Salvage for the Saint

1

The Coroner cleared his throat sympathetically.

“Mrs Tatenor,” he said tentatively, but with the determined firmness of a Pillar of the Establishment who knows that he must Do his Duty, however painful, “there still seems to be some mystery concerning the identity of your husband’s co-driver.”

Arabella Tatenor nodded. She had already had more than enough of the meticulous, punctilious coroner. Her expression, if it conveyed anything, conveyed mild boredom.

She was dressed befittingly in black; but her skirt and blouse, for all their sombre colour, had clearly been cut without the slightest intention of concealing the shape of what they enclosed. And what they enclosed while draped around Arabella Tatenor had plenty of shape.

As for the shape she was in generally, on taking the stand a few minutes before in the crowded Ryde courtroom she had raised a filmy black veil to reveal features only a shade or two paler than they had been before the events of five days ago.

The Coroner was a large bony man with a well-scrubbed and barbered look. His black hair was shaved to an exaggerated short-back-and-sides respectability that gave him something of the look of an SS officer. He wore a dark-grey pinstriped suit, a white shirt with old-fashioned detachable collar starched and pressed to a celluloid shine, and a spotted tie done up in a tight little knot.

“The name you gave the police,” he went on. “Maurice Fournier. No one of that name has been traced. If you could possibly recall something that might—”

“No, there’s nothing,” cut in Arabella rather brusquely. “He said his name was Fournier. That’s all I know.”

The Coroner hesitated.

“But he was a guest in your house for a week or more.”

“He was my husband’s guest. I’d never met him before. And when I did meet him I took an instant dislike to him.”

The Coroner pursed his lips and brought two sets of five fingertips carefully together.

“Well, perhaps you can assist us by saying whether you formed the impression that Fournier was his true name?”

“No, I formed no impression about that. I had no reason to question whether it was his true name.”

“And what is your impression in retrospect, in view of the fact that the French authorities say that no Maurice Fournier is known to them?”

Arabella shrugged, making no particular effort to hide her impatience.

“Authorities can be wrong,” she told him. “And anyway he could easily have been Swiss or Belgian or something. But I really don’t see that his name matters. He, and my husband, are both dead.”

The Coroner winced visibly at the nakedness of her words, as if he would have liked to substitute something more bland and bloodless like “passed on” or “deceased”. Simon Templar, who was also in court, smiled at the thought of the interior battle that the Coroner must have been waging with himself at that juncture — a battle between, on the one hand, the legal ego, which hates to let anyone get away with robbing it of the initiative in argument as she had just done, and on the other the well-brought-up conservative gentleman whose sympathy for a newly widowed woman makes him a bottomless fount of indulgent tolerance.

The gentleman won on points, even if his fount did emerge as unmistakably non-bottomless. Its visible bottom took the form of a restrained concession to the legal ego; the Coroner swallowed hard — a species of exertion that caused his protuberant Adam’s apple to twitch the knot of the spotted tie — and said with forced pleasantness:

“You must allow me to be the judge of what matters in this case, Mrs Tatenor. But I realise how distressing all this must be for you. I am sure you have the sympathy and good wishes of everyone present in the court, and I hope we shall now be able to conclude this inquiry quickly. You may stand down now.”

She made a movement that just barely feinted at being a hint of a half-bow that she’d thought better of, and went back to her seat, which was next to the Saint’s in the second row of the block reserved for witnesses and members of the public.

In the front row of the same block sat the press-men, taking up their full allocation; on the Saint’s other hand sat Vic Cullen, and every other seat in the small Ryde courtroom was occupied too. Among the assembled faces Simon recognised at least half a dozen of the other race drivers; the rest were mostly holidaymakers who happened to be on the island at the time and who for reasons of their own considered a Coroner’s Inquest a good afternoon’s entertainment.

The Saint had half-turned in his seat to survey the spectators with casual interest, and his gaze had just stopped thoughtfully at two vaguely familiar-looking men whom he couldn’t for the moment place in either the boat-racing or the holiday-making group — both were overdressed and one was unusually fat, with a drooping moustache — when the Coroner spoke again.

