Then it was Arthur Gresson who shattered the fragile silence by leaping out of his chair like a bouncing ball.
“I’ve got it!” he yelped. “Believe me, everybody, I’ve got it! This’ll kill you!”
“I hope not,” Major Fanshire said dryly. “But what is it?”
“Listen,” Gresson said. “I knew something rang a bell somewhere, but I couldn’t place it. Now it all comes back to me. This is something I only heard at the hotel the other day, but some of you must have heard it before. It happened about a year ago, when Gregory Peck was visiting here. He stayed at the same hotel where I am, and one afternoon he was on the beach, and the wind came up, just like it did today, and it picked up one of those beach umbrellas and carried it right to where he was lying, and the point just grazed his ribs and gave him a nasty gash, but what the people who saw it happen were saying was that if it’d been just a few inches the other way, it could have gone smack into his heart, and you’d’ve had a film star killed in the most sensational way that ever was. Didn’t you ever hear about that, Major?”
“Now you mention it,” Fanshire said slowly, “I think I did hear something about it.”
“Well,” Gresson said, “what if it happened again this afternoon, to someone who wasn’t as lucky as Peck?”
There was another of those electric silences of assimilation, out of which Lucy Wexall said, “Yes, I heard about that.” And Janet said, “Remember, I told you about it! I was visiting some friends at the hotel that day, and I didn’t see it happen, but I was there for the commotion.”
Gresson spread out his arms, his round face gleaming with excitement and perspiration.
“That’s got to be it!” he said. “You remember how Vosper was lying under the umbrella outside the patio when we started playing touch football, and he got sore because we were kicking sand over him, and he went off to the other end of the beach? But he didn’t take the umbrella with him. The wind did that, after we all went off to change. And this time it didn’t miss!”
Suddenly Astron stood up beside him, but where Gresson had risen like a jumping bean, this was like the growth and unfolding of a tree.
“I have heard many words,” Astron said, in his firm gentle voice, “but now at last I think I am hearing truth. No man struck the blasphemer down. The arrow of God smote him, in his wickedness and his pride, as it was written long ago in the stars.”
“You can say that again,” Gresson proclaimed triumphantly. “He sure had it coming.”
Again the Saint drew at his cigarette and created his own vision behind half-closed eyes. He saw the huge umbrella plucked from the sand by the invisible fingers of the wind, picked up and hurled spinning along the deserted twilight beach, its great mushroom spread of gaudy canvas no longer a drag now but a sail for the wind to get behind, the whole thing transformed into a huge unearthly dart flung with literally superhuman power, the arrow of God indeed. A fantastic, an almost unimaginable solution, and yet it did not have to be imagined because there were witnesses that it had actually almost happened once before...
Fanshire was saying, “By Jove, that’s the best suggestion I’ve heard yet — without any religious implication, of course. It sounds as if it could be the right answer!”
Simon’s eyes opened on him fully for an instant, almost pityingly, and then closed completely as the true and right and complete answer rolled through the Saint’s mind like a long peaceful wave.
“I have one question to ask,” said the Saint.
“What’s that?” Fanshire said, too politely to be irritable, yet with a trace of impatience, as if he hated the inconvenience of even defending such a divinely tailored theory.
“Does anyone here have a gun?” asked the Saint.
There was an almost audible creaking of knitted brows, and Fanshire said, “Really, Mr Templar, I don’t quite follow you.”
“I only asked,” said the Saint imperturbably, “if anyone here had a gun. I’d sort of like to know the answer before I explain why.”
“I have a revolver,” Wexall said with some perplexity. “What about it?”
“Could we see it, please?” said the Saint.
“’I’ll get it,” said Pauline Stone.
She got up and left the room.
“You know I have a gun, Fanshire,” Wexall said. “You gave me my permit. But I don’t see—”
“Neither do I,” Fanshire said.
The Saint said nothing. He devoted himself to his cigarette, with impregnable detachment, until the voluptuous secretary came back. Then he put out the cigarette and extended his hand.
Pauline looked at Wexall, hesitantly, and at Fanshire. The Superintendent nodded a sort of grudging acquiescence. Simon took the gun and broke it expertly.
“A Colt .38 Detective Special,” he said. “Unloaded.” He sniffed the barrel. “But fired quite recently,” he said, and handed the gun to Fanshire.
“I used it myself this morning,” Lucy Wexall said cheerfully.
“Janet and Reg and I were shooting at the Portuguese men-of-war. There were quite a lot of them around before the breeze came up.”
“I wondered what the noise was,” Wexall said vaguely.
“I was coming up the drive when I heard it first,” Gresson said, “and I thought the next war had started.”
“This is all very int’resting,” Fanshire said, removing the revolver barrel from the proximity of his nostrils with a trace of exasperation, “but I don’t see what it has to do with the case. Nobody has been shot—”
“Major Fanshire,” said the Saint quietly, “may I have a word with you, outside? And will you keep that gun in your pocket so that at least we can hope there will be no more shooting?”
The Superintendent stared at him for several seconds, and at last unwillingly got up.
“Very well, Mr Templar.” He stuffed the revolver into the side pocket of his rumpled white jacket, and glanced back at his impassive chocolate sentinel. “Sergeant, see that nobody leaves here, will you?”
He followed Simon out on to the verandah and said almost peremptorily, “Come on now, what’s this all about?”
It was so much like a flash of a faraway Scotland Yard Inspector that the Saint had to control a smile. But he took Fanshire’s arm and led him persuasively down the front steps to the beach. Off to their left a tiny red glow-worm bunked low down under the silver stars.
“You still have somebody watching the place where the body was found,” Simon said.
“Of course,” Fanshire grumbled. “As a matter of routine. But the sand’s much too soft to show any footprints, and—”
“Will you walk over there with me?”
Fanshire sighed briefly, and trudged beside him. His politeness was dogged but unfailing. He was a type that had been schooled from adolescence never to give up, even to the ultimate in ennui. In the interests of total fairness, he would be game to the last yawn.
He did go so far as to say, “I don’t know what you’re getting at, but why couldn’t it have been an accident?”
“I never heard a better theory in my life,” said the Saint equably, “with one insuperable flaw.”
“What’s that?”
“Only,” said the Saint, very gently, “that the wind wasn’t blowing the right way.”
Major Fanshire kept his face straight ahead to the wind and said nothing more after that until they reached the glow-worm that they were making for and it became a cigarette-end that a constable dropped as he came to attention.
The place where Floyd Vosper had been lying was marked off in a square of tape, but there was nothing out of the ordinary about it except some small stains that showed almost black under the flashlight which the constable produced.