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.”