“Mr Simon Templar — will you take the stand now, please?”

The Saint stood up, took the stand, and went through the usual initiation ritual.

The Coroner eyed him with evident distrust. The Saint resisted the urge to stick his tongue out, and contented himself with returning the Coroner’s cold stare in kind.

“You are the man they call the Saint?” asked the Coroner.

“The same.”

The Coroner sniffed, and made a nervous adjustment to the knot of the spotted tie which left it in exactly the same position as before.

“Mr Templar, your reputation is well known. You have often been described as a common criminal, and I have to say that you are by no means the sort of witness with whom I should have preferred to have to deal in this court.”

The Saint smiled. He didn’t intend losing sight of the seriousness of the occasion, but the opportunity was too good to miss.

“That’s quite all right,” he replied generously. “To be frank, you’re by no means my favourite type of coroner, either.”

There was a brief eruption of laughter, started by a couple of reporters. The Coroner glared at them and went three shades pinker. The Adam’s apple and spotted tie wiggled as he struggled to get control of himself.

“However,” he went on, heroically abstaining from comment on the Saint’s riposte, “I am told that your knowledge of power-boating matters is sound, Mr Templar, and I understand that you and your co-driver Mr... ah... Cullen were the first on the scene after the explosion.”

“That is correct,” agreed the Saint in a businesslike tone.

“I have here your eyewitness report, taken by the police at the time.” The Coroner indicated the document in front of him. “Perhaps you will help us by expanding on one or two points.”

“If I can,” said the Saint.

“One thing puzzles me in particular. Mr Tatenor’s boat suddenly changed course and began heading for the beach at...” — the Coroner peered at the papers — “... Hengistbury Head. You and Mr Cullen could hardly help being aware of this sudden turn, since the boat cut right across your own course.”

“Correct.”

The Coroner leaned forward.

“But having changed course in that abrupt manner, the boat then continued in the new direction, still heading straight for the shore, for a distance of approximately half a mile?”

“As you say — approximately.”

“Does that not seem to you a little odd, Mr Templar?”

It seemed to the Saint decidedly odd, but he hadn’t the slightest conscience about pretending otherwise to the Coroner.

“Not in the least odd,” he said in a tone of conviction.

“But how would you explain it?”

“What seems to me the most likely explanation,” Simon lied, picking his words with care, “is that the boat hit a big wave, and that as a result both men lost their footing, hit their heads and were knocked cold.”

“Leaving no one at the wheel?”

“That’s right. It could easily happen. It was a very choppy sea.”

“But with nobody at the wheel,” persisted the Coroner, “wouldn’t you have expected the boat to follow a rather erratic course, instead of travelling a good half mile or more in a straight line?”

It was a question the Saint had expected and one that had, somehow, to be answered. He took a deep breath.

“I suggest,” he said with a magnificent airy confidence that made everything seem much simpler than it was in his real thoughts on the matter, “that one of those unconscious bodies became slumped or wedged against the wheel just after they hit the big wave. The rudder would probably have found its approximate straight-ahead position very quickly in any case, on the principle of least resistance, and the wheel would have gone back with it, rather like the wheels of a car straighten up and take the steering wheel back after you round a bend. If one of the two men then fell against the Candecour’s wheel, as I think must have happened, that would have kept the boat on a roughly straight-ahead course.”

“Thank you, Mr Templar.”

There was a begrudging note in the Coroner’s voice but he continued to nod sagely as if to imply that of course he had seen all this for himself and now had come to the really difficult question. He posed it triumphantly.

“Yet, just before the impact, according to your evidence, the boat made another abrupt turn, and then once again straightened up.” The Coroner paused for effect. “You’re not seriously suggesting, Mr Templar, that the whole exact and rather unusual sequence of events which you have postulated was repeated?”

