Saint and the Templar Treasure (13 page)

The professor ignored him.

“She was the goddess of ghosts and the creatures of the night. The queen of graveyards and of the spirits of the lost. Later she became the ruler of witches and all who followed the paths of darkness. A hymn to Hecate was part of the necromancer’s ritual.”

“Sounds like a dead-end job,” Simon remarked, but before Norbert could take offence he added: “Why the three faces and the wolves?”

“Wolves were seen as creatures of evil in the Middle Ages. As for the three faces, they represent the triplicity of her nature. She is powerful in heaven, on earth, and in hell. Also she embodies the stages of the moon, waxing, full, and waning. She was believed to haunt crossroads and it was at crossroads that witches were buried,” Norbert explained.

“What do you make of this place?” Simon asked, and for the first time the professor bothered to look away from the statue and consider the rest of the chamber.

“Obviously a part of the original fortress. I would surmise that it might once have been a meeting place.”

“So the Knights would have been responsible for the statue. And hence the anagram of Regina. But I thought they were supposed to be militant Catholics.”

“You do not listen,” Norbert said testily. “I told you that one of the charges made against the Templars was that they practised black magic. Generally it was most certainly a lie; but here, perhaps, it may have been true.”

“Doesn’t anything strike you as odd about this room?” Simon asked, and after a brief glance around Norbert shook his head.

“No. What is wrong?”

“Well,” Simon pointed out, “we are here because the floor of the storehouse and the roof of this chamber collapsed. If you look up, you’ll see that there is the ceiling of this room, then a layer of rock, above which is a few centimetres of soil, and then there are the flagstones which are the floor of the storehouse.”

“So what?”

“So how did anyone get in here in the old days?”

Norbert looked from the Saint to the ceiling, and then turned his flashlight over every wall and corner.

“There is no door!” he exclaimed, when he had finally authenticated the statement.

“For a great scholar, you do catch on fast,” said the Saint mockingly.

The professor glowered, and Simon patted him consolingly on the head.

“Never mind—we can’t all go to the same schools. But now we had better get out of here in case any more of the ceiling falls in.”

“But you don’t realise how important this is! I have work to do,” Norbert protested.

“And you are not going to be able to do it if half a ton of rock lands on your head. You can come back when it’s been shored up.”

The authority in the Saint’s voice brooked no argument, and with a last longing look at the statue Norbert began to climb up the ladder. Simon stayed for one final review, and for the first time his gaze rested on the pile of stones that had once been the floor of the storehouse. What he saw made him bend down for a closer look.

He inspected one stone after another until he had examined all the larger fragments. About half of them were scored and chipped in a way that could never have been caused by their fall. It needed no Sherlock Holmes to deduce how the marks had been caused. Someone had recently been at work on the floor of the storehouse with a pickaxe.

2

That evening he dined alone with Yves Florian and Mimette. Philippe had phoned to say that he would not be home until late, Professor Norbert had pleaded that he wanted to be alone to study the historic implications of the underground chamber, and Henri Pichot and Jeanne Corday were having supper with Gaston at his cottage. As a result the tenseness that had marked the previous night’s meal was absent and the conversation less restricted. After ranging through a wide variety of topics from the state of the franc to the life expectancy of Generalissimo Franco, the talk reverted to the events of the afternoon.

“You must have very extensive cellars here where you store the wine,” said the Saint, when he had a suitable opening, and Yves nodded.

“To tell you the truth even I am not certain where they all begin and end, and I have lived here all my life,” Yves confessed. “My father had new storage facilities built under the courtyard by the chai, and it is there that we store most of the wine we produce. Except for the wine we keep for ourselves, which is kept under the kitchens, the old cellars are not used nowadays. Only Gaston, and perhaps Charles, would know all of them.”

“Yesterday on my way from my room to the salon I got lost and ended up at the chapel. I noticed a door at the foot of the stairs, and I assumed that was the main way in.”

“It used to be, but it has not been used for some years. Originally the staircase went right down to the old dungeons of the castle, but they became unsafe, and so we had to brick up the opening and put a door in. I don’t suppose anyone has been down there for ten years at least.”

Simon finished the last of his Chateau Ingare Reserve with unconcealed regret.

“A great wine,” he said. “You’re very generous to let me taste your private stock. I’m surprised the Germans allowed you to keep any of it.”

