Лесли Чартерис - The Saint and the Templar Treasure

He was small for a policeman, scarcely average height, and his khaki uniform was cut to a degree of perfection rarely attained by police tailors. His hair, which was meticulously trimmed, was as black and shiny as his shoes, and the sheen of his belt and the brightness of the buckle would have won applause from any sergeant-major. His face was tanned and smooth but saved from being bland by a pair of piercing black eyes that darted continuously from person to person.

A couple of paces behind the sergeant came Charles and after him the gendarme from the hall, who no longer appeared lethargic as he closed the door and placed himself in front of it, his hand resting on the holster on his belt.

Olivet nodded to Yves but walked towards the Saint. In his left hand he carried his pillbox cap and in his right a small package wrapped in sacking. He placed both carefully on the table before addressing the Saint.

“Monsieur Simon Templar, I am Sergeant Olivet. I am here to make preliminary inquiries into the murder of Gaston Pi-chat.”

His tone was quiet but authoritative, and he appeared very conscious that he was the centre of interest and clearly intended to keep matters that way.

“Good for you,” Simon drawled, sipping his drink.

“I was surprised when I was told that you were a guest at In-gare,” Olivet continued. “It is not the sort of place where one expects to meet the famous Simon Templar.”

“Oh, I get around to the most respectable places,” the Saint replied coolly.

“It is interesting, though,” Olivet mused, and seemed to be talking more to himself than to anyone else, “that a Templar should go out of his way to visit a place once so closely associated with the Templiers. Almost too extraordinary a coincidence, one might say.”

“You might, but I wouldn’t,” the Saint countered. The interview was developing into a verbal fencing match with more hazards than he had anticipated. He had only expected to answer the normal when, where, why, and how type of questions that he was used to being asked in such circumstances.

“Until I came here,” he said, “you could have written everything I knew about the Templars on a postcard and still had room for the stamp. I was driving from Avignon, heading for the Riviera. I picked up a couple of hitch-hikers and gave them a lift here. When we arrived, a couple of hoodlums were setting fire to the barn. I did what I could to help, and Mademoiselle Florian kindly invited me to stay when my car broke down. It’s as simple as that.”

Olivet’s eyes stopped their perpetual motion and bored into the Saint.

“The car that the arsonists used was stolen from Avignon that morning,” he said at last. “It is interesting that you were also in Avignon at the time.”

“Me and a few thousand others. So the idea is that I hired a couple of voyous to burn down the barn, picked up a pair of hitch-hikers as a cover, and arranged to arrive on the scene in the nick of time to prove myself a hero.”

Olivet appeared to consider the possibility.

“It would have been an ingenious plan to ingratiate yourself, worthy of the famous Saint.”

The famous Saint sighed.

“Or a brilliant theory that might get a gendarme promoted? Unfortunately his superiors might have just enough brains to think he’d been out too long in the hot sun.”

Olivet flushed. He said coldly: “I have heard about your attitude to authority, Monsieur Templar. I advise you not to try such tactics with me.”

“And I advise you to stop trying to dream up ridiculous theories and get on with finding Gaston’s murderer. If you want my help you can have it.”

“Help,” Olivet rolled the word meditatively. “Perhaps you can help to identify this.”

Carefully he undid the package he had brought in, to reveal a short poker. It was about ten inches long and topped with an elaborately tooled brass handle. Holding it delicately in a fold of its erstwhile wrapping, he held it up like an exhibit.

The Saint’s eyes narrowed as he inspected it. He needed no one to tell him the origin of the red stickiness on the end of the shaft.

Olivet turned so that the others in the room could see it.

“This was found in Gaston Pichot’s cottage. I believe it to be the murder weapon.”

Mimette looked quickly away, but for the others it appeared to hold a morbid fascination. Olivet returned his attention to the Saint.

“Do you recognise it?”

“Don’t tell me, let me guess. It’s a poker.”

Olivet tensed at the Saint’s flippancy, and his voice took on a harder edge.

“A rather fine one. You see the handle carries the Florian crest encircled by a large spray of daffodils as the base of the motif.”

“Very pretty,” Simon observed impassively. “So what?”

“It seems too good to have been owned by the murdered man, yet it was found in his cottage. How would you explain that?”

“Perhaps the murderer took it with him. I’m told that people who intend to put out other people’s lights quite often like the reassurance of knowing they have the required blunt instrument in hand,” the Saint replied.

Olivet seemed delighted with the suggestion. The Saint decided that if he ever left the gendarmerie he would be a cinch on the stage. He was certainly making a great build-up to his dramatic moment — whatever that was to be.

Olivet turned to Charles, who had been standing near the door with the attentive self-effacement of the perfectly trained servant.

“I believe you recognised it?” he said, and the major-domo nodded slowly.

“It is one of a set.”

“And how many sets like this are there in the château?”

“Only one exactly like that. The crest is on all of them, but the flowers differ according to the room the set was made for.”

Olivet paused theatrically before delivering his apocalyptic question: “And where is this set kept?”

The servant looked directly at the Saint for the first time, and Simon could see the accusing bitterness in his eyes.

“In the room of Monsieur Templar.”

Simon Templar made no effort to hide the shock of astonishment that jolted him.

He had not really studied the chasing on the poker’s handle when Olivet displayed it, and even the mention of daffodils had not immediately rung a bell. The symbolic painting on the door of his guest room, and Charles’s explanation of it, were far enough in the past, and far enough removed in context from Gaston’s death and the present situation, for Olivet’s bombshell to catch him completely off his guard.

At that, to a shrewd analyst, the very transparency of his reaction might have been the most convincing evidence of his innocence. But the Saint knew at once that he could not count on that kind of shrewdness. As he looked around the room and watched the significance of the old retainer’s words registering, he realised that it was going to take all his resourcefulness to ride out this one.

It was not utterly astounding that the murderer had attempted to frame him: He was, after all, the ideal candidate. What took him aback was the manner in which the frame had been so subtly thought out and cold-bloodedly accomplished. After the amateurish ransacking of Gaston’s cottage, he had not credited the murderer with the degree of finesse that had just been demonstrated.

In the cold light of a court-room, any competent advocate would have shown Olivet’s find to be blatantly circumstantial. But in the charged atmosphere of Ingare, the Saint was acutely aware that it would take some fast talking for him to remain on the scene long enough to discover the person responsible.

The silence was growing more tense with every second that crawled past, until the dropping of the proverbial pin would have sounded like the detonation of a mine. The Saint seized the initiative by being the one who broke it.