“No,” said the Saint with patient civility, “I’m not suggesting that. The explanation’s far simpler. When the Candecour got near the head, she hit the rip tide — that’s all.”

“Ah, the rip tide,” said the Coroner, little enlightened.

“At the right time,” the Saint explained with a briskly authoritative note in his voice, “which means during about the first two hours of the ebb, there’s a very sharply demarcated rip tide off the Head, moving almost parallel to the coast at up to twenty-five knots. I think it’s pretty clear that the rip was enough to deflect the Candecour and turn her through maybe another thirty or forty degrees, but not to stop her. So she hit the rocks farther along.”

On this specific point Simon Templar’s confidence was genuine. The rip tide was fact — the Privateer herself having had to battle obliquely across it to get to the blazing wreckage — and he was as sure as he could reasonably be that the Candecour’s final turn had been consistent with the rip tide’s likely effect on her runaway progress.

Otherwise, however, he was sure of nothing except that, somewhere, things were not entirely as they seemed... After the searing inferno that had been the Candecour had more or less burned itself out, two big lumps of something resembling charcoal had been recovered from the drifting debris. Each had the vestigial metal frame of a crash helmet all but fused to its charred skull. It was fortunate, from the Saint’s angle, that the Press had observed their normal reticence in the matter of giving specific details of the bodies. In particular they had said nothing about the crash helmets. Nor, it seemed, had the Coroner been reminded of them by anything in the papers. Simon’s own original eyewitness statement had foresightedly avoided direct reference to them — because even then he had been thinking ahead to the inquest. For when Simon Templar was on a project — and he regarded himself as still very much on this project, even if its terms of reference had altered somewhat since Arabella’s nocturnal visit — the last thing he wanted was great flat-footed policemen stamping about the scene of the crime, or interesting questions to cramp his own style. Therefore he had kept the crash helmets out of the discussion. If they had been brought into it they might have made the Coroner and jury just that important shade more likely to doubt his airy explanation of the crash. For two men to be knocked cold at the same time is by no means beyond the bounds of credibility, especially when the proposition is put by someone as blandly authoritative and seemingly convinced by it as he had taken care to appear. But a double knock-out when both men’s heads were protected by purpose-made helmets? Any reasonable member of the jury, and certainly the critical Coroner, might have balked at that... if the facts had been brought together in that way, which they had not.

The Saint had got away with it. He had calculated his performance to satisfy the all-important Coroner and jury, even though in the process as a boat expert he might have taken a nose-dive in the esteem of some of his racing colleagues.

The case was all over in another half-hour. Technical witnesses appeared, were questioned mechanically, gave their evidence after their own styles, and were duly dismissed. There was an RAF officer from the safety launch which had accompanied the competitors in mid-field and had made an early attempt to put out the fire; a marine fire expert who wrapped up the obvious — that the boat had exploded — in egregious jargon; a lugubrious forensic medical expert who confirmed that the bodies were too burnt for identification; and a dentist who, with a good deal of hedging and qualification and puffing and blowing said that the teeth were no help either.

The jury brought in their expected verdict of accidental death on Charles Tatenor and “one known as” Maurice Fournier; and Tatenor’s widow sighed with visible relief and left the court on Simon Templar’s arm.

They climbed into the powerful silver Aston Martin he had hired on the island, and talked about nothing in particular as the Saint’s effortless touch threaded the car through the twists and turns of the island’s narrow roads as if he had known and driven them for years.

And then abruptly Arabella asked the question he had known she would have to ask.

“Simon — you don’t think Charles could have committed suicide, do you? And killed Fournier at the same time?”

The Saint shook his head.

“No, I don’t,” he told her firmly. “And neither do you. I don’t think either of us can seriously see Charles as a suicide. And if he’d wanted to get rid of Fournier there are a dozen ways he could have done it without blowing himself up at the same time.” He glanced sideways at her thoughtful profile. “Right?”

“Right,” she agreed.

