Лесли Чартерис - The Saint and the Templar Treasure

“That is for the professor to occupy himself with,” he said gruffly.

As the Saint prepared to leave Gaston became suddenly serious.

“You are still staying at Ingare?”

“Mademoiselle Mimette insists, until my car is repaired, so I see no reason to leave.”

“Even after what happened to me yesterday?”

“That was the purest accident, wasn’t it? Nothing sinister about it. Why should that make me go?”

Gaston did not reply at once. Instead he looked searchingly at his visitor.

“Trust no one,” he cautioned at last. “Not even those you think of no account.”

“Precisely who do you have in mind?” Simon asked, but the old man was not to be drawn and merely thanked his guest for the visit and bade him a deferential au revoir.

On his way back to the château the Saint stopped at the tower. The scene was the same as it had been when the seance broke up. The table, the overturned chairs, the circle of cards, and the shattered wine-glass at the foot of the column had not been picked up or moved. He searched for several minutes before finding what he was looking for. The piece of thread was almost hidden in a crack between the flagstones. Simon extracted it with care and slipped it into an envelope in his pocket. He continued on his way to the château, leaving everything else exactly as it had been.

“I must stop reading detective stories,” he told himself.

It is said that before an earthquake you can hear the silence. The animals and birds depart, only the people remain unaware. The Saint, whose instinct for danger was as finely honed as any animal’s, watched the behaviour of his companions with a naturalist’s detachment during the following two days.

The events of the preceding forty-eight hours were treated with well-bred indifference, as if ignoring them would make them go away. In the same manner his presence became accepted, and he realised how Norbert had managed to turn a weekend visit into a six-week stay. Conventional references to the condition of his car were easily and deftly coped with.

Supplied with the morsels of information the Saint had gathered during his brief stay at Château Ingare, any ordinary private investigator would have exhausted himself trying to unravel the spaghetti of riddles that Providence had heaped on his plate, until he and everyone else around was suffering from acute indigestion. The Saint did not. In fact to any observer unfamiliar with his methods he appeared to do nothing at all.

After the excitement generated by Gaston Pichot’s accidental discovery of the underground chamber had subsided, life at the château returned to as near normal as its motley assortment of personalities would allow, and Simon slipped comfortably into the routine of the household. The time-honoured ritual of the harvest continued, and he followed the progress of the grapes from vine to press to fermenting vat with genuine interest. When not in the fields or watching the wine being made, he behaved exactly as any other guest would have done.

Philippe Florian had returned from Avignon and appointed himself to take charge of the Hecate crypt. His archaeological interest was negligible; but his keenness to facilitate Louis Nor-bert’s study of it was very great. Since every able-bodied worker on the domaine was fully occupied with the picking and processing of grapes, he took on the task of securing the safety of the rest of the ceiling himself, revealing unsuspected talents as a practical handy-man. With the professor fluttering around to fetch and carry and lend an unmuscular hand, he brought in planks and timber and did a very competent job of underpinning the floor above. The scraping of his saw and the hammering of wedges reverberated to the outside for hours at a time.

For his part, Simon was unobtrusive to the point of elusiveness. Jeanne Corday’s clothes and poses placed her in the centre of the spotlight he had previously occupied, and he was content to fade into the background and watch and wait.

After dinner on the fourth day following his arrival, all the others excused themselves early for one reason or another, and for the first time in a long while he found himself alone again with Mimette in the salon.

She wasted no time in taking advantage of the opportunity.

“You must have a lot to tell me.”

It was so close to sounding like an imperious challenge that he was amused to treat it with elaborate carelessness.

“Not really-why should I?”

A slight flush tinged the girl’s cheeks.

“You mean you’ve been doing nothing?”

“I can’t say I’ve been a great help with the récolte,” Simon granted. “And Philippe already has an enthusiastic assistant.”

“Which should have left you plenty of time to do something else useful.”

“What would you have proposed?” he teased her lazily. “Should I have brought in a steam shovel and started digging up your foundations until we found a treasure which may not even exist?”

“You know there is something wrong here, and I thought you were going to try to discover it.”

Suddenly she sounded very tired and lonely, and the Saint relented.

“Okay,” he said. “I’d like to show you something. Can we go back to the dining-room?”

Wonderingly, but without hesitation, she moved to the door.

The dining-room, meticulously cleared of all trace of dinner, looked stark and lifeless in the blaze that she switched on. Simon put a match to a single one of the candles in the massive silver candelabrum on the sideboard, and turned off the electricity.

“There, that’s a lot better,” he said. “More atmospheric and misteriose. Now, would you sneak into the nether regions and fetch us a large wine-glass. Empty.”

“But why?”

“I’m going to show you a party trick that I happened to remember.”

When she returned, he had laid out a rough circle of torn pieces of paper at one end of the table top, which he was lightly polishing with a silk handkerchief.

“Of course, Charles keeps this table waxed and shined like a flies’ skating rink,” he remarked, “which makes the trick much easier.” He placed the glass upside down in the center of the paper circle and tested its mobility with a fingertip. “Now, you sit down opposite me—”

“What is this-another séance?”

“With a difference. But we might as well get in the mood.”

As she reluctantly took the chair across from him, he went on:

“I’ve been making use of your library, swotting up on the history of your noble house.”

“And?”

“Your ancestors — and maybe mine — seem to have been a pretty barbaric crowd even for those days. It seems that one of the first Florians, who had rashly promised some characters that they would not be hurt, kept them in the dungeons beneath this very room and simply starved them to death. But every day he had a sumptuous meal prepared and placed outside their cells — just out of reach. ‘They must not be allowed to believe,’ he said, ‘that I am starving them to save money.’ ”

Mimette grimaced. “How horrible!”

“Of course, if you weren’t feeling subtle, there were always the good old fun things to do, like one master of Ingare who used any peasants who complained for crossbow practice.”

“That was a different age, a different world,” she said defensively. “It can’t be blamed on the Florians of today.”

“In another thirty years the Germans will be saying the same about the Nazis. And I suppose they’ll be right, too,” said the Saint philosophically. “All the same, it does make this a place where a spiritualist could expect a good crop of spooks. I wonder how many men have entered Ingare and never left? Just think of the cries of despair and the screams of agony these walls must have heard, the murder and mayhem they must have seen...”