The Saint Around the World Read Free Page A

five thousand pounds as an alternative, it began to dawn upon the poor girl that his love might not be as passionate and deathless as he had proclaimed. By then she was on the verge of her fifth month, and an X-ray had shown that she was preparing to endow the world with not one but two little Ivalots. This was the last straw that drove her to issue an ultimatum to the effect that unless Mr. Ivalot came through with a wedding ring within a week she would continue their romance through a lawyer. It was not, she explained later to the former Lona Shaw, who interviewed her, that she thought that money could heal a broken heart, and that she felt it her maternal duty to see that her imminent offspring were not left to face a lifetime of illegitimacy with a lousy Ł 2500 capital apiece, instead of their rightful inheritance of millions.
    This fair and sporting warning was her gravest mistake, for Mr. Ivalot had promptly elected to vanish rather than contest the suit.
    A lawyer with a fat contingency fee in prospect was not to be so easily discouraged. He promptly forwarded the papers to an attorney in Bermuda, with the request that they be served on Mr. Ivalot there. And that was when the blow fell that punctured a fabulous legend and at the same time paradoxically inflated an otherwise routine scandal into the sensation of the year. For according to the advice that came back to London, nobody in Bermuda—no attorney, bank, real estate agency, newspaper, or any individual who had been questioned—had ever heard of Mr. Roger Ivalot, nor was he listed in any official registry or directory.
    “In fact, he never had been here,” said the Saint.
    “That’s what I couldn’t quite swallow,” Lona Dayne said. “I thought it out this way. The Bermuda thing came out when somebody asked him about taxes. It seemed to me that that question might really have taken him by surprise. He had to have an answer quickly, and a good one, without having too much time to think about it or what it might lead to. But what he suddenly realized was that it might occur to the authorities to start investigating anyone who was throwing money around as lavishly as he was, in the hope of catching a tax dodger, and from what’s come out since he obviously couldn’t risk being investigated. He had to head that inquiry off right away. But how likely would he be to come up with Bermuda unless he knew a lot about it? I kept on thinking about that.”
    Simon nodded appreciatively.
    “That’s pretty sharp thinking. Most people wouldn’t have known about that tax angle. But if he’d run into someone who really lived here–-“
    “There wasn’t too much risk of that. You wouldn’t find rnany people with a home in Bermuda visiting England in the winter. But he might very easily have run into someone who’d visited here, so he had to be ready to talk about the place like a native. Which still made it look as if he must have spent a lot of time here, at least.”
    The mystery of Mr. Ivalot had all the earmarks of a monumental swindle, but it became even more baffling as weeks went by without anyone turning up who claimed to have been swindled. That is, with the exception of the pregnant starlet, whose loss was debatable; and her plight and the cruelly clouded future of her two still unborn little bastards became a matter of popular concern and the grist of many columns of tear-squeezing prose for Lona Shaw.
    “And you came here to go on milking it?” Simon asked.
    “Well, not quite. You see, I met Havvie”—the Saint managed to suppress a shudder—“when he was in England last year on his holiday, and he’d been after me with, letters and telephone calls to marry him ever since, and we really did get on awfully well together, so eventually I said yes. Then I had to get leave from the Record, and I’ve always been a thrifty type, so I sold them the idea that I ought to stay on salary if I came here and went on trying to dig up something about