“The name you gave the police,” he went on. “Maurice Fournier. No one of that name has been traced. If you could possibly recall something that might—”
“No, there’s nothing,” cut in Arabella rather brusquely. “He said his name was Fournier. That’s all I know.”
The Coroner hesitated.
“But he was a guest in your house for a week or more.”
“He was my husband’s guest. I’d never met him before. And when I did meet him I took an instant dislike to him.”
The Coroner pursed his lips and brought two sets of five fingertips carefully together.
“Well, perhaps you can assist us by saying whether you formed the impression that Fournier was his true name?”
“No, I formed no impression about that. I had no reason to question whether it was his true name.”
“And what is your impression in retrospect, in view of the fact that the French authorities say that no Maurice Fournier is known to them?”
Arabella shrugged, making no particular effort to hide her impatience.
“Authorities can be wrong,” she told him. “And anyway he could easily have been Swiss or Belgian or something. But I really don’t see that his name matters. He, and my husband, are both dead.”
The Coroner winced visibly at the nakedness of her words, as if he would have liked to substitute something more bland and bloodless like “passed on” or “deceased”. Simon Templar, who was also in court, smiled at the thought of the interior battle that the Coroner must have been waging with himself at that juncture — a battle between, on the one hand, the legal ego, which hates to let anyone get away with robbing it of the initiative in argument as she had just done, and on the other the well-brought-up conservative gentleman whose sympathy for a newly widowed woman makes him a bottomless fount of indulgent tolerance.
The gentleman won on points, even if his fount did emerge as unmistakably non-bottomless. Its visible bottom took the form of a restrained concession to the legal ego; the Coroner swallowed hard — a species of exertion that caused his protuberant Adam’s apple to twitch the knot of the spotted tie — and said with forced pleasantness:
“You must allow me to be the judge of what matters in this case, Mrs Tatenor. But I realise how distressing all this must be for you. I am sure you have the sympathy and good wishes of everyone present in the court, and I hope we shall now be able to conclude this inquiry quickly. You may stand down now.”
She made a movement that just barely feinted at being a hint of a half-bow that she’d thought better of, and went back to her seat, which was next to the Saint’s in the second row of the block reserved for witnesses and members of the public.
In the front row of the same block sat the press-men, taking up their full allocation; on the Saint’s other hand sat Vic Cullen, and every other seat in the small Ryde courtroom was occupied too. Among the assembled faces Simon recognised at least half a dozen of the other race drivers; the rest were mostly holidaymakers who happened to be on the island at the time and who for reasons of their own considered a Coroner’s Inquest a good afternoon’s entertainment.
The Saint had half-turned in his seat to survey the spectators with casual interest, and his gaze had just stopped thoughtfully at two vaguely familiar-looking men whom he couldn’t for the moment place in either the boat-racing or the holiday-making group — both were overdressed and one was unusually fat, with a drooping moustache — when the Coroner spoke again.
“Mr Simon Templar — will you take the stand now, please?”
The Saint stood up, took the stand, and went through the usual initiation ritual.
The Coroner eyed him with evident distrust. The Saint resisted the urge to stick his tongue out, and contented himself with returning the Coroner’s cold stare in kind.
“You are the man they call the Saint?” asked the Coroner.
“The same.”
The Coroner sniffed, and made a nervous adjustment to the knot of the spotted tie which left it in exactly the same position as before.
“Mr Templar, your reputation is well known. You have often been described as a common criminal, and I have to say that you are by no means the sort of witness with whom I should have preferred to have to deal in this court.”
The Saint smiled. He didn’t intend losing sight of the seriousness of the occasion, but the opportunity was too good to miss.
“That’s quite all right,” he replied generously. “To be frank, you’re by no means my favourite type of coroner, either.”
There was a brief eruption of laughter, started by a couple of reporters. The Coroner glared at them and went three shades pinker. The Adam’s apple and spotted tie wiggled as he struggled to get control of himself.
“However,” he went on, heroically abstaining from comment on the Saint’s riposte, “I am told that your knowledge of power-boating matters is sound, Mr Templar, and I understand that you and your co-driver Mr... ah... Cullen were the first on the scene after the explosion.”
“That is correct,” agreed the Saint in a businesslike tone.
“I have here your eyewitness report, taken by the police at the time.” The Coroner indicated the document in front of him. “Perhaps you will help us by expanding on one or two points.”
“If I can,” said the Saint.
“One thing puzzles me in particular. Mr Tatenor’s boat suddenly changed course and began heading for the beach at...” — the Coroner peered at the papers — “... Hengistbury Head. You and Mr Cullen could hardly help being aware of this sudden turn, since the boat cut right across your own course.”
“Correct.”
The Coroner leaned forward.
