“What in God’s name do you mean? You don’t know what you are saying. My wife——”
“Your wife is in London. Charlotte here is Charlotte Meiner and always was.” I looked at Charlotte. A total incomprehension and the tentative beginnings of a dazed hope. “Earlier this year, blazing the trail for many kidnappings that were to follow, your friends Lavorski and Dollmann had your wife seized and hidden away to force you to act with them, to put your resources at their disposal. I think they felt aggrieved, Tony, that you should be a millionaire while they were executives : they had it all worked out, even to having the effrontery of intending to invest the proceeds in your empire. However. Your wife managed to escape, so they seized her cousin and best friend, Charlotte – a friend upon whom, shall we say, your wife was emotionally very dependent – and threatened to kill her unless they got Mrs. Skouras back again. Mrs. Skouras surrendered immediately. This gave them the bright idea of having two swords of Damocles hanging over your head, so, being men of honour, they decided to keep Charlotte as well as your imprisoned wife. Then, they knew, you would do exactly as they wanted, when and as they wanted. To have a good excuse to keep both you and Charlotte under their surveillance at the same time, and to reinforce the idea that your wife was well and truly dead, they gave out that you had been secretly married.” Uncle Arthur was a kind man: no mention of the fact that h was common knowledge that, at the time of her alleged death, brain injuries sustained by Mrs, Skouras in a car crash two years previously had become steadily worse and it was known that she would never leave hospital again.
“How on earth did you guess that?” Lord Kirkside asked.
“No guess. Must give my lieutenants their due,” Uncle Arthur said in his best magnanimous taught-’em-all-I-know voice. “Hunslett radioed me at midnight on Tuesday. He gave me a list of names of people about whom Calvert wanted immediate and exhaustive inquiries made. That call was tapped by the Shangri-la but they didn’t know what Hunslett was talking about because in our radio transmissions all proper names are invariably coded. Calvert told me later that when he’d seen Sir Anthony on Tuesday night he thought Sir Anthony was putting on a bit of an act. He said it wasn’t all act. He said Sir Anthony was completely broken and desolated by the thought of his dead wife. He said he believed the original Mrs, Skouras was still alive, that it was totally inconceivable that a man who so patently cherished the memory of his wife should have marrkd again two or three months later, that he could only have pretended to marry again for the sake of the one person whom he ever and so obviously loved.
“I radioed France. Riviera police dug up the grave in Beaulieu where she had been buried near the nursing home where she’d died. They found a coffin full of logs. You knew this, Tony.”
Old Skouras nodded. He was a man in a dream.
“It took them half an hour to find out who had signed the death certificate and most of the rest of the day to find the doctor himself. They charged him with murder. This can be done in Prance on the basis of a missing body. The doctor wasted no time at all in taking them to his own private nursing home, where Mrs, Skouras was in a locked room. The doctor, matron and a few others are in custody now. Why in God’s name didn’t you come to us before?”
“They had Charlotte and they said they would kill my wife out of hand. What – what would you have done?”
“God knows,” Uncle Arthur said frankly. “She’s in fair health, Tony. Calvert got radio confirmation at five a.m.” Uncle Arthur jerked a thumb upwards. “On Lavorski’s big transceiver in the castle,”
Both Skouras and Lord Kirkside had their mouths open, Lavorski, blood still Sowing from his mouth, and Dollmann looked as if they had been sandbagged. Charlotte’s eyes were the widest wide I’d ever seen. She was looking at me in a very peculiar way.
“It’s true,” Susan Kirkside said. “I was with him. He told me to tell nobody,” She crossed to take my arm and smiled up at me. “I’m sorry again for what I said last night. I think you’re the most wonderful man I’ve ever known. Except Rolly, of course.” She turned round at the sound of footsteps coming down the stairs and promptly forgot all About the second most wonderful man she’d ever known.
“Rolly !” she cried. “Rolly!” I could see Rolly bracing himself.
They were all there, I counted them, Kirkside’s son, the Hon. Rollinson, the policeman’s sons, the missing members of the small boats and, behind them all, a small brown-faced old woman in a long dark dress with a black shawl over her head. I went forward and took her arm.
“Mrs, MacEachern,” I said. “Til take you home soon. Your husband is waiting.”
“Thank you, young man,” she said calmly. “That will be very nice.” She lifted her arm and held mine in a proprietorial fashion.
Charlotte Skouras came and held my other arm, not in quite so proprietarial a fashion, but there for everyone to see. I didn’t mind. She said: “You were on to me? You were on to me all the time?”
“He was,” Uncle Arthur said thoughtfully. “He just said he knew. You never quite got round to explaining that bit, Calvert.”
“It wasn’t difficult, sir – if you know all the facts, that is,” I added hastily. “Sir Anthony put me on to you. That visit he paid me on the Firecrest to allay any suspicion we might have had about our smashed radio set only served, I’m afraid, to mate me suspicious. You wouldn’t have normally come to me, you’d have gone ashore immediately to the police or to a phone, sir. Then, in order to get me talking about the cut telephone wires, you wondered if the radio-wrecker, to complete our isolation from the mainland, had smashed the two public call boxes. From a man of your intelligence, such a suggestion was fatuous, there must be scores of houses in Torbay with their private phone. But you thought it might sound suspicious if you suggested cut lines, so you didn’t, Then Sergeant MacDonald gave me a glowing report about you, said you were the most respected man in Torbay and your public reputation contrasted so sharply with your private behaviour in the Shangri-la on Tuesday night – well, I just couldn’t buy it.
“That nineteenth-century late Victorian melodrama act that you and Charlotte put on in the saloon that night had me fooled for all of five seconds. It was inconceivable that any man so devoted to his wife could be vicious towards another obviously nice woman—”
“Thank you kindly, sir,” Charlotte murmured.
“It was inconceivable that he send her for his wife’s photograph, unless he had been ordered to do so. And you had been ordered to do so, by Lavorski and Dollmann. And it was inconceivable that she would have gone – the Charlotte Meiner I knew would have clobbered you over the head with a marline spike. Ergo, if you weren’t what you appeared to be, neither were you, Charlotte.
“The villains, they thought, were laying a foundation for an excellent reason for your flight from the wicked baron to the Firecrest, where you could become their eyes and ears and keep them informed of all our plans and moves, because they’d no idea how long their secret little transmitter in the engine-room would remain undetected. After they knew we’d found Hunslett – they’d removed the transmitter by that time – it was inevitable that they would try to get you aboard the Firecrest. So they laid a little more groundwork by giving you a bruised eye – the dye is nearly off already – and some wicked weals across your back and dumped you into the water with your little polythene kitbag with the micro-transmitter and gun inside it. Do this, they said, or Mrs. Skouras will get it.”
She nodded. “They said that.”
“I have twenty-twenty eyesight. Sir Arthur hasn’t – his eyes were badly damaged in the war. I had a close look at those weak on your back. Genuine weals. Also genuine pinpricks where the hypodermic with the anasthetic had been inserted before the lashes were inflicted. To that degree, at least, someone was humane.”
“I could stand most things,” Skouras said heavily. “I couldn’t stand the thought of – the thought of—–”
“I guessed you had insisted on the anaesthetic, sir. No, I knew. The same way that I knew that you had insisted that the crews of all those small yachts be kept alive or the hell with the consequences. Charlotte, I ran a finger-nail down one of those weals. You should have jumped through the saloon roof. You never batted an eyelid. After submersion in salt water. After that, I knew.