Trust The Saint

The cleaner cure

Copyright © 1959 by Great American Publications, Inc.

Simon Templar suffered neither fools nor pests gladly, but he was never too stubborn to admit that even the most obnoxious person could have something to offer him that might be useful at some remote time in some odd way.

He did not like Dr Wilmot Javers, whom he met at a cocktail party in London for which the occasion has no bearing on this story, but he talked with him. Or, rather, he listened and made a few conventionally encouraging noises while Dr Javers talked.

“I came across a case recently that would interest you,” Dr Javers stated, in a tone that defied contradiction. “I said to myself at the time, this would be one for the Saint.”

“Did you?” responded the Saint politely.

“Of course, I never dreamed I’d have the chance to find out whether you could solve it. But now you’ll have to show me whether you’re as clever as they say you are.”

“I couldn’t be,” Simon responded promptly.

But Dr Javers was not to be diverted. As a medico, he may have been extremely competent and conscientious, sympathetic and indefatigable in affliction, dedicated to his profession and his patients, but as an individual he was one of those opinionated and aggressive types that can only assert themselves by reducing somebody else.

There are physical specimens of the same mentality who, with a certain reinforcement of alcohol, upon spotting a former or even current boxing champion in a bar, are impelled to try their best to pick a fight with him — an occupational hazard of which every career pugilist is acutely aware. What can they lose? If he declines the challenge, he is yellow. If the loud mouth can score with a sneak punch, he can boast about it for ever. But if the pro gives him the beating that he deserves, then the champ is nothing but a big bully picking on a poor helpless amateur. Even actors who portray tough-guy parts before movie or TV cameras, merely to support their wives and children, are the recurrent targets of hopped-up heroes who feel inspired to prove that these actors are not as tough as the script makes them.

The Saint was exposed to this psychosis on two planes — not merely the physical, but also the intellectual, which in several ways was harder to cope with, requiring more patience than muscular prowess. But he had learned to roll with the abstract punches as well as the other kind.

“Here’s the situation,” said Dr Javers. “The subject is a man thirty-eight years old, married, two children, more than averagely successful in business. Never had a serious illness in his life, but is somewhat overweight. His business calls for a lot of expense-account wining and dining. His only trouble is that the wining is often too much for him. He isn’t an alcoholic, and he holds it like a gentleman, but he goes to bed drunk two or three nights a week, regularly. I mean, when he lies down, it’s a fine question whether he falls asleep or passes out.”

“So?”

“One night, after taking a foreign buyer out to dinner and a couple of night clubs, he comes home and goes to bed in his dressing-room, as he always does when he’s out late. His wife is an understanding soul, and she doesn’t wait up for him. The next day, he has the usual hangover, only it’s much worse than usual.”

“Must have been an extra big night.”

“He has the splitting headache and the nausea, of course, but much worse than he can ever remember having them. And a bad cough, though he can’t remember whether he smoked a lot more than his normal quota of cigarettes. Naturally, he has no appetite for breakfast. But he doesn’t improve during the day. He feels worse all the time, he can’t eat, and his eyeballs turn yellow. The following day, his wife thinks he must have an attack of jaundice, and calls me in. By that time he has stopped passing urine. I do what I can, but in two days he is dead.”

“Another casualty to the expense-account system,” said the Saint. “His wife ought to sue the Government for instituting a tax system that forces business men to entertain each other to death just so they can have a little fun with their own profits before the tax collectors grab for them.”

Dr Javers frowned. It was evident that on top of everything else he disapproved of flippancy, at least when it detracted from the importance he attributed to his own conversation.

“I’d given him a complete check-up only three weeks before. His social-business drinking hadn’t been going on long enough to do any irreparable damage. His liver and kidneys were still in good shape. He showed no signs of any cardiac condition. In fact, I would have testified anywhere that there was nothing organically wrong with him.”

“Anyone can make a mistake, I suppose.”

