The Saint on the Spanish Main

Introduction

It can hardly escape notice that I have a personal antipathy to the words “detective” and “mystery” as descriptives of a certain type of story. Aside from the pejorative implications which has been given them by literary snobs (and, admittedly, with the assistance of the worst and most venal writers) I find them both inadequate and unnecessarily restrictive. They relate to an old cut-and-dried formula: body is found — whodunit? — detective pins guilt on least likely suspect. Even the genius of John Dickson Carr, who added the superlative factor of what I have named the “howdiddee” (the murder was committed in a sealed and locked room, and would be theoretically impossible except that you can’t explain away the body, so some rational method of killing and leaving it there must be found) could not wipe out this limitation. Considered in three or even four dimensions, there are still many more aspects to a crime than that. At the moment, I tend to favor the description “crime story,” meaning that in its core there is essentially some factor of extra-legality, so that in addition to the ordinary problems of human friction and attraction between A and B there is a third impersonal force called The Law. It is along these excursion lines that I have tried to enlarge the range of The Saint Magazine.

But while being so guided in this anthology, I have become aware that I have given my benison to a preponderance of unorthodox selections — that is, stories which are basically neither “whodunits” or “howdiddees.” Having maintained for years that I don’t write “detective” or “mystery” stories, but adventures with a criminal angle, it is ironic that I feel obliged to redress the balance with one of my own few genuine exercises in the formula I disparage. But, in my own judgment, one of the best I have been able to do.

— Leslie Charteris

1

One of Simon Templar’s stock criticisms of the classic type of detective story is that the victim of the murder, the reluctant spark-plug of all the entertaining mystery and strife, is usually a mere nonentity who wanders vaguely through the first few pages with the sole purpose of becoming a convenient body in the library by the end of Chapter One. But what his own feelings and problems may have been, the personality which has to provide so many people with adequate motives for desiring him to drop dead, is largely a matter of hearsay, retrospectively brought out in the conventional process of drawing attention to one suspect after another.

“You could almost,” Simon has said, “call him a corpus derelicti. ...Actually, the physical murder should only be the mid-point of the story: the things that led up to it are at least as interesting as the mechanical solution of who done it... Personally, I’ve killed very few people that I didn’t know plenty about first.”

Coming from a man who is generally regarded as almost a detective-story character himself, this comment is at least worth recording for reference, but it certainly did not apply to the shuffling off of Mr Floyd Vosper, which caused a brief commotion on the island of New Providence in the early spring of that year.

2

Why Simon Templar should have been in Nassau (which, for the benefit of the untraveled, is the city of New Providence, which is an island in the Bahamas) at the time is one of those questions which always arise in stories about him, and which can only be answered by repeating that he liked to travel and was just as likely to show up there as in Nova Zembla or Namaqualand. As for why he should have been invited to the house of Mrs Herbert H. Wexall, that is another irrelevancy which is hardly covered by the fact that he could just as well have shown up at the house of Joe Wallenski (of the arsonist Wallenskis) or the White House — he had friends in many places, legitimate and otherwise. But Mrs Wexall had some international renown as a lion hunter, even if her stalking had been confined to the variety which roars loudest in plush drawing rooms, and it was not to be expected that the advent of such a creature as Simon Templar would have escaped the attention of her salon safari.

Thus one noontime Simon found himself strolling up the driveway and into what little was left of the life of Floyd Vosper. Naturally he did not know this at the time, nor did he know Floyd Vosper, except by name. In this he was no different from at least fifty million other people in that hemisphere, for Floyd Vosper was not only one of the most widely syndicated pundits of the day, but his books (Feet of Clay, As I Saw Them, and The Twenty Worst Men in the World) had all been the selections of one book club or another and still sold by the million in reprints. For Mr Vosper specialized in the ever-popular sport of shattering reputations. In his journalistic years he had met, and apparently had unique opportunities to study, practically every great name in the national and international scene, and could unerringly remember everything in their biographies that they would prefer forgotten, and could impale and epitomize all their weaknesses with devastatingly pinpoint precision, leaving them naked and squirming on the operating table of his vocabulary. But what this merciless professional iconoclast was like as a person, Simon had never heard or bothered much to wonder about.

