Salvage for the Saint (7 page)

The boatman looked at him quizzically from under sunbleached eyebrows.

“Aaredaiz doant zee mahren wunniz dahg.”

The Saint thought he might have caught an entire syllable here: he was almost sure he had heard the word “don’t.” He took encouragement and plunged on.

“I’m hoping to find out what happened to a friend of mine who may have gone missing down this way a few days ago,” he said, articulating with special care as if in compensation. “As a matter of fact it was on the same day as the boat-race accident just down here and he was due to travel up to London that evening. But he never arrived. He had no car, so I suppose he would have been meaning to use the train. What would be the nearest station around here?”

The man manoeuvred the boat into its berth. He chewed steadily and slowly for a while on another wad of tobacco while the watery eyes regarded the Saint. Then he spoke.

He said: “Oiklaff.”

“You … what?” queried the Saint, for once helplessly stuck for something to say.

“Oiklaff,” said the boatman more loudly and positively.

“Oiklaff?” the Saint repeated weakly.

“Aas roik,” said the man, as if giving encouragement to a moron. “Eedaga’a trine a Lunnun frathahr ahrroik.”

Simon’s aural deciphering system reeled under the strain, clutched desperately at the “Lunnun”, which could have been interpreted as “London”, and shifted into a higher gear to begin coming to grips with the rest.

“A train!” he almost shouted in triumph after a pause. “He could have got a train from there. From Highcliffe!”

“Aas wah’oisaad, Oiklaff. Eecada gahnnair boi the bahs.”

“Ah, there’s a bus, is there?” Simon said, mainly to convince himself he had it right. “And how far’s Highcliffe from here?”

The man spat out another tobacco wad.

“Bate foive moiwe.”

“And do you happen to know when the next bus goes?”

The boatman fumbled for an ancient pocket watch and studied it interminably.

“Bate aafenaouer fmnay,” he said at last.

“I see,” said the Saint with a sense of real accomplishment. “I think you said ten bob. Here’s a quid for your time. And thanks for the information.”

He proceeded in due course to Highcliffe station with his investigatory aplomb more shaken than it had been in a long time. He had had some experience of the mild nasal burr of the typical Hampshireman—Vic Cullen was a good example—but nothing had quite prepared him for the primordial accent he had just encountered.

He approached the ticket clerk at the station in a distinctly wary frame of mind. The ticket clerk turned out to be a small, fastidiously moustached man of Indian or Pakistani origin. There was a conspicuous absence of other staff, and the little dark man radiated the air of being himself not only the ticket seller but also parcels porter, sweeper-up, lavoratory cleaner, and station-master—all of which indeed he was.

He eyed Simon shrewdly.

“Vhat can I do for you, Sir?’

“I’m looking for information. Not quite the ordinary sort, though.”

He told his story of the friend who had failed to turn up in London when expected. The stationmaster’s quick dark eyes never left Simon’s face.

“Can you describe this—friend of yours?”

“Middle aged, stocky build, short greyish hair. Speaks with an accent.”

The man nodded.

“He vas here. I remember him distinctly. This is an exceptionally quiet station for the most part, and I am far more than aweragely obserwant, though I say so myself. This man spoke vith, I should say, a French accent. Yes, I vould be practically certain that he was a Frenchman. He bought a single ticket to Vaterloo, and I saw him get on the train.”

The quick dark eyes flicked over Simon’s tall, somewhat untidily dressed figure, and he continued:

“You must understand ve don’t see many foreign passengers through this station. Ours are mostly from Birmingham or Manchester, or they are locals. This man vas different. But he had no bags, and he didn’t look like a tourist.”

“You’d make a good court witness,” Simon observed.

“Thank you,” said the little man. “But there’s one thing more.” He hesitated a moment. “I don’t think this Frenchman was really your friend as you told me—Mr Templar.”

“Now wait a minute—”

“No,” put in the station-man quickly, holding up a restraining hand. “Please don’t try to pull the vool ower my eyes any further. I have seen enough photographs of the notorious Simon Templar to be quite certain that you are indeed that adwenturous personage. Therefore it vould be quite pointless to persist in denying it or in maintaining your story of a friend who failed to turn up somevhere. You vere in the boat race. Putting together the ewidence, I vould wenture a hypothesis as follows.”

The little man paused for breath, and Simon blinked in sheer disbelief as he continued with assured fluency.

