Salvage for the Saint (9 page)

And then, eleven years later, one of those accomplices—Tranchier, calling himself Fournier—had caught up with him. And it took little imagination to guess that he had come for his—or their collective—share of the loot.

And on the evidence the Saint had discovered, it looked as if he might have got what he had come for. And yet—why were the others here? Had Tranchier now run out on them? One thing was certain: if the loot was still in the form of gold bars, Tranchier was not carrying it with him.

Simon tried to put himself in Schwarzkopf’s place after the robbery. He would almost certainly have aimed to keep the gold and convert it into cash gradually, rather than raise suspicions by trying to sell off that quantity all at once. He would have reckoned to “spend” the gold over a period of years. And he would have needed a safe place to stash it away, gold being far too heavy to lug about. So, Schwarzkopf would most likely have hidden the gold somewhere and returned at intervals to draw from his private “bank”. The odds were, then, that Tranchier, before he had killed Schwarzkopf, had extracted from him the necessary information and means of access to the remaining gold.

But again Simon came back to the other two he had seen. What did they want? Not Tranchier, presumably. They had no reason not to accept his death as fact—as far as the Saint knew. Therefore they must be there to continue what, as far as their knowledge could be presumed to go, Tranchier had failed to accomplish …

And then it came to Simon with the blinding clarity of the newly obvious. There was only one person left from whom they might expect to discover where that gold was.

That person was his widow.

Arabella.

Already uneasy, the Saint was climbing into the silver Aston Martin almost before he drew that final inference.

He drove straight to Arabella’s house.

At the back of his mind ever since the court hearing had been that nagging discomfort he had still not managed to explain to himself, the first seeds of which had been sown when he had seen the two men he now knew as Descartes and Bernadotti. As he now saw, his reaction to them had amounted to an instinctive awareness that their interest in Tatenor’s death was somehow more than casual. Now, Simon cursed himself for not listening much earlier, and with closer attention, to that inner voice of disquiet; and it was with a definite foreboding of trouble ahead that he drove up the crunching gravel approach to the house.

Mrs Cloonan was pottering about in the front garden.

“Why, bless me, sir, if you haven’t missed her by a day,” she told him. “She’s gone to France. The south of France. Marseilles.” She pronounced it “Mah-sales”.

Simon was not altogether surprised to find her gone. Arabella was an independent-minded woman and there was no reason she shouldn’t shoot off to France if the fancy took her. But he was curious, nevertheless, about the rather abrupt manner of her departure—especially as they had had at least a half-arrangement to meet within a day or two.

“The South of France,” he repeated, with raised eyebrows. “Rather a spur-of-the-moment young widow, isn’t she? Did she take her black bikini?”

Mrs Cloonan did her best to look shocked.

“Oh, sir! I do declare, I never heard such a thing!” She clucked reprovingly, but with a twinkle in her eye. “But truth be told, well …” She looked around conspiratorially, satisfied herself that the nearby bushes contained no obvious eavesdroppers and continued almost in a whisper: “…what with Mr Tatenor passing away as he did, and all—I gather she had to go down to try and sell her yacht, sir.”

“Her yacht,” murmured the Saint. “Poor thing.”

“Yes, sir. But she does seem in better spirits. She phoned me from France last night. She was staying in a nice little hotel, she said, near Orleans. Playing backgammon, she said—with some great blimp of a Frenchman.”

For an instant the Saint’s heart stopped; and then a ghostly millipede with icicles for feet scuttled up his spine. It was thanks only to an automatic self-control, bred in him over long years of practice, that neither of these two events produced more than the merest ripple on the outer surface of his casual demeanour.

“A fat Frenchman who likes to play backgammon? Well, he sounds harmless enough to the ladies, as Frenchmen go,” he quipped.

Mrs Cloonan beamed.

“Exactly what I thought myself, sir. And she said he’d been most civil, and entertaining, and helpful. Oh, and tonight, she’s going to be staying at his hotel, in the South … Why, is something wrong, Mr Templar?”

