Лесли Чартерис - Salvage for the Saint

So Schwarzkopf the Swiss had vanished after the bullion robbery, leaving his accomplices to take the rap while he took the gold. And then Schwarzkopf the Swiss had become Tatenor the Englishman — if anything, a more English Englishman than most of the native-born kind. That he had been able to pull it off was a remarkable testimony to his linguistic talent — added to the national advantage the Swiss have in that respect.

And then, eleven years later, one of those accomplices — Tranchier, calling himself Fournier — had caught up with him. And it took little imagination to guess that he had come for his — or their collective — share of the loot.

And on the evidence the Saint had discovered, it looked as if he might have got what he had come for. And yet — why were the others here? Had Tranchier now run out on them? One thing was certain: if the loot was still in the form of gold bars, Tranchier was not carrying it with him.

Simon tried to put himself in Schwarzkopf’s place after the robbery. He would almost certainly have aimed to keep the gold and convert it into cash gradually, rather than raise suspicions by trying to sell off that quantity all at once. He would have reckoned to “spend” the gold over a period of years. And he would have needed a safe place to stash it away, gold being far too heavy to lug about. So, Schwarzkopf would most likely have hidden the gold somewhere and returned at intervals to draw from his private “bank”. The odds were, then, that Tranchier, before he had killed Schwarzkopf, had extracted from him the necessary information and means of access to the remaining gold.

But again Simon came back to the other two he had seen. What did they want? Not Tranchier, presumably. They had no reason not to accept his death as fact — as far as the Saint knew. Therefore they must be there to continue what, as far as their knowledge could be presumed to go, Tranchier had failed to accomplish...

And then it came to Simon with the blinding clarity of the newly obvious. There was only one person left from whom they might expect to discover where that gold was.

That person was his widow.

Arabella.

Already uneasy, the Saint was climbing into the silver Aston Martin almost before he drew that final inference.

He drove straight to Arabella’s house.

At the back of his mind ever since the court hearing had been that nagging discomfort he had still not managed to explain to himself, the first seeds of which had been sown when he had seen the two men he now knew as Descartes and Bernadotti. As he now saw, his reaction to them had amounted to an instinctive awareness that their interest in Tatenor’s death was somehow more than casual. Now, Simon cursed himself for not listening much earlier, and with closer attention, to that inner voice of disquiet; and it was with a definite foreboding of trouble ahead that he drove up the crunching gravel approach to the house.

Mrs Cloonan was pottering about in the front garden.

“Why, bless me, sir, if you haven’t missed her by a day,” she told him. “She’s gone to France. The south of France. Marseilles.” She pronounced it “Mahsales”.

Simon was not altogether surprised to find her gone. Arabella was an independent-minded woman and there was no reason she shouldn’t shoot off to France if the fancy took her. But he was curious, nevertheless, about the rather abrupt manner of her departure — especially as they had had at least a half-arrangement to meet within a day or two.

“The South of France,” he repeated, with raised eyebrows. “Rather a spur-of-the-moment young widow, isn’t she? Did she take her black bikini?”

Mrs Cloonan did her best to look shocked.

“Oh, sir! I do declare, I never heard such a thing!” She clucked reprovingly, but with a twinkle in her eye. “But truth be told, well...” She looked around conspiratorially, satisfied herself that the nearby bushes contained no obvious eavesdroppers and continued almost in a whisper: “...what with Mr Tatenor passing away as he did, and all — I gather she had to go down to try and sell her yacht, sir.”

“Her yacht,” murmured the Saint. “Poor thing.”

“Yes, sir. But she does seem in better spirits. She phoned me from France last night. She was staying in a nice little hotel, she said, near Orleans. Playing backgammon, she said — with some great blimp of a Frenchman.”

For an instant the Saint’s heart stopped; and then a ghostly millipede with icicles for feet scuttled up his spine. It was thanks only to an automatic self-control, bred in him over long years of practice, that neither of these two events produced more than the merest ripple on the outer surface of his casual demeanour.

“A fat Frenchman who likes to play backgammon? Well, he sounds harmless enough to the ladies, as Frenchmen go,” he quipped.

Mrs Cloonan beamed.

“Exactly what I thought myself, sir. And she said he’d been most civil, and entertaining, and helpful. Oh, and tonight, she’s going to be staying at his hotel, in the South... Why, is something wrong, Mr Templar?”

Even the Saint’s aforementioned self-control must have let him down fractionally when he heard that final piece of news. He hastily assured Mrs Cloonan that there was nothing to worry about, and then took his leave of her.

He had been, he knew, careless. He could have thought of at least a dozen past occasions in his life when a like degree of carelessness would have cost him that life. And his life was a possession he did not regard lightly.

“Simon Templar, old son,” he told himself sternly as he drove back to the hotel, “you’re getting careless.”

He certainly couldn’t excuse himself for failing to foresee at least the possibility of developments involving Arabella, nor for playing his cards so close to the chest and giving her the impression that he regarded the whole affair as closed.

There was only one practical course of action open to him now; and that was to pack a few things of his own and set off after her.

He was a whole day behind, but the likelihood was that Arabella would be safe at least until she checked into Descartes’ hotel in the south that evening. That “come into my parlour” establishment had to be the Saint’s immediate and direct destination.

Ten minutes on the telephone to travel agents was enough to establish that there was no available combination of air and surface transport that would get him to the village of St Martin-du-Marais in under eighteen hours. He knew he should be able to do it by car and ferry in several hours less than that.

Minutes later he was skimming across the water in the Privateer towards Vic Cullen’s boatyard at Bursledon, on Southampton Water, where he had left the Hirondel; and within another half hour he was weaving the big red-and-cream car skillfully and at a highly illegal speed along the south coast road towards Newhaven. It was almost eleven, and the ferry was due to leave at one. Drivers had to be at the quay half an hour beforehand. Simon reckoned that he might still get on if he arrived as late as 12.45, but that still gave him only an hour and three quarters to travel those seventy-five miles, in far from open-road conditions.

First the outskirts of Portsmouth loomed up, with an infuriating succession of dawdling drivers in wood-trimmed Morris Minors; then Havant and Chichester, then Worthing and Brighton. He drove with tremendous verve and skill, with the needle nudging up beyond sixty on every brief occasion when a burst of speed was possible. But there was a limit to what even the Saint and the Hirondel together could do in the thick and almost constant traffic, and he arrived at the Newhaven quay at three minutes to one, just as the ferry, its loading completed, was preparing to leave.