“You have conjectured, have you not, that there was something decidedly fishy about the explosion in which Mr Charles Tatenor and his French co-driver vere killed—or rather, in which both of them were apparently killed. Further, I surmise from your present somevhat wagabond appearance, and your presence at my station, that you have perhaps already accumulated some ewidence to support the hypothesis that the Frenchman escaped the explosion, having planned the entire episode beforehand, and leawing an unconscious or already dead man in the boat in his place. I suspect that you have been searching and have found something on the beach. There is sand on your shoes,” he concluded simply.

Simon Templar swallowed hard.

“What is your name?” he asked weakly.

“John Matthew Thomas Bartholomew Chatterjee,” said the stationmaster promptly and proudly.

“John Matthew,” Simon told him, “you have restored my faith in the power of human articulation. Tonight your name will be added to my regional directory of back-up brainpower. Whenever I need a second opinion or some help with a difficult bit of inferential reasoning, I’ll definitely consider calling you in.”

Chatterjee smiled radiantly, exhibiting a set of dazzling white teeth.

“You are too amiable a man to have made such an utterance in any spirit of sarcasm,” he declared. “Therefore I thank you. It vill be a privilege to assist such a notorious desperado should an occasion ewer present itself vhen I may be of service.”

“But there’s one proviso.” Here the Saint leaned forward unsmiling, with a face hard as flint. “You so much as whisper a word of this to anyone—and I mean anyone—and I promise that you’ll assist me in quite another way. I promise I’ll make a point of using you for the practical exercises in the correspondence course I’m taking in amateur brain surgery. Do you read me?”

Chatterjee nodded vigorously, the white-toothed smile even broader than before.

“Indeed I do. Loud and clear. Your varning, Mr Templar, is admirably explicit, not to say drolly vorded. I completely see and understand your point of view. I shall, of course, be the wery soul of discretion. You may be confident that no third party vhatever shall be priwy to our secret. Should anybody chance to question me—for example a custodian of the law—I shall feign total incapacity to recall details of the passengers who pass daily under my eyes. I shall explain, vhile regretting sincerely, the long-standing inadequacy of my memory for faces …”

At some point Simon slipped quietly away and back to the Privateer by the way he had come. It was well into the evening before he reached his hotel room in Cowes, and after a bath and leisurely dinner he fell readily into bed.

The astonishing little stationmaster’s analysis left little to be added, as far as the Saint’s present knowledge went. The evidence certainly seemed to point to Fournier’s having set it all up. He could have knocked Tatenor out, kept out of sight himself while he steered the boat towards the shore, then turned the wheel and jumped clear on the blind side at the crucial moment, surfacing quietly farther along the beach and lying low till the fuss had died down. It was feasible—even if it did mean that Fournier was a lot cleverer than Simon had been inclined to give him credit for.

Of course, there was still the second body to be explained. Complete with crash helmet. But the Candecour was one of the few boats in the race big enough to hide a body, either an unconscious body or one that was already a corpse … The Candecorpse … The Saint’s thoughts veered and his eyelids drooped as he drifted back and forth across the hazy margins of sleep and waking. Fournier must have smuggled the body aboard after the scrutineer’s main inspection on the eve of the race. Odd name, Candecour. He’d been pondering on it. And on Tatenor. That was an odd name too. What did it mean, anyway? And Tatenor spoke perfect, but pairrfect, French. Monsieur Teteneur …or how about Tete noire? Monsieur Blackhead. Like the French used to call the Algerian colonists pieds noirs. Mr Blackhead is dead … something shady about him—a bit of a black sheep … sheep … sleep. The Saint slept.

-4-

On that same evening, less than two hours before, Arabella Tatenor, breaking her journey to Marseilles, had parked her red MG tourer in front of a country hotel near Orleans and booked in for the night.

Her decision to zoom south-of-France-wards post-haste had been made the instant the solicitor’s gloomy and mostly unwelcome news had finally sunk in. Which was about forty-five seconds after he had stopped apologising, prised his rear end up out of the torturous garden chair, and said his goodbyes.

“Now, Mrs Cloonan, don’t fuss!” she had remonstrated good-humouredly in response to the housekeeper’s mild demurrer. “It’s not the North Pole or the lower regions of hell—it’s just France.”