It was plain enough to Simon that she saw no real reason to doubt seriously that Tatenor’s death had been an accident. A spectacular accident maybe, and coming at a time when there was pressure on him, but an accident just the same. After all, powerboat racing had its risks — that was part of the appeal of the sport to men like Charles Tatenor.

“I’ll be sticking around for a couple of days,” Simon told her as he dropped her outside the opulent Victorian grange above Egypt Point which she now had all to herself — except for Mrs Cloonan.

The plump motherly housekeeper, whom Simon had met briefly a couple of times during the past few days, was staying on with Arabella, and she appeared now in the doorway and waved as he drove off.

During the two or three days for which he planned to stay on, the Saint meant to be busy. He was waiting now with supercharged curiosity to see whether his friend Beaky would come up with anything interesting on Fournier, but he had some investigating of a more active kind to pursue in the meantime. After that... well, Arabella was resilient and would be more or less back on an even keel in a couple of days; and if the Saint’s suspicions were borne out he might have something more than mildly interesting to tell her — something which, had he been able and willing to tell it at the inquest, would have been enough to set the stuffy Coroner’s larynx to a positive frenzy of twitching.

The Saint smiled at the thought. Coroners are coroners and Saints are Saints, and never the twain... But at the back of his mind, when he remembered the inquest, something nagged; a small insistent voice which prattled in no very intelligible language of an undigested thought, some loose end left, some fragment of information his brain so far hadn’t had time to process.

It was much later that he remembered.

He had been glancing around the courtroom idly examining the audience, when his eye had fallen on those two overdressed, foreign-looking men sitting together, one of them very fat and the other lizard-like. And the detail which in retrospect seemed to him especially interesting — the detail he had noted in passing at the time but had so far not returned to ponder on — was the exact quality of the reaction he had seen in the fat man’s flabby bandit face when the Coroner had announced the name Simon Templar.

2

Arabella Tatenor extended an irritable brown leg from the pink wickerworks swing seat and pushed away the tiny white toy poodle that was positioning itself neurotically to spring into her lap for the fifth time in as many minutes.

She wagged a reproving finger at the highly strung overbred travesty of doggy-hood.

“Don’t be a bore, now, Phaideaux.”

The wretched dog jittered and quivered, fixing its mistress with beseeching black button eyes. A little bell fixed to its collar tinkled annoyingly with its every movement, and next to this dangled a solid silver plate that confirmed the spelling of its name — pronounced, of course, exactly like “Fido.” It was her not-so-dear departed husband who had thought up this piece of linguistic tomfoolery and tongue-in-cheek snobbery, and Arabella had once found it amusing enough.

But at this moment her thoughts were elsewhere than on the dog; and neither were they directly concerned with the departed.

More with what the departed had left behind.

Opposite Arabella sat a very large man who had somehow shoe-horned himself into a very small wrought-iron chair. He was large in as many dimensions as the chair was small, with florid features and an unruly mop of greying hair. He was wearing a rather crumpled blue suit and had an attaché case balanced precariously on his knees, with a stack of papers balanced still more precariously on top of the case.

This was Richard Brightly — Brightly Senior of Brightly, Brightly and Smallbody, Solicitors, and he had just told Arabella, twice, slowly, that Charles Tatenor had died broke.

“I’m sorry.” She blinked groggily. “Charles was what?”

“Broke.” Brightly riffled through the stack of papers. “Your husband was broke. You are broke. I’m sorry.”

“Broke? Don’t be ridiculous.” She reached impatiently for the papers. “What are those?”

Brightly held them out to her.

“Unpaid bills.”

Arabella jerked back her hand as if the papers were red hot. Her face had taken on an expression of mingled amazement and indignation which suggested that she was beginning to take the idea seriously. She opened her mouth a couple of times to say something, then gave up the struggle. Sensing its opportunity, the dog scampered up into her lap.

“Quite,” Brightly said. “But you see, my dear, there really is a butcher, a baker, a—”

“Wait a minute, now,” Arabella said in a bloodless voice. She put the dog down, less gently than before, and stared hard at the solicitor. “Are you saying just... broke? I mean, you don’t really mean broke-type broke?”