So the first impression that Vosper made on him was a voice, a still unidentified voice, a dry and deliberate and peculiarly needling voice, which came from behind a bank of riotous hibiscus and oleander.

“My dear Janet,” it said, “you must not let your innocent admiration for Reggie’s bulging biceps color your estimate of his perspicacity in world affairs. The title of All-American, I hate to disillusion you, has no reference to statesmanship.”

There was a rather strained laugh that must have come from Reggie, and a girl’s clear young voice said, “That isn’t fair, Mr Vosper. Reggie doesn’t pretend to be a genius, but he’s bright enough to have a wonderful job waiting for him on Wall Street.”

“I don’t doubt that he will make an excellent contact man for the more stupid clients,” conceded the voice with the measured nasal gripe. “And I’m sure that his education can cope with the simple arithmetic of the Stock Exchange, just as I’m sure it can grasp the basic figures of your father’s Dun and Bradstreet. This should not dazzle you with his brilliance, any more than it should make you believe that you have some spiritual fascination that lured him to your feet.”

At this point Simon rounded a curve in the driveway and caught his first sight of the speakers, all of whom looked up at him with reserved curiosity and two-thirds of them with a certain hint of relief.

There was no difficulty in assigning them to their lines — the young red-headed giant with the pleasantly rugged face and the slim pretty blonde girl, who sat at a wrought-iron table on the terrace in front of the house with a broken deck of cards in front of them which established an interrupted game of gin rummy, and the thin stringy man reclining in a long cane chair with a cigarette-holder in one hand and a highball glass in the other.

Simon smiled and said, “Hello. This is Mrs Wexall’s house, is it?”

The girl said, “Yes,” and he said, “My name’s Templar, and I was invited here.”

The girl jumped up and said, “Oh, yes. Lucy told me. I’m her sister, Janet Blaise. This is my fiancé, Reg Herrick. And Mr Vosper.”

Simon shook hands with the two men, and Janet said, “I think Lucy’s on the beach. I’ll take you around.”

Vosper unwound his bony length from the long chair, looking like a slightly dissolute and acidulated mahatma in his white shorts and burnt chocolate tan.

“Let me do it,” he said. “I’m sure you two ingénues would rather be alone together. And I need another drink.”

He led the way, not into the house but around it, by a flagged path which struck off to the side and meandered through a bower of scarlet Poinciana. A breeze rustled in the leaves and mixed flower scents with the sweetness of the sea. Vosper smoothed down his sparse gray hair, and Simon was aware that the man’s beady eyes and sharp thin nose were cocked towards him with brash speculation, as if he were already measuring another target for his tongue.

“Templar,” he said. “Of course, you must be the Saint — the fellow they call the Robin Hood of modern crime.”

“I see you read the right papers,” said the Saint pleasantly.

“I read all the papers,” Vosper said, “in order to keep in touch with the vagaries of vulgar taste. I’ve often wondered why the Robin Hood legend should have so much romantic appeal. Robin Hood, as I understand it, was a bandit who indulged in some well-publicized charity — but not, as I recall, at the expense of his own stomach. A good many unscrupulous promoters have also become generous — and with as much shrewd publicity — when their ill-gotten gains exceeded their personal spending capacity, but I don’t remember that they succeeded in being glamorized for it.”

“There may be some difference,” Simon suggested, “in who was robbed to provide the surplus spoils.”

“Then,” Vosper said challengingly, “you consider yourself an infallible judge of who should be penalized and who should be rewarded.”

“Oh, no,” said the Saint modestly. “Not at all. No more, I’m sure, than you would call yourself the infallible judge of all the people that you dissect so definitively in print.”

He felt the other’s probing glance stab at him suspiciously and almost with puzzled incredulity, as if Vosper couldn’t quite accept the idea that anyone had actually dared to cross swords with him, and moreover might have scored at least even on the riposte — or if it had happened at all, that it had been anything but a semantic accident. But the Saint’s easily inscrutable poise gave no clue to the answer at all, and before anything further could develop there was a paragraphic distraction.

