The Saint Around the World (9 page)

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

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

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

v

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It seemed almost like an omen.

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

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

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

“Really?” said his guest politely.

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

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

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

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

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

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

vi

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

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

Her pixie face was almost sullen with concentration.

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

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

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

“That was roughly what I had in mind.”

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

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

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

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

She stared at him resentfully.

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

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

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

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

“But you can’t stay here all night.”

“I can think of worse fates.”

“You might think of some better dialogue.”

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

She stood up and paced restlessly.

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

“And some more beer?”

“You’ve just drunk the last I had.”

He got up and stretched himself.

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

She hesitated an instant.

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

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

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

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

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

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

There was a note stuck in the refrigerator door.

Decided I might only mess things up for you after all, so I pushed off. Thanks, apologies, and good luck.

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

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

vii

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

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

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

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

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

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

“My love,” Mr. Clarron said loudly.

She did not stir.

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

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

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

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

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

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