Brightly inclined his head apologetically.

“But...!” Arabella spluttered. She gestured around her. “Does this look broke to you?”

“It looks rented.”

“Rented? Rented?” she repeated unbelievingly; and then dully: “Rented.”

“I’m afraid so, my dear. Did Charles really never tell you? But this house, the cars, practically everyth—”

“Of course he told me,” she interrupted mechanically. “Charles told me everything... What the hell do you mean, rented?”

The dog risked another assault on her lap. She put it down with a brisk “Get lost, Phaideaux,” and addressed the solicitor again.

“Charles had income, though. I know he did.”

Brightly nodded.

“He paid his debts twice a year, because twice a year he managed to come up with a large sum of cash. From somewhere.”

“Somewhere?” She shook a murderous finger at the dog, which was preparing to launch itself at her again. “Where?”

“He’d never say, and I could never learn.”

“But... this is absolutely ridiculous—”

Perhaps fortunately, her frustration, bewilderment and anger were interrupted at that moment by the arrival of a filled tea-tray, closely followed by Mrs Cloonan.

“Do excuse me, Mr Brightly, won’t you, Sir,” she said as she moved in front of him to put the tea things down on a small wrought-iron table that matched the small chair. And then, sympathetically, “I do hope you’re having a nice visit.”

Brightly could see Arabella gritting her teeth as the housekeeper pottered about and prepared to pour the tea.

“That’s all right, Mrs Cloonan, I’ll see to that. Thank you.”

“Thank you, Ma’am.”

As she turned to go, Arabella called her back in a tight voice.

“Oh, Mrs Cloonan.”

The housekeeper turned back by this time aware of the tension.

“Could you help me, please?” Arabella said with forced sweetness, having just intercepted the frenetic canine nuisance with a roughness which had produced a definite winded yelp. “Mr Brightly has just told me I have a lot of debts and no money, and I seem to be in danger of murdering the dog.”

Mrs Cloonan said “Oh, you poor thing!” and made clucking noises which likewise were not exclusively directed either to the dog or to its mistress but contrived to seem sympathetic to both. She swept the offending animal up to what, in less exalted literature than this, would be flatly — or perhaps not flatly — described as her ample bosom.

When she had gone, Brightly said reassuringly:

“Things aren’t entirely black, I’m glad to say. One thing you do own outright — the Phoenix. Though I’m afraid she’ll have to be sold to pay the debts.”

“The — Phoenix?” Arabella was lost.

“Still tied up down in Marseille, is she?”

“Marseille? Well, I suppose... well, as far as I...” Then, giving up and shrugging helplessly: “What’s the Phoenix?”

Brightly stared in astonishment.

“Good God, you don’t mean you... she’s your yacht, Mrs Tatenor.”

“My yacht?”

“Pretty near half a million worth, thank heaven. But it’s amazing — he never even told you about your own yacht?”

Arabella trailed the pink-nailed toes of one foot on the floor, propelling the wicker-work seat around in a series of meaningless little oscillating circles.

“Charles always told me everything,” she said weakly and vacantly.

3

Simon Templar made an early start next morning. There was some exploring he wanted to do in the neighbourhood of the Candecour’s incineration now that the publicity had died down and he could hope to find the area reasonably clear of ghoulish or inquisitive sightseers.

The weather was calmer than it had been on that memorable day when he had last set out in the Privateer on the course he now set. He had an almost dead-flat sea.

Soon the sweeping bight of Christchurch Bay was lying to his starboard exactly as when Tatenor’s boat had veered off towards the shore.

This morning the Saint had deliberately not shaved and had left his dark hair tousled after an early-morning dip in the sea. An old tweed flat cap he had unearthed in a local junk-shop made an odd but not impossible match with the muddy dungarees and moth-eaten sweater he had conjured from elsewhere: which was exactly the appearance of amiable eccentricity which he needed for the beach-combing project he had set himself.

