Free The Saint on the Spanish Main by Leslie Charteris

Commissioner and Deputy Commissioner, paid trib ute to the
importance of the case by taking personal charge of it. He was a slight pinkish
blond man with rather large and very bright blue eyes and such a dis creetly
modulated voice that it commanded rapt atten tion through the
basic effort of trying to hear what it was saying. He sat
at an ordinary writing desk in the living room, with a Bahamian sergeant
standing stiffly beside him, and contrived to turn the whole room into an
office in which seven previously happy-go-lucky adults wriggled like
guilty schoolchildren whose teacher has been found libelously caricatured
on their black board.
    He said, with wholly impersonal conciseness:
“Of course, you all know by now that Mr. Vosper was found on the
beach with the steel spike of an umbrella through his chest. My job is
to find out how it happened. So to start with, if anyone did it to him,
the topography sug gests that that person came from, or through, this house. I’ve heard all
your statements, and all they seem to amount
to is that each of you was going about his own business at the time when
this might have happened.”
    “All I know,” Herbert Wexall said,
“is that I was in my study, reading and signing the letters
that I dictated this
morning.”
    “And I was getting dressed,” said his wife.
    “So was I,” said Janet Blaise.
    “I guess I was in the shower,”
said Reginald Herrick.
    “I was having a bubble bath,” said
Pauline Stone.
    “I was still working,” said Astron.
“This morning I started a new chapter of my book—in my mind,
you understand. I do not write by putting everything on pa per. For
me it is necessary to meditate, to feel, to open floodgates in my mind, so that
I can receive the wisdom that comes from beyond the—”
    “Quite,” Major Fanshire assented
politely. “The point is that none of you have alibis, if you need them. You were all going about your own business, in your own rooms.
Mr. Templar was changing in the late Mr. Vosper’s room—”
    “I wasn’t here,” Arthur Gresson
said recklessly. “I drove back to my own place—I’m staying at the
Fort Montagu Beach Hotel. I wanted a clean shirt. I drove back
there, and when I came back here all this had hap pened.”
    “There’s not much difference,”
Major Fanshire said. “Dr. Horan tells me we couldn’t
establish the time of death within an hour or two, anyway. … So the
next thing we come to is the question of motive. Did anyone here,”
Fanshire said almost innocently, “have any really serious trouble with
Mr. Vosper?”
    There was an uncomfortable silence, which the
Saint finally broke by saying: “I’m on the outside here, so I’ll take the rap. I’ll answer for
everyone.”
    The Superintendent cocked his bright eyes.
    “Very well, sir. What would you
say?”
    “My answer,” said the Saint, “is—everybody.”
    There was another silence, but a very
different one, in which it seemed, surprisingly, as if all of them relaxed
as unanimously as they had stiffened before. And yet, in its own
way, this relaxation was as self-conscious and uncomfortable as the preceding
tension had been. Only the Saint, who had every attitude of the
completely care less onlooker, and Major Fanshire, whose deferential patience
was impregnably correct, seemed immune to the interplay of hidden strains.
    “Would you care to go any further?”
Fanshire asked.
    “Certainly,” said the Saint. “I’ll go anywhere. I
can say what I like, and I don’t have to
care whether anyone is on speaking
terms with me tomorrow. I’ll go on record with my opinion that the late
Mr. Vosper was one of the most unpleasant
characters I’ve ever met. I’ll make
the statement, if it isn’t already general knowl edge, that he made a specialty of needling everyone he spoke to or about. He goaded everyone with nasty
little things that he knew, or thought he knew, about them. I wouldn’t blame anyone here for wanting, at least
theo retically,