“This is what I wasn’t supposed to find,” he said. “In fact I don’t think Freddie even imagined you’d have it around. But it made quite a difference. How much were you going to shake him down for, Lissa?”
“I only asked him for two hundred thousand,” she said. “I’d never have said anything. I just didn’t want to be like some of the others — thrown out on my ear to be a tramp for the rest of my life.”
“But you wanted too much,” said the Saint. “Or he just didn’t trust you, and he thought you’d always be coming back for more. Anyhow, he figured this would be a better way to pay off.”
His cigarette hadn’t even gone out. He picked it up and brightened it in a long peaceful draw that expressed all the final settling down of his mind.
“The mistake that all of us made,” he said, “was not figuring Freddie for a moderately clever guy. Because he was a bore, we figured he was moderately stupid. Which is a rather dangerous mistake. A bore isn’t necessarily stupid. He doesn’t necessarily overrate his own intelligence. He just underrates everyone else. That makes him tedious, but it doesn’t make him dumb. Freddie isn’t dumb. He just sounds dumb because he’s talking down to how dumb he thinks the rest of us are. As a matter of fact, he’s quite a lively lad. He put a lot of gray matter into this little scheme. As soon as he heard that I’d arrived in town, he had the inspiration that he’d been waiting for. And he didn’t waste a day in getting it started. He wrote himself the famous threatening letter at once — it was quite a coincidence, of course, that there was that last Christmas party to hang it on, but if there hadn’t been that he’d certainly have thought of something else almost as good. He only had to establish that he was being menaced, and get me into the house to protect him. Then he had to put you in the middle of the first situation, in a set-up that would look swell in the beginning but would get shakier and shakier as things went on. That wasn’t difficult either.”
The only sound when he paused was Freddie Pellman’s heavy sobbing breathing.
“After that, he improvised. He only had to stage a series of incidents that would give everyone else in turn an absolutely ironclad alibi that would satisfy me. It wasn’t hard to do — it was just a matter of being ready with a few props to take advantage of the opportunities that were bound to arise. Perhaps he was a bit lucky in having so many chances in such a short space of time, but I don’t know. He couldn’t go wrong anyway. Everything had to work in for him, once the primary idea was planted. Even an accident like Angelo picking up the knife was just a break for him — there weren’t any fingerprints on it, of course, and it just helped the mystery a little... And this evening he was able to finish up in style with the snake routine. It wasn’t exactly his fault that the routine fitted in just as well with another pattern that was gradually penetrating into my poor benighted brain. That’s just one of the natural troubles with trying to create artificial mysteries — when you’re too busy towing around a lot of red herrings, you don’t realise that you may be getting a fishy smell on your own fingers... That was what Freddie did. He was being very clever about letting it work out that your alibi was the only flimsy one, but he forgot that when I had to start questioning alibis it might occur to me that there was one other person whose alibis were flimsier still. And that was him.”
Simon drew on his cigarette again.
“Funnily enough, I was just leading up to telling him that when he made his first major mistake. You see, I had an idea what was going on, but I was going nuts trying to figure out why. There didn’t seem to be any point to the whole performance, except as a terrific and ponderous practical joke. And I couldn’t see Freddie with that sort of humor. So I was just going to come out flatly and face him with it and see what happened. It’s a shock technique that works pretty well sometimes. And then he took all the wind out of my sails by insisting on helping me to see how it all pointed to you. That’s what I mean about him underrating other people’s intelligence. He was just a little too anxious to make quite sure that I hadn’t missed any of the points that I was supposed to get. But it had just the opposite effect, because I happened to know that your alibi must have been genuine. So then I knew that the whole plot didn’t point to you — it was pointed at you. And when Freddie went a little further and helped me to think of the idea of staying behind tonight and searching your room, I began to guess that the climax would be something like this. I suppose he got hold of you privately and told you he’d started to get suspicious of what I was up to — maybe I was planning to plant some evidence and frame one of you?”
“Yes.”