It was near high water when he reached the shore at Hengistbury Head. He beached the Privateer near the quiet western end and began his search, not confining himself to the beach itself but also poking and rooting among the dunes which backed on to it. Occasionally he stuffed something into his battered canvas hold-all to keep up appearances for the odd few holidaymakers who watched him curiously from time to time. In this way he gradually acquired a collection of soggy driftwood, bits of glass, cigarette packets and other useless detritus for later quiet dumping.

He had been wise in his decision to begin at the western end of the beach, about half a mile along from the site of the explosion. Even then, it took him a good six and a half hours of searching — in a pattern of coverage that was a lot more systematic than it might have appeared — before he found what he was looking for.

A corner of glass which lay exposed and glinting in the sun brought him to the spot near a grassy dune; and it only took him a minute or so to dig all the equipment out, after checking that he was unobserved.

There was a swim-mask, flippers, weighted belt and compact backpack-and-breathing-pipe assembly.

In short, a complete scuba outfit.

Simon had uncovered it only to satisfy himself that it was indeed what he thought it was, and was still shiny enough to have been put there quite recently. It was. He buried it again and proceeded to the second stage of his expedition.

For this his eccentric garb might not be ideal, but he thought it would do. He walked briskly along the foreshore until he came to the narrow stretch of water — a mere fifty yards or so across — which forms the entrance to Christchurch Harbour and divides Hengistbury’s curled fingertip from the main coastline at Mudeford, a pleasant seaside village.

As he had done his swimming for the day, he hailed an old local salt who was reclining in a rowing-boat on the other side. A cool breeze had sprung up during the day.

“Can you take me across?” he called out amiably.

In due course an eye was opened and a pair of lips moved. But the man’s reply was a jumbled confusion of palatals lost on the wind.

Then the boatman held up both fists and opened his ten fingers to indicate his price.

“Ten shillings!” the Saint muttered under his breath. “Dick Turpin at least wore a mask.” But he signalled his agreement and the man inched his way across the water with rhythmically plodding oars.

“D’you do this every day?” Simon asked conversationally, when the plodding had been resumed in the opposite direction with himself aboard. “Row people back and forth, I mean.”

The man spat out a well-masticated wad of tobacco into the sea. He had a leathery red face; his blue eyes were watery and deeply recessed behind inscrutable walls of eyebrow and eyelid.

“Aas roik. Meamoi maik,” he said gruffly.

“Ah,” said the Saint, without the foggiest notion of what the man had said, but gathering that the general sense of the answer as affirmative. “You must see a lot of people, then — different people.” This, Simon was uncomfortably aware, was not destined to be remembered among his more sparkling pieces of dialogue. “I suppose that might help to keep it from getting too boring.”

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.

Arabella toyed with the menu impatiently. She was about to call out when the fat man beat her to it.

“Monsieur!”

The voice was a rich bass, full of authority. He rapped imperiously on the table, snapped his fingers and assumed an expression of fierce chivalry, as the startled waiter came towards him.

“The young lady is waiting to be served,” he told him in French. “S’il vous plait!”

“Mais certainement.” The waiter turned to Arabella. “I am sorry you have been kept waiting.”

“De rien,” Arabella said after nodding her thanks to the fat man. And she continued in rather hesitant French. “I should like to have, first, some hors d’oeuvres, and afterwards the filet mignon, medium, with a green salad.”

The fat man watched with his head cocked slightly on one side.

“Permit me to advise you, Madame,” he put in, in English. “I could not avoid to overhear your order. May I suggest, if you are considering a wine, the Chateau Durfort-Vivens? It is a fine Bordeaux wine, most reasonably priced.” The fat man hesitated. “Indeed, if you will permit a further liberty, I too will be feasting on le filet mignon de Charolais and I will be honoured if you will join me at the table and share with me a bottle of the Chateau Durfort-Vivens.”

