He had been wise in his decision to begin at the western end of the beach, about half a mile along from the site of the explosion. Even then, it took him a good six and a half hours of searching — in a pattern of coverage that was a lot more systematic than it might have appeared — before he found what he was looking for.
A corner of glass which lay exposed and glinting in the sun brought him to the spot near a grassy dune; and it only took him a minute or so to dig all the equipment out, after checking that he was unobserved.
There was a swim-mask, flippers, weighted belt and compact backpack-and-breathing-pipe assembly.
In short, a complete scuba outfit.
Simon had uncovered it only to satisfy himself that it was indeed what he thought it was, and was still shiny enough to have been put there quite recently. It was. He buried it again and proceeded to the second stage of his expedition.
For this his eccentric garb might not be ideal, but he thought it would do. He walked briskly along the foreshore until he came to the narrow stretch of water — a mere fifty yards or so across — which forms the entrance to Christchurch Harbour and divides Hengistbury’s curled fingertip from the main coastline at Mudeford, a pleasant seaside village.
As he had done his swimming for the day, he hailed an old local salt who was reclining in a rowing-boat on the other side. A cool breeze had sprung up during the day.
“Can you take me across?” he called out amiably.
In due course an eye was opened and a pair of lips moved. But the man’s reply was a jumbled confusion of palatals lost on the wind.
Then the boatman held up both fists and opened his ten fingers to indicate his price.
“Ten shillings!” the Saint muttered under his breath. “Dick Turpin at least wore a mask.” But he signalled his agreement and the man inched his way across the water with rhythmically plodding oars.
“D’you do this every day?” Simon asked conversationally, when the plodding had been resumed in the opposite direction with himself aboard. “Row people back and forth, I mean.”
The man spat out a well-masticated wad of tobacco into the sea. He had a leathery red face; his blue eyes were watery and deeply recessed behind inscrutable walls of eyebrow and eyelid.
“Aas roik. Meamoi maik,” he said gruffly.
“Ah,” said the Saint, without the foggiest notion of what the man had said, but gathering that the general sense of the answer as affirmative. “You must see a lot of people, then — different people.” This, Simon was uncomfortably aware, was not destined to be remembered among his more sparkling pieces of dialogue. “I suppose that might help to keep it from getting too boring.”
The boatman looked at him quizzically from under sunbleached eyebrows.
“Aaredaiz doant zee mahren wunniz dahg.”
The Saint thought he might have caught an entire syllable here: he was almost sure he had heard the word “don’t.” He took encouragement and plunged on.
“I’m hoping to find out what happened to a friend of mine who may have gone missing down this way a few days ago,” he said, articulating with special care as if in compensation. “As a matter of fact it was on the same day as the boat-race accident just down here and he was due to travel up to London that evening. But he never arrived. He had no car, so I suppose he would have been meaning to use the train. What would be the nearest station around here?”
The man manoeuvred the boat into its berth. He chewed steadily and slowly for a while on another wad of tobacco while the watery eyes regarded the Saint. Then he spoke.
He said: “Oiklaff.”
“You... what?” queried the Saint, for once helplessly stuck for something to say.
“Oiklaff,” said the boatman more loudly and positively.
“Oiklaff?” the Saint repeated weakly.
“Aas roik,” said the man, as if giving encouragement to a moron. “Eedaga’a trine a Lunnun frathahr ahrroik.”
Simon’s aural deciphering system reeled under the strain, clutched desperately at the “Lunnun”, which could have been interpreted as “London”, and shifted into a higher gear to begin coming to grips with the rest.
“A train!” he almost shouted in triumph after a pause. “He could have got a train from there. From Highcliffe!”
“Aas wah’oisaad, Oiklaff. Eecada gahnnair boi the bahs.”
“Ah, there’s a bus, is there?” Simon said, mainly to convince himself he had it right. “And how far’s Highcliffe from here?”
The man spat out another tobacco wad.
“Bate foive moiwe.”
“And do you happen to know when the next bus goes?”
The boatman fumbled for an ancient pocket watch and studied it interminably.
“Bate aafenaouer fmnay,” he said at last.
“I see,” said the Saint with a sense of real accomplishment. “I think you said ten bob. Here’s a quid for your time. And thanks for the information.”
He proceeded in due course to Highcliffe station with his investigatory aplomb more shaken than it had been in a long time. He had had some experience of the mild nasal burr of the typical Hampshireman — Vic Cullen was a good example — but nothing had quite prepared him for the primordial accent he had just encountered.
He approached the ticket clerk at the station in a distinctly wary frame of mind. The ticket clerk turned out to be a small, fastidiously moustached man of Indian or Pakistani origin. There was a conspicuous absence of other staff, and the little dark man radiated the air of being himself not only the ticket seller but also parcels porter, sweeper-up, lavoratory cleaner, and station-master — all of which indeed he was.
He eyed Simon shrewdly.
“Vhat can I do for you, Sir?”
“I’m looking for information. Not quite the ordinary sort, though.”
He told his story of the friend who had failed to turn up in London when expected. The stationmaster’s quick dark eyes never left Simon’s face.
“Can you describe this — friend of yours?”
“Middle aged, stocky build, short greyish hair. Speaks with an accent.”
The man nodded.
“He vas here. I remember him distinctly. This is an exceptionally quiet station for the most part, and I am far more than aweragely obserwant, though I say so myself. This man spoke vith, I should say, a French accent. Yes, I vould be practically certain that he was a Frenchman. He bought a single ticket to Vaterloo, and I saw him get on the train.”
The quick dark eyes flicked over Simon’s tall, somewhat untidily dressed figure, and he continued:
“You must understand ve don’t see many foreign passengers through this station. Ours are mostly from Birmingham or Manchester, or they are locals. This man vas different. But he had no bags, and he didn’t look like a tourist.”
“You’d make a good court witness,” Simon observed.
“Thank you,” said the little man. “But there’s one thing more.” He hesitated a moment. “I don’t think this Frenchman was really your friend as you told me — Mr Templar.”
“Now wait a minute—”
“No,” put in the station-man quickly, holding up a restraining hand. “Please don’t try to pull the vool ower my eyes any further. I have seen enough photographs of the notorious Simon Templar to be quite certain that you are indeed that adwenturous personage. Therefore it vould be quite pointless to persist in denying it or in maintaining your story of a friend who failed to turn up somevhere. You vere in the boat race. Putting together the ewidence, I vould wenture a hypothesis as follows.”
The little man paused for breath, and Simon blinked in sheer disbelief as he continued with assured fluency.
“You have conjectured, have you not, that there was something decidedly fishy about the explosion in which Mr Charles Tatenor and his French co-driver vere killed — or rather, in which both of them were apparently killed. Further, I surmise from your present somevhat wagabond appearance, and your presence at my station, that you have perhaps already accumulated some ewidence to support the hypothesis that the Frenchman escaped the explosion, having planned the entire episode beforehand, and leawing an unconscious or already dead man in the boat in his place. I suspect that you have been searching and have found something on the beach. There is sand on your shoes,” he concluded simply.