the house was pleasantly cool in the steadily increasing heat.
We came into a quiet room and the old servant said softly, ‘Mr Kemp, ma’am.’
She rose from a chair. ‘Thank you, John.’
There was a man standing behind her but I ignored him because she was enough to fill the view. She was less than thirty, long of limb and with flaming red hair, green eyes and the kind of perfect complexion that goes with that combination. She was not at all what I had imagined as the widow of David Salton, fifty-two-year-old building tycoon.
A lot of thoughts chased through my mind very quickly but, out of the helter-skelter, two stayed with me. The first was that a woman like Jill Salton would be a handful for any man. Physical beauty is like a magnet and any husband married to this one could expect to be fighting off the competition with a club.
The second thought was that under no circumstance in law can a murderer benefit by inheritance from the person murdered.
Now why should I have thought that?
I
‘Mr Kemp, glad to meet you,’ said Mrs Salton. She showed no sign of being aware of my goggle-eyed reaction; perhaps to her it was standard from the human male. Her grip was pleasantly firm. ‘This is Mr Stern.’
Reluctantly I shifted my gaze. Stern was a tall man somewhere in his mid-thirties. His features had the handsome regularity of a second-rank movie star. First-rank stars don’t need it – just look at John Wayne. He smiled genially and stepped forward to shake my hand. I let him crush my fingers and looked expectantly at Mrs Salton. ‘Mr Stern is my lawyer,’ she said.
I allowed a twitch of an eyebrow to betray surprise as I was manoeuvred to a seat. Stern caught it and laughed. ‘I invited myself over,’ he said. ‘Mrs Salton happened to mention your proposed visit when she telephoned me yesterday. I thought it advisable to be on hand.’
‘To hear Lord Hosmer’s expressions of regret?’ I said ironically.
‘Oh, come now,’ said Stern. ‘The chairman of Western and Continental didn’t send a man across the Atlantic just for that. Besides, he has already spoken to Mrs Salton on the telephone.’
She was sitting opposite me, her hands in her lap smoothing the hem of the simple black dress she wore, and her eyes were downcast. I said, ‘Will you accept my regrets, Mrs Salton? I’ve heard your husband spoken of highly.’
‘Thank you, Mr Kemp,’ she said quietly, and looked up. ‘Can I offer you anything? We were just about to have coffee.’
‘Coffee would be very nice.’
Stern was about to say something when John trundled a loaded tea trolley into the room. He had to do something with his open mouth so he said innocuously, ‘Did you have a good flight?’
‘As good as they ever are, I suppose.’
We stuck to trivialities while John was serving the coffee, and I studied Mrs Salton appraisingly. She was a very still woman and appeared to have no mannerisms of gesture, her voice was quiet and restful – educated and English – and I thought it would be most relaxing to spend time in her company. Her beauty did not come out of a Max Factor bottle but stemmed from good bone structure and sheer animal health.
John departed and Stern waited until he was out of earshot before he asked, ‘Can we assume that the insurance claim will be met expeditiously?’
I studied him with interest. He seemed to be as jittery as Mrs Salton was placid, and he couldn’t wait to bring up the subject. ‘It will be handled as quickly as circumstances allow.’
He frowned. ‘Do you mean that the circumstances are unusual?’
‘I mean that the company, as yet, knows very little about the circumstances. There are one or two points to be clarified. That’s why I’m here, rather than a loss adjuster.’
‘I don’t follow.’
‘I’m an independent consultant,’ I said. ‘Rather different remit, you see.’
‘What remit?’ he demanded, almost aggressively.
I ignored the question and looked again at Mrs Salton, who was sitting watchfully with no expression at all on her face. I said, ‘What was Mr Salton’s departure point when he took the boat out that final time?’
She stirred. ‘He sailed from here.’
‘The boat was found four days later drifting off Buque Island – that’s the other side of Campanilla. A long way.’
‘That was gone into at the inquest,’ said Stern. ‘The wind direction and the current drift accounted for it satisfactorily.’
‘Maybe, but I was looking at the sea as I came here. In whichever direction I looked there was a boat. There are a lot of yachts here and four days is a long time. It seems odd that Mr Salton’s boat wasn’t discovered earlier.’
‘A matter of chance,’ said Stern. ‘And boats don’t approach each other too closely anyway. Even at a hundred yards you couldn’t tell …’ He looked at Mrs Salton and stopped.
‘But Mr Salton was missing for four days. Didn’t anyone worry about that?’
Stern started to speak but Mrs Salton interrupted. ‘I’ll explain. I didn’t know David was missing.’ She paused. ‘My husband and I had a quarrel – a rather bad one. He left the house in a fit of temper and went across to the main island. We have an airstrip there where we keep a plane.’
She must have noticed my reaction to this exemplar of the super-rich, because she added, ‘My husband had many interests in the United States and it was convenient to run our own aircraft.’
I straightened out the expression on my face. ‘Did he pilot it himself?’
‘No. We have a pilot and an engineer. Shortly after David left here, the plane took off. I didn’t think much of it at the time but when David didn’t come back I went across to the airstrip. The plane wasn’t there, of course, and I couldn’t find Philips, the engineer. I went to see Mrs Haslam, the pilot’s wife – Haslam and Philips both have houses on the estate. She said she had seen Haslam talking to my husband and they got into the plane. I assumed he had flown to the United States.’
‘Just like that? Without packing a suitcase?’
‘It wasn’t necessary,’ she said. ‘He maintains a wardrobe in the apartment in New York.’
‘What was he wearing when he left?’
She considered. ‘A polo shirt, shorts and sandals.’
It was winter in the northern hemisphere. While the heat was borderline unbearable in the Caribbean, the snow could be drifting up to three feet thick in the streets of New York. This was straining my credulity a bit too far. I said, ‘He went to New York