“Not me, Mr Templar. Not that bad a mistake. In fact, to protect my own reputation, it was I who urged that there should be a post-mortem. The subject’s wife agreed, and I was completely vindicated. He had absolutely no chronic lesion or disease. If he had watched his diet, cut down his drinking, and taken a little exercise, there was no reason why he couldn’t have lived as long as any of us. But he died, actually, of acute kidney failure.”

“So he was poisoned.”

“Obviously. But what with?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t do it.”

“I’ll give you a little help. It was done with something that anyone can buy without any restriction, which you’d be likely to find in almost any house, and which isn’t generally considered poisonous at all. And generally speaking, it isn’t. This poisoning was a freakish accident. It depended on an entirely separate circumstance which I included in my summary, if you were paying close enough attention.”

Simon made a heroic effort to mute a sigh.

“I’m no toxicologist, doctor,” he said. “You tell me.”

“I’ll give you one more clue,” Javers said, with visibly expanding egocentric glee. “There was a heavy smear of lipstick on the collar of the coat he had worn on his last night out. But he insisted, and I believe him, that this was merely a souvenir of the floor show at one of the clubs to which he had taken his customer, which had one of those numbers where the chorus girls make fools of some of the men at the ringside tables.”

The Saint shrugged.

“I give up.”

Javers shook his head, and his round smug face shone with delight. In any sensibly ordered world, no further justification should have been needed for punching him in the nose.

“Oh, no, you don’t,” he said. “You still haven’t really tried. I want to find out how good you are. Think it over for a while.”

He moved away, chortling to himself, leaving Simon unexpectedly unhooked and joyfully free to set a course towards a prettily molded blonde in another corner whom he had been wistfully watching for some time.

Needless to say, the Saint did not think about Dr Javers’s conundrum for a moment, but Dr Javers was not so easily dismissed. An hour later he came all the way across the room to buttonhole Simon relentlessly again.

“Have you found the answer yet?”

“No,” Simon said patiently. “What is it?”

The doctor beamed at him gloatingly.

“You haven’t concentrated on it yet. I know, I’ve been watching you. Unfortunately I have to leave now, but I’m not letting you off so lightly. I’m going to leave you with the problem. It’ll torment you later, when you’re trying to go to sleep or waking up in the morning. And when you can’t stand it any longer, you can call me.” He handed Simon a card. “We’ll have a spot of dinner together and I’ll explain it to you. Or if you happen to have hit on that solution. I’ve got a few other scientific puzzles for you to sharpen your wits on. I expect I’ll hear from you one of these days.”

He departed again, chuckling fatly, and Simon put the card in his pocket and took a mental pledge never to look at it again or to waste another instant wondering what chemical coincidence Dr Javers’s patient could have succumbed to.

Experience should long since have taught him the intrinsic danger of such rash resolutions, but he felt that in this case at least there was nothing he could obtain from such an odious bore that would be worth the tedium and irritation of getting it. He held firmly to this erroneous assumption for several weeks, during which he was fully occupied with other matters that are recorded elsewhere in these annals, which left him no spare time to fret over tricky puzzles that did not immediately concern him.

The nudge of Destiny was still far from perceptible at first, one night in Paris when he came home very late to his suite at the George V, giving a perfunctory bonsoir to the anonymous cleaning woman whom he passed on her knees in the corridor. But he had hardly taken off his coat and tie when there was a timid touch on the buzzer at the outer door, and he opened it and recognized her more by her drab fatigue uniform than anything else.

“May I speak with Monsieur a moment?” she asked nervously.

“But certainly, Madame,” he replied cordially, in the same French, giving her the ceremonious title which Gallic gallantry may accord even to the humblest servant.

She came in, a gray woman toil-worn to nothing but skin and bones and indefatigable persistence, yet with a great dignity in her large deep-set eyes.

“I know who you are, Monsieur Templar,” she said, when she had shut the door. “Everyone talks about le Saint staying here. I have waited many nights for the chance to catch you at a good moment.”

“What is your trouble?” he asked.

