The Saint on the Spanish Main (11 page)

“Now you mention it,” Fanshire said
slowly, “I think
I did hear something about it.”

“Well,” Gresson said,
“what
if it happened again this
afternoon, to someone who wasn’t as lucky as
Peck?”

There was another of those electric silences
of as
similation, out of which Lucy Wexall said: “Yes, I heard
about
that.” And Janet said: “Remember, I told you about it! I was visiting
some friends at the hotel that
day, and I didn’t see it happen, but I was
there for the
commotion.”

Gresson spread out his arms, his round face
gleaming
with excitement and perspiration.

“That’s got to be it!” he said.
“You remember how Vosper was lying under the umbrella outside the patio
when we
started playing touch football, and he got sore
because we were
kicking sand over him, and he went off
to the other end of
the beach? But he didn’t take the
umbrella with him. The wind did that,
after we all went
off to change. And this time it didn’t miss!”

Suddenly Astron stood up beside him; but
where
Gresson had risen like a jumping bean, this was like the
growth and unfolding of a tree.

“I have heard many words,” Astron
said, in his firm gentle voice, “but now at last I think I am hearing
truth. No man struck the blasphemer down. The arrow of God
smote
him, in his wickedness and his pride, as it was
written long ago in
the stars.”

“You can say that again,” Gresson
proclaimed trium
phantly. “He sure had it coming.”

Again the Saint drew at his cigarette and
created his
own vision behind half-closed eyes. He saw the huge
umbrella
plucked from the sand by the invisible fingers of the wind, picked up and
hurled spinning along the deserted twilight beach, its great mushroom spread of
gaudy canvas no
longer a drag now but a sail for the
wind
to get behind, the whole thing transformed into a
huge unearthly dart flung with literally
superhuman
power, the arrow of God
indeed. A fantastic, an almost
unimaginable
solution; and yet it did not have to be
imagined because there were witnesses that it had actual
ly almost happened once before… .

Fanshire was saying: “By Jove, that’s
the best sugges
tion I’ve heard yet—without any religious implication,
of
course. It sounds as if it could be the right answer!”

Simon’s eyes opened on him fully for an
instant,
almost pityingly, and then closed completely as the true
and right
and complete answer rolled through the
Saint’s mind like a
long peaceful wave.

“I have one question to ask,” said
the Saint.

“What’s that?” Fanshire said, too
politely to be ir
ritable, yet with a trace of impatience, as if he hated
the
inconvenience of even defending such a divinely tailored
theory.

“Does anyone here have a gun?”
asked the Saint.

There was an almost audible creaking of
knitted
brows, and Fanshire said: “Really, Mr. Templar, I don’t
quite
follow you.”

“I only asked,” said the Saint
imperturbably, “if anyone here had a gun. I’d sort of like to know the
answer
before I explain why.”

“I have a revolver,” Wexall said
with some perplexity.
“What about it?”

“Could we see it, please?” said the Saint.

“I’ll get it,” said Pauline Stone.

She got up and left the room.

“You know I have a gun, Fanshire,” Wexall said.
“You gave me my permit. But I don’t
see—”

“Neither do I,” Fanshire said.

The Saint said nothing. He devoted himself
to his
cigarette, with impregnable detachment, until the vol
uptuous
secretary came back. Then he put out the
cigarette and
extended his hand.

Pauline looked at Wexall, hesitantly, and at
Fanshire.
The Superintendent nodded a sort of grudging ac
quiescence.
Simon took the gun and broke it expertly.

“A Colt .38 Detective Special,” he
said. “Unloaded.”
He sniffed the barrel. “But fired quite
recently,” he said,
and handed the gun to Fanshire.

“I used it myself this morning,”
Lucy Wexall said
cheerfully. “Janet and Reg and I were shooting at
the
Portuguese men-of-war. There were quite a lot of them
around before the breeze came
up.”

“I wondered what the noise was,”
Wexall said
vaguely.

“I was coming up the drive when I heard
it first,” Gresson said, “and I thought the next war had
started.”

“This is all very int’resting,”
Fanshire said, removing
the revolver barrel from the proximity of his nostrils
with a trace of exasperation, “but I don’t
see what it has
to do with the case.
Nobody has been shot—”

“Major Fanshire,” said the Saint
quietly, “may I have
a word with you, outside? And will you keep
that gun in your pocket so that at least we can hope there will be no
more
shooting?”

The Superintendent stared at him for several
seconds,
and at
last unwillingly got up.

“Very well, Mr. Templar.” He stuffed the revolver
into the side pocket of his rumpled white jacket,
and
glanced back at his impassive
chocolate sentinel. “Ser
geant,
see that nobody leaves here, will you?”

He followed Simon out on to the verandah and
said almost peremptorily: “Come on now, what’s this all about?”

It was so much like a flash of a faraway
Scotland
Yard Inspector that the Saint had to control a smile.
But he took Fanshire’s arm and led him persuasively down the front steps to the
beach. Off to their left a tiny red
glowworm blinked low down under the
silver stars.

“You still have somebody watching the
place where
the body was found,” Simon said.

“Of course,” Fanshire grumbled.
“As a matter of rou
tine. But the sand’s much too soft to show any footprints,
and—”

“Will you walk over there with
me?”

