The Saint on the Spanish Main (10 page)

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, except
ing 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 um
brella 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 um
brella 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 trib
ute 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 dis
creetly
modulated voice that it commanded rapt atten
tion 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 black
board.

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 sug
gests 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 pa
per. 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 hap
pened.”

“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 care
less 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 knowl
edge, 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
theo
retically, 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 juve
nile for taking him seriously. He called Astron a com
mercial 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
me 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 fol
lowing
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 sud
denly
cried out: “No! No—it couldn’t have been Reg
gie!”

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 in
teresting 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 im
possible,
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?”