The Saint in the Sun Read Free

idyllic relationship until Mrs Bertha Noversham had arrived. Mrs Noversham was the English woman whom Natalie had met on the Blue Train and whose company in Monte Carlo had postponed the problems of solitude. She had been to Corsica on the yacht of some titled plutocrats whom she had met at a roulette table and adopted as old friends on the basis of having seen them several times in the most fashionable London restaurants-Natalie had already told Simon about Mrs Noversham’s steamroller methods of enlarging her circle of acquaintances.
    “Yes, dear, it was utterly divine,” Mrs Noversham said, sinking massively into a chair at their table without waiting for an invitation. “It’s a shame you couldn’t have gone along, but they did only have the one spare berth, and even I practically had to ask myself. They’re such snobs, though-Sir Oswald wasn’t knighted more than five years ago, and they couldn’t get over me having the Duke of Camford for a great-uncle, and calling him a silly old fool, which he is.”
    She was a woman with a gross torso and short skinny legs, who masked whatever complexion she may have had with an impenetrable coating of powder and rouge, and dissimulated her possibly graying hair with a tint of magenta that never sprang from human follicle. In spite of this misguided effort, she failed to look a day under fortyfive, which may have been all she was. Her dress looked as if it had been bought from a black-and-white illustration in a mail-order catalog. But like magic charms to obscure and nullify all such cheap crudities, she wore Jewels.
    It was a long time since the Saint had seen jewels in quite such ostentatious quantity, even in that traditional paradise of jewel thieves. Mrs Noversham wore them in every conceivable place and form, and a few that required a long stretch of the imagination as well. She wore them in an assortment of settings so garish that she must have designed them herself, because no jeweller with a vestige of sanity would have banked on a customer falling in love with them in his shop window. If the most casual observer was to be left in doubt as to how she was loaded, it was not going to be her fault.
    “I’ll have a champagne cocktail,” she told the waiter. “This wasn’t some itty bitty little yacht, Mr Templar. It’s a small liner. Natalie can tell you-she came to dinner on board before we sailed. But do you know, with all that money, Lady Fisbee still insists on having all the wine iced, even the claret.”
    “You must have been glad it wasn’t a longer trip,” said the Saint earnestly.
    “Well, you know what did cut it short?” Mrs Noversham said, with the unction of a born connoisseur of catastrophes. “We had a robbery!”
    “What, not another?” Natalie exclaimed.
    “Yes, dear. Right in the harbor at Ajaccio. Lady Fisbee had given most of the crew a day off to go ashore-it’s quite ridiculous the way she pampers those people-and all of us had dinner at the Hotel so that they wouldn’t have to work. She’s obviously still frightened of servants and thinks that she has to make them happy instead of it being the other way round. So there were only two men on board, and they were playing cards and probably drinking, and somebody got on board and jimmied the safe in Lady Fisbee’s cabin and cleaned out the two other guests who had anything worth stealing as well.”
    Natalie turned to Simon and explained: “There was a robbery at the Métropole in Monte Carlo, too, while we were there. We must attract them.”
    “One of us does, dear. Perhaps it’s a good job they couldn’t find room for you, after all-you might have lost that nice collar of sparklers.”
    Natalie fingered the exquisitely mounted string of white fire around her throat almost self-consciously, and said: “I’m not really surprised. That wall safe that Lady Fisbee showed us looked terribly flimsy to me. The best thing about it was the way it was hidden. And that Italian actress