This took the form of a man seated on top of a truncated column which for reasons best known to the architect had been incorporated into the design of a wall which curved out from the house to encircle a portion of the shore like a possessive arm. The man had long curly hair that fell to his shoulders, which with his delicate ascetic features would have made him look more like a woman if it had not been complemented with an equally curly and silken beard. He sat cross-legged and upright, his hands folded symmetrically in his lap, staring straight out into the blue sky a little above the horizon, so motionless and almost rigid that he might easily have been taken for a tinted statue except for the fluttering of the long flowing white robe he wore.

After rolling with the first reasonable shock of the apparition, Simon would have passed on politely without comment, but the opportunity was irresistible for Vosper to display his virtuosity again, and perhaps also to recover from his momentary confusion.

“That fugitive from a Turkish bath,” Vosper said, in the manner of a tired guide to a geek show, “calls himself Astron. He’s a nature boy from the Dardanelles who just concluded a very successful season in Hollywood. He wears a beard to cover a receding chin, and long hair to cover a hole in the head. He purifies his soul with a diet of boiled grass and prune juice. Whenever this diet lets him off the pot, he meditates. After he was brought to the attention of the Western world by some engineers of the Anglo-Mongolian Oil Company, whom he cures of stomach ulcers by persuading them not to spike their ration of sacramental wine with rubbing alcohol, he began to meditate about the evils of earthly riches.”

“Another member of our club?” Simon prompted innocuously.

“Astron maintains,” Vosper said, leaning against the pillar and giving out as oracularly as if the object of his dissertation were not sitting on it at all, “that the only way for the holders of worldly wealth to purify themselves is to get rid of as much of it as they can spare. Being himself so pure that it hurts, he is unselfishly ready to become the custodian of as much corrupting cabbage as they would like to get rid of. Of course, he would have no part of it himself, but he will take the responsibility of parking it in a shrine in the Sea of Marmora which he plans to build as soon as there is enough kraut in the kitty.”

The figure on the column finally moved. Without any waste motion, it simply expanded its crossed legs like a lazy tongs until it towered at its full height over them.

“You have heard the blasphemer,” it said. “But I say to you that his words are dust in the wind, as he himself is dust among the stars that I see.”

“I’m a blasphemer,” Vosper repeated to the Saint, with a sort of derisive pride combined with the ponderous bonhomie of a vaudeville old-timer in a routine with a talking dog. He looked back up at the figure of the white-robed mystic towering above him, and said, “So if you have this direct pipeline to the Almighty, why don’t you strike me dead?”

“Life and death are not in my hands,” Astron said, in a calm and confident voice. “Death can only come from the hands of the Giver of all Life. In His own good time He will strike you down, and the arrow of God will silence your mockeries. This I have seen in the stars.”

“Quaint, isn’t he?” Vosper said, and opened the gate between the wall and the beach.

Beyond the wall a few steps led down to a kind of Grecian courtyard open on the seaward side, where the paving merged directly into the white sand of the beach. The courtyard was furnished with gaily colored lounging chairs and a well-stocked pushcart bar, to which Vosper immediately directed himself.

“You have visitors, Lucy,” he said, without letting it interfere with the important work of reviving his highball.

Out on the sand, on a towel spread under an enormous beach umbrella, Mrs Herbert Wexall rolled over and said, “Oh, Mr Templar.”

Simon went over and shook hands with her as she stood up. It was hard to think of her as Janet Blaise’s sister, for there were at least twenty years between them and hardly any physical resemblances. She was a big woman with an open homely face and patchily sun-bleached hair and a sloppy figure, but she made a virtue of those disadvantages by the cheerfulness with which she ignored them. She was what is rather inadequately known as “a person,” which means that she had the personality to dispense with appearances and the money to back it up.

“Good to see you,” she said, and turned to the man who had been sitting beside her, as he struggled to his feet. “Do you know Arthur Gresson?”

Mr Gresson was a full head shorter than the Saint’s six foot two, but he weighed a good deal more. Unlike anyone else that Simon had encountered on the premises so far, his skin looked as if it was unaccustomed to exposure. His round body and his round balding brow, under a liberal sheen of oil, had the hot rosy blush which the kiss of the sun evokes in virgin epidermis.

“Glad to meet you, Mr Templar.” His hand was soft and earnestly adhesive.