“It is a long story, but I will try to make it short. My name is Yvonne Norval. I had a husband once, and his name was Norval, so that is also the name of my daughter Denise. But he died long ago, in Algeria, after the Liberation, which did not settle everything for the professional soldiers. Denise is almost sixteen now, and she was born the day after I was notified of his death.”

“A small consolation, perhaps. But it must have been hard for you to bring her up alone.”

“Very hard, Monsieur. The pay of a French sergeant is not much, at the best, and the pension of his widow is even less. But we had waited a long time for a child, always promising ourselves that if ever we were blessed with one it should have the best upbringing that we could give it, at any sacrifice. For neither of us had had much, but there must always be a time when any family can improve itself, if the parents are determined to pass on to their children a little more than they received. And after I had lost my husband, this hope became an obsession. I was already twenty-seven years old when Denise was born: I had had the best of my own life. But I still had a good figure and a pretty face, though you would not believe it now.”

It was hard to realize that simple arithmetic made her no more than forty-three. Anyone’s guess would have pegged her at least twelve years older. But the Saint said, “On the contrary, Madame, one sees that you must once have had great beauty, and now it has only matured, like a good wine.”

“I had, at any rate, something that men still wanted, for a little while,” she said calmly. “And since I no longer had any use for it, I gave the benefit to Denise.”

“Je vous écoute,” said the Saint. “Please sit down. At an hour like this, I have nothing but time.”

This was a poetic exaggeration, but on this occasion he did not feel that the time was wasted.

The tale that he heard might have sounded to a cynic like the plot for a soap opera that no soap manufacturer would dare to sponsor, but it was told with a stoical dispassionateness that gave it a quality of classic tragedy.

Yvonne Norval had chosen the oldest profession with no illusions, solely on her cold-blooded estimate that there was no other in which she was qualified to earn so much money so quickly. But unlike most of her sisters in it, she had hoarded every franc that she could. She spent nothing on personal luxuries, and no more than the essential minimum on such decorative vanities as were necessary to attract her clientele; her Spartan willpower and singleness of purpose substituted for the expensive stimulus of drink and drugs which many others depended on to numb their self-disgust, and with the cunning and ferocity of a tigress she evaded or fought off the approaches of the pimps who would have helped themselves to the largest share of her income. She did not say it all in those words, but the facts were implicit in her own austere way of telling it.

In seven years of this rigorous dedication, she had expended the last saleable vestige of her original stock-in-trade, but she had accumulated a fund that would guarantee her daughter’s care and education for the next ten, on a much higher level even than she could have hoped for if a fellagha sniper’s aim had been a little less deadly.

She placed the child in a convent school of excellent standing, representing herself as the widow of an Army officer whose snobbish family had sternly refused to recognize their marriage or its offspring. Too proud to plead for the charity of these intransigent in-laws, she was depositing everything he had left her to pre-pay the raising of their daughter in the style to which she should be entitled: the fact that she herself would thus be forced to take any menial job for her own subsistence was not to cloud the childhood of Denise. When the little girl became aware enough to ask why Yvonne visited her so seldom and never took her home, she would be told that her mother was married again, to a man who was so intensely jealous of the past that he refused ever to see the fruit of it; perhaps one day he would relent, her mother was working on him constantly, but the day had not dawned yet. The sympathetic nuns had agreed to lend their silence to the deception.

“They would have needed a very tolerant confessor themselves,” said the Saint, “if they had not been moved by such a sacrifice as yours. But after this, did you still have more trouble?”

“Like you, Monsieur, I thought it was ended. But if it had been, I should not be talking to you. Instead, it was only beginning. After all, there was a maquereau I did not escape.”

His given name was Pierre, and in the half-world where he belonged he was known as Pîerrot-le-Fût — a gross arrogant beast of the type that are loosely called Apaches, but not because there is anything noble in their savagery. Of surnames he had a variety, but once when he was picked up in a police dragnet it had amused him to call himself Pierre Norval — that same day, Yvonne had refused his “protection” for the nineteenth time, in particularly graphic phrases, and under the influence of a stolen bottle of Calvados it had struck him as a brilliantly subtle retaliation. Even afterwards, he was still entranced with his own malicious genius, and continued to use the name, grumbling obscure crudities about his unfaithful “wife.”

