“I think I get the picture,” Simon said, not without sympathy. “You’re afraid hubby may decide to do a bunk to escape the clutches of comrade Fournier, and you’re worried that if he does vamoose he may well get the bright idea of arranging for all the family shekels to vanish along with him, before you’ve had a chance to get your hands on your share.”
“You put it with real delicacy,” she said sarcastically. “But that about sums it up. As I told you, I know next to nothing about his money, our money, or even how or where he keeps it. As things stand I get a regular allowance, but if Charles does cut and run before the divorce hearing, well, if I know him, he’ll take every brass farthing with him. Which will mean phut to my chances of a settlement. Before long I’d probably have to take a— a job.”
She spoke the final word with a shudder.
“An obscene idea, I agree,” said the Saint.
“So,” she concluded. “That’s it. What I’d like you to do is to keep an eye on things. Maybe find out what’s going on between Fournier and Charles.”
Simon maintained a neutral uncommitted manner.
“And if they go off together after the race as planned, I suppose you want me to follow them? Or if Charles makes a run for it, you want me to follow him?”
“That’s it.”
She eyed him hopefully, but his gaze was studiously inscrutable.
“If not for me, then for yourself,” she urged, trying another tack. “Fournier, now — he’s pretty obviously, I should say, one of those human excrescences you love to squash...”
Again the hopeful glance. “Isn’t he?” she asked.
The Saint’s inscrutability was still as politely impenetrable.
“He’s a slug of a man,” she declared firmly.
The bantering lift of a dark eyebrow gave nothing away.
“A disgusting parasitical creature,” she continued. “A wart on the nose of humanity! A carbuncle on its neck! A lump of—”
The Saint held up a restraining hand.
“The trouble with you,” he said severely, “is that you’ve been reading too much of the stuff that fellow Charteris writes about me. But that’s by the way. On this occasion I happen to agree with you. If appearances are anything to go by, Fournier is indubitably a pluke of the first water.”
“Quite,” she agreed, and then reverted to her other tack before he could recover his breath. “And what’s more, a fair settlement in the divorce court is my just right. And the court won’t even get a look in if Charles decamps with the stocks and bonds and whatnot. What say you, Simon? Will you help?”
The Saint laughed, and the two pairs of candid blue eyes met again.
“I’m on the case,” he said. “To tell you the truth, I’ve been on it since yesterday.”
3
In the ten minutes before she left the hotel, he told her what he had achieved so far.
There wasn’t much to tell, since his limited labours had yet to bear fruit.
It was on the previous day that he had stood Taffy Hughes a couple of consolatory beers, and it was then, immediately after that talk with Tatenor’s supplanted race colleague, that the Saint had made up his mind to upgrade his casual interest in the pushy French interloper into something more actively investigative.
He had begun there and then.
All he had to go on was the vague feeling that he’d seen Fournier’s ugly mug somewhere before. That suggested an obvious starting point, and the Saint refused to let its obviousness put him off starting there. He ran the Privateer a few miles along the island’s coast to Ryde, a bigger and less specialised resort where the business he had in mind could be transacted more discreetly. From a locally recommended photographic dealer there he hired some valuable hardware, and then he cruised back to Cowes Harbour and took his navigator and co-driver, Vic Cullen, aboard for the afternoon’s practice session — the final one before the race.
They checked over the engines and equipment, made a couple of adjustments, and then churned their way out across the mild swell for a routine of offshore speed runs and practice starts. Little more than half an hour went by before they saw the big yellow splodge that was Tatenor’s boat, the Candecour, detach itself from the quay and cream its way in turn across Cowes Roads into the Solent proper to begin some Umbering manoeuvres of its own. And then, still keeping a cautious distance between the boats, the Saint had proceeded to indulge himself with some long-range portrait photography.
They were too far out, he judged, for this interesting recreation to be spotted even through Arabella Tatenor’s binoculars, assuming her to be deploying them as previously; and in any case the Saint’s photographic efforts were completed in a few swift seconds.
The telephoto equipment he had borrowed enabled him to get some candid if unsteady mug shots of the hairless Frenchman, who was just then looking even more woeful than usual owing to the sensation of complete inadequacy that had engulfed his digestive organs from the very first seconds of the Candecour’s motion.
The Saint had returned the photographic paraphernalia that same evening, and its estimable and conveniently incurious owner had next obliged him with some speedy developing and printing. Several among the most rather blurred shots of Fournier were passably recognisable; and these the Saint had sent, with a brief covering note, to a useful unofficial contact of his in London’s sprawlingly complex web of officialdom.
Knowing that corruptible Civil Servant to be both unrushable and thorough, the Saint was resigned to waiting several days for a report which, when it did arrive, would certainly be as informative as it could be made. If there was anything to be had on Fournier, the gentleman Simon Templar knew as Beaky would assuredly pass it on.
The Saint was content meanwhile to concentrate his mind on the race.
It was just three hours away when he woke up on the morning after Arabella Tatenor’s late visit. From his window he had a view north across the water to the mainland. He saw at once that the sea was a good bit rougher than it had been; the day was bright with some patches of blue up aloft but the sky was in continual turmoil as huge grey clouds raced before a boisterous wind.
It was one of those clear fresh gusty days which occur sometimes in England at any season; days when everything stands out with such a perfectly focused clarity that it seems almost as if the wind itself had scoured the land and sea clean of all their fuzzier outlines. The mainland at its closest point was five miles away but seemed a good deal nearer. Looking across the arms of the Solent to Southampton water the Saint could distinctly make out the figures of the individual passengers on the decks of a big P & O liner, greyish white with one ochre funnel, that was just turning east on its way out to the open sea. He watched idly for a minute or two as it ploughed into the waves with a ponderous slow-motion plunging progress, like a great anaemic whale. Beyond lay the quiet stretch of wooded coast from Hill Head up to Warsash and Bursledon, inaccessible except on foot or from the water. From his viewpoint on the island it usually appeared as a smudged mass of dark green, but now he could have counted off the thousands of trees one by one.
The English summer may not be quite as mythical as some visitors have concluded, but its reputation for unpredictability is largely deserved. Like an inconsiderate annual houseguest, it can’t be relied upon to put in an appearance on schedule, or even to show up at all; and when it does appear it may arrive without notice and depart the scene just as abruptly. By these elastic standards this year’s summer had been a good one, the Saint observed to himself. The warmth had lasted pretty well without interruption right through from mid-June until this late August morning, when the abrupt-departure habit had manifested itself in temperature a good twelve to fifteen degrees down on the previous day’s.