Cynthia was recklessly feeding her horses all the gas they needed to overtake the Maserati, and they were doing it at a rate which drew a vague kind of communal shout from the crowd. But to anyone who could make an educated estimate of the ballistic and dynamic factors involved, it was a performance to bring a cold sweat to the palms. For all straights come to an end; and this one ended at the extreme northeast tip of the course with two approximately right-angled turns which reversed it like a broad hairpin to run back into the starting and finishing stretch. At Cynthia's rate of acceleration she could pass Teresa, all right; but in doing it she would build up a velocity that no braking system might be able to cut down again fast enough to navigate the next corner against the immutable drag of centrifugal force. even without any mechanical failure.
"He needn't 've gone to all that trouble," Peter said, as if half hypnotized. "They'll kill each other anyhow."
"We'd better stop the race," Charlie said, with quiet tenseness.
"You talk to the stewards," Simon snapped.
It may have been a somewhat superfluous directive, for Charlie was already turning towards the press box. But the Saint had a chill fear that even that procedure might be too slow — might perhaps be already too late. At this stage in his career he had become a trifle diffident about some of the more flamboyant performances which he once found irresistible. But this was one situation in which what could be literally called a grandstand play seemed to be forced on him.
With an almost instantaneous assessment of the physical and formal obstacles between him and the track via the nearest stairway, he swung his long legs over the nearest balcony rail and dropped an easy ten feet to the ground between some only moderately startled camp followers. With hardly a pause in motion he raced through an empty pit stall and across the open tarmac to the assortment of signal flags in their row of sockets beside the starter's box. He grabbed the red one which means "The race has been stopped", and in his other hand the yellow one which says "Caution", and stepped out into the track, waving them both frantically.
Even so, he was only just in time to get an acknowledging lift of one of Teresa Montesino's green-gloved hands as the Maserati streaked by and he saw its brakes begin to smoke.
But the Bristol did not follow; and as he moved farther out into the fairway, ignoring the frenzied injunctions of the P-A system, his heart sank as he saw a car of a different color swooping down towards the bridge, while in the distance a few tiny figures could be seen running like perturbed ants towards some undiscernible center of fascination behind the far turn.
"The biggest joke of it is," Peter commented later, "that if Cynthia 'd tried to make that turn, at the speed she was going, she'd 've been practically certain to spin out and roll over and probably break her neck. But that loose nut on the steering arm just happened to fall off in the straight, and she already had the brakes on as hard as she could, and when she tried to turn the wheel nothing happened at all, and so she went ploughing right on off the track into a lot of soft sand that stopped her like a feather pillow. Well, almost. Anyway, if Godfrey hadn't been so bloody clever, she'd probably be stone cold dead in de market, instead of just nursing a few bruises."
"That should make him feel a lot better," said the Saint. "What else will he have to worry about?"
"Oh, the stewards and some other people had quite a talk with him," Charlie said impersonally. "It isn't the sort of thing we want a lot of publicity about. He'll be leaving the island on the next plane — but I don't think Cynthia will be with him."
"Or Mrs. Santander either," Brenda put in. "You may think you were awfully discreet, but I bet the story's all over Nassau before midnight."
"You've got to admit he was no piker," Peter mused. "It even shook me a bit when we found the Montesino gal's steering fixed the same way, except that hers was still holding by half a thread. One more rough corner, and she could 've been another wreck. The kind of sabotage that even a first-class mechanic mightn't spot — and him pretending he didn't know one end of an engine from the other. If it hadn't been for this suspicious Templar character, he might 've got rid of all his problems in one happy afternoon."
"Poor Simon," Betty Bethell said. "Now you'll be hounded to death by grateful women."
The Saint grinned untroubledly, and waved a languid hand at a white-coated waiter who was conveniently headed in their direction across the Country Club lounge.
"Let's have another round of that Old Curio," he said.
"Yes, Mr. Templar," said the man. "Right away, sir. But I was comin' to tell you you're wanted on the phone, sir. Some lady callin', sir."
5. FLORIDA: The Jolly Undertaker
"Sometimes," Simon Templar pronounced once, "I think that critics make far too much fuss about the use of coincidence in detective stories. In real life, mysteries are solved by coincidence at least half the time — because some chance witness happened to notice and remember something, or the criminal accidentally lost a button at the scene. An alibi goes blooey because an unpredictable fire stops the schemer getting back to his apartment in time for the phone call he's arranged to answer. And how many plays and movies have you seen where the perfect crime was all laid out at the start, and you sat happily on the edge of your seat waiting for the inevitable coincidence to foul it up — the incalculable old lady who comes looking for her wandering Fido, or the power failure that stops the electric clock that should have fired the bomb? The plain truth is that without some sort of fluke there'd usually be no story or no suspense. Coincidences happen to everyone, but they're only branded as far-fetched when somebody does something with one."
One such coincidence which he might have been recalling was not really extravagant at all, reduced to its prime essentials, which consisted of
A: reading about, and being mildly intrigued by, a minor offense committed against an individual of no obvious importance and certainly unknown to him; and
B: having that victim pointed out to him less than 48 hours later, before he had time to forget the association.
That is, if you exclude the third factor, that such coincidences seemed to happen to the Saint with exceptional frequency. But modern insurance studies have revealed that it is not purely accidental that some people have more accidents than others, and can be properly called "accident‑prone". In the same way, Simon Templar seemed to attract interesting coincidences, perhaps because he made better use of them than ordinary people. This, therefore, on the best actuarial authority, should not even be called a coincidence.
The first ingredient, then, was an item in a Palm Beach, Florida, newspaper reporting that a Funeral Home in Lake Worth operated by an undertaker with the rather delightful name of Aloysius Prend had been broken into during the night, but appeared to have rewarded the robbers with no more than $7.18 and some postage stamps, the contents of a petty cash box in an office drawer.