“Well, I don’t know...” Arabella looked appraisingly at the fat man. He was what Mrs Cloonan would undoubtedly have called “rather forward”, but he might well make an interesting dinner companion. She wavered. The baggy-featured waiter glanced from one to the other.

Arabella made up her mind.

“Why, yes, I should like that. Thank you.”

The fat man beamed. After he had dispatched the waiter with a barrage of instructions, Arabella sat down at his table.

“Well, well,” he said, as he un-Gallically tucked one corner of a napkin behind his cravat — making himself look like a vast nursery Tweedledum — “a remarkable coincidence, is it not, Madame Tatenor?”

Arabella stared at him startled.

“I beg your pardon. Do I know you?”

The fat Frenchman spread his hands apologetically.

“In truth, it is I who should beg yours. Perhaps I should have pretended not to recognise you, rather than place myself in the necessity for reminding you of what must be most distressing. Perhaps you did not notice? Quite understandable in the circumstances. You see, I was in the courtroom during the inquest on your unfortunate husband. It was a terrible tragedy, but terrible. And you are a widow so young.” He shrugged to convey the hopelessness of trying to put these things into words. “You have my deepest sympathies.”

“Thank you. Now that you mention it, I think I do recall seeing you in court.”

The fat man allowed himself a restrained smile, and twirled his moustache with magnificent resignation.

“Madame — I am difficult to overlook altogether.” He patted his gross midriff affectionately. “A consequence, I am afraid, of gastronomic excess. A lifelong habit which I am now too old, fortunately, to consider breaking... But what am I thinking of? I am shamefully forgetting the manners. I must introduce myself. I am Jacques Descartes. I was making on the island some negotiations in a matter of bulls and cows. Now I am returning to my home in the south, I drive with my assistant until we tire, then we stop at this delightful hotel and — suddenly, there in the restaurant, quelle surprise! Whom do I see but the beautiful — you permit me, Madame? — the beautiful Madame Tatenor. It is a little world, is it not? Such a little world!”

“It certainly is,” Arabella agreed. And then for conversation’s sake she added: “Whereabouts in the south is your home? I suppose you’re some kind of — farmer?”

Descartes winced at the word.

“Not a farmer, Madame. No, no! I am an entrepreneur of the bullfighting in France. I am a breeder and trainer of the picador horses, also a breeder of bulls. You know, perhaps, that not only the Spanish have their bulls and picadors. I have my haras in the village of St Martin-du-Marais, in the Camargue. There I live, and there I own also an hotel. It is true I have also several local farms under my wings, but that is purely a business operation. My horses and bulls, they are my real love. My associates and I are proud, most proud, of our successes.”

“And — if I may ask without seeming too nosey — was your trip to England, to the island, a success, would you say?”

Descartes hesitated.

“Let me put it in this way. I have a... a lead to follow up, which could prove to be most rewarding. Most rewarding. Oh yes, I think you can say that our trip was well worth while.”

“But what happened to the assistant you mentioned?” Arabella enquired. “Isn’t he hungry?”

Descartes smiled broadly, exhibiting some expensive gold dental work.

“Enrico is indisposed. He is not at all a good traveller when a passenger, I am afraid. So he sleeps now. And it is good. Tomorrow he will drive, and when driving he will not feel sick. It is so with some people.”

“How about you? Will you feel queasy when he’s driving?”

“Definitely not. My digestive system has become hardened during all the years of abuse — glorious abuse!” Descartes leaned forward, as far as his midriff would allow, with a confiding and avuncular manner. “I confess, Madame Tatenor, I am an incorrigible gourmand. Food is for me a grand passion, perhaps the grand passion I failed to find with a woman. But life is so, n’est-ce-pas? We find our compensations. For example, I detect, do I not, the arrival of our hors d’oeuvres!”

They continued to chat amiably over the food, and Arabella found that time passed pleasantly enough in Descartes’ ebullient company.

“You’re something of a philosopher yourself, aren’t you?” she observed an hour and a half later, over the cognac. “Like your famous namesake.”

