Salvage for the Saint (2 page)

“Reputation phooey!” She made a face. “I don’t give a fig for that sort of notion.”

Her convention-defying stance struck a chord, and Simon grinned.

“The hell with desk clerks,” he agreed. “Anyway, you’re here, having made quite a preliminary investment in reconnaissance.”

He waited patiently. She drank deeply, taking her time.

“Yes. You have a reputation—a particular reputation—for involving yourself in all sorts of troubles. Sometimes other people’s troubles.”

He waited while she downed most of the remaining half of her drink. Then she continued, still giving an impression of some reluctance to come to the point.

“And I know that when you do get involved in something it’s usually because you’ve sniffed out some nasty bit of business for yourself—or some specimen of human vermin you just can’t resist smacking on the snout. But occasionally when you weigh into the affray, it’s because you’ve been asked.”

Simon Templar took a long pull from his own drink—he had some catching up to do—and regarded her soberly. (They were weakish drinks.) He studied her relaxed posture, her calm face, her big bright untroubled eyes.

“And you’re asking?” he queried.

“Certainly,” she said. “After all, I understand you specialise in damsels in distress.”

-2-

The Saint smiled inwardly as well as outwardly. It looked as if he had one very out-of-the-ordinary lady here, and he was glad he had the opportunity to get to know her better.

“Of course I do,” he answered. “Doesn’t every self-respecting redblooded knight errant? But…” The upward displacement of one dark eyebrow was minute, but sufficient to suggest a polite skepticism that was barely distinguishable from complete open-mindedness. “But … are you in distress?”

She wrung her hands helplessly and batted her eyelashes at him nineteen to the dozen.

“Is that better?”

They both laughed; and then she said seriously:

“Simon, I may not be as demonstratively in distress as some of your classic damsels. Technically you might even say I’m not in distress at all. Certainly I don’t think I’m in any kind of personal danger.” Here she looked wistful, almost as if she would have rather enjoyed being in personal danger. “All of which may seem to disqualify me as a true dyed-in-the-wool d in d. And all of which is part of the reason why it’s taken me four days to make up my mind to come and see you.”

“And the rest of the reason?”

“The first part of the rest of the reason is that I’m an independent-type girl and I don’t like asking for help. And the rest of the reason is—well, call it natural skepticism.”

“You mean when it comes to the providential arrival of a rescuing knight on a white charger that looks more like a red powerboat?”

She gave a thumbs-up sign.

“You got it in one. Where rescuing knights are concerned, I’m a total unbeliever. Or was. I’d heard and read all about the famous Saint, of course. But frankly I thought you were just too good to be true.”

She paused, draining non-existent dregs from her glass.

“But anyhow,” she continued, “I hesitated to bother you at a time when you’re— well—” She spread her hands in a vague gesture that seemed to indicate satisfactorily the island and the circumstances of his being there.

“On vacation?” he supplied.

“Something of the sort, I guess. Only I didn’t think you daredevil freelance buccaneer types went in for fixed periods of work and leisure as such.”

“We don’t,” he agreed. “Or at any rate this one doesn’t. For me the work’s a kind of vacation in itself most of the time, so it doesn’t break my heart when an earmarked vacation turns into work, as it looks like doing now.”

He was trying gently to coax her to get to the point, but he knew enough about her already to be sure that she would continue to take her time. It came, he suspected, from a kind of careful-stepping delicacy in her character; and that was something he could respect, even if it meant his bedtime was thereby delayed a little further.

He said nothing for a few moments while he repeated his legerdemain with the glasses; and then he regarded her silently for a few moments more, with a level blue gaze in which there was a shifting light she had seen before, a light that was elusively mocking and quixotic and challenging all at the same time.

He said: “So you took a good gander at me and decided that the stainless purity of my character spoke for itself—eventually?”

“I decided,” she answered slowly and deliberately, “that against all probability, everything I’d ever heard and read about you was true—or at least, all the good things— and that there’s no comparative stranger I’d be readier to trust.”

The Saint blinked.

