Лесли Чартерис - The Saint and the Templar Treasure

“Well, leaving a great clumsy clue like that doesn’t seem to me like the famous Simon Templar,” he remarked with recovered nonchalance. “I hope it doesn’t make you think silly thoughts about me, Sergeant. I wouldn’t be in too much of a hurry to bring out the bracelets and wait for the medal if I were you.”

“I don’t think the bracelets, as you call them, would be necessary,” retorted Olivet suavely, and Simon saw the gendarme at the door flip open the top of his holster and rest his hand on the butt of his pistol.

“You can’t be seriously thinking of arresting me?” said the Saint with the utmost incredulity.

“Pas encore, peut-être,” Olivet said, with deliberate emphasis on the second word.

Philippe banged his glass down on the arm of the sofa with a force that sent the liquid inside slopping over the rim.

“Why not?” he bellowed. “If he is a well-known criminal—”

Olivet turned to him and spoke sharply.

“Monsieur Florian, you will kindly let me carry out this investigation in my own way.”

“What the sergeant means,” Simon explained, in the tone a teacher might use to a particularly slow-witted child, “is that he is not yet sure enough of his evidence. And he doesn’t want to end up looking a fool. One fool is enough for any party.”

Philippe pointed to the poker that Olivet still held.

“Not sure of his evidence?” he repeated scornfully. “What do you call that?”

“I call that a frame. What do you call it?” the Saint returned evenly, and before Philippe could renew his protest turned to Charles. “Are the guest rooms in this house locked up when the guests are out?”

The major-domo looked uncertainly at Olivet, and waited until the sergeant indicated that he should answer the question before replying that they were not.

“And there is only yourself and your wife to look after them?”

“Oui.”

“Which means,” Simon continued, turning back to Olivet, “that anyone, including the estimable Charles himself, at almost any time, could have lifted the poker with hardly any risk of being seen.”

“And yet you yourself never noticed that it was missing!”

“Why should I? There’s been no need for a fire lately. More to the point, Charles did not miss it, or is not admitting if he did. And if I had left it at Gaston’s, I could certainly have retrieved it when I went there earlier this evening.”

Olivet was momentarily startled out of the complacent attitude he had adopted.

“You went there? Why?”

“Because when I helped to lift Gaston’s body out of the vat, I could tell that he had been dead for at least six hours. He had been recovering from a fall, resting at the cottage. So that seemed a likely place for him to have been murdered. While we were waiting for you to arrive, Mademoiselle Mimette and I went there to have a look.”

“You did not mention this, mademoiselle,” said Olivet suspiciously.

“I must have forgotten,” she said carelessly.

With a frown, the gendarme turned again to the Saint, inviting him to go on.

“When we got there, the place had been ransacked. The poker may have been there, but as everything was in such a mess I thought it best to leave it as it was until you had seen it. If I’d been stupid enough to leave a murder weapon behind, I could easily have removed it then. But I wasn’t even looking for blunt instruments at the time.”

The Saint saw Philippe start.

“Ransacked? But Gaston had nothing worth stealing.”

“That’s what I thought-but how do you know?” the Saint inquired, and Philippe suddenly found himself again the centre of attention.

“I don’t,” he said quickly. “But Gaston was only a foreman. How could he have had anything worth killing for?”

“Somebody obviously thought he had,” the Saint pointed out. “I wonder if they found it.”

Olivet was beginning to look uncomfortable. The aura of confident authority that had surrounded him a few minutes earlier was rapidly dissolving. He spoke cautiously, weighing his words.

“I think the rest of this interview should be conducted at the gendarmerie.”

The Saint smiled. To certain other detectives in other spots of the globe that smile in itself would have been sufficient enough warning that the battle they thought they had won was really just beginning.

“The only way I go there with you is if you arrest me,” he said coolly. “And you’re not going to arrest me because there are so many holes in your so-called evidence that you could use it for a colander.”

Olivet was not accustomed to having his invitations so calmly declined, but he recovered quickly.

“Perhaps you do not understand, Monsieur Templar, that in France it is you who are required to prove yourself innocent, not the police who must prove you guilty.”

“I know all about the Code Napoleon,” Simon said imperturbably. “But you still have to present some sort of case, and you don’t have one that would last five minutes in court.”

Olivet fidgeted beneath the ice-blue gaze that was focused on him. When the Saint continued, he was addressing the sergeant for the benefit of everyone present.

“Let’s look at this so-called evidence. You have a murder weapon, lucky you. It’s from my room, unlucky me. But that’s as far as it goes. You haven’t yet had time to test it for fingerprints. You don’t have a professional opinion about when Gaston was killed, so you don’t know whether I have an alibi or not. You don’t even know why he was murdered. In fact the sum total of what you don’t know is staggering.”

Simon paused for a moment, to make his counterpoint more telling.

“What you do know is that if you arrest me tonight, it’ll be front-page news in every paper in Europe tomorrow, and in a few hours there’ll be more reporters around here than vines. You’ll be the big hero for a day. The cop who finally sewed up the Saint. But you also know that if you don’t make it stick you’ll be the laughing stock of every police force from Paris to Pago-Pago, and afterwards you’ll be lucky if your bosses trust you to look for lost dogs.”

For effective punctuation, the Saint took another unhurried sip from his glass. He went on with nerveless precision, taking aim and scoring like a marksman:

“When you stop being dazzled with dreams of glory, you know damn well that I wouldn’t have my reputation if I went about murdering people and leaving clues that a blind man couldn’t help tripping over. The only thing we know for sure is that the killer was someone who’s free to go anywhere in the château — which doesn’t include only me.”

It was an effective enough speech in its own way, he decided, even if it didn’t reach the heights attained in some similar confrontations in the past. But the mixture of contempt and logic was still volatile enough to have had Chief Inspector Claud Eustace Teal groping for another soothing strip of Wrigley’s or Inspector John Fernack yearning for the freedom of a downtown backroom and a length of rubber hose.

However, the Saint knew the kind of ground he was on. The averagely ignorant foreigner, if he thinks about such matters at all, thinks of all French law officers as “gendarmes,” whereas in fact the gendarmes are the rural constabulary, who operate outside the metropolitan districts which have their own police forces, whose officers are correctly called agents. It was Simon Templar’s business to know things like that; he knew that he was not dealing with a really sophisticated top cop, nor would any such phenomenon materialise to take charge in the instant future. A case at Ingare would have to percolate up through enough echelons of bureaucracy to give time for quite a few developments before it came into summit jurisdiction.