“I expect you’d like a drink,” Lucy Wexall said. “Let’s keep Floyd working.”

They joined Vosper at the bar wagon, and after he had started to work on the orders she turned back to the Saint and said, “After this formal service, just make yourself at home. I’m so glad you could come.”

“I’m sure Mr Templar will be happy,” Vosper said. “He’s a man of the world like I am. We enjoy Lucy’s food and liquor, and in return we give her the pleasure of hitting the society columns with our names. A perfectly businesslike exchange.”

“That’s progress for you,” Lucy Wexall said breezily. “In the old days I’d have had a court jester. Now all I get is a professional stinker.”

“That’s no way to refer to Arthur,” Vosper said, handing Simon a long cold glass, “For your information, Templar, Mr Gresson — Mr Arthur Granville Gresson — is a promoter. He has a long history of selling phony oil stock behind him. He is just about to take Herb Wexall for another sucker, but since Herb married Lucy he can afford it. Unless you’re sure you can take Janet away from Reggie, I advise you not to listen to him.”

Arthur Gresson’s elbow nudged Simon’s ribs.

“What a character!” he said, almost proudly.

“I only give out with facts,” Vosper said. “My advice to you, Templar, is never be an elephant. Resist all inducements. Because when you reach back into that memory, you will only be laughed at, and the people who should thank you will call you a stinker.”

Gresson giggled, deep from his round pink stomach.

“Would you like to get in a swim before lunch?” Lucy Wexall said. “Floyd, show him where he can change.”

“A pleasure,” Vosper said. “And probably a legitimate part of the bargain.”

He thoughtfully refilled his glass before he steered Simon by way of the verandah into the beachward side of the house, and into a bedroom. He sat on the bed and watched unblinkingly while Simon stripped down and pulled on the trunks he had brought with him.

“It must be nice to have the Body Beautiful,” he observed. “Of course, in your business it almost ranks with plant and machinery, doesn’t it?”

The Saint’s blue eyes twinkled.

“The main difference,” he agreed good-humouredly, “is that if I get a screw loose it may not be so noticeable.”

As they were starting back through the living room, a small bird-like man in a dark and (for the setting outside the broad picture window) incongruous business suit bustled in by another door. He had the bright baggy eyes behind rimless glasses, the slack but fleshless jowls, and the wide tight mouth which may not be common to all lawyers, bankers, and business executives, but which is certainly found in very few other vocations, and he was followed by a statuesque brunette whose severe tailoring failed to disguise an outstanding combination of curves, who carried a notebook and a sheaf of papers.

“Herb!” Vosper said. “I want you to meet Lucy’s latest addition to the menagerie which already contains Astron and me — Mr Simon Templar, known as the Saint. Templar — your host, Mr Wexall.”

“Pleased to meet you,” said Herbert Wexall, shaking hands briskly.

“And this is Pauline Stone,” Vosper went on, indicating the nubile brunette. “The tired business man’s consolation. Whatever Lucy can’t supply, she can.”

“How do you do,” said the girl stoically.

Her dark eyes lingered momentarily on the Saint’s torso, and he noticed that her mouth was very full and soft.

“Going for a swim?” Wexall said, as if he had heard nothing. “Good. Then I’ll see you at lunch, in a few minutes.”

He trotted busily on his way, and Vosper ushered the Saint to the beach by another flight of steps that led directly down from the verandah. The house commanded a small half-moon bay, and both ends of the crescent of sand were naturally guarded by abrupt rises of jagged coral rock.

“Herbert is the living example of how really stupid a successful business man can be,” Vosper said tirelessly. “He was just an office-boy of some kind in the Blaise outfit when he got smart enough to woo and win the boss’s daughter. And from that flying start, he was clever enough to really pay his way by making Blaise Industries twice as big as even the old man himself had been able to do. And yet he’s dumb enough to think that Lucy won’t catch on to the extracurricular functions of that busty secretary sooner or later — or that when she does he won’t be out on a cold doorstep in the rain... No, I’m not going in. I’ll hold your drink for you.”

Simon ran down into the surf and churned seawards for a couple of hundred yards, then turned over and paddled lazily back, coordinating his impressions with idle amusement. The balmy water was still refreshing after the heat of the morning, and when he came out the breeze had become brisk enough to give him the luxury of a fleeting shiver as the wetness started to evaporate from his tanned skin.