“But having changed course in that abrupt manner, the boat then continued in the new direction, still heading straight for the shore, for a distance of approximately half a mile?”
“As you say — approximately.”
“Does that not seem to you a little odd, Mr Templar?”
It seemed to the Saint decidedly odd, but he hadn’t the slightest conscience about pretending otherwise to the Coroner.
“Not in the least odd,” he said in a tone of conviction.
“But how would you explain it?”
“What seems to me the most likely explanation,” Simon lied, picking his words with care, “is that the boat hit a big wave, and that as a result both men lost their footing, hit their heads and were knocked cold.”
“Leaving no one at the wheel?”
“That’s right. It could easily happen. It was a very choppy sea.”
“But with nobody at the wheel,” persisted the Coroner, “wouldn’t you have expected the boat to follow a rather erratic course, instead of travelling a good half mile or more in a straight line?”
It was a question the Saint had expected and one that had, somehow, to be answered. He took a deep breath.
“I suggest,” he said with a magnificent airy confidence that made everything seem much simpler than it was in his real thoughts on the matter, “that one of those unconscious bodies became slumped or wedged against the wheel just after they hit the big wave. The rudder would probably have found its approximate straight-ahead position very quickly in any case, on the principle of least resistance, and the wheel would have gone back with it, rather like the wheels of a car straighten up and take the steering wheel back after you round a bend. If one of the two men then fell against the Candecour’s wheel, as I think must have happened, that would have kept the boat on a roughly straight-ahead course.”
“Thank you, Mr Templar.”
There was a begrudging note in the Coroner’s voice but he continued to nod sagely as if to imply that of course he had seen all this for himself and now had come to the really difficult question. He posed it triumphantly.
“Yet, just before the impact, according to your evidence, the boat made another abrupt turn, and then once again straightened up.” The Coroner paused for effect. “You’re not seriously suggesting, Mr Templar, that the whole exact and rather unusual sequence of events which you have postulated was repeated?”
“No,” said the Saint with patient civility, “I’m not suggesting that. The explanation’s far simpler. When the Candecour got near the head, she hit the rip tide — that’s all.”
“Ah, the rip tide,” said the Coroner, little enlightened.
“At the right time,” the Saint explained with a briskly authoritative note in his voice, “which means during about the first two hours of the ebb, there’s a very sharply demarcated rip tide off the Head, moving almost parallel to the coast at up to twenty-five knots. I think it’s pretty clear that the rip was enough to deflect the Candecour and turn her through maybe another thirty or forty degrees, but not to stop her. So she hit the rocks farther along.”
On this specific point Simon Templar’s confidence was genuine. The rip tide was fact — the Privateer herself having had to battle obliquely across it to get to the blazing wreckage — and he was as sure as he could reasonably be that the Candecour’s final turn had been consistent with the rip tide’s likely effect on her runaway progress.
Otherwise, however, he was sure of nothing except that, somewhere, things were not entirely as they seemed... After the searing inferno that had been the Candecour had more or less burned itself out, two big lumps of something resembling charcoal had been recovered from the drifting debris. Each had the vestigial metal frame of a crash helmet all but fused to its charred skull. It was fortunate, from the Saint’s angle, that the Press had observed their normal reticence in the matter of giving specific details of the bodies. In particular they had said nothing about the crash helmets. Nor, it seemed, had the Coroner been reminded of them by anything in the papers. Simon’s own original eyewitness statement had foresightedly avoided direct reference to them — because even then he had been thinking ahead to the inquest. For when Simon Templar was on a project — and he regarded himself as still very much on this project, even if its terms of reference had altered somewhat since Arabella’s nocturnal visit — the last thing he wanted was great flat-footed policemen stamping about the scene of the crime, or interesting questions to cramp his own style. Therefore he had kept the crash helmets out of the discussion. If they had been brought into it they might have made the Coroner and jury just that important shade more likely to doubt his airy explanation of the crash. For two men to be knocked cold at the same time is by no means beyond the bounds of credibility, especially when the proposition is put by someone as blandly authoritative and seemingly convinced by it as he had taken care to appear. But a double knock-out when both men’s heads were protected by purpose-made helmets? Any reasonable member of the jury, and certainly the critical Coroner, might have balked at that... if the facts had been brought together in that way, which they had not.
The Saint had got away with it. He had calculated his performance to satisfy the all-important Coroner and jury, even though in the process as a boat expert he might have taken a nose-dive in the esteem of some of his racing colleagues.
The case was all over in another half-hour. Technical witnesses appeared, were questioned mechanically, gave their evidence after their own styles, and were duly dismissed. There was an RAF officer from the safety launch which had accompanied the competitors in mid-field and had made an early attempt to put out the fire; a marine fire expert who wrapped up the obvious — that the boat had exploded — