Лесли Чартерис - The Saint and the Templar Treasure

The professor stopped his pacing. He stood glaring venomously at the Saint and shaking with anger.

“You were meddling in matters that did not concern you, and you are meddling again now.” Norbert’s voice rose to a shriek. “Get out! Go away. Leave me to my work. Leave me in peace!”

The Saint looked steadily into a pair of eyes that seemed to glow with a secret fire, and for the first time he wondered whether Professor Louis Norbert was completely sane. He could think of little that might be gained by staying, and turned compliantly away. By the time he reached the door Norbert was back on his knees, frantically scrubbing at the marks on the floor.

The Saint strolled out into the fresh air of the garden and sat on the edge of the wall. Except for some interesting historical background he had learnt little. He was wondering what to do next when the decision was made for him.

A scream and a crash of falling masonry drifted up from the direction of the chai and outbuildings below the château, and he was on his feet and racing towards them before the echo had died.

He covered the first hundred metres in a fraction over eleven seconds and reached the entrance to the nearest storehouse at the same time as the men who had been unloading the truck outside.

In the centre of the flagstone floor was a jagged hole, and lying ten feet down, half buried beneath broken wood and shattered paving, was the spread-eagled body of Gaston Pichot.

As he looked down at the sprawled figure Simon experienced a disorienting isolation from the surrounding confusion. The excited shouts of the labourers and the thud of their heavy boots on the flagstones drifted into a remote background. He was totally aware of everything that happened yet was apart from it. He stood motionless, numbed by an eerie feeling of déjà vu, as if the events of the preceding seconds were no more than stills from a film he had seen before.

With cool detachment he searched for a reason and found it in the veiled warning that Gaston had delivered a little earlier. The old man’s words returned to jar him back to reality.

“Accidents happen.”

In the instant of his return to his usual alertness Simon realised three things. The first was that Gaston was not fatally injured, for he was already clambering to his knees. The second was that the workmen were turning to him as if for an explanation. And the third was a vibration he could feel beneath his feet.

“Back!”

The urgency in his voice made the others jump to obey even before they appreciated the danger. No sooner had they retreated from the edge than another section of the floor collapsed on the opposite side of the hole from where the Saint stood.

A string of oaths rose with the cloud of dust that followed the cave-in, and the Saint grinned with relief in the assurance that no one capable of such a voluble and coherent attack on the parentage and peculiarities of his would-be rescuers could yet be written off. He knelt down, carefully spreading his weight more evenly, and peered into the gloom below. Gaston was on his feet, brushing the dust and dirt from his clothes and hair with one hand as he massaged the small of his back with the other.

“Are you all right?”

Gaston looked up, clearly surprised to hear the Saint’s voice, and winced at the pain the sudden movement caused him.

“I think so, monsieur,” he replied hesitantly. “At least there are no bones broken.”

“What happened?”

“I was rolling a barrel across the floor when it just gave way. You had best be careful, the supports down here are all rotten. I cannot imagine how they have lasted so long.”

“That’s what they said to Methuselah,” Simon rejoined. “We’ll have you out in a minute. Stay in the centre in case any more of the floor collapses.”

He moved cautiously back from the edge and turned to speak crisply to the men nearest to him.

“You, get some rope and a ladder. You get a flashlight. You go to the château, tell anyone you find there what has happened, and bring back a first-aid box. The rest of you stay outside, we don’t want any more accidents.”

The workmen hurried to carry out his instructions. Simon perched himself on one of the barrels stacked by the door and waited for them to return.

Had it not been for Gaston’s prophetic warning, he would have found nothing very extraordinary in what had happened. He recalled his visit to the chapel the previous day, and Gas-ton’s accident merely confirmed what he had surmised then, that the hill beneath the château was likely to be a warren of cellars and tunnels dating back to the building of the original fortress. Like the rest of the house they would have been extended piecemeal as required with little concern as to how long they would have to last. In such circumstances, subsidences were bound to be occasional events. It would have been satisfying to have found a more sinister explanation for what had happened, but it was evident that Gaston had been alone in the storehouse and the odds against the accident having been engineered were too long to be taken seriously.

The sounds that reached him indicated that Gaston Pichot had no intention of keeping still until he was rescued, and Simon had just decided to find out what he was doing when the labourers began to return.

The Saint tied an end of the rope to one of the two powerful flashlights they had brought and then laid the ladder on the floor and slid it towards the hole. Treading as lightly as possible on the rungs, he carried the rope and the flashlights to the hole.

Gaston was on his hands and knees in the gloom and appeared to be sifting through the debris when the Saint found him with the beam of the second torch.

“I’m lowering a light so that you can see where to guide the ladder,” Simon told him as he began to pay out the rope.

Once he had a clear view of the bottom of the hole, Simon tipped the ladder over the edge, positioning it as near vertically as possible to lessen the strain on the floor. As soon as it was in place he shinned nimbly down with the other lamp.

“There is no need, I can manage,” said Gaston huffily, but Simon ignored him.

Now that he was sure that the overseer was not gravely hurt he was impatient to find out what lay below. Gaston held his light on the bottom of the ladder until the Saint reached it, and then raised the beam to illuminate the room they stood in.

The combined brilliance of their two lamps showed it in detail. It was about twenty feet square and nine feet high. The walls and what was left of the ceiling were made of trimly hewn stone blocks, while the floor consisted only of the smoothed rock of the hill. Jutting from three of the walls seat-high from the ground were boxed-in stone benches that reminded Simon of the tombs of monks he had seen in abbeys, although the general appearance suggested an ante-room rather than a burial chamber.

He took in the lay-out of the room with one sweeping glance until his gaze reached the far wall.

On a low intricately carved plinth stood one of the strangest statues he had ever seen.

It was a life-sized marble sculpture of a woman dressed in a flowing Grecian style costume. Pawing at her dress like lap dogs were a pair of baying wolves which she was affectionately stroking. The Saint had an involuntary shudder as he took in the head. There was no sign of the classical beauty he had half expected: Instead, the sculptor had fashioned not one face but three, each as hideous as the other. The mouths were fixed in tight-lipped snarls that copied the menace of the wolves, and the noses were hooked like scythes. The eyes held no expression at all. They were simply deep black voids. Framing the features was a wild mass of tangled hair that tumbled down the figure’s back and over her breasts like a nest of angry snakes. Between her feet stood a small iron-bound oak casket which seemed to contain a few tiny scraps of brittle yellow parchment.