Simon Templar swallowed hard.
“What is your name?” he asked weakly.
“John Matthew Thomas Bartholomew Chatterjee,” said the stationmaster promptly and proudly.
“John Matthew,” Simon told him, “you have restored my faith in the power of human articulation. Tonight your name will be added to my regional directory of back-up brainpower. Whenever I need a second opinion or some help with a difficult bit of inferential reasoning, I’ll 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 pronounced it. “You driving by yourself in France is what I’m thinking of — with all those fifty million Frenchmen there, or whatever it is, and on the wrong side of the road, too!”
Arabella had smiled at that. She knew that Mrs Cloonan was genuinely fond of her and concerned for her well-being.
“They’re not all like Fournier, thank goodness!” she told her soothingly. “And I’ve driven in France before, you know. Actually you get used to it very quickly. And the French countryside’s marvellous, and the road to Marseilles is hardly a footpath.” Arabella grinned. “So stop worrying. I promise I’ll call you, the first overnight stop I make.”
That was Arabella Tatenor. She had to go to Marseille? Very well, then go she would. Right away. Or as near right away as could comfortably be managed.
She had seen the MG and herself safely aboard the eight o’clock ferry to Southampton on the morning after Brightly’s visit. From Southampton — which in those days had no direct ferry link with France — she had driven the seventy-five miles along the south coast to Newhaven in good time to catch the one o’clock boat to Dieppe; and some five hours later she had driven the MG off the boat and on to a French quay. The French customs formalities had delayed her only a minute or so, mostly taken up with a stylish piece of ogling from a raffish-looking douanier who wielded the chalk of his species, with, Arabella thought, unusual panache.
And then she had emerged into the sunshine of a late Normandy afternoon, and within minutes she was zipping through that rich green countryside, so hauntingly like yet unlike its English counterpart a mere hundred miles back across the water. She had driven contentedly for the better part of four hours — and not so contentedly for the worse part.
The worse part was driving through the towns that straddle the main road — towns like Rouen and Evreux, Dreux and Chartres — every one of which meant a two-or three-kilometre intrusion of those cobbles so beloved of the French and so bone-jarring to anyone travelling in a firmly sprung sports car.
Daylight was dissolving into the transparency of a star-spangled night when she pulled up outside the hotel, a few miles beyond Orleans. The place looked as if it had once been a barn; all half-timbered and skew-whiff, it had a warm, friendly look and an obviously active restaurant. And it had the name Hotel des Anglais, which at least offered prospect of sympathetic welcome for weak speakers of French, in which category Arabella unreservedly placed herself.
She chose the hotel for these reasons and because it happened to come into view at the right moment. But the two occupants of the ordinary black Citroen that pulled up outside the same hotel a minute or so later, after she had gone inside with her suitcase, chose it for a very different reason.