In a psychological reaction, that has afflicted many better men, rejection had not quenched his interest but had inflamed it. He did not think for an instant that she was irresistible or irreplaceable, he knew a dozen girls who were prettier or better built or more entertaining, but that abstract estimate made it an even more intolerable affront to his vanity that Yvonne should turn him down. It had become a point of honor that he must subjugate her, so that in his own time he could humiliate her as she had humiliated him. And to this objective he had devoted more tenacity and ingenuity than he would ever have squandered on any legitimate enterprise.

And when he finally found the key, it fitted more perfectly than he could have hoped for in his most vindictive imaginings.

“Somehow, he found out what I had done with Denise, and how I had paid the school so that she would be safe no matter what became of me. Naturally, I had let no one know about the money I was saving. And now there was no way for him to touch it. But he had armed himself with the one weapon that I could not fight. He told me that unless I became his slave, he would wait until Denise was old enough to be destroyed, and then tell her all the truth about herself and about me.”

For a few seconds the Saint was utterly at a loss for words, and in that silence he realized that no comment he could have made would have been adequate. In a lifetime that had been lived as close as possible to every form of evil, he had never heard a blackmail threat of such callous enormity.

Finally he said, “You should have killed him.”

“You are right. But that is easier for most people to say than to do, especially for a woman. And if I had done that, even the nuns might have turned against me. The whole scandal might have come out. And even if I escaped the guillotine, I could no longer have hoped to help Denise a little more, perhaps, after she left the school — to see her sometimes and perhaps not have her hate me altogether for giving her up to satisfy the new jealous husband I had invented.”

“So you had to accept Pierrot-le-Fût.”

“Yes. I accepted him. I had a little time left in which men of a lower class, or drunk enough, would still pay for me. And even after that, he would not let me go. He had not yet satisfied his hate. He kept me as his cook, his servant, to wait on his friends and their girls and to clean up after them. And to bring home enough money to pay for this privilege, I could go out and work as a scrub woman also, as you saw me tonight.”

Simon thought this must be the end of the story.

“You have my sympathy and my homage, Madame,” he said. “But that cannot be all you wanted of me. Tell me what you think I could do.”

“I would not have troubled you, Monsieur Templar, if only what I have been doing was enough. I am used to the work now, and to the beatings when he is drunk, and I am still able to hold back a little money which he does not know about, which I am saving for when Denise will need it. But now, Pierrot threatens something much worse than before.”

“Can there be such a thing?” asked the Saint incredulously.

“Yes. Now this filthiness says that what I do is no longer enough. He has been watching Denise. She is old enough and pretty enough, he says, to profit him much more than I can, in the one trade that he understands.”

Simon Templar would never again claim that he had heard everything.

“But what threat could he use to make that possible?”

“He may not need one. He can find some way to shame her at the school, by telling the truth about me to her, or to her friends, or to their parents. Then, when she is an outcast by them or by her own shame, he will take over, by force if necessary. He and his kind know only one art, but they know it well. And because I tried so hard to have her gently brought up, she will have none of the defenses that I had. Pierrot-le-Fût is not stupid, you must understand, but he is utterly ruthless, and he is obsessed with one idea which has become a mania. For him to reduce and ruin Denise would be his last and greatest triumph.”

“And, of course, there is no bribe left to offer him. He has had the satisfaction of making you suffer the last possible indignity. Now he can only look forward to the sadistic climax of proving that all your sacrifice was in vain.”

“C’est ça. One believes, now, that the Saint understands everything.”

“That’s one thing I’ll never do,” said the Saint. “But I’ll keep trying.”

He lighted a cigarette and stared out of the elaborately lace-curtained windows through which he could see practically nothing, listening to the vague rumbles and beeps and blended voices and sporadic clatters of the city without hearing them, and wondered if some miracle would ever earn him a reprieve from the reputation to which he had dedicated himself.

