Saint and the Templar Treasure (18 page)

“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-etre,” 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?”

“Out”

“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 imper-turbably. “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 chateau—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.

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 voila pour la solidarite 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 chateau!”

“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 kepi. 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 bientot, 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.”

“Evidemment, 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 suspecta-ble 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.