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When she reported that Clarron had gone to London, I had a man watch the
railway station let us know when he came back. Then she phoned and told me
you'd left, and I hoped you meant it. I came over and joined her here. We were
informed as soon as Clarron got off the train, and we started watching his
house. I was afraid he might try something desperate soon, after the scare
you'd given him, and I could only hope we'd be able to prevent it. As soon as
he started screaming, we rushed over."
"But you hadn't spotted that Mrs. Jafferty was purely fictitious."
"Not yet."
"And if I hadn't been there, you still wouldn't have been in time to save
Mrs. Clarron's life."
"We might have been able to get her to a hospital in time."
"You wouldn't. But even if you had, you'd only have been looking for Mrs.
Jafferty. And even if you'd discovered that she was a phony, you could only
have convicted Reginald of attempted murder. It took the fright I threw into
him to make him confess everything."
"That's probably true," Teal said grudgingly. "But it still doesn't excuse
your interfering and taking the law into your own hands." His voice rose a
little. "And one of these days  "
"Now you're forgetting," Simon reminded him gently. "There aren't going to be
any more of these days for you. You're retiring, and you'll only read about me
in the papers."
Chief Inspector Teal swallowed.
He looked ahead into a vague Elysian vista in which there were no problems,
no apprehensions and no taunting privateer with unquenchable devilment in his
eyes and an impudent forefinger pointing like a rapier at his stomach. It
would be very restful; and there would be something lacking.
"That's right," said Mr. Teal. "I was forgetting."
He hauled himself sluggishly to his feet, and put out his hand; and for
almost the first time in all those years Simon saw something very like a smile
on his round pink apoplectic face.
"I'm rather glad it ends up this "way," Teal said. He glanced selfconsciously
around him. "But I've still got work to do tonight. And I think Miss Halberd
has some apologizing to do which she might rather do in private. The rent's
paid on this cottage to the end of the month," he added inconsequently. "So if
you'll excuse me  "
"Damn it, Claud Eustace," said the Saint, "I'm going to miss you too."
THE RELUCTANT NUDIST
i
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"When do you start taking your clothes off?" Simon Templar asked, with a
faint hint of malice.
George McGeorge wriggled unhappily inside his pastel blue silk shirt and
sharply creased slacks. Between the crown of his stylish Panama and the soles
of his immaculate suede shoes, he was almost conspicuously a young man to whom
the ministrations of tailor and haberdasher were more than ordinarily
important. His rather vapidly good-looking face took on a tinge of pink under
its urban pallor.
"Not before everyone else does, anyway," he said.
"Never mind about anyone else," Simon persisted. "I think it would give Uncle
Waldo a big glow to see that you were entering into the spirit of the thing
right from the start."
"In that case, he'd be still more bucked if I could introduce you in your
birthday suit too, and tell him that I'd even made another convert on the way
over."
"That wasn't in the deal, George. I offered to come with you as moral support
and as an interested observer not as a sort of trophy. And because it sounded
like one of the few places left in the world where I could feel reasonably
sure of not getting mixed up in some sort of crime. I'm banking on the idea
that nudists couldn't carry around much stuff worth stealing, and that murder
is a lot more difficult where it would be such a problem to conceal a weapon."
"The closer I get to it," Mr. McGeorge said darkly, "the more I wish one of
'em would strangle Uncle Waldo."
The Saint grinned, and gazed with tranquil anticipation at the islands spread
before the bow of the little ferry. There were three of them to be seen, the
fourth member of the group being just below the western horizon; reading from
right to left he could identify, from an earlier glance at a map, the small
hump of Bagaud, the much larger bulk of Port-Cros, and finally, the longest
and most easterly, the Ile du Levant, which was their destination. Lying in a
corner of the Mediterranean which is still virtuallyterra incognita to the
American tourist army, whose Riviera extends no further west than the
outskirts of Cannes, they are known to prosy official cartographers as the
Iles d'Hyeres, but to the more flowery-minded authors of travel brochures as
the Golden Isles; while one of them, to a still more specialized public,
stands for the closest approximation to the Garden of Eden to be found within
the borders of civilization.
For this island of about six miles in length and roughly a mile and a quarter
in average width, which is separated by only nine miles of water from the
unglamorized but busy little Provencal resort of Le Lavandou, is the
beneficiary of an official dispensation which remains unique among the local
ordinances of Europe.
"You see," Mr. McGeorge had explained it, "over there it's perfectly legal
for anyone I mean women as well as men to go around in a sort of triangular
fig-leaf effect, and nothing else."
This happened at the bar of the Club at Cavaliere, the most exclusive
hostelry on that stretch of the coast, where they had drifted into one of
those usually sterile bar-stool conversations to which this was to prove a
notable exception.
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"Oh," said the Saint. "A kind of semi-nudist colony."
"Not even semi," the other said. "That's only in the village. When they go
swimming, they're allowed to takeeverything off. And the point is, it isn't a
colony or a club. It isn't private property, and you don't have to belong to
anything or join anything. Anybody can go there. And you don't even have to
take off your hat if you don't want to. It's just that there's no law against
taking off practically everything if you like and from the pictures I've seen,
most of them seem to like."
"Zat is right." Raymond Vidal, proprietor and host of the Club, who had been
listening, chimed in with genially expansive corroboration. "It was about
nineteen 'undred twenty, zat two docteurs from Paris, named Durville, very
serious men, wish to bring people to be cured by ze sun, and zey start to make
ze village which zey call Heliopolis. And so zat ze patient can get ze most
sun wiz ze least clozing, ze ayrrange atolerance from ze Commune of Hyeres, so
zat no one 'as to wear more zan zeslip minimum. But it is all quite open. It
is very beautiful, very natural. You should go zaire and see it."
"I have to go there," said Mr. McGeorge, with no echo of enthusiasm, "to see
my uncle."
He looked like a young man who should have an uncle preferably one with a [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]