Even the Saint’s aforementioned self-control must have let him down fractionally when he heard that final piece of news. He hastily assured Mrs Cloonan that there was nothing to worry about, and then took his leave of her.

He had been, he knew, careless. He could have thought of at least a dozen past occasions in his life when a like degree of carelessness would have cost him that life. And his life was a possession he did not regard lightly.

“Simon Templar, old son,” he told himself sternly as he drove back to the hotel, “you’re getting careless.”

He certainly couldn’t excuse himself for failing to foresee at least the possibility of developments involving Arabella, nor for playing his cards so close to the chest and giving her the impression that he regarded the whole affair as closed.

There was only one practical course of action open to him now; and that was to pack a few things of his own and set off after her.

He was a whole day behind, but the likelihood was that Arabella would be safe at least until she checked into Descartes’ hotel in the south that evening. That “come into my parlour” establishment had to be the Saint’s immediate and direct destination.

Ten minutes on the telephone to travel agents was enough to establish that there was no available combination of air and surface transport that would get him to the village of St Martin-du-Marais in under eighteen hours. He knew he should be able to do it by car and ferry in several hours less than that.

Minutes later he was skimming across the water in the Privateer towards Vic Cullen’s boatyard at Bursledon, on Southampton Water, where he had left the Hirondel; and within another half hour he was weaving the big red-and-cream car skillfully and at a highly illegal speed along the south coast road towards Newhaven. It was almost eleven, and the ferry was due to leave at one. Drivers had to be at the quay half an hour beforehand. Simon reckoned that he might still get on if he arrived as late as 12.45, but that still gave him only an hour and three quarters to travel those seventy-five miles, in far from open-road conditions.

First the outskirts of Portsmouth loomed up, with an infuriating succession of dawdling drivers in wood-trimmed Morris Minors; then Havant and Chichester, then Worthing and Brighton. He drove with tremendous verve and skill, with the needle nudging up beyond sixty on every brief occasion when a burst of speed was possible. But there was a limit to what even the Saint and the Hirondel together could do in the thick and almost constant traffic, and he arrived at the Newhaven quay at three minutes to one, just as the ferry, its loading completed, was preparing to leave.

There was nothing he could do but sit and watch helplessly as it slowly backed out of its berth, announcing its departure with a single prolonged trump of what sounded, in the circumstances, very much like derision.

-2-

After another rapid investigation of options, the Saint had to conclude that there was nothing else for it but to wait there for the next boat—four hours later.

It was after 9 o’clock that night when he finally drove the Hirondel off the boat at Dieppe and started on the long haul south. Not for the first time, he was glad that he still had the Hirondel to rely on, after the years of service it had given him. Now, with long distances to cover at speed on fairly open and deserted roads, the car would come into its own with a vengeance. The great flamboyant vehicle thrived on a challenge, and it was for the sake of times like these, remembered and anticipated, that Simon Templar had kept it, year after year, despite the blandishments and the sometimes real temptations offered by newer and discreeter vehicles.

There never had been a car quite like the Hirondel, and there never would be again. That magnificent monster, that opulent and now splendidly dated conveyance that drew every eye back for a second ogle—and a third—went, if possible, even better than its looks promised. From the low-throated throb of its eight cylinders to the deep muted rasp of its near-racing exhaust, it promised, and delivered, the exhilaration of sheer power. Unstoppably, tirelessly, it carved its way through the air, its huge-tyred wheels thrusting mile after mile of road and countryside behind it. The Saint met little traffic on that five-hundred-and-fifty-mile drive south, and he covered the distance in an astonishing eleven hours, including a couple of essential stops. For most of the distance the Hirondel’s powerful headlamps sliced a bright wedge through the Gallic dark; for the last hundred miles or so the sky lightened through a grey-and-pink dawn.

It was just about eight o’clock when he pulled up in the Camargue village of St Martin-du-Marais. The hotel was easy enough to find, being slap in the middle of what was anyway a small village. It was a compact hotel and had doubtless once been unimposing; now, its exterior had some of the incongruous flamboyance of its owner himself, an effect achieved mostly by the use of large, elaborately curlicued, multicolored lettering for the name: Hotel Descartes.