Fanshire sighed briefly, and trudged beside
him. His
politeness was dogged but unfailing. He was a type that
had been
schooled from adolescence never to give up, even to the ultimate in ennui. In
the interests of total
fairness, he would be game to the last yawn.

He did go so far as to say: “I don’t
know what you’re
getting at, but why
couldn’t
it have been an acci
dent?”

“I never heard a better theory in my life,” said the
Saint equably, “with one insuperable flaw.”

“What’s that?”

“Only,” said the Saint, very
gently, “that the wind
wasn’t blowing the right way.”

Major Fanshire kept his face straight ahead to the
wind and saw nothing more after that until they
reached
the glowworm that they were
making for and it became a cigarette-end that a constable dropped as he came to
attention.

The place where Floyd Vosper had been lying
was
marked off in
a square of tape, but there was nothing out of the ordinary about it except
some small stains
that showed almost black
under the flashlight which the
constable
produced.

“May I mess up the scene a bit?”
Simon asked.

“I don’t see why not,” Fanshire
said doubtfully. “It
doesn’t show anything, really.”

Simon went down on his knees and began to
dig with
his hands, around and under the place where the stains
were.
Minutes later he stood up, with sand trickling
through his fingers,
and showed Fanshire the
mushroomed scrap of metal that he had found.

“A .38 bullet,” Fanshire said, and
whistled.

“And I think you’ll be able to prove it
was fired from
the gun you have in your pocket,” said the Saint.
“Also
you’d
better have a sack of sand picked up from where
I was digging. I think a laboratory examination will find
that it also contains fragments of bone and human
flesh.”

“You’ll have to explain this to
me,” Fanshire said
quite humbly.

Simon dusted his hands and lighted a cigarette.

“Vosper was lying on his face when I
last saw him,”
he said, “and I think he was as much passed out as
sleep
ing. With the wind and the surf and the soft sand, it was easy for the
murderer to creep up on him and shoot him
in the back where he
lay. But the murderer didn’t want you looking for guns and comparing bullets.
The um
brella was the inspiration. I don’t have to remind you that the exit
hole of a bullet is much larger than the
entrance. By turning
Vosper’s body over, the murderer
found a hole in his chest that it can’t have
been too difficult to force the umbrella shaft through—obliterating
the
original wound and confusing everybody in one
simple operation.”

“Let’s get back to the house,”
said the Superintendent
abruptly.

After a while, as they walked, Fanshire said:
“It’s
going to feel awfully funny, having to arrest Herbert
Wexall.”

“Good God!” said the Saint, in
honest astonishment.
“You weren’t thinking of doing
that?”

Fanshire stopped and blinked at him under
the still
distant light of the uncurtained windows.

“Why not?”

“Did Herbert seem at all guilty when he
admitted he had a gun? Did he seem at all uncomfortable—I don’t
mean just
puzzled, like you were—about having it produced? Was he ready with the
explanation of why it still
smelled of being fired?”

“But if anyone else used Wexall’s
gun,” Fanshire pon
dered laboriously, “why should they go
to such lengths
to make it look as if no gun was used at all, when Wexall
would obviously have been suspected?”

“Because it was somebody who didn’t
want Wexall to
take
the rap,” said the Saint. “Because Wexall is the
goose who could still lay golden eggs—but he wouldn’t
do much laying on the end of a rope,
or whatever you do
to murderers
here.”

The Superintendent pulled out a handkerchief
and
wiped his face.

“My God,” he said, “you mean you think Lucy—”

“I think we have to go all the way back
to the prime
question of motive,” said the Saint. “Floyd
Vosper was
a nasty man who made dirty cracks about everyone
here. But
his cracks were dirtiest because he always had
a wickedly good idea
what he was talking about. Nevertheless, very few people become murderers
because of a dirty crack. Very few people except me kill other people
on points
of principle. Vosper called us all variously dupes, phonies, cheaters and
fools. But since he had
roughly the same description for all of us,
we could all
laugh it off. There was only one person about whom he
made the
unforgivable accusation… . Now shall we re
join the mob?”

“You’d better do this your own
way,” Fanshire mut
tered.

Simon Templar took him up the steps to the
verandah and back through the french doors into the living room,
where all
eyes turned to them in deathly silence.

“A paraffin test will prove who fired
that revolver in the last twenty-four hours, aside from those who have
already
admitted it,” Simon said, as if there had been no
interruption.
“And you’ll remember, I’m sure, who sup
plied that very handy theory about the
arrow of God.”

“Astron!” Fanshire gasped.

“Oh, no,” said the Saint, a little
tiredly. “He only said that God sometimes places His arrow in the hands of
a
man. And I feel quite sure that a wire to New York will
establish
that there is actually a criminal file under the
name of Granville,
with fingerprints and photos that
should match Mr. Gresson’s—as Vosper’s
fatally
elephantine memory remembered… . That was the one
crack he
shouldn’t have made, because it was the only
one that was more
than gossip or shrewd insult, the only
one that could be
easily proved, and the only one that
had a chance of upsetting an operation
which was all set
—if you’ll excuse the phrase—to make a big
killing.”