He could no longer have been flippant about soap operas, but he was beginning to think that a magnificent soap opera could have been built around him, except that hardly anyone would have believed the plot material except himself.

“Tell me some more about this charmer, Pierrot-le-Fût,” he said.

The details he was mainly interested in were the haunts and habits of the specimen. He wrote down certain addresses that Yvonne Norval gave him, and when he had finished asking questions she stood up with quiet dignity.

“I apologize for taking so much of your time, Monsieur,” she said. “But since you have heard it all, may I dare to hope a little?”

“I will try to think of something,” he said. “But whatever happens, when you leave this room, you must forget that you ever spoke to me, or told me anything. This may be our last meeting, but in any case, we never met.”

“C’est entendu, Monsieur le Saint.”

It was the most natural thing for him to offer his hand as he opened the door for her, but he was somewhat stunned and embarrassed when she bent over it and touched it to her lips. Then, before he could protest, she was gone.

It was quite a while since the Saint had tackled such a relatively basic and elementary problem as this. Regardless of the visions of starry-eyed spiritual or psychological idealists, he had never believed in the redemption or rehabilitation of such creatures as Pierrot-le-Fût: he believed in one fast, thrifty, and final cure for what ailed them, a treatment which eliminated all risk of a relapse. The fact that he had not administered this remedy so often of late was not due to any loss of faith in the efficacy of death as a disinfectant, but to the distracting pressure of too many more intriguing and more profitable claims on his attention. He realized now how much he had missed some of the old simple pleasures. But it had taken a pustule of such almost incredible stature as Pierrot-le-Fût to remind him of them.

The next evening he headed for the area near Montmartre which was frequented by the self-baptized Pierre Norval and his ilk, not to sample any of the garish boîtes clustered around the Place Pigalle where pilgrims from all over the world pay their traditional respects to the symbols of mammalian reproduction, but to sift through some of the unglamorous outlying cafés where the parasites on the by-products of this activity met to scheme, drink, boast, connive, gamble, and trade every kind of illicit merchandise — vegetable, mineral, and human. And without any elaborate disguise, using only a few of those subtle shifts of dress and demeanor which were his own inimitable masterpieces of camouflage, he was able to do it without ever incurring the kind of attention that would have greeted an ordinary tourist who had strayed so far from the time-honored tourist trap-line.

He found Pierrot-le-Fût quite quickly, at the third of the addresses he had jotted down, an unattractive bistro off the Boulevard Clichy, and without evident nausea he sipped some extraordinarily foul and bitter coffee while he browsed slowly and exhaustively through the same edition of Match that he had mauled through each of the other stops he had made.

His purpose at that time was no more vital than to satisfy a student’s curiosity to observe this excrescence with his own eyes, to verify certain aspects which Yvonne Norval’s prejudice might have distorted, and to make a few observations of his own, in much the same way as a professional executioner discreetly assesses the weight and musculature of the man he is to hang.

Pierrot-le-Fût was a big man, built somewhat along the lines of the barrel which was only one of the possible meanings of his sobriquet, but in spite of his tubby shape he also looked hard as a cask is hard. He had small piggy eyes and a sadistic mouth from which a loud voice blustered mechanical obscenities. He had a flushed face and an equally ruddy nose which bespoke other habitual intemperances. He drank cognac from a large glass which was frequently refilled, and although it did not seem to be having any devastating effect on him at the time, this was still early in the night’s probable span for him.

From what he saw and overheard, Simon Templar decided that the picture that had been drawn for him was not exaggerated, and he paid for his noxious coffee and folded his magazine and went out. The entire excursion would hardly have been worth mentioning in this anecdote at all, if it had not been for the totally unexpected complication which it unluckily led to.

The Saint had only walked a block or so along the Boulevard Clichy, and caught the attention of a prowling taxi, and discussed his destination with the chauffeur according to the protocol established by modern Paris taxi drivers (who must first be assured that the travel plans of a potential passenger fit in with their own, which they almost never do, which calls for a special bonus above the metered fare to be agreed on to compensate the driver for the inconvenience), when there was a nudge at his elbow and he turned, with a standard formula of polite but firm rebuff ready on the tip of his tongue. But instead of the painted or the pandering nonentity that he expected, he looked into a mournful emaciated-spaniel face that he knew only too well, for it belonged to Inspector Archimède Quercy of the Police Judiciaire.