Simon opened the front door and went in. The cramped lobby smelt of the morning’s coffee and croissants, and a hint of last night’s bourguignonne still hung on the air, along with the fumes from a cigarette the concierge was smoking.

The concierge, a small weedy cynical-looking man in rolled-up shirtsleeves, looked as though he had been on duty all night and had stayed awake some of the time. When Simon opened the door from the street, he was standing by the reception counter scanning the morning paper. A cleaning cloth and water bucket were by his feet.

“I’m looking for Madame Tatenor,” Simon said in French.

The concierge looked up.

“Madame Tatenor?” he said. “She is departed. Perhaps one hour since.”

Simon started counting to ten, and got as far as five.

“Any idea where she’s heading?”

The weedy concierge shook his head, tapped an inch off his Gauloise, and shrugged.

“Marseille—maybe. I do not know.”

“What about the proprietor, Monsieur Descartes?” Simon persisted. “I believe she is a friend of his—a guest. Would he perhaps know where—”

“M Descartes is not here,” the man cut in. “I cannot help you any further.” His manner had changed from the merely offhand to the definitely truculent. “And now, I have work to do, Monsieur.”

He stubbed out the remains of the Gauloise, picked up the bucket and cleaning cloth, and shuffled off through one of the doorways leading from the lobby. Simon turned to go, his mouth set in a grim line. But then unexpectedly a hoarse voice, like a stage whisper, reached him.

“Monsieur!”

He turned in the direction of the sound. It came from somewhere in the short main corridor from the lobby, from a doorway that was now being held fractionally ajar.

The Saint covered the distance to the doorway in two noiseless seconds. The door was opened wider, and he saw a young woman who might well, in normal circumstances, have been pretty. But it appeared that circumstances for her had recently been far from normal, and she was a far from pretty sight. Her face was a mass of welts and bruises; both her eyes were blackened, and her lips were cut and swollen. She was wearing a nightdress which, though by no means in the negligee class, exposed enough of her neck and shoulders to reveal bruising there too. She spoke with difficulty.

“You … you look for the English woman?”

Simon nodded.

“Madame Tatenor, yes. She is a friend of mine.” Simon kept his own voice to a whisper and motioned his wish to join her inside the room.

She let him in and closed the door quietly behind them.

“I am Genevieve. Chambermaid in the hotel. I think, Monsieur,” she croaked painfully, “you will not find her on the road to Marseille.”

Simon spent approximately the next two and a half seconds digesting the information.

“Is she still here?” he asked.

Genevieve shook her head.

“No, Monsieur … she left perhaps half an hour ago.”

“Alone?”

Genevieve nodded.

“In her own car?”

“Yes … but they have done something to her car. This morning, before it was fully light. I heard a sound, and from the window I saw him, the lizard one, Bernadotti.” She made a mime of spitting in disgust, and Simon’s lips came together in a hard line.

“The lizard one—Bernadotti. Did he do this to you?”

She nodded.

“I found him last night, searching Madame Tatenor’s room, while she was having dinner.”

The Saint said to himself, with feeling: “That’s one I owe you for her, Enrico old chum.” For the moment he preferred not to speculate how many he might owe Enrico for Arabella by the time he caught up with her.

“Where do you think they’ll have taken her?” he asked tersely.

Genevieve rummaged in a drawer.

“I will draw a plan for you so that you can look for her where you are most likely to find her,” she said in that painful whispering croak. “At the haras of Monsieur Descartes.” She paused and looked at Simon appraisingly. “I think you are a good man. Please remember, worse will happen to me if it is know that I assisted you against them.”

“I understand,” Simon told her. “I shall say nothing.”

“They are very bad men.” She gave a shudder. “And no one in the village would help you to find the way quickly if they thought you were no friend of these men. They have fear of these three. We all have fear of them … the sadique, the deaf one with the knife always, and that great fat cochon. For two years or more they have lived here. They loan money to the farmers, rent to us the equipment. Now we do not exist except as they wish.”

She had found a pencil and a piece of paper which she spread on the table with trembling fingers.