Free The Saint on the Spanish Main by Leslie Charteris Page A

to kill him.”
    “I’m not exactly concerned with your interpretation of blame,” Fanshire said detachedly.
“But if you have any facts, I’d
like to hear them.”
    “I have no facts,” said the Saint
coolly. “I only know that in the few hours I’ve been here, Vosper
made statements to me, a stranger, about everyone here, any one of
which could be called fighting words.”
    “You will have to be more specific,” Fanshire said.
    “Okay,” said the Saint. “I
apologize in advance to anyone it hurts. Remember, I’m only
repeating the kind of thing that made Vosper a good murder candidate.… I am now
specific. In my hearing, he called Reg Herrick a dumb athlete who was trying to
marry Janet Blaise for her money. He suggested that Janet was a
stupid juve nile for taking him seriously. He called Astron a com mercial charlatan. He implied
that Lucy Wexall was a dope and a snob. He
inferred that Herb Wexall had more
use for his secretary’s sex than for her stenography, and he thought out loud
that Pauline was amenable. He called
Mr. Gresson a crook to his face.”
    “And during all this,” Fanshire
said, with an inoffensiveness that had to be heard to be believed, “he
said nothing about
you?”
    “He did indeed,” said the Saint. “He analyzed me, more or less, as a flamboyant phony.”
    “And you didn’t object to that?”
    “I hardly could,” Simon replied
blandly, “after I’d hinted to him that I thought he was even
phonier.”
    It was a line on which a stage audience could
have tittered, but the tensions of the moment let it sink with a slow thud.
    Fanshire drew down his upper lip with one
forefinger and nibbled it inscrutably.
    “I expect this bores you as much as it does me, but this is the job I’m paid for. I’ve got to say
that all of you had the opportunity,
and from what Mr. Templar says you
could all have had some sort of motive. Well, now I’ve got to look into what
you might call the problem of physical
possibility.”
    Simon Templar lighted a cigarette. It was
the only movement that anyone made, and after that he was the most intent listener of them
all as Fanshire went on: “Dr. Horan
says, and I must say I agree with him, that to drive that umbrella shaft clean through a man’s chest must have
taken quite exceptional strength. It seems to me something that no woman, and probably no ordinary man, could have
done.”
    His pale bright eyes came to rest on Herrick
as he finished speaking, and the Saint found his own eyes fol lowing
others in the same direction.
    The picture formed in his mind, the young
giant towering over a prostrate Vosper, the umbrella raised in his mighty
arms like a fantastic spear and the setting sun flaming on his red
head, like an avenging angel, and the thrust downwards with all the power of
those herculean shoulders … and then, as Herrick’s face began to
flush under the awareness of so many stares, Janet Blaise sud denly
cried out: “No! No—it couldn’t have been Reg gie!”
    Fanshire’s gaze transferred itself to her
curiously, and she said in a stammering rush: “You see, it’s
silly, but we didn’t quite tell the truth, I mean about being in our
own rooms. As a matter of fact, Reggie was in my room most of the
time. We were—talking.”
    The Superintendent cleared his throat and
continued to gaze at her stolidly for a while. He didn’t make any comment.
But presently he looked at the Saint in the same dispassionately
thoughtful way that he had first looked at Herrick.
    Simon said calmly: “Yes, I was just
wondering myself whether I could have done it. And I had a rather in teresting thought.”
    “Yes, Mr. Templar?”
    “Certainly it must take quite a lot of
strength to drive a spike through a man’s chest with one blow. But now remember
that this wasn’t just a spike, or a spear. It had an enormous great
umbrella on top of it. Now think what would happen if you were stabbing down
with a thing like that?”
    “Well, what would