with a good deal of hedging and qualification and puffing and blowing said that the teeth were no help either.
The jury brought in their expected verdict of accidental death on Charles Tatenor and “one known as” Maurice Fournier; and Tatenor’s widow sighed with visible relief and left the court on Simon Templar’s arm.
They climbed into the powerful silver Aston Martin he had hired on the island, and talked about nothing in particular as the Saint’s effortless touch threaded the car through the twists and turns of the island’s narrow roads as if he had known and driven them for years.
And then abruptly Arabella asked the question he had known she would have to ask.
“Simon—you don’t think Charles could have committed suicide, do you? And killed Fournier at the same time?”
The Saint shook his head.
“No, I don’t,” he told her firmly. “And neither do you. I don’t think either of us can seriously see Charles as a suicide. And if he’d wanted to get rid of Fournier there are a dozen ways he could have done it without blowing himself up at the same time.” He glanced sideways at her thoughtful profile. “Right?”
“Right,” she agreed.
It was plain enough to Simon that she saw no real reason to doubt seriously that Tatenor’s death had been an accident. A spectacular accident maybe, and coming at a time when there was pressure on him, but an accident just the same. After all, powerboat racing had its risks—that was part of the appeal of the sport to men like Charles Tatenor.
“I’ll be sticking around for a couple of days,” Simon told her as he dropped her outside the opulent Victorian grange above Egypt Point which she now had all to herself—except for Mrs Cloonan.
The plump motherly housekeeper, whom Simon had met briefly a couple of times during the past few days, was staying on with Arabella, and she appeared now in the doorway and waved as he drove off.
During the two or three days for which he planned to stay on, the Saint meant to be busy. He was waiting now with supercharged curiosity to see whether his friend Beaky would come up with anything interesting on Fournier, but he had some investigating of a more active kind to pursue in the meantime. After that … well, Arabella was resilient and would be more or less back on an even keel in a couple of days; and if the Saint’s suspicions were borne out he might have something more than mildly interesting to tell her—something which, had he been able and willing to tell it at the inquest, would have been enough to set the stuffy Coroner’s larynx to a positive frenzy of twitching.
The Saint smiled at the thought. Coroners are coroners and Saints are Saints, and never the twain … But at the back of his mind, when he remembered the inquest, something nagged; a small insistent voice which prattled in no very intelligible language of an undigested thought, some loose end left, some fragment of information his brain so far hadn’t had time to process.
It was much later that he remembered.
He had been glancing around the courtroom idly examining the audience, when his eye had fallen on those two overdressed, foreign-looking men sitting together, one of them very fat and the other lizard-like. And the detail which in retrospect seemed to him especially interesting—the detail he had noted in passing at the time but had so far not returned to ponder on—was the exact quality of the reaction he had seen in the fat man’s flabby bandit face when the Coroner had announced the name Simon Templar.
-2-
Arabella Tatenor extended an irritable brown leg from the pink wickerworks swing seat and pushed away the tiny white toy poodle that was positioning itself neurotically to spring into her lap for the fifth time in as many minutes.
She wagged a reproving finger at the highly strung overbred travesty of doggy-hood.
“Don’t be a bore, now, Phaideaux.”
The wretched dog jittered and quivered, fixing its mistress with
The jury brought in their expected verdict of accidental death on Charles Tatenor and “one known as” Maurice Fournier; and Tatenor’s widow sighed with visible relief and left the court on Simon Templar’s arm.
They climbed into the powerful silver Aston Martin he had hired on the island, and talked about nothing in particular as the Saint’s effortless touch threaded the car through the twists and turns of the island’s narrow roads as if he had known and driven them for years.
And then abruptly Arabella asked the question he had known she would have to ask.
“Simon—you don’t think Charles could have committed suicide, do you? And killed Fournier at the same time?”
The Saint shook his head.
“No, I don’t,” he told her firmly. “And neither do you. I don’t think either of us can seriously see Charles as a suicide. And if he’d wanted to get rid of Fournier there are a dozen ways he could have done it without blowing himself up at the same time.” He glanced sideways at her thoughtful profile. “Right?”
“Right,” she agreed.
It was plain enough to Simon that she saw no real reason to doubt seriously that Tatenor’s death had been an accident. A spectacular accident maybe, and coming at a time when there was pressure on him, but an accident just the same. After all, powerboat racing had its risks—that was part of the appeal of the sport to men like Charles Tatenor.
“I’ll be sticking around for a couple of days,” Simon told her as he dropped her outside the opulent Victorian grange above Egypt Point which she now had all to herself—except for Mrs Cloonan.
The plump motherly housekeeper, whom Simon had met briefly a couple of times during the past few days, was staying on with Arabella, and she appeared now in the doorway and waved as he drove off.
During the two or three days for which he planned to stay on, the Saint meant to be busy. He was waiting now with supercharged curiosity to see whether his friend Beaky would come up with anything interesting on Fournier, but he had some investigating of a more active kind to pursue in the meantime. After that … well, Arabella was resilient and would be more or less back on an even keel in a couple of days; and if the Saint’s suspicions were borne out he might have something more than mildly interesting to tell her—something which, had he been able and willing to tell it at the inquest, would have been enough to set the stuffy Coroner’s larynx to a positive frenzy of twitching.
The Saint smiled at the thought. Coroners are coroners and Saints are Saints, and never the twain … But at the back of his mind, when he remembered the inquest, something nagged; a small insistent voice which prattled in no very intelligible language of an undigested thought, some loose end left, some fragment of information his brain so far hadn’t had time to process.
It was much later that he remembered.
He had been glancing around the courtroom idly examining the audience, when his eye had fallen on those two overdressed, foreign-looking men sitting together, one of them very fat and the other lizard-like. And the detail which in retrospect seemed to him especially interesting—the detail he had noted in passing at the time but had so far not returned to ponder on—was the exact quality of the reaction he had seen in the fat man’s flabby bandit face when the Coroner had announced the name Simon Templar.
-2-
Arabella Tatenor extended an irritable brown leg from the pink wickerworks swing seat and pushed away the tiny white toy poodle that was positioning itself neurotically to spring into her lap for the fifth time in as many minutes.
She wagged a reproving finger at the highly strung overbred travesty of doggy-hood.
“Don’t be a bore, now, Phaideaux.”
The wretched dog jittered and quivered, fixing its mistress with
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