“That was quite a speech,” he said. “Thanks. I’m flattered, I really am … Of course, if you got to know me better, disillusion would soon set in. You’d find I have to cut my toenails and wash my socks just like ordinary mortals. On occasions I burp, and I have even been—”

“Oh, give me every time a man who really knows how to burp!” she purred, clapping her hands in beautifully judged over-enthusiasm.

And she laughed again with the same rich encompassing warmth as before, a warmth that was peculiarly feminine and flattering in itself. It somehow blended intimacy and reserve and mystery and promise; and it made the Saint study her some more.

He put her age somewhere between twenty-five and thirty. Those were, from a male point of view, the best years for certain types of women, and in Simon Templar’s connoisseur opinion she was certainly one such type. She was the type whose features in rather earlier youth might well have seemed a little underformed, a shade on the doughy side. But as the years swung by and bone structure began to assert itself, as the faces of her contemporaries took on an edge of hardness hers would simply have lost its excess softness to emerge as the example of perfectly sculptured beauty it had now become.

Yes, a woman like that came into her own between twenty-five and thirty. Especially if she’d managed to keep a healthy skin, unraddled by the clogging attentions of the multitudinous offerings of chemico-cosmetic quackery on whose efficacy the greater part of credulous womankind have been induced to pin such a pathetic faith.

Arabella Tatenor had certainly managed the miracle of dermal preservation, though whether she’d done so by shunning face goo or in spite of using the stuff Simon couldn’t tell. Her skin was smooth and clear with a healthy pink glow. She had the eyes to go with it, too, translucent blue like the Saint’s own; and above them was the spun copper sweep of her hair. He wondered about her colouring; maybe there was a strong Irish, or at any rate western fringe Celtic, contingent somewhere in her pedigree. But it must have been some way back because there was no trace of Irish in her speech. He’d known at once that she was American, or at least predominantly American. It wasn’t so much from any strongly marked accent as from her choice of words. She’d said “that sort of notion”, which had a transatlantic ring, and she’d referred to the “desk clerk” where a speaker of pure British English would probably have said “receptionist”, and of course she’d said “vacation” rather than “holiday”. The Saint was sensitive to such minor differences of idiom even though his own international background meant that he had himself long since adopted a style of speech which freely mixed the usages of Britain and the US. He noticed, for instance, that she pronounced “asked” in the American way, and “clerk” to rhyme with “lurk.”

Yet at the same time there was a good deal of English English in her pronunciation. It had hardly any of the strident nasalisation of much American speech. Boston was the first likely area that came to mind, but to the Saint’s ear she sounded still more English than that.

“Fitzpatrick was my name before I married,” she remarked, latching on to his thought with near-clairvoyant accuracy. “A solid New England family and filthy rich. When I was fourteen my parents sent me over here to raise the tone of Cheltenham Ladies’ College. And then on to Oxford.”

“Where you took a brilliant double first in Byzantine history and molecular physics while ruining the academic dedication of countless slavering male students,” hazarded the Saint.

“Where I got bored after two terms of Eng. Lit,” she corrected, “and took off into the wild blue yonder.”

“Much to Daddy’s disgust, no doubt.”

“Much.”

“And then?”

“I travelled the world. Bumming around, mostly, I guess you might call it. Having a ball. Until the money ran out. I have some expensive tastes, and after Oxford—well, the milk of parental generosity just kind of dried up.”

He grinned as he made another open appraisal of her expensively tailored figure.

“I imagine your style in bumming around might be comparable to Gloria Vanderbilt.”

She fielded the grin and returned it to the accompaniment of a reproachfully levelled forefinger and the same mischievous twinkle in her eyes as he had seen there before.

“Don’t you make a mistake,” she warned, “of thinking you have me all figured out and labelled and docketed. Because let me assure you, you haven’t, Mister Saint, not by a long chalk.”

The Saint erected a momentary barricade of arms and elbows in front of his head in mock terror at her stern finger-wagging warning.

“OK,” he said penitently. “Maybe I’ll buy that. And I’ll consider myself roundly rebuked. After all, you did take four days over me. I suppose I ought to wait at least as long before making up my mind about you … But there’s one confident guess I’ll risk.”