“You will permit me to ride with you?” said the Inspector, making the question mark barely perceptible. “The George Cinq is not far out of my way, and it would be agreeable to rest my feet.”

“But of course,” said the Saint, with a delighted geniality which he did not feel. “After all the jokes I’ve made about that occupational malady of policemen, it’s about time I did something to alleviate it.”

In the cab, he closed the glass partition that separated them from the driver.

“And which of the nude spectacles have you been checking on?” he continued quizzically. “I had no idea it was one of the duties of the Police Judiciaire to go around making surprise examinations of show girls’ costumes, to catch anyone trying to chisel a millimeter off the legal minimum of eight centimeters tapering to four.”

“And I,” said Quercy, with the utmost composure, “had no idea that the Saint was interested in such canaille as Pierrot-le-Fût.”

Simon’s bantering gaze did not waver, in spite of the leaden feeling that sagged within him as his premonition was so bluntly confirmed.

“Then how did you acquire this extraordinary notion?”

“Purely by observation. I give you my word, I have not been having you watched. By accident, I happened to see you in a café as I passed. I was about to cross the street to speak to you, when I noticed that in certain small ways you were not comporting yourself as I am used to seeing you. These were not things that would have caught the eye of anyone else — indeed, they were things that would help you to escape attention. It was clear, then, that you did not want to be seen.”

“Which naturally made you want to see.”

“It is a professional instinct,” said the other calmly. “You soon left this first café and went to another, which was equally unlike the kind of place where one is accustomed to find the elegant Simon Templar. But again, you were trying not to appear elegant. And since you did not trail anyone there, it became evident that you were looking for someone. This was substantiated when, after a while, you walked to the third bistro, again not following anyone, again trying to efface yourself, and again devoting yourself to a magazine which I had already seen you read twice.”

“It’s a pity it was so absorbing, or I might have felt you breathing down my neck.”

“Obviously it had not occurred to you that anyone might be following you: therefore you must believe that in this affair, whatever it is, you have all the initiative.”

“Did Emile Gaboriau get any of his inspiration from you?”

“He could have, but I was not so old then... Eh bien at last you discover Pierrot-le-Fût. He does not recognize you, and you are not wearing a false beard, so one deduces easily that he is not aware of your interest in him. But although you hardly exist for anyone else, you can be so skilful at submerging yourself on the rare occasions when you choose to, it is you I am watching from my concealment outside. I suspect you identify him from a picture or a description that has been given you, since it is manifest that you have never met, and the identification is ratified for you when his friends call him Pierrot. I see you studying him closely from behind your magazine, for a long time, until you seem to be satisfied and you leave.”

“And what makes you think I was looking for this Pierrot character, out of all the others I must have looked at while you were spying on me?”

“You did not look at any others in the same way. And after you had finished studying him, you left, and you did not try any more bars. You hailed this taxi and asked to be taken to your hotel. When I heard that, I knew that you had accomplished your object, at least for the present, and I allowed myself to intrude on you.”

Simon threw back his head and laughed almost inaudibly.

“If you don’t qualify for some sort of award, I’ll have to institute one for you,” he said. “What would you think of calling it the Prix Poulet?... Now, let me tell you. I’ve had such a bellyful of some of these elegant places where one is accustomed to find me, as you put it, that I had an overwhelming urge tonight to go slumming. I wanted to sit in some dull dives and look at some drab characters of the type that I sometimes ran into in the bad old days. Obviously I had to try to make myself inconspicuous, or at least not too much like an American tourist. But things don’t seem the same as they used to seem. Or maybe it’s me who is getting old. But I sat in a couple of joints without finding anything to be nostalgic about, and then in the last one there was this Pierrot, a survival from what seems like another era. I watched him for a while, and concluded that he was no longer amusing, only a gross bullying pig. I decided to stop trying to recapture the past and return to the soporific civilization of the Champs Élysées.”