He beamed.

“You are right. I too, in my way, am a thinker. Perhaps not quite in the class of the great Rene Descartes... but then, there is one enterprise of logical thinking in which even he might not be the match of me. I say so, Madame, with all modesty. That enterprise is — do you by chance play the game of backgammon?”

“Backgammon?” Arabella cast back through her memory. “Why yes, I do believe I played that a few times in my college days. What’s it called in French?”

“It is called le tric-trac. And I—” Descartes puffed out his chest proudly, but the expansion of his midriff was manifestly greater and Arabella’s composure teetered on the brink for a difficult moment “—in certain circles I am known as Jacques du tric-trac. I am, with modesty, probably the finest backgammon player in all France.”

Arabella raised a polite but ironic eyebrow.

“Only in France?”

“Possibly even in the entire world. Although there is Schneider, and I suppose there is Guggisheimer.”

“Guggisheimer?”

“An American player of some reputation. Doubtless he has a certain talent.” Descartes shrugged in a manner dismissive of Guggisheimer. “One day I shall test this talent of his for myself.”

Arabella cupped her hands under the brandy glass and swirled the amber liquid around appreciatively.

“Come to think of it, Charles — my husband — once told me he used to play backgammon a lot. I mean competitively.”

“Oh yes, your husband was a player...?” The question mark was applied so lightly, almost as an afterthought, that Arabella looked sharply at Descartes.

“You didn’t — you didn’t know my husband?”

Descartes hesitated for a moment, then shook his head. “An Englishman called Charles Tatenor? No, Madame, I never knew him. But tell me about him, if it is not too painful. What kind of a man was he?”

“Charles?” Arabella mused for a while. “Oh, I guess he was as English as they come. The quintessential uppercrust sporting Englishman. Plummy accent, vague profession; something or other in property that paid the bills and let him indulge his taste for expensive sports, like powerboat racing, horses, gambling, and women. In short, all the vices of the upper set.”

Descartes smiled another smile in which peripheral dental gold gleamed under the canopy of the bandit moustache.

“You are very frank and direct, Madame. I enjoy the conversation to be so. But the typical Englishman — he has not only the vices, I trust? Or sometimes the vices are also the virtues or the attractions, is it not so?”

“That’s true. But there was one thing about Charles that was very untypical of the English. He was exceptionally good at languages. You know how the English have this reputation, like the Americans, they don’t usually bother much with foreign languages, and when they do, well, the accent’s atrocious. But Charles spoke French and German fantastically well. To my ear, perfectly. Though he was strangely modest about it, almost secretive actually. But just occasionally the need would arise, and I was always amazed at his fluency. There’s no doubt he was a very clever man.”

Descartes, who had been listening attentively, nodded vigorously.

“Certainly, Mr Tatenor was extremely clever — from what you say, Madame... But allow me to be direct in revealing my curiosity. May I ask what brings you to France, so to speak pell mell upon your husband’s most regrettable death?”

Arabella was at her ease with the fat Frenchman by this juncture and saw nothing untoward in the question. Yet some instinct, which was more than simple reticence over her financial status, but which she couldn’t have analysed at the time, made her keep back a part of the story.

“I’m going to Marseilles to admire a yacht,” she told him.

Descartes looked puzzled.

“A yacht?”

“Charles had had this yacht for years, apparently, but he never said a word about it to me. And now she’s mine. So I’m going down there to look her over for myself.”

Descartes nodded slowly and thoughtfully, and the gold dental work flashed briefly again.

“That is completely understandable,” he said. “In your place, I too would speed at once in the direction of such a property. It is exciting, I am sure, to find oneself suddenly the owner of a substantial possession which one has never yet seen.”

“Exactly.”

“Then you are driving on to Marseille tomorrow?” It was more a statement than a question. “But what a fortunate coincidence!” he added softly. “My village is directly on your route, only an hour or so before Marseille. I will insist, Madame, that you will accept the hospitality of my hotel for tomorrow night.”