The girl continued to watch him without expression. She had put on a plain black dress with only a touch of white at the collar. There were no tears on her cheeks, but her eyes were puffy and shadowed.
“Are you all right?” he said. “The gendarme kept me answering so many questions.”
“What could you tell him?”
“I had a job to convince him that I scarcely know McGeorge at all.”
“Why did he do it?” she said, in a dry and aching monotone. “Why?”
The Saint used his lighter again, on a cigarette. There was still one crevice in which a wedge could be started, which could open a split through which anything might fall. He saw nothing to be gained by waiting another moment to strike there. Win or lose, there would be no better time to try it — the test that Waldo Oddington had agreed to, but which had not been made.
“One thing came out,” he said flatly. “It seems that everybody was wrong about Uncle Waldo — just like they were about your grandfather. He wasn’t a rich man at all. It turns out he didn’t have a dime.”
Her eyes stayed on him so fixedly that they seemed hypnotized. And then, faintly and hollowly, she began to laugh.
It was a thin racking laughter, almost soundless, that shook her whole body and yet had nothing to do with mirth.
“So you are just like the others,” she said. “I expect you would believe that I wanted someone to kill him. Perhaps even that I somehow helped to arrange it. I thought better of you. Oh, you fool!” She stood up suddenly, straight and quivering. “Let me show you something.”
She crossed the room to the desk and jerked open a drawer. If she had brought out a gun he would hardly have been surprised, she was shaken with such an intensity of passion, but instead it was only a cheap cardboard file that she spilled out on the top of the desk. The papers scattered under her hands as she skimmed through them, until she found what she wanted. She brought it back and thrust it at him.
“Read that!”
Simon took it. It was on a chastely discreet letterhead that said only “INFINITE ENTERPRISE CORPORATION,” above the address, with the words engraved even smaller in the left-hand corner: “Office of the Chairman.” He read:
Dear Uncle Waldo:
Please forgive me for being a bit late with the enclosed check for your usual quarterly allowance. I’ve had to do a lot of traveling lately, and I somehow lost touch with my personal calendar. I hope this hasn’t inconvenienced you too much.
Regarding your wish to own the villa you are now renting, I’d like to advance you the price, and agree that it might be an economy in the long run, but in view of the rumors about the French Navy’s plans for the island, don’t you think we should wait a little longer until you’re sure the investment won’t be jeopardized…?
There was more of it, but the Saint’s eyes were already plunging to the foot of the page, where it ended:
Your affectionate nephew,
Simon Templar was conscious of seconds that crawled by like snails before he regained his voice.
Images unscrambled themselves and reassembled in their proper place as if a complex of distorting prisms that overlaid them had been snatched away.
“Of course,” he said huskily, almost to himself. “May God forgive me if I ever let myself think in clichés again. In books it’s always the rich uncle and the no-good pampered nephew whose only idea of a career is to keep putting the bite on Uncle. So everything that George said, I had to take the wrong way. I couldn’t even hear him properly when he told me how fond his mother was of Uncle Waldo, and how she’d made George promise practically on her death-bed that he’d try to be like a son to the old boy. I was too clogged-up in the brain to be able to remember that there could also be such a thing as a penniless uncle with a rich nephew.”
“Yes,” Nadine said, with the resentment still burning in her voice. “George is very rich. Waldo told me all about him. He buys and sells companies and manipulates shares. He is called some kind of boy wonder in finance.”
“My second feeble-minded fatuity,” Simon went on scarifying himself ruthlessly. “Because George is young, and snotty, and stuffy, and in every way the type of jerk I long to stick pins into, it never dawned on me that he could be fabulously brilliant in some racket of his own. Or that anyone I personally disliked could be extravagantly loyal and generous to his family.”
“He was. Very generous.”
“But when you came along, he wanted to be sure that he wasn’t going to be fleeced at second hand, by way of Uncle Waldo. You can’t blame him for wondering what he might have had to bail Uncle Waldo out of.”
“Waldo could have told him in a minute that I knew everything, and that we wanted nothing extra from him.”
“But you’ve seen what George’s personality is like. I can imagine how it would rub Uncle Waldo the wrong way. Only he couldn’t show it — he had to try to keep George happy, instead of it being the other way around. But when George proposed that corny and pretty insulting test, Uncle Waldo must have nearly bust a gut. It would have been a crime to tell him then that you already knew. It was much more fun to look forward to seeing George’s red face when you told him yourself.”
“So,” she said, “now you believe me.”
He nodded.
“That was my third blind spot. When one sees a pretty young girl like you with a man of over sixty, it’s so easy to think of another cliché. I humbly apologize.”
She gazed at him for a long time, while the last of the fire slowly died down in her and was spent.
“It isn’t your fault,” she said in a low voice. “It would be hard for you to understand. But I told you how I had been disgusted with young men, through Pierre — and perhaps others. I loved Waldo — no, not in the romantic way that you would think of love, but with a full heart. With him I felt protected, and safe, and sure, and that was right for me.”
The Saint lowered his eyes to the piece of paper which he still held, and after a moment got it back in focus.
“Who else knew about this?” he asked.
“No one,” she said. “He told me, because that was his kind of honesty. But he did not want anyone else to know, because that was his one harmless little pride, to let it be thought that what he had was his own.”
“And when you told Pierre that Waldo had made you his heiress—”
“It was partly to try to stop Pierre bothering me, and partly to build up Waldo. Pierre is the last person to whom I could tell the truth. How he would sneer!”
Simon’s cigarette reminded him of itself when it burned his fingers. He crushed the stump into an ashtray.
The door opened at the front of the house, and Pierre Eschards came through the archway. He had on a pair of very short shorts that displayed his muscular thighs, and a dark mesh shirt open to the waist. His hair glistened with brilliantine. He gave the Saint a glance that barely condescended to recognition, and went straight across to Nadine and put an arm around her.
“I could not go to bed without being sure that you were all right,” he said in French. “Is there anything I can do?”
“No.” she said quietly.
“Pauvre petite.” His lips brushed the top of her head. “But you are young. It will pass. You must not let it spoil the rest of your life. And when you want me to help you forget, I shall be at your service.”
The Saint put McGeorge’s letter down with the other papers strewn on the desk, slipping it sideways so that it would not be staring anyone in the face. All the rest of what he had to do seemed suddenly so straightforward.