Quercy nodded sympathetically.

“I understand you perfectly,” he said. “And therefore I have to warn you that although Pierrot-le-Fût is without doubt a pig of outstanding swinishness, the responsibility for slaughtering him must be left to a French court and the authorized machinery of the State.”

“When do you think they will get around to it?”

“That is not for me to predict, Monsieur Templar. But after this, if anything violent should happen to Pierre Norval that cannot instantly be attributed to his equally abominable associates, I predict that I shall be obliged to investigate every possibility that it was an act of the Saint.”

“Do you mean,” asked the Saint incredulously, “that you don’t believe me?”

The Inspector rubbed his sad sunken jowls forbearingly.

“We have been through more than one case together, and I have learned a great respect and fondness for you, mon cher ami. But I do not forget the record which was the first thing I had to study about you, and I do not think you have quite overcome all your bad habits — especially when you mock a serious policier.”

They had arrived at the hotel. Simon got out, and said with unabated impudence, “Must we make it such an early night? How about bringing your tape measure and we’ll walk over and process the G-strings at the Crazy Horse Saloon?”

But Quercy shook his head and remained in the cab.

“Merci. I am too comfortable now, so I shall ride the rest of the way home. But I beg you, do not forget what I have said. For I shall not forget.”

“Everyone should have his beautiful memories, Archimède,” said the Saint.

But upstairs in his suite, he paced the floor for half an hour before he could relax enough even to lie down on the bed.

The wild coincidence that Quercy had chanced to spot him in the first café, and had deployed such unexpected talents for analytical observation, had transformed with one malign stroke what should have been a virtually kindergarten exercise in meritorious homicide into a disconcertingly serious hazard.

The Saint was even less inclined to allow Pierrot-le-Fût to continue to pollute the universe than he had been when he set out for Montmartre that night, but he had no intention of losing his head over the project, figuratively or literally — and Inspector Quercy had made the latter possibility much too explicit for complacency.

The mopping-up of Pierre Norval would have to be as clean a job as the Saint had ever engineered.

It was not until he was horizontal, but still tussling frustratedly with the problem, that he had a sudden dazzling recollection of a certain cocktail party and the pompously infuriating Dr Wilmot Javers.

There was a BEA flight to London at eleven o’clock in the morning which he was able to catch with no indecent scrambling, and thanks to the anomaly of daylight-saving time he arrived in England a little earlier than he had left France. He called Dr Javers from the first telephone he could reach at the airport, and was fortunate to catch him at his office.

“You remember, you warned me your puzzle would haunt me,” he said, with shamelessly hypocritical humility. “I didn’t believe you at the time, but eventually it did. But I simply don’t have the technical knowledge to solve it. Anyway, this being the first time I’ve been back here since you gave me that headache, the top-priority item on my list is to get you to put me out of my misery.”

He could hear the man’s jocund gurgle of self-satisfaction. “I remember our little talk perfectly. And I think you’ve suffered enough. Can you dine with me tonight at my club? It just happens to be the evening I keep free for my scientific reading, but for an occasion like this the Medical Journal can wait!”

Dr Javers was just as unctuously patronizing when they met, and maliciously refused to be the first to bring up the reason for their meeting. Simon out-waited him through two Dry Sacks and a lot of small talk, and finally had the minor satisfaction of forcing the other to advert to the topic after they had sat down to dinner.

“So you couldn’t stand it any longer, eh? You admit that was one mystery that stumped you?”

“You can have it in writing if you like. But don’t make me rack my feeble brain any longer.”

Dr Javers took his time, sipping a spoonful of soup and savouring it deliberately along with his moment of triumph.

“The subject was poisoned by carbon tetrachloride — otherwise, the commonest kind of cleaning fluid.” Simon stared at him, blinking.

“I thought that was supposed to be harmless. Unless he drank it. But I’m positive you never gave me any hint that he might have done that.”