He crossed the sand to the Greek patio, where Floyd Vosper was on duty again at the bar in a strategic position to keep his own needs supplied with a minimum of effort. Discreet servants were setting up a buffet table. Janet Blaise and Reg Herrick had transferred their gin rummy game and were playing at a table right under the column where Astron had resumed his seat and his cataleptic meditations — a weird juxtaposition of which the three members all seemed equally unconscious.

Simon took Lucy Wexall a Martini and said with another glance at the tableau, “Where did you find him?”

“The people who brought him to California sent him to me when he had to leave the States. They gave me such a good time when I was out there, I couldn’t refuse to do something for them. He’s writing a book, you know, and of course he can’t go back to that dreadful place he came from, wherever it is, before he has a chance to finish it in reasonable comfort.”

Simon avoided discussing this assumption, but he said, “What’s it like, having a resident prophet in the house?”

“He’s very interesting. And quite as drastic as Floyd, in his own way, in summing up people. You ought to talk to him.”

Arthur Gresson came over with an hors d’oeuvre plate of smoked salmon and stuffed eggs from the buffet. He said, “Anyone you meet at Lucy’s is interesting, Mr Templar. But if you don’t mind my saying so, you have it all over the rest of ’em. Who’d ever think we’d find the Saint looking for crime in the Bahamas?”

“I hope no one will think I’m looking for crime,” Simon said deprecatingly, “any more than I take it for granted that you’re looking for oil.”

“That’s where you’d be wrong,” Gresson said. “As a matter of fact, I am.”

The Saint raised an eyebrow.

“Well, I can always learn something. I’d never heard of oil in the Bahamas.”

“I’m not a bit surprised. But you will, Mr Templar, you will.” Gresson sat down, pillowing his round stomach on his thighs. “Just think for a moment about some of the places you have heard of, where there is certainly oil. Let me mention them in a certain order. Mexico, Texas, Louisiana, and the recent strike in the Florida Everglades. We might even include Venezuela in the south. Does that suggest anything to you?”

“Hm-mm,” said the Saint thoughtfully.

“A pattern,” Gresson said. “A vast central pool of oil somewhere under the Gulf of Mexico, with oil wells dipping into it from the edges of the bowl, where the geological strata have also been forced up. Now think of the islands of the Caribbean as the eastern edge of the same bowl. Why not?”

“It’s a hell of an interesting theory,” said the Saint.

“Mr Wexall thinks so too, and I hope he’s going into partnership with me.”

“Herbert can afford it,” intruded the metallic sneering voice of Floyd Vosper. “But before you decide to buy in, Templar, you’d better check with New York about the time when Mr Gresson thought he could dig gold in the Catskills.”

“Shut up, Floyd,” said Mrs Wexall, “and get me another Martini.”

Arthur Granville Gresson chuckled in his paunch like a happy Buddha.

“What a guy!” he said. “What a ribber. And he gets everyone mad. He kills me!”

Herbert Wexall came down from the verandah and beamed around. As a sort of tacit announcement that he had put aside his work for the day, he had changed into a sport shirt on which various exotic animals were depicted wandering through an idealized jungle, but he retained his business trousers and business shoes and business face.

“Well,” he said, inspecting the buffet and addressing the world at large, “Let’s come and get it whenever we’re hungry.”

As if a spell had been snapped, Astron removed himself from the contemplation of the infinite, descended from his pillar, and began to help himself to cottage cheese and caviar on a foundation of lettuce leaves.

Simon drifted in the same direction, and found Pauline Stone beside him, saying, “What do you feel like, Mr Templar?”

Her indication of having come off duty was a good deal more radical than her employer’s. In fact, the bathing suit which she had changed into seemed to be based more on the French minimums of the period than on any British tradition. There was no doubt that she filled it opulently, and her question amplified its suggestiveness with undertones which the Saint felt it wiser not to challenge at that moment.

“There’s so much to drool over,” he said, referring studiously to the buffet table. “But that green turtle aspic looks pretty good to me.”

