Simon drifted in the same direction, and found Pauline Stone beside him, saying, “What do you feel like, Mr Templar?”
Her indication of having come off duty was a good deal more radical than her employer’s. In fact, the bathing suit which she had changed into seemed to be based more on the French minimums of the period than on any British tradition. There was no doubt that she filled it opulently, and her question amplified its suggestiveness with undertones which the Saint felt it wiser not to challenge at that moment.
“There’s so much to drool over,” he said, referring studiously to the buffet table. “But that green turtle aspic looks pretty good to me.”
She stayed with him when he carried his plate to a table as thoughtfully diametric as possible from the berth chosen by Floyd Vosper, even though Astron had already settled there in temporary solitude. They were promptly joined by Reg Herrick and Janet Blaise, and slipped at once into an easy exchange of banalities.
But even then it was impossible to escape Vosper’s tongue. It was not many minutes before his saw-edged voice whined across the patio above the general level of harmless chatter:
“When are you going to tell the Saint’s fortune, Astron? That ought to be worth hearing.”
There was a slightly embarrassed lull, and then everyone went on talking again, but Astron looked at the Saint with a gentle smile and said quietly, “You are a seeker after truth, Mr Templar, as I am. But when instead of truth you find falsehood, you will destroy it with a sword. I only say ‘This is falsehood, and God will destroy it. Do not come too close, lest you be destroyed with it.’ ”
“Okay,” Herrick growled, just as quietly. “But if you’re talking about Vosper, it’s about time someone destroyed it.”
“Sometimes,” Astron said, “God places His arrow in the hand of a man.”
For a few moments that seemed unconscionably long nobody said anything, and then before the silence spread beyond their small group the Saint said casually, “Talking of arrows — I hear that the sport this season is to go hunting sharks with a bow and arrow.”
Herrick nodded with a healthy grin.
“It’s a lot of fun. Would you like to try it?”
“Reggie’s terrific,” Janet Blaise said. “He shoots like a regular Howard Hill, but of course he uses a bow that nobody else can pull.”
“I’d like to try,” said the Saint, and the conversation slid harmlessly along the tangent he had provided.
After lunch everyone went back to the beach, with the exception of Astron, who retired to put his morning’s meditations on paper. Chatter surrendered to an afternoon torpor which even subdued Vosper.
An indefinite while later, Herrick aroused with a yell and plunged roaring into the sea, followed by Janet Blaise. They were followed by others, including the Saint. An interlude of aquatic brawling developed somehow into a pick-up game of touch football on the beach, which was delightfully confused by recurrent arguments about who was supposed to be on which of the unequal sides. This boisterous nonsense churned up so much sand for the still freshening breeze to spray over Floyd Vosper, who by that time had drunk enough to be trying to sleep under the big beach umbrella, that the misanthropic oracle finally got back on his feet.
“Perhaps,” he said witheringly, “I had better get out of the way of you perennial juveniles before you convert me into a dune.”
He stalked off along the beach and lay down again about a hundred yards away. Simon noticed him still there, flat on his face and presumably unconscious, when the game eventually broke up through a confused water-polo phase to leave everyone gasping and laughing and dripping on the patio with no immediate resurge of inspiration. It was the last time he saw the unpopular Mr Vosper alive.
“Well,” Arthur Gresson observed, mopping his short round body with a towel, “at least one of us seems to have enough sense to know when to lie down.”
“And to choose the only partner who’d do it with him,” Pauline added vaguely.
Herbert Wexall glanced along the beach in the direction that they both referred to, then glanced for further inspiration at the water-proof watch he was still wearing.
“It’s almost cocktail time,” he said. “How about it, anyone?”
His wife shivered, and said, “I’m starting to freeze my tail off. It’s going to blow like a son-of-a-gun any minute. Let’s all go in and get some clothes on first — then we’ll be set for the evening. You’ll stay for supper of course, Mr Templar?”
“I hadn’t planned to make a day of it,” Simon protested diffidently, and was promptly overwhelmed from all quarters.
He found his way back to the room where he had left his clothes without the benefit of Floyd Vosper’s chatty courier service, and made leisured and satisfactory use of the fresh-water shower and monogrammed towels. Even so, when he sauntered back into the living room, he almost had the feeling of being lost in a strange and empty house, for all the varied individuals who had peopled the stage so vividly and vigorously a short time before had vanished into other and unknown seclusions and had not yet returned.
He lighted a cigarette and strolled idly towards the picture window that overlooked the verandah and the sea. Everything around his solitude was so still, excepting the subsonic suggestion of distant movements within the house, that he was tempted to walk on tiptoe, and yet outside the broad pane of plate glass the fronds of coconut palms were fluttering in a thin febrile frenzy, and there were lacings of white cream on the incredible jade of the short waves simmering on the beach.
He noticed, first, in what should have been a lazily sensual survey of the panorama, that the big beach umbrella was no longer where he had first seen it, down to his right outside the pseudo-Grecian patio. He saw, as his eye wandered on, that it had been moved a hundred yards or so to his left — in fact, to the very place where Floyd Vosper was still lying. It occurred to him first that Vosper must have moved it himself, except that no shade was needed in the brief and darkening twilight. After that he noticed that Vosper seemed to have turned over on his back, and then at last as the Saint focused his eyes he saw with a weird thrill that the shaft of the umbrella stood straight up out of the left side of Vosper’s scrawny brown chest, not in the sand beside him at all, but like a gigantic pin that had impaled a strange and inelegant insect — or, in a fantastic phrase that was not Simon’s at all, like the arrow of God.
3
Major Rupert Fanshire, the senior Superintendent of Police, which made him third in the local hierarchy after the Commissioner and Deputy Commissioner, paid tribute 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 discreetly modulated voice that it commanded rapt attention 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 blackboard.
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 suggests 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.”