“But I’ll be back again in the autumn,” he told his friends consolingly.
He had always paid cash for everything, even for his biggest parties, so that there had never been an occasion for anyone to inquire into his credit or bank references, but he claimed to be the British Empire’s first uranium millionaire. According to him, he had foreseen the coming boom before the dust had settled on Hiroshima, and had invested in a skillfully selected list of mining enterprises in Africa and Australia. While he was shrewdly secretive about the precise location of his holdings, the soundness of his judgment appeared to be adequately evidenced by the amount of money he had to spend.
It was in answer to the obvious question of how even a uranium millionaire’s income could survive modern taxation with so little visible injury, that he had explained that he made his legal home in Bermuda, where there was no income tax.
True to his promise, he had returned in November, and the pattern of his first season had been more or less repeated, with the difference that this time he was already a well-known character with a large if not exactly elite circle of friends. Before the advent of another spring, only the most strong-minded comedians could get through a monologue of any length without hanging some gag on Jolly Roger Ivalot.
This year, however, Mr Ivalot’s departure was not signalized by a mammoth thirty-six-hour farewell party, as it had been the previous time. In fact, it was first confirmed, after several days of unwonted quiescence, by a solicitor who had been trying to serve him with a summons to appear and defend himself in court. Mr Ivalot, it transpired, had got wind of this project and had strategically taken himself out of jurisdiction, without saying goodbye to anyone.
“And how many people were discovered holding the bag?” Simon asked, with anticipative relish.
“Only one that we know of,” Lona Dayne said. “He’d just had one of the usual slip-ups with his Jolly Rogering. One of his girls was going to have a baby — twins, as a matter of fact.”
“Ah,” said the Saint. “A bag holding people.”
She let that wilt in an interregnum of withering silence.
“He didn’t owe anybody — I told you he always paid cash,” she said after the pause. “He hadn’t sold any shares or promoted anything. His furnished flat was paid up to the end of the month. He’d just packed up and gone.”
The expectant mother, a nominal actress whose gifts sounded more thoracic than thespian, alleged that Mr Ivalot had been promising to marry her for more than a year. But although she had found herself pregnant almost immediately after his return, he had persistently evaded or postponed setting a wedding date; and when he finally proposed a cash settlement of some five thousand pounds as an alternative, it began to dawn upon the poor girl that his love might not be as passionate and deathless as he had proclaimed. By then she was on the verge of her fifth month and an X-ray had shown that she was preparing to endow the world with not one but two little Ivalots. This was the last straw that drove her to issue an ultimatum to the effect that unless Mr Ivalot came through with a wedding ring within a week she would continue their romance through a lawyer. It was not, she explained later to the former Lona Shaw, who interviewed her, that she thought that money could heal a broken heart, and that she felt it her maternal duty to see that her imminent offspring were not left to face a lifetime of illegitimacy with a lousy two thousand five hundred pounds capital apiece, instead of their rightful inheritance of millions.
This fair and sporting warning was her gravest mistake, for Mr Ivalot had promptly elected to vanish rather than contest the suit.
A lawyer with a fat contingency fee in prospect was not to be so easily discouraged. He promptly forwarded the papers to an attorney in Bermuda, with the request that they be served on Mr Ivalot there. And that was when the blow fell that punctured a fabulous legend and at the same time paradoxically inflated an otherwise routine scandal into the sensation of the year. For according to the advice that came back to London, nobody in Bermuda — no attorney, bank, real estate agency, newspaper, or any individual who had been questioned — had ever heard of Mr Roger Ivalot, nor was he listed in any official registry or directory.
“In fact, he never had been here,” said the Saint.
“That’s what I couldn’t quite swallow.” Lona Dayne said. “I thought it out this way. The Bermuda thing came out when somebody asked him about taxes. It seemed to me that that question might really have taken him by surprise. He had to have an answer quickly, and a good one, without having too much time to think about it or what it might lead to. But what he suddenly realized was that it might occur to the authorities to start investigating anyone who was throwing money around as lavishly as he was, in the hope of catching a tax dodger, and from what’s come out since he obviously couldn’t risk being investigated. He had to head that inquiry off right away. But how likely would he be to come up with Bermuda unless he knew a lot about it? I kept on thinking about that.”
Simon nodded appreciatively.
“That’s pretty sharp thinking. Most people wouldn’t have known about that tax angle. But if he’d run into someone who really lived here—”
“There wasn’t too much risk of that. You wouldn’t find many people with a home in Bermuda visiting England in the winter. But he might very easily have run into someone who’d visited here, so he had to be ready to talk about the place like a native. Which still made it look as if he must have spent a lot of time here, at least.”
The mystery of Mr Ivalot had all the earmarks of a monumental swindle, but it became even more baffling as weeks went by without anyone turning up who claimed to have been swindled. That is, with the exception of the pregnant starlet, whose loss was debatable, and her plight and the cruelly clouded future of her two still unborn little bastards became a matter of popular concern and the grist of many columns of tear-squeezing prose for Lona Shaw.
“And you came here to go on milking it?” Simon asked.
“Well, not quite. You see, I met Havvie” — the Saint managed to suppress a shudder — “when he was in England last year on his holiday, and he’d been after me with letters and telephone calls to marry him ever since, and we really did get on awfully well together, so eventually I said yes. Then I had to get leave from the Record, and I’ve always been a thrifty type, so I sold them the idea that I ought to stay on salary if I came here and went on trying to dig up something about Ivalot. Then I only had to tell Havvie that I’d set my heart on a honeymoon in Bermuda, and everything was fine.”
“You’ve given me a new concept of romance,” murmured the Saint.
Her recital of the saga of Jolly Roger Ivalot, somewhat less succinct than it has been recapitulated here, had taken them all the way through dinner and dessert, and now they were sitting over Benedictine and coffee. Once again he lighted cigarettes for them.
“What was your plan of campaign when you got here?”
“We gave out a story to the local papers that the Record had unearthed a terrific clue which was expected to flush Ivalot from his cover within two or three days. I suppose that was before you got here, or you’d have read it.”
“I guess it was. But if I’d read it, I’d have thought it was rather an old wheeze.”
“It might still have scared Ivalot, if he was here,” she said. “I hoped it might tempt him to try to make a deal, or—”
“Or something more violent?”
“That’s what Havvie was afraid of.”
“He should have been. The rivers and ponds are full of amateurs who’ve had that kind of brilliant idea — anchored in concrete blocks.”