“I didn’t, and he didn’t. The clue I gave you was the lipstick stain on his coat. Although it was comparatively innocent, he probably thought it would be better to get rid of it than have to explain it to his wife. He got out a bottle of this cleaner and started to work on it. But, being in the condition he was, he knocked the bottle over and spilt what there was in it. After that, he gave up and went to bed.”

“But if a few fumes like that can kill someone, from something that everybody uses, why aren’t people dropping dead all the time?”

“It’s a wonder it doesn’t happen more often. Everyone thinks carbon tet is harmless, but that’s because it doesn’t catch fire or explode. The fumes are quite poisonous — a concentration of five thousand parts per million, with an exposure of only five minutes, can cause damage that may be fatal after a week’s illness. That is, about a quart of fluid vaporized in a small space like the dressing-room where the subject slept.”

“Do you mean he was using a whole quart bottle of cleaning fluid?”

“Certainly not. But neither was he exposed for only five minutes. That’s why the average user gets away with it — even if they’re leaning over the thing they’re cleaning and inhaling lots of fumes, they don’t do it for long. The subject slept in this small room for more than four hours. In that length of time, a few ounces could have fatal results. And on top of this, there was one other factor which I was careful to emphasize.”

Simon figured that he had eaten his humble pie, so he was no longer obligated to play guessing games.

“Which was that?”

“Now, really, I should have thought any detective would have spotted that one. I refer to the fact that the subject had been drinking heavily. For some reason which is not yet fully understood, alcohol sharply reduces the ability of the liver and kidneys to detoxify carbon tetrachloride. So that for a person who is under the influence, the probably lethal dose can be cut by about thirty per cent. Put these factors together, and you can calculate that it didn’t take any extraordinary amount of fluid to kill the subject I told you about, in the circumstances I described.”

The Saint thoughtfully finished his soup, enjoying it every bit as much as the doctor had enjoyed his, and considered various angles while the traditionally venerable club waiter was replacing it with a plate of delicately browned sole meunière.

Then he said, “Perhaps it’s just as well more people don’t know all that, or there might be a whole rash of mysterious murders.”

“Don’t you believe it,” Javers said scornfully. “Carbon tet evaporates, yes, but it isn’t undetectable. Any good pathologist would recognize the effects at once, from the way it dissolves the fat in the body organs — just as it dissolves grease spots from your clothes. So any murderer who was planning to use it would have to be damn sure it could be taken for an accident. And that’s the problem with practically any other poison, as you must know.”

Simon nodded respectfully. He could see no flaw that would be a handicap to him.

He knew that his subject slept in a small room and went to bed well marinated in alcohol every night, and he could safely assume that Pierrot-le-Fût slept with the shutters tightly closed, like the average Frenchman of his class, in defense against the deleterious miasmas of the night. He also knew the hours during which Yvonne Norval would be scouring and vacuuming the corridors of the George V, consolidating any alibi she might ever need.

Dr Wilmot Javers, flicking bright gloating glances at him between dissecting operations on his sole, thought he could read the Saint’s mind like a book.

“Of course, you might have been able to get away with it, for one of those so-called ‘justice’ killings they say you did in your young days, where there was no obvious motive to connect you with the victim. It’s too bad you couldn’t think of it for yourself then. It’s too late now, because if I read in the paper about anything that sounded as if you’d made use of it, I’d feel morally bound to go to the police and tell them how I might have given you the idea. I don’t approve of people taking the law into their own hands.”

Simon Templar was able to smile beatifically. Fate, true to its kindly form, had finally paid its indemnity for the time and irritation that this odious coxcomb had cost him.

To make one more flying visit to Paris under another name, avoiding all places in the category of the George V, and wearing some simple disguise that this time would obviate the risk of accidental recognition by Archimède Quercy or any of his ilk, would present no great difficulty to the Saint. And he felt reasonably confident that the unspectacular demise of a low-echelon Parisian hood like Pierrot-le-Fût would not rate any space in the English press.

“Good heavens, chum,” he protested. “Everyone knows I gave that up years ago.”