“Now do you get an idea why we couldn’t resist it?” Lona Dayne said.
He nodded, conscious of the associations that must have heightened the strain that she was fighting.
“You’ll both be enjoying it again before long,” he said quietly, “if I’m still any good at these games.”
She turned and walked briskly over to the bar.
“How about a whisky and soda?”
“Thanks. But make mine with water.”
“Going back to your last question,” she said, making herself busy with her back turned, and speaking in a resolutely clear and business-like voice, “I’m certain now that Ivalot always passed as British. You see, one of the things that’s made him so hopelessly hard to trace is that there’s so little real information about him. In the hotels where he stayed, for instance, the only record was the name, Roger Ivalot—address, Bermuda. Only a British subject could have registered like that. If he’d been taken for a foreigner, he’d’ve had to fill out a form with a lot more questions than that, and give a passport number as well. And then we’d either have had more facts to go on, or the police would’ve been leading the hunt for him, for making false declarations.”
“Whereas right now there’s no official interest?”
“I’ve told you, there’s nothing against him except a paternity suit, and that sort of thing doesn’t concern Scotland Yard.”
With a discreet knock, the caretaker entered.
“Will it be all right if I wait in my quarters, ma’am,” he asked respectfully, “until you want me to row Mr Templar ashore?”
Lona Dayne turned with the Saint’s drink in her hand, nonplussed for an instant, and then Simon took it and said calmly, “That won’t be necessary. I’d much rather take you ashore, Lona, to a hotel, where I think you’d be safer than out here.”
“But this is almost like a castle with a moat around it!”
“And anybody who can row, or even swim, can cross a moat. Unless it’s guarded. So if you’re determined to stay here, which you probably are, to be around for any more messages that come in, I’m going to stay and join the garrison.”
She hesitated barely an instant.
“That would be quite wonderful,” she said frankly, and he admired her for not making any half-hearted protests. “Bob, would you make sure that everything’s ship-shape in the spare room before you go to bed? And thank you for waiting up.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
The caretaker withdrew, looking more than ever like an Ethiopian pontiff with a troublesome congregation.
“I’m afraid this shocks him even more than your husband’s disappearing act,” Simon remarked.
“I can’t help that. I’ll be perfectly honest now and admit that I’ve been scared for myself too. But I’d have tried not to tell you if you hadn’t mentioned it first.” She picked up her drink and brought it over to join him. “It’s true, isn’t it—a man in Ivalot’s position might do anything?”
The Saint selected a corner of one of the big settees and let himself down into it.
“That depends on how desperate he is—which means, what he has to feel desperate about. You say nobody’s filed any criminal charge against him. So that would mean that he chose to pull up stakes and vanish completely, leaving all the fleshpots that he seems to have thought were fun, just to duck a common paternity suit. But half of those suits are plain ordinary blackmail, anyway—which Jolly Roger seems to have suspected, since he offered a fairly handsome settlement. From the rest of your account, he doesn’t sound like a guy who’d be unduly concerned about his reputation, at any rate with the blue-nosed set. So if the little mother’s price was too high, why didn’t he just get himself a tough lawyer and fight it?”
“You tell me,” she said. “I’ve been going around it all by myself until my head’s swimming.”
“Well, I’d say it suggests that he had something pretty big to hide. I don’t see him being so scared of the lawsuit; but the lawyers would certainly start investigating his means before they got into court, in order to prove how much he could afford to pay, and I’m inclined to think that’s what scared him. Did anyone ever check on these uranium mines he was supposed to have an interest in?”
“Yes, we did. We contacted every Australian and South African mining company that has anything to do with uranium. None of them had ever heard of him, and his name wasn’t on any of their lists of shareholders. But of course, his shares wouldn’t necessarily have to be in his own name.”
“No. But it’s usually only millionaires and big operators who’re concerned about keeping their holdings hidden. According to Ivalot’s story, as you told it, he wasn’t in either category when he bet his shirt on the atomic future. So why would he have bought stocks then under a phony name?”
“Perhaps even in those days he didn’t want to be investigated.”
“Perhaps. But another thing. He must have done something to earn a living and save up a stake before he invested in uranium. While you were doing your research on him, didn’t you ever turn up anything on that background?”
“I tried to, naturally. But I didn’t find out anything. If anyone asked him, he must have managed to dodge the question.”
“So what this all boils down to,” said the Saint, “is that we don’t have one single solid fact about him before he exploded on London like a bomb, and everything you’ve told me except what he actually did in London before witnesses is probably pure fiction.”
“Except that he did have a lot of money.”
“He spent a good deal of money. But not millions. We don’t know how much he had left when he checked out.”
“And he is in Bermuda.”
“Apparently. Which only leads to another question: why? When things got too hot in London, he took a powder. Nothing happened to the gal who was giving him trouble. But here, it’s your husband who disappears. Why?”
She put her clenched fists to her temples.
