Salvage for the Saint (6 page)

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 attache 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 beachcombing 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.”