Read Online Salvage for the Saint by Leslie Charteris - Free Book Online Page B

definitely consider calling you in.”
    Chatterjee smiled radiantly, exhibiting a set of dazzling white teeth.
    “You are too amiable a man to have made such an utterance in any spirit of sarcasm,” he declared. “Therefore I thank you. It vill be a privilege to assist such a notorious desperado should an occasion ewer present itself vhen I may be of service.”
    “But there’s one proviso.” Here the Saint leaned forward unsmiling, with a face hard as flint. “You so much as whisper a word of this to anyone—and I mean anyone—and I promise that you’ll assist me in quite another way. I promise I’ll make a point of using you for the practical exercises in the correspondence course I’m taking in amateur brain surgery. Do you read me?”
    Chatterjee nodded vigorously, the white-toothed smile even broader than before.
    “Indeed I do. Loud and clear. Your varning, Mr Templar, is admirably explicit, not to say drolly vorded. I completely see and understand your point of view. I shall, of course, be the wery soul of discretion. You may be confident that no third party vhatever shall be priwy to our secret. Should anybody chance to question me—for example a custodian of the law—I shall feign total incapacity to recall details of the passengers who pass daily under my eyes. I shall explain, vhile regretting sincerely, the long-standing inadequacy of my memory for faces …”
    At some point Simon slipped quietly away and back to the Privateer by the way he had come. It was well into the evening before he reached his hotel room in Cowes, and after a bath and leisurely dinner he fell readily into bed.
    The astonishing little stationmaster’s analysis left little to be added, as far as the Saint’s present knowledge went. The evidence certainly seemed to point to Fournier’s having set it all up. He could have knocked Tatenor out, kept out of sight himself while he steered the boat towards the shore, then turned the wheel and jumped clear on the blind side at the crucial moment, surfacing quietly farther along the beach and lying low till the fuss had died down. It was feasible—even if it did mean that Fournier was a lot cleverer than Simon had been inclined to give him credit for.
    Of course, there was still the second body to be explained. Complete with crash helmet. But the Candecour was one of the few boats in the race big enough to hide a body, either an unconscious body or one that was already a corpse … The Candecorpse … The Saint’s thoughts veered and his eyelids drooped as he drifted back and forth across the hazy margins of sleep and waking. Fournier must have smuggled the body aboard after the scrutineer’s main inspection on the eve of the race. Odd name, Candecour. He’d been pondering on it. And on Tatenor. That was an odd name too. What did it mean, anyway? And Tatenor spoke perfect, but pairrfect, French. Monsieur Teteneur …or how about Tete noire? Monsieur Blackhead. Like the French used to call the Algerian colonists pieds noirs. Mr Blackhead is dead … something shady about him—a bit of a black sheep … sheep … sleep. The Saint slept.
    -4-
    On that same evening, less than two hours before, Arabella Tatenor, breaking her journey to Marseilles, had parked her red MG tourer in front of a country hotel near Orleans and booked in for the night.
    Her decision to zoom south-of-France-wards post-haste had been made the instant the solicitor’s gloomy and mostly unwelcome news had finally sunk in. Which was about forty-five seconds after he had stopped apologising, prised his rear end up out of the torturous garden chair, and said his goodbyes.
    “Now, Mrs Cloonan, don’t fuss!” she had remonstrated good-humouredly in response to the housekeeper’s mild demurrer. “It’s not the North Pole or the lower regions of hell—it’s just France.”
    “Well, exactly,” Mrs Cloonan had said dubiously. “France.” The syllable might have been synonymous with “sin” as she