“We have Gaston and Charles to thank for that. They hid the finest vintages away, I don’t know where, and put old labels on all the newest and rawest, and the Boches sat around this very table and praised them to the heavens because he had told them they were so special. But then what can you expect from a nation of beer drinkers?” added Yves with chauvinistic glee.

The Saint wondered what the citizens of Rheinhessen would think of that, but decided not to make the point.

“I suppose Norbert has been pestering Gaston to death about all these closed-off crypts and passages,” he said.

“I have no doubt,” said Yves goodhumouredly. “He is doing no harm, and if he discovers anything of archaeological importance it will be interesting. And Philippe thinks it would do the business no harm to enhance our snobisme ancestral.”

“Not to mention my own,” said the Saint lightly.

Mimette put in: “If you would like to look at our private cellars, you would be most welcome. Just see Charles, there is nothing he enjoys more than showing off his private catacombs.”

The Saint was quick to accept.

“Thank you, I should like that very much indeed.”

The next morning after breakfast he took up the offer, and found the family retainer a willing and knowledgeable guide.

Charles ushered him down a winding flight of stone stairs that led off from a corner of a kitchen that looked big enough to prepare three-course meals for a regiment. He had the air of a curator opening the museum vaults to reveal his rarest and most precious collections. He seemed to blend in perfectly with the long racks of cobwebbed bottles and the close musty vinegar smell.

The cellar itself was unremarkable and from Simon’s viewpoint something of a disappointment. It consisted of a series of wide interconnecting tunnels that spread like the strands of a spider’s web from an open area in the centre, but all the ramifications were ultimately dead ends. The door from the kitchen provided both entrance and exit. At the end of most of the tunnels was a wall of new bricks built to separate the family’s personal wine stocks from the rest of the chateau’s cellars.

They walked slowly down the narrow aisles between the racks of bottles. Charles eagerly provided a running commentary on the different wines in his charge and enjoyed answering the Saint’s questions in the minutest detail. By the time the tour was completed the Saint’s repertoire of wine lore had been substantially increased; while Charles, finding his audience less inept than he had expected, became less formally distant and more congenial.

“You have been at Ingare for a long time?” Simon asked as they returned to the daylight.

“I have always been at Ingare,” answered Charles. “My father was butler before me, and his father before him. It is so long ago I am not even sure when we first came here.”

As he carefully double-locked the door to the cellar, Simon asked: “What do you think about this treasure of the Templars that everyone is so worked up about?”

“It is not my business,” Charles replied stiffly. “If there is one, it would belong to the Florians.”

He led the way back into the kitchen and it seemed to the Saint that the further they moved into the house the more Charles became the inscrutable servant and less the wine enthusiast chatting to a fellow connoisseur.

“Perhaps the chamber Gaston fell into yesterday might provide a clue,” Simon ventured. “I should think there are a number of underground passages here that no one knows about.”

“It is very possible, monsieur,” Charles agreed politely. “Is there anything else you require?”

There was; but not the kind of domestic service that Charles was offering. The Saint knew when he was being stonewalled and accepted that any further probing would be useless.

That afternoon he visited Gaston. The foreman’s home was a white-walled low-roofed cottage at the foot of the hill looking towards the Ouveze, which he had learnt was the name of the river in the plain below. The ground floor consisted of a single room simply furnished with locally made furniture. A massive iron stove set into the fireplace served both for heating and for cooking food. The only decorations were an array of shining copper utensils that hung beside the chimney breast and an assortment of framed photographs on the mantelpiece. Despite its spartan appearance, however, the house had a feeling of warmth and security that the chateau could never project.

Gaston’s bed had been brought downstairs and he was sitting propped up in it reading when the Saint arrived.

“I am embarrassed, m’sieur,” he said. “I have no wounds, but the doctor orders that I must rest for two or three days until the pain in my back is gone.”

The overseer put away his book and the jumble of papers on which he had been scribbling, and for more than an hour they chatted about the harvest weather, about wine-making, about everything and anything but nothing in particular. The only awkward break in the conversation came when Simon brought up the mysterious underground chamber which Gaston had so dramatically and painfully opened up. It was a subject that Gaston gave the impression it would be disloyal or indiscreet of him to discuss.

“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 chateau 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 chateau, 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 Chateau 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 chateau 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 elusive-ness. 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.