“What are you driving at?” she pleaded. “You’re only making it seem more hopeless!”
“I have to do this, Lona,” he said steadily. “It’s the dull part of playing detective. First I have to prune off everything that we don’t actually know at all. It isn’t till we’ve trimmed off all the camouflage and confusion that we’ll get a good look at what’s really left. And raising more questions sometimes leads to more answers. For instance, that last one. The two most likely reasons why our boy hasn’t left Bermuda are either a) that he feels better able to cope with things here, or b) that it’s harder for him to leave. I wouldn’t call those sensational clues, but they might come in handy before we’re through.”
She recovered herself again, with a toss of her blonde head something like a dog shaking off water.
“I’m sorry,” she said, smiling very hard. “I must remember, I told you I was tough. What next?”
“Something very important. Do you have a picture of this character?”
“No. That’s what makes it even more impossible.”
“A playboy like that never got his picture taken?”
“Photographers don’t go popping flash bulbs all over the place in England like they do in America, or at least in American films. They’d have to ask his permission, and if he didn’t want any pictures he could get out of it.”
Simon scowled thoughtfully.
“And yet he didn’t care how many people saw him making an exhibition of himself—he did everything to attract attention. Damn it, it doesn’t make sense…Wait a minute, though. Maybe it does. It means he wasn’t afraid of anyone in England recognizing him, but a news photo might go anywhere in the world.”
“Another clue?”
“Could be. But you must have a description of him.”
She screwed up her eyes a little, concentrating.
“Ordinary height—about five feet ten. Medium build, but quite muscular. The girl with the twins said he was in very fine shape for his age—and please don’t say whatever that v
ulgar expression is getting ready for, Simon, I think I’ve already heard every possible joke on that subject. He told her he was fifty-three. But a lot of people thought he looked older, because he was half bald, and the fringe of hair that he had left was very gray, and so was his beard—”
“Oh, no,” groaned the Saint. “Not a beaver, too?”
“Not a royal growth. The kind that just carries the sideburns on down around the jawbone until they meet and make a tuft on the chin.”
“Which can be grown in two weeks and change the outline of a face completely. And I was just going to ask you what type of face he had.”
“And I was going to tell you it was round. But I see what you mean. Everyone says he was always smiling—the Jolly Roger business, of course—and that would help his face to look round, too.”
“Mouth?”
“Biggish—the smile would help that, I know, don’t tell me. And of course he had a mustache.”
“Of course. He would. Teeth?”
“Good.”
“Nose?”
She moved her hands helplessly.
“Did you ever try to make the average person describe a nose? It wasn’t a great beak and it wasn’t an Irish pug and it wasn’t broken. It was just a nose.”
“Eyes?”
“Brown. Two.”
Simon Templar unrolled and came up on his feet in an ultimate surge of exasperation.
“God burn and blast it,” he erupted, “do you realize that that adds up to practically nothing at all? A middling-sized guy with strictly conventional features—the greatest physical assets any crook could start with. Everything else could be grown or glued on and shaped and/or dyed or worn as an expression, on this foundation you still haven’t described. We don’t even have a clear picture of his age, except that I’ll bet that it’s less than fifty-three. If you want to do a good job of faking, it’s a lot easier to pretend to be older than younger—as I shouldn’t have to tell a woman. But as for all the spinach on this act…”
He groped around for an illustration, and his gaze lit on a framed photograph on the mantelpiece. He targeted it with a dynamically outthrust forefinger.
“Why,” he said, “I could pin the same shrubbery on that guy, and he’d fit your description.”
“That guy,” she said, out of an icy stillness, “happens to be my husband.”
The Saint stood transfixed, his eyes almost glazed with the fascination of the frabjous idea that his runaway train of thought had gone hurtling into. But she never noticed that teetering instant of thunderstruck rigidity, for within the same full second the telephone began to ring.
She started towards it with a tensely even step, but reached it in a rush.
Simon was beside her as she picked it up. With an arm lightly around her, he pressed his ear to the other side of the receiver.
“Hullo,” she said.
He was inappropriately aware of her hair brushing his cheek and her faint perfume in his nostrils, while he listened to the voice which he could hear thinly but quite clearly through the plastic. It had a forced and unmistakably artificial timbre, with a strong nasal twang.
“Mrs Dayne,” it said, “I’ll let you talk to your husband as soon as Mr Templar has left Bermuda. But if he isn’t on a plane tomorrow, you can consider yourself a widow.”
There was a soft click, and that was all.
3
The Saint awoke early in the morning, for there had been no further reason to stay up late the night before.
He had made the only possible offer directly their eyes met after she hung up the dead telephone: “I’ll leave tomorrow, of course.”
Her face was a tortured battleground of uncertainty.
“Thank you for making it easy for me!” she said. “Even if you were the best hope I had…But you do understand, don’t you?”
