“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 sleeping. 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 umbrella 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 pondered 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 rejoin the mob?”
“You’d better do this your own way,” Fanshire muttered.
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 supplied 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.”
Major Fanshire fingered his upper lip.
“I don’t know,” he began, and then, as Arthur Granville Gresson began to rise like a floating balloon from his chair, and the ebony-faced sergeant moved to intercept him like a well-disciplined automaton, he knew.
Jamaica: The black commissar
1
The white crescent of Montego Bay was under their wings, and most of the passengers on the Pan-American clipper who were disembarking at Kingston could be identified by a certain purposeful stirring as they straightened and reassembled themselves and their impedimenta in preparation for the landing a few minutes ahead. Simon Templar, who saw no reason for not traveling from one vacation spot to another in vacation clothes, was ready for Jamaica without further preparation, wearing nothing more troublesome than sandals, slacks, and a sport shirt tastefully decorated with a pattern of rainbow-hued tropical fish circulating through a forest of graceful corals and vivid submarine flora, but he calculated that he had time for one more cigarette before the “no smoking” sign went on, and lighted it without haste.
The woman who had been sitting next to him, a cold-eyed and stoutly corseted dowager of the type which travel agencies so skillfully keep out of the pictures in their romantically illustrated brochures, had temporarily left her seat, presumably for basic adjustments in the privacy of the ladies’ room, and Simon thought it was only she returning when he felt someone loom over him and settle in the adjoining chair. He continued to gaze idly at the scenery below his window until a voice brought his head around — rather abruptly, because not only had that forbidding female maintained a majestic silence throughout the trip, but the voice was much deeper than even she could plausibly have possessed, and moreover it addressed him by name.
“Excuse me, Mr Saint, sah.”
Simon looked into a grinning ebony face that was puzzlingly familiar, but which he somehow couldn’t associate at all with the spotless white shirt, port-wine shantung jacket, hand-painted tie, and smartly creased dove-gray trousers which the young negro wore.
“Bet you don’t recognize me, sah.”
Simon felt a little embarrassed, more so than if a white man had posed him the same challenge, but he smiled amiably.
“Yes, I know I’ve seen you before. But where?”
“Johnny, sah. I was a sparrin’ partner with Steve Nelson, up in New York, the time you and he had that go with the Masked Angel. Remember now, Mr Saint?”
“Of course.” Now it all came back. “But go easy with that name, will you? I’m trying to live a quiet and peaceful Life for a while.”
“I’m sorry, sah.”
“I don’t think anyone else is... Well, I’ve certainly got an excuse for not recognizing you. I don’t think I ever saw you before with anything but trunks on. What are you doing now, and where are you going?”
“Home, sah.”
The Saint raised his eyebrows with pleasant interest, but he could not escape a faint flicker of guilt that touched him at a deeper level. Of course he remembered Johnny: a nice, well-mannered, good-natured, hard-working colored boy around the gym, a willing but not gifted fighter... and that was all. As a being of a different race and color, his background, his past, his personal private present, and his unpredictable future, had seemed as remote and insignificant, except as they might affect any immediate contact with him, as the private life of a mounted policeman’s horse. It was strange how incurious one could be about any fellow human, especially one whose complexion made him an everlasting stranger.