Free The Saint Around the World by Leslie Charteris Page B

to keep my nose clean. I knew that Teal had to be working on some case, even if he is retiring; and whatever it was, I figured I could do a memorable job of lousing it up for him.”
    “You mean you didn’t know about Clarron before?”
    “Teal took it for granted that I did, and let out the name. Then I needled him some more, and he mentioned Maidenhead. That was plenty for me to start on.”
    She stared at him with sober brown eyes, and bit her lip.
    “That’s rather disappointing.”
    “I’ve done plenty with less, in my time,” he said cheerfully. “But you’re still holding something back. What was that about you being the next victim?”
    “Oh. Yes. You see, I’ve got to know him quite well. He thinks I’m a young widow with money.”
    “And that you might be available if only he were free?”
    “That’s right. That’s why I talked the insurance company into letting me rent this cottage, to make it easy. It’s right next door to his house.”
    The Saint raised his eyebrows over the cigarette he was lighting.
    He got up and stood at the window. Looking out at an angle, he still could not see the other house; and he recalled that when they arrived at the cottage he had not clearly seen an adjoining house, since the front of the cottage was well screened with trees; but in the back only a low hedge separated the lawns that went down to the river.
    “I’ve done more than that,” Adrienne said. “Once I got him over here, and pretended to be a bit tight, and more than hinted that when my imaginary husband was ill with pneumonia I’d helped to make sure that he didn’t get over it.”
    “The soul-mate approach again?”
    “It was a trick I read about in a mystery story. But it didn’t work on him. He’s too—what did you call it?—cagey, even to fall for that.”
    A man had come into sight on the next lawn, at first inspecting a stretch of hedge with the diagnostic eye of an amateur gardener, then turning and looking back over it towards the cottage. Then he walked down a little farther and came through an opening in it.
    “We’d better hurry up and think of a new approach that includes me,” said the Saint. “Lover Boy is coming to call.”
    iv
    Mr. Reginald Clarron’s failure to achieve any notable success on the stage was only due, he would always be convinced, to the cloddish stupidity of the public. About his own outstanding talents he had no doubt whatsoever. Where lesser thespians played their parts for a couple of hours behind the footlights, he could sustain his for twentyfour hours a day, with no help from a script, and sell them to an audience that did not have to be pre-conditioned by the atmosphere o.f a theater. He prided himself on having every flicker of expression and every inflection of voice under conscious control at every moment. It would be trite to observe that he would have made a formidable poker player: he already was.
    He was a passably good-looking face without a single distinctive feature, but like a good showman he applied distinction to it with the full cut of his artistically long but carefully brushed gray hair and a pair of glasses with extra heavy black frames, so that a recognizable caricature might have been made of those two items alone with no face shown at all. His figure, at least as far as it was ever displayed to the public, was most commendable for a man of fiftyfive; and only a certain fleshiness around the chin betrayed a tendency to embonpoint which skilful tailoring was able to conceal elsewhere.
    He had not batted an eyelid when he heard the name Templar, although instinct told him that there was only likely to be one Templar who might be making inquiries about him. He still could not imagine how that Templar could have become interested in him, but he had read enough to believe that the Saint’s nose for undetected crime verged on the supernatural. Nevertheless, he was not going to let himself be stampeded by the uncomfortable fact, which he