“Well, exactly,” Mrs Cloonan had said dubiously. “France.” The syllable might have been synonymous with “sin” as she pronounced it. “You driving by yourself in France is what I’m thinking of—with all those fifty million Frenchmen there, or whatever it is, and on the wrong side of the road, too!”

Arabella had smiled at that. She knew that Mrs Cloonan was genuinely fond of her and concerned for her well-being.

“They’re not all like Fournier, thank goodness!” she told her soothingly. “And I’ve driven in France before, you know. Actually you get used to it very quickly. And the French countryside’s marvellous, and the road to Marseilles is hardly a footpath.” Arabella grinned. “So stop worrying. I promise I’ll call you, the first overnight stop I make.”

That was Arabella Tatenor. She had to go to Marseille? Very well, then go she would. Right away. Or as near right away as could comfortably be managed.

She had seen the MG and herself safely aboard the eight o’clock ferry to Southampton on the morning after Brightly’s visit. From Southampton—which in those days had no direct ferry link with France—she had driven the seventy-five miles along the south coast to Newhaven in good time to catch the one o’clock boat to Dieppe; and some five hours later she had driven the MG off the boat and on to a French quay. The French customs formalities had delayed her only a minute or so, mostly taken up with a stylish piece of ogling from a raffish-looking douanier who wielded the chalk of his species, with, Arabella thought, unusual panache.

And then she had emerged into the sunshine of a late Normandy afternoon, and within minutes she was zipping through that rich green countryside, so hauntingly like yet unlike its English counterpart a mere hundred miles back across the water. She had driven contentedly for the better part of four hours—and not so contentedly for the worse part.

The worse part was driving through the towns that straddle the main road— towns like Rouen and Evreux, Dreux and Chartres—every one of which meant a two-or three-kilometre intrusion of those cobbles so beloved of the French and so bone-jarring to anyone travelling in a firmly sprung sports car.

Daylight was dissolving into the transparency of a star-spangled night when she pulled up outside the hotel, a few miles beyond Orleans. The place looked as if it had once been a barn; all half-timbered and skew-whiff, it had a warm, friendly look and an obviously active restaurant. And it had the name Hotel des Anglais, which at least offered prospect of sympathetic welcome for weak speakers of French, in which category Arabella unreservedly placed herself.

She chose the hotel for these reasons and because it happened to come into view at the right moment. But the two occupants of the ordinary black Citroen that pulled up outside the same hotel a minute or so later, after she had gone inside with her suitcase, chose it for a very different reason.

They chose it because they had followed her, very carefully and discreetly, all the way from Cowes, and they had not the slightest intention of losing her now.

She had settled herself in the hotel’s restaurant and was preparing to order her dinner when the fat man came in and sat down at a neighbouring table.

The fatness made the sitting down into a rather protracted operation. Arabella watched the performance discreetly but with more than normal curiosity. She had a vague feeling that there was something familiar about the fat man; but it was no more than that, and for the moment she dismissed it.

He was large generally, but his midriff was of a vast and pendulous corpulence out of proportion to the rest of him. Arabella noticed with concealed amusement that he had to sit well back from the table to leave room for that great wobbling paunch. His sparse greying hair was matched by a similarly greying but luxuriant moustache that drooped to give him the look of an ageing Mexican bandido.

The impression, however, was contradicted by his clothing, which was so incongruously dapper that Arabella had to control herself sternly to keep from giggling out loud. His trousers were immaculate light-grey flannels, belted at the waist—which in his case meant somewhere on the re-entrant undersurface of that ballooning midriff. At least two of his chins were camouflaged by a startlingly debonair cravat, and the upper part of his pear-shaped torso was gift-wrapped absurdly in the type of blazer in which lean young men at Cambridge once used to look dashing.

Arabella’s attention dwelt only briefly on these details of the fat man. She was too hungry to trouble herself about where, if anywhere, she might have seen him before, or someone who resembled him. She was impatient to catch the eye of the white-jacketed waiter, an apparently world-weary old retainer of a type still found in some French provincial hotels. He had a face like a cross between a pensioned-off clown and a tired bloodhound, and he seemed quietly determined, in the traditional manner of waiters, that his eye should not be caught. He pottered busily at a corner trolley with napkins and cutlery, or straightened a tablecloth here and there, giving the impression that such engrossing exertions could easily fill his entire day.