“And what’s that?”

“That the problem that’s prompted you to call on me—after due examination of my credentials—isn’t entirely unconnected with a certain bullet-bonced Gallic leech—”

“—that’s attached itself to my connubial other half,” she cut in, smoothly finishing the sentence in almost exactly the words the Saint would have used.

He laughed, and behind the laughter was a passing inward delight which he couldn’t have expressed, though it had to do with two people’s thoughts being oddly tuneable to the same pitch, and with the rarity of that in the real world.

“You speak my kinda language, blue-eyes,” he Bogarted. “We must be using the same scriptwriter.”

“Well, he’s good and he’s cheap, isn’t he?” she Bacalled huskily. “And why should you have all the best lines? … But coming back to the Gallic leech”—she had reverted to the blended tones of Oxford and New England—“of course, you could hardly have missed him. You’ve probably heard his name too. Fournier. Maurice Fournier. Mean anything to you?”

“The name—no. But that phizog. That does ring some sort of bell.”

He had already racked his brain repeatedly in a vain struggle to recall where he had seen that unprepossessing face before. Almost the first out-of-key phenomenon to catch his attention among the varied manifestations of boating and boat-watching humanity in and around Cowes that week had been the short thick-set shaven-headed man who seemed to have no higher or more engrossing purpose in life than that of keeping himself glued limpet-like to a point approximately three inches from the elbow of Charles Tatenor.

Tatenor himself lived on the island. Squarely built, greying, fiftyish, he was a sophisticate of British sporting circles, and the faster and more expensive the sport the better he liked it. Powerboat racing fitted very well; Tatenor’s was one of the leading names around the world, and even if Simon Templar had his own ideas about who was going to win the two-hundred-mile race along the coast to Penzance, it was certain that Tatenor was the favourite in most people’s books.

Which fact made it all the more surprising to everybody else that he had suddenly decided to ditch his experienced navigator Taffy Hughes in favour of this newcomer who not only seemed to have difficulty telling the sharp end from the blunt end of a boat but gave every appearance of turning pale green as soon as he came within spitting distance of the ocean—incidentally an appropriate expression, as Fournier spat frequently.

Hughes—Simon had commiserated with him over a drink—was as mystified as anyone. Tatenor had simply told him that Fournier was an old friend from way back, and that for old times’ sake he had agreed to his friend’s joining him in the race. But in explaining this to Hughes, Tatenor had worn a face of acetic sourness that seemed at variance, in Hughes’s alcoholically emphasised opinion, with the professed friendly spirit behind the gesture. And from his own observation the Saint had to agree that Tatenor’s way of eyeing his long-lost chum was anything but chummy.

But where Tatenor went Fournier went. When Tatenor went aboard his boat, though it might only be to work on the engines, Fournier went along. When Tatenor drank in the Royal Yachtsmen’s Club—usually without Arabella in attendance—Fournier drank too. And when Tatenor went home to his extravagant hillside home above Egypt Point, just outside the town, that dogged French shadow went with him. It was as if the two men were joined by an invisible chain.

A part of the Saint’s mind was working again at the puzzle of trying to match the Frenchman’s fishy features against something obscurely out of focus in his memory; and he wondered if some circumstantial detail might give him the clue he needed.

“Just how long has Fournier been on the scene?” he asked Arabella.

“Six days,” she told him. “He just turned up at the house one night. Our place is just along the road from here. Well, when this Fournier thing showed up that evening”— she wrinkled her nose in distaste—“Charles was obviously more than a tiny bit flabbergasted, and none too delighted either. It was over twelve years since they’d met. Anyway, he stayed to dinner—Mrs Cloonan’s a miracle-worker, she can always cope with a guest at the drop of a hat—and next morning there he was again at breakfast. That’s when Charles told me Fournier’d be staying till after the race, and then the two of them’d be going off on business together for a few days. And ever since, Fournier’s hardly let Charles out of his sight. Except today.”

“What happened today?”

“Charles gave him the slip for a few hours, after the scrutineers had finished their main stint this afternoon. Charles took the boat out on his own, and he didn’t come back till the evening.”