The Saint Around the World (The Saint Series)

by Leslie Charteris

  He hung up.

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

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

  He took it.

  “Is it poisoned?”

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

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

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

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

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

  “How did you meet Bob?”

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

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

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

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

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

  He hung the instrument up and turned away.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Then how did he leave here?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Simon observed him with critical detachment.

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

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

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

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

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

  “Alive?” Simon inquired, rather carefully.

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

  The Saint shrugged.

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

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

  5

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  THE TALENTED HUSBAND

  1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “I said—”

  “But I did. Honestly.”

  “Why me?”

  “I heard you were going to retire.”

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

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

  “Yes.”

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