“I do indeed. I know why the parents of kidnaped kids pay ransom. You couldn’t force me to go, but I can’t take advantage of that. However”—his smile was a thing of coldly dazzling deadliness—“I’ll still be working until the last plane leaves.”
He had found out that she had some sleeping pills, and had persuaded her to take one.
“We’re talked out for tonight,” he said. “At least you can be fairly sure that your husband’s alive, and that you’ll hear from him tomorrow. This is your chance to get some rest. Let me do the worrying.”
He had not worried at all, for that was a sterile indulgence of which he was constitutionally incapable. But he had been happy to find that the guest room which had been prepared for him was directly opposite the master bedroom: she had gratefully accepted the suggestion that both doors should be left ajar, and thereafter he had slept with the tranquil self-confidence of a cat. But nothing had disturbed the night, and when he opened his eyes and saw daylight, many things had sorted themselves out in his mind, and he knew that for that period there had been no real danger.
He found his way out of the house and down to the water in the dressing-gown she had lent him—it was so obviously part of a bridegroom’s going-away outfit that the loan seemed like an embarrassing kind of compliment, but he had to take it. It was easy to slip into the almost lukewarm water in a tiny cove on the seaward side of the island without benefit of swimming trunks. He churned back and forth for a while, drifted along the shore to watch the questings of a school of yellow-striped fish, and finally hoisted himself out onto a rock where the sun quickly dried him. In front of him was only the blue Sound, embraced by the main chain of islands and dotted with smaller satellite islands; local folklore claims that the Bermudas are made up of 365 islands, one for every day in the year, but the actual number is much less than half that, and a large number of those have a somewhat slender claim to be counted, being mere outcroppings of coral which have barely managed to raise their heads above high water. Small sailboats, launches, and a couple of the busy ferries that bustle endlessly to and fro to link a dozen landings spaced around the harbor and the Sound, made the view look absurdly like an animated travel-folder picture: no one is ever quite prepared for the fact that Bermuda, more than almost any other highly advertised place, looks so instantly and exactly like its postcards. But after his first appreciative survey, the Saint turned his back on the panorama and concentrated on the humped contours of the island that he was on, trying speculatively to fit them with another geological item which he recalled from a guide-book he had been reading.
After a few minutes he put on the borrowed robe again and walked back up over the close-cropped grass. Near a corner of the formal garden that surrounded the house he came upon the colored caretaker planting an oleander hedge, making a neat row of eighteen-inch cuttings bent over in interlocking arcs with both ends set in the ground, but characteristically looking more like a gravedigger than a gardener.
“Good morning, sir,” he said, with studiously impersonal politeness.
“Good morning.”
Simon paused to light a cigarette. His gaze swept around the panorama again, and from that vantage point he could see more than two-thirds of the private island.
“There’s something I’ve been meaning to ask,” he said. “Exactly how did Mr Dayne leave here when he disappeared? Did he get a phone call first? Or did someone come to see him? Did he say anything when he left?”
“I’m afraid I have no idea, sir. I’d gone into Somerset to do some shopping, and when I came back Mr Dayne was gone.”
“Well, when you came back, was another of the boats from here over at the landing, besides the one you’d taken?”
“No, sir. Just the one I’d used.”
“Then someone must have come and picked him up in a boat.”
“That must be right, sir.”
The Saint rubbed his chin for a moment.
“By the way,” he said. “I noticed a small Chris-Craft tied up at the dock last night. Is that working?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I think we might use it to run into Hamilton thi
s morning.”
“Yes, sir, of course—to get your ticket.”
Simon’s eyes flickered fractionally.
“How did you know I was going anywhere?”
“Mrs Dayne just told me what happened last night, sir. She’s in the kitchen, fixing breakfast. I’m sorry, sir,” the caretaker said stiffly.
“So am I,” said the Saint briefly, and went on into the house.
He put his head in the kitchen door and asked, “How soon are you serving?”
“In about five minutes, or whenever you’re ready,” she answered, and added, “You’ll find an electric razor in our bathroom.”
“Thanks.”
In well under ten minutes he had shaved, rinsed himself under a shower, dressed, and was sitting down to a platter of perfectly cooked eggs and bacon.
“I see you were brought up right,” he said. “Frying an egg sounds like the easiest job in the world, but I’m always amazed how seldom it’s done properly, without making bubbles in the white and a leathery brown crust underneath. Even in France, the land of the great chefs, nobody has the faintest notion of how to fry an egg.”
“You don’t have to cover up,” she said steadily. “I know how the idea of running away must be hurting you. So I’ve decided that if you think it’s the wrong thing to do, you mustn’t do it—even if I beg you to.”
“I have to make a plane reservation anyhow,” he said. “Has it dawned on you that you’re being watched? I’d never met you till yesterday evening, and yet I was the main thing our pal had on his mind when he phoned you last night.”
Her eyes widened a little.
“You mean Ivalot himself could have been at the Van Hessens’—or at the restaurant where we had dinner—”
The Saint Around the World (The Saint Series) Page 3