“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 paper. 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 happened.”
“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 careless 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 knowledge, 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 theoretically, 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 juvenile for taking him seriously. He called Astron a commercial 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 be 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 following 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 suddenly cried out, “No! No — it couldn’t have been Reggie!”
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 interesting 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 happen?”
“The umbrella would be like a parachute. It would be like a sort of sky anchor holding the shaft back. The air resistance would be so great that I’m wondering how anyone, even a very strong man, could get much momentum into the thrust. And the more force he put into it, the more likely he’d be to lift himself off the ground, rather than drive the spike down.”
Fanshire digested this, blinking, and took his full time to do it.
“That certainly is a thought,” he admitted. “But damn it,” he exploded, “we know it was done. So it must have been possible.”
“There’s something entirely backwards about that logic,” said the Saint. “Suppose we say, if it was impossible, maybe it wasn’t done.”
“Now you’re being a little ridiculous,” Fanshire snapped. “We saw—”
“We saw a man with the sharp iron-tipped shaft of a beach umbrella through his chest. We jumped to the natural conclusion that somebody stuck it into him like a sword. And that may be just what a clever murderer meant us to think.”