.”

He unbuttoned the old-fashioned black dress, peeled it off, and draped it over the stair rail. Underneath it he wore a kind of upholstered combination garment extending down to his knees and padded in all the necessary places to produce Mrs Jafferty’s voluptuous contours. He took that off and hung it similarly over the rail, where it slid down to join the dress. Completing his descent of the stairs, he removed the orange-colored wig and set it carefully on the banister knob at the bottom.

“It’s Templar!” croaked Mr Clarron. And for one delirious instant he felt inspired, invulnerable. “He did it in that disguise! He was with Mrs Halberd this afternoon when I said I was going to London. She’s probably his accomplice—”

“Miss Halberd,” Teal said precisely, “is a police officer, acting under my orders.”

“As it eventually dawned on me,” said the Saint. “And there never was a Mrs Jafferty, except when Reginald dressed up in that outfit. Instead of trying to dream up the perfect alibi, which has tripped up a lot of bright lads, he dreamed up the perfect scapegoat. And before he has any more attacks of genius, and before I budge from here, I wish someone would go through his pockets, where they’ll find Mrs Clarron’s jewels. And if he has anything to say after that, ask him why he’s wearing those white cotton gloves.”

8

“What do you mean, it eventually dawned on you that I was with the police?” Adrienne Halberd demanded sulkily.

Simon lighted a cigarette.

“The way you picked me up at Skindle’s was rather determined,” he said. “But I could swallow that temporarily. When you told me you were investigating for an insurance company, I could take that for a while too. There are such things as female private eyes, even if they aren’t very often eyefuls. And when you said you’d been a distant adorer of mine since you were in pigtails, it was piling it up a bit tall, but I could still open my mouth that wide. Weird as it may seem, I have met such crazy gals. But with all that build-up, you’d set yourself a lot to live up to. And soon after you found out that I hadn’t any information to add to what you’d told me, or any definite plan to let you in on, you changed quite startlingly. Gone was the worshiping bug-eyed fan. You became impatient, critical — even caustic. You couldn’t see any merit at all in the idea that I adlibbed on two seconds’ notice when Reggie started to amble over. And it wasn’t such a bad one, either. But it made you almost rude.”

“If I remember,” she said, “you weren’t such a paragon—”

“But I wasn’t trying to sell anything, darling. You had been. And the transformation was just too sudden. A real fan would have thought anything I suggested was marvelous, no matter how screwy or dangerous it sounded. And then I realized something else. This was Claud Eustace’s last big case, and he’d warned me to keep out of it, but I told him I intended to stick my nose in anyway. Yet I came straight to Maidenhead, and none of the local constabulary was around to meet me and back up Teal’s orders. More surprising still, there wasn’t even a vestige of a cop anywhere around here, keeping tabs on Reggie or trying to save Mrs Clarron from being bumped off. So at last I connected. The cop had to be you. Teal had plenty of time to phone you while I was driving down from Heathrow, tell you I was headed for Skindle’s, tell you to pick me up there, rope me, keep me handy. The explanation you had to hatch up between you wasn’t so hard to invent, but I could almost hear the wheels whirring in Teal’s fat head, and see his buttons popping with pride at his own brilliance.”

Chief Inspector Teal thumbed open a tiny envelope of spearmint and mailed the contents in his mouth.

“All right,” he said trenchantly. “But what happened after Miss Halberd left you in her cottage?”

“After she left me to phone you for more advice,” said the Saint smoothly, “I went over those random hunches again and convinced myself. Then I knew I wouldn’t have much more time to work on my own, and I really was seriously worried about what my appearance and my story might rush Reggie into doing. And I decided I just had to see if I couldn’t find a clue in his house — which you couldn’t have tried without a search warrant. You know my methods, Claud. Impulsive. So I picked up the phone and called Mrs Clarron, and said I was the local police.”

“Falsely representing yourself to be a police officer,” barked Teal.

“For which I might easily get fined a few pounds,” said the Saint sadly. “I said that Mr Clarron had asked us to keep an eye on her on account of a suspicious character in the neighborhood, and it was really a break when she wasn’t a bit surprised. Reggie had warned her about the Saint. So I asked if we might send a man over to make sure that everything was all right. She said yes, but she couldn’t let him in. I said that was all right, Mr Clarron had left us a key. I moved my car up the road, walked back, and jiggered the lock, which is a very easy one.”

“He broke in,” jabbered Mr Clarron forlornly. “He admits it!”

It was not a very effective effort, considering the heap of jewels from his pockets which one of the constables was laboriously inventorying while the other counted them on to an outspread handkerchief, and Teal glanced at him almost pityingly.

“I told her I wanted to check all the windows,” Simon went on, “which gave me an excuse to roam through the house. I didn’t have to roam far. In Reggie’s bedroom, the first thing that caught my eye was a typical old theatrical trunk. I opened the lid, and right on top was this wig, and underneath it those dowager-size falsies.”

He paused for a dramatic moment which he could not deny himself, releasing a leisured streamer of smoke.

“It was all clear in a bolt of lightning. There was no mistaking that hair — I’d seen Mrs Jafferty at the pub, as Adrienne can tell you. And she’d told me that he was an actor, and once played with a sort of minstrel troupe. And I could see Reggie’s face as I’d met him this afternoon, and of course it was Mrs Jafferty’s, with the powder and rouge and lipstick off and those horn-rimmed glasses added. And I remembered that in those old music-hall skits with a comic charwoman, which Mrs Jafferty had reminded me of nothing else but, the part was nearly always played by a man.”

“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.”