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Authors: Leslie Charteris
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followed by
others, including the Saint. An interlude
of aquatic brawling developed some how
into a pick-up game of touch football on the beach, which was delightfully confused by recurrent
arguments about who was supposed to
be on which of the unequal sides. This boisterous nonsense churned up so
much sand for the still freshening breeze
to spray over Floyd Vosper, who by
that time had drunk enough to be trying to sleep under the big beach umbrella, that the misan thropic
oracle finally got back on his feet.
“Perhaps,” he said witheringly,
“I had better get out of the way of you perennial juveniles before
you convert me into a dune.”
He stalked off along the beach and lay down
again about a hundred yards away. Simon noticed him still there, flat
on his face and presumably unconscious, when the game eventually
broke up through a confused water-polo phase to leave everyone gasping
and laugh ing and dripping on the patio with no immediate resurge
of inspiration. It was the last time he saw the unpopular Mr. Vosper
alive.
“Well,” Arthur Gresson observed,
mopping his short round body with a towel, “at least one of us seems
to have enough
sense to know when to lie down.”
“And to choose the only partner who’d do
it with him,” Pauline added vaguely.
Herbert Wexall glanced along the beach in the
direc tion that they both referred to, then glanced for further inspiration
at the waterproof watch he was still wearing.
“It’s almost cocktail time,” he
said. “How about it, anyone?”
His wife shivered, and said: “I’m
starting to freeze my tail off. It’s going to blow like a
son-of-a-gun any minute. Let’s all go in and get some clothes on first—
then we’ll be set for the evening. You’ll stay for supper of course, Mr. Templar?”
“I hadn’t planned to make a day of
it,” Simon pro tested diffidently, and was promptly overwhelmed from all quarters.
He found his way back to the room where he
had left his clothes without the benefit of Floyd Vosper’s chatty courier service, and made leisured and satisfactory use of the
freshwater shower and monogrammed towels. Even so, when he
sauntered back into the living room, he almost had the feeling of being lost in
a strange and empty house, for all the varied individuals who had peo pled the
stage so vividly and vigorously a short time before had vanished
into other and unknown seclusions and had not yet returned.
He lighted a cigarette and strolled idly
towards the picture window that overlooked the verandah and the sea.
Everything around his solitude was so still, except ing the subsonic
suggestion of distant movements within the house, that he was tempted to walk on
tiptoe; and yet outside the broad pane of
plate glass the fronds of coconut
palms were fluttering in a thin febrile frenzy, and there were lacings of white cream on the incredible jade of
the short waves simmering on the beach.
He noticed, first, in what should have been a
lazily sensual survey of the panorama, that the big beach um brella was
no longer where he had first seen it, down to his right outside
the pseudo-Grecian patio. He saw, as his eye wandered on, that it had been
moved a hundred yards or so to his left—in fact, to the very place where Floyd
Vosper was still lying. It occurred to him first that Vosper must have
moved it himself, except that no shade was needed in the brief and darkening
twilight. After that he noticed that Vosper seemed to have turned over on
his back; and then at last as the Saint focused his eyes he saw with a
weird thrill that the shaft of the um brella stood straight up out of the
left side of Vosper’s scrawny brown chest, not in the sand beside
him at all, but like a gigantic pin that had impaled a strange and inelegant
insect—or, in a fantastic phrase that was not Simon’s at all, like
the arrow of God.
3
Major Rupert Fanshire, the senior
Superintendent of Police, which made him third in the local hierarchy after
the
others, including the Saint. An interlude
of aquatic brawling developed some how
into a pick-up game of touch football on the beach, which was delightfully confused by recurrent
arguments about who was supposed to
be on which of the unequal sides. This boisterous nonsense churned up so
much sand for the still freshening breeze
to spray over Floyd Vosper, who by
that time had drunk enough to be trying to sleep under the big beach umbrella, that the misan thropic
oracle finally got back on his feet.
“Perhaps,” he said witheringly,
“I had better get out of the way of you perennial juveniles before
you convert me into a dune.”
He stalked off along the beach and lay down
again about a hundred yards away. Simon noticed him still there, flat
on his face and presumably unconscious, when the game eventually
broke up through a confused water-polo phase to leave everyone gasping
and laugh ing and dripping on the patio with no immediate resurge
of inspiration. It was the last time he saw the unpopular Mr. Vosper
alive.
“Well,” Arthur Gresson observed,
mopping his short round body with a towel, “at least one of us seems
to have enough
sense to know when to lie down.”
“And to choose the only partner who’d do
it with him,” Pauline added vaguely.
Herbert Wexall glanced along the beach in the
direc tion that they both referred to, then glanced for further inspiration
at the waterproof watch he was still wearing.
“It’s almost cocktail time,” he
said. “How about it, anyone?”
His wife shivered, and said: “I’m
starting to freeze my tail off. It’s going to blow like a
son-of-a-gun any minute. Let’s all go in and get some clothes on first—
then we’ll be set for the evening. You’ll stay for supper of course, Mr. Templar?”
“I hadn’t planned to make a day of
it,” Simon pro tested diffidently, and was promptly overwhelmed from all quarters.
He found his way back to the room where he
had left his clothes without the benefit of Floyd Vosper’s chatty courier service, and made leisured and satisfactory use of the
freshwater shower and monogrammed towels. Even so, when he
sauntered back into the living room, he almost had the feeling of being lost in
a strange and empty house, for all the varied individuals who had peo pled the
stage so vividly and vigorously a short time before had vanished
into other and unknown seclusions and had not yet returned.
He lighted a cigarette and strolled idly
towards the picture window that overlooked the verandah and the sea.
Everything around his solitude was so still, except ing the subsonic
suggestion of distant movements within the house, that he was tempted to walk on
tiptoe; and yet outside the broad pane of
plate glass the fronds of coconut
palms were fluttering in a thin febrile frenzy, and there were lacings of white cream on the incredible jade of
the short waves simmering on the beach.
He noticed, first, in what should have been a
lazily sensual survey of the panorama, that the big beach um brella was
no longer where he had first seen it, down to his right outside
the pseudo-Grecian patio. He saw, as his eye wandered on, that it had been
moved a hundred yards or so to his left—in fact, to the very place where Floyd
Vosper was still lying. It occurred to him first that Vosper must have
moved it himself, except that no shade was needed in the brief and darkening
twilight. After that he noticed that Vosper seemed to have turned over on
his back; and then at last as the Saint focused his eyes he saw with a
weird thrill that the shaft of the um brella stood straight up out of the
left side of Vosper’s scrawny brown chest, not in the sand beside
him at all, but like a gigantic pin that had impaled a strange and inelegant
insect—or, in a fantastic phrase that was not Simon’s at all, like
the arrow of God.
3
Major Rupert Fanshire, the senior
Superintendent of Police, which made him third in the local hierarchy after
the
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