Лесли Чартерис - The Saint and the Templar Treasure

Olivet looked distinctly unhappy. His black eyes probed the Saint uncertainly. As a rural policeman, not a big-city detective, he was not used to prospective prisoners arguing so eloquently and adumbrating pictures of potential disaster that infiltrated his stomach with butterflies.

Philippe was less impressed.

“He’s bluffing,” he told Olivet. “If he isn’t the killer, it would have to be one of us. Which is absurd.”

Simon cocked a sardonic eyebrow.

“How comforting for you,” he murmured.

The sergeant tried to reassert the authority of his office.

“As I have already said, Monsieur Florian, this is only a preliminary inquiry. I am here to make a report on which the department will act, and that is all.”

“And I apologise to Monsieur Templar,” said Mimette, “for any attempt to make him our scapegoat.”

Yves Florian looked intently into the Saint’s face as if seeking some form of reassurance. Finally he said: “Monsieur Templar has helped us a great deal since he arrived here, and I personally have confidence in him. If it would be any help, he can remain here as my guest until your investigations are completed.”

“Et en voilà pour la solidarité de la famille,” said Philippe scathingly.

Olivet was plainly undecided, although Yves’s offer had made a deep impression on him. And then, to the Saint’s surprise, Henri came in on his side.

“I think that offer should be accepted,” he told the sergeant, and continued in the same flat unemotional tone as if addressing a tribunal. “As a lawyer, I must agree with Monsieur Templar that you have insufficient grounds on which to arrest him, certainly not enough to even contemplate going to court. Therefore if he gave an undertaking to remain available for questioning, there need be no sensational publicity. You have said that he is well known, surely that is the one reason why he is unlikely to run away. He would be caught within hours.”

The Saint kept a straight face as he remembered the days when half the police forces of Europe had hunted him across the continent without success, but he did not feel it politic to air his reminiscences at that moment.

Henri added: “I was very fond of my uncle. I want to see his murderer caught. But I also know that he would not have wished the family to be subjected to the publicity that will surely result if Monsieur Templar is arrested.”

Olivet was visibly relieved. He avoided looking at Philippe and spoke directly to Yves.

“Eh bien — we shall continue when I have fingerprints and a medical report. Meanwhile, I shall expect all of you to be at my disposition here.”

“But you can’t leave us like that,” protested Norbert. “None of us will be safe. We still have a murderer in the château!”

“Then you will be most anxious to find him,” Olivet said maliciously. “I don’t think you have anything to fear for the moment, but I shall leave a man here in case.”

Carefully he rewrapped the poker and picked up his képi. The gendarme at the door fastened his holster and returned to his former pose of stolid indifference. The sergeant bowed himself out with a curtly formal “A bientôt, messieurs-dames.”

Understandably, it was a far from convivial dinner that Charles served, soon afterwards, with impeccable frigidity. The tension across the table was almost tangible. Jeanne and Henri sat in a frosted silence which showed that their quarrel of the afternoon had not been made up. In addition Henri was subjected to a cold shoulder from his employer that must have had him wondering where his next pay cheque was coming from. Norbert stayed as far away from the Saint as the confines of the room allowed, and hurriedly excused himself as soon as the cheese was served. Only Yves and Mimette made a brave pretence of table talk, and that was clearly at the dictation of good manners.

Mimette made one forlorn attempt to lighten the general pall of gloom.

“Sitting here like so many zombies won’t bring Gaston back,” she said. “And I don’t think he would have wanted to be remembered this way.”

“It is hardly amusing,” Philippe said heavily, “to think that even a Florian could be accused of his murder, if suspicion is not confined to others.”

“Sans doute,” retorted Mimette, “every murderer’s family has always felt the same, when one of them turned out to be a bad egg.”

“That is still only a theory from a roman policier,” Yves intervened soothingly. “There may be some other explanation altogether. Until we know, we do not have to think we are all criminals.”

It was an argument that seemed to make little impression. Minutes after the service of coffee, Simon found himself left in the small salon alone with Mimette, who had declined Yves’s discreet offer to see her to her room.

“I’m flattered,” said the Saint, after the door had closed, “that you aren’t terrified to be left at the mercy of a well-known outlaw.”

“Évidemment, je suis idiote,” she said, looking straight at him, “but I would trust you more than anyone here, except my own father.”

He took the liberty of replenishing his snifter of Armagnac.

“What I’d like to know,” he said, “is why Philippe wants me in the Bastille.”

“Isn’t it obvious?” Mimette said bitterly.

He shook his head.

“It’s too obvious. That’s what worries me. Naturally if he killed Gaston, he’d be specially keen to see the murder pinned on me. But however you feel about your uncle, you can’t think he’s stupid. I can’t see him being so unsubtle, in a way that would make anyone think what you’re thinking.”

“Well, what else would turn him so much against you?”

Simon paced across the room and back, scowling at the inoffensive walls. His answers themselves came out as questions.

“Because to him the most important thing is to get the whole scandal swept under the carpet, to get anyone arrested who isn’t part of the Florian household, and I’m the most suspectable outsider?... Or because he has quite another guilty secret, which he’s afraid I might stumble on if I’m allowed to stay around here and play detective?... How nice it would be to be a mind-reader!”

He subsided on to the settee beside her. He was exasperated by the passive role that had been thrust upon him, by having to expand theories while waiting for something else to happen, when his own instinct had always been for positive action. But what action was possible?

He wished, suddenly, that he could have found himself there at Ingare with no mystery to cloud the pleasure of discovering his possible remote link with its ancient history — and its present beautiful descendant.

They sat listening to the lulling whisper of the wind through the ivy and watching the moon lay a shifting golden path across the lawn. The breeze carried the subtle smells of the countryside to freshen and clear heads blocked by half-truths and unanswered questions. A few wisps of grey drifted lazily across a sky of purple and diamonds. It was a night created for making love, not thinking about murder or sifting the secrets of the long dead.

Mimette sighed deeply, and the Saint put his arm around her shoulders and drew her closer.

“Simon, when will it end?” she whispered, and he stroked her hair with gently caressing fingers and did not reply at once.

“I wish I knew,” he said at length. “But it can’t be long.”

His hands traced the delicate outline of her profile. He had never seen her look more exciting or more vulnerable. He looked into her eyes and saw stirring in their depths a longing and a frightened urgency that he had never seen before, a plea that he was incapable of refusing.