She stayed with him when he carried his plate to a table as thoughtfully diametric as possible from the berth chosen by Floyd Vosper, even though Astron had already settled there in temporary solitude. They were promptly joined by Reg Herrick and Janet Blaise, and slipped at once into an easy exchange of banalities.

But even then it was impossible to escape Vosper’s tongue. It was not many minutes before his saw-edged voice whined across the patio above the general level of harmless chatter:

“When are you going to tell the Saint’s fortune, Astron? That ought to be worth hearing.”

There was a slightly embarrassed lull, and then everyone went on talking again, but Astron looked at the Saint with a gentle smile and said quietly, “You are a seeker after truth, Mr Templar, as I am. But when instead of truth you find falsehood, you will destroy it with a sword. I only say ‘This is falsehood, and God will destroy it. Do not come too close, lest you be destroyed with it.’ ”

“Okay,” Herrick growled, just as quietly. “But if you’re talking about Vosper, it’s about time someone destroyed it.”

“Sometimes,” Astron said, “God places His arrow in the hand of a man.”

For a few moments that seemed unconscionably long nobody said anything, and then before the silence spread beyond their small group the Saint said casually, “Talking of arrows — I hear that the sport this season is to go hunting sharks with a bow and arrow.”

Herrick nodded with a healthy grin.

“It’s a lot of fun. Would you like to try it?”

“Reggie’s terrific,” Janet Blaise said. “He shoots like a regular Howard Hill, but of course he uses a bow that nobody else can pull.”

“I’d like to try,” said the Saint, and the conversation slid harmlessly along the tangent he had provided.

After lunch everyone went back to the beach, with the exception of Astron, who retired to put his morning’s meditations on paper. Chatter surrendered to an afternoon torpor which even subdued Vosper.

An indefinite while later, Herrick aroused with a yell and plunged roaring into the sea, followed by Janet Blaise. They were followed by others, including the Saint. An interlude of aquatic brawling developed somehow into a pick-up game of touch football on the beach, which was delightfully confused by recurrent arguments about who was supposed to be on which of the unequal sides. This boisterous nonsense churned up so much sand for the still freshening breeze to spray over Floyd Vosper, who by that time had drunk enough to be trying to sleep under the big beach umbrella, that the misanthropic oracle finally got back on his feet.

“Perhaps,” he said witheringly, “I had better get out of the way of you perennial juveniles before you convert me into a dune.”

He stalked off along the beach and lay down again about a hundred yards away. Simon noticed him still there, flat on his face and presumably unconscious, when the game eventually broke up through a confused water-polo phase to leave everyone gasping and laughing and dripping on the patio with no immediate resurge of inspiration. It was the last time he saw the unpopular Mr Vosper alive.

“Well,” Arthur Gresson observed, mopping his short round body with a towel, “at least one of us seems to have enough sense to know when to lie down.”

“And to choose the only partner who’d do it with him,” Pauline added vaguely.

Herbert Wexall glanced along the beach in the direction that they both referred to, then glanced for further inspiration at the water-proof watch he was still wearing.

“It’s almost cocktail time,” he said. “How about it, anyone?”

His wife shivered, and said, “I’m starting to freeze my tail off. It’s going to blow like a son-of-a-gun any minute. Let’s all go in and get some clothes on first — then we’ll be set for the evening. You’ll stay for supper of course, Mr Templar?”

“I hadn’t planned to make a day of it,” Simon protested diffidently, and was promptly overwhelmed from all quarters.

He found his way back to the room where he had left his clothes without the benefit of Floyd Vosper’s chatty courier service, and made leisured and satisfactory use of the fresh-water shower and monogrammed towels. Even so, when he sauntered back into the living room, he almost had the feeling of being lost in a strange and empty house, for all the varied individuals who had peopled the stage so vividly and vigorously a short time before had vanished into other and unknown seclusions and had not yet returned.

He lighted a cigarette and strolled idly towards the picture window that overlooked the verandah and the sea. Everything around his solitude was so still, excepting the subsonic suggestion of distant movements within the house, that he was tempted to walk on tiptoe, and yet outside the broad pane of plate glass the fronds of coconut palms were fluttering in a thin febrile frenzy, and there were lacings of white cream on the incredible jade of the short waves simmering on the beach.

He noticed, first, in what should have been a lazily sensual survey of the panorama, that the big beach umbrella was no longer where he had first seen it, down to his right outside the pseudo-Grecian patio. He saw, as his eye wandered on, that it had been moved a hundred yards or so to his left — in fact, to the very place where Floyd Vosper was still lying. It occurred to him first that Vosper must have moved it himself, except that no shade was needed in the brief and darkening twilight. After that he noticed that Vosper seemed to have turned over on his back, and then at last as the Saint focused his eyes he saw with a weird thrill that the shaft of the umbrella stood straight up out of the left side of Vosper’s scrawny brown chest, not in the sand beside him at all, but like a gigantic pin that had impaled a strange and inelegant insect — or, in a fantastic phrase that was not Simon’s at all, like the arrow of God.

3

Major Rupert Fanshire, the senior Superintendent of Police, which made him third in the local hierarchy after the Commissioner and Deputy Commissioner, paid tribute to the importance of the case by taking personal charge of it. He was a slight pinkish blond man with rather large and very bright blue eyes and such a discreetly modulated voice that it commanded rapt attention through the basic effort of trying to hear what it was saying. He sat at an ordinary writing desk in the living room, with a Bahamian sergeant standing stiffly beside him, and contrived to turn the whole room into an office in which seven previously happy-go-lucky adults wriggled like guilty schoolchildren whose teacher has been found libelously caricatured on their blackboard.

He said, with wholly impersonal conciseness, “Of course, you all know by now that Mr Vosper was found on the beach with the steel spike of an umbrella through his chest. My job is to find out how it happened. So to start with, if anyone did it to him, the topography suggests that that person came from, or through, this house. I’ve heard all your statements, and all they seem to amount to is that each of you was going about his own business at the time when this might have happened.”

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

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

“So was I,” said Janet Blaise.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Superintendent cocked his bright eyes.

“Very well, sir. What would you say?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And you didn’t object to that?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes, Mr Templar?”

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

“Well, what would happen?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“’I’ll get it,” said Pauline Stone.

She got up and left the room.

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

“Neither do I,” Fanshire said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Will you walk over there with me?”

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

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

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

“What’s that?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Simon dusted his hands and lighted a cigarette.

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

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

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

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

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

“Why not?”

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

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

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

The Superintendent pulled out a handkerchief and wiped his face.

“My God,” he said, “you mean you think Lucy—”

“I think we have to go all the way back to the prime question of motive,” said the Saint. “Floyd Vosper was a nasty man who made dirty cracks about everyone here. But his cracks were dirtiest because he always had a wickedly good idea what he was talking about. Nevertheless, very few people become murderers because of a dirty crack. Very few people except me kill other people on points of principle. Vosper called us all variously dupes, phonies, cheaters, and fools. But since he had roughly the same description for all of us, we could all laugh it off. There was only one person about whom he made the unforgivable accusation... Now shall we rejoin the mob?”

“You’d better do this your own way,” Fanshire muttered.

Simon Templar took him up the steps to the verandah and back through the French doors into the living room, where all eyes turned to them in deathly silence.

“A paraffin test will prove who fired that revolver in the last twenty-four hours, aside from those who have already admitted it,” Simon said, as if there had been no interruption. “And you’ll remember, I’m sure, who supplied that very handy theory about the arrow of God.”

“Astron!” Fanshire gasped.

“Oh, no,” said the Saint, a little tiredly. “He only said that God sometimes places His arrow in the hands of a man. And I feel quite sure that a wire to New York will establish that there is actually a criminal file under the name of Granville, with fingerprints and photos that should match Mr Gresson’s — as Vosper’s fatally elephantine memory remembered... That was the one crack he shouldn’t have made, because it was the only one that was more than gossip or shrewd insult, the only one that could be easily proved, and the only one that had a chance of upsetting an operation which was all set — if you’ll excuse the phrase — to make a big killing.”

Major Fanshire fingered his upper lip.

“I don’t know,” he began, and then, as Arthur Granville Gresson began to rise like a floating balloon from his chair, and the ebony-faced sergeant moved to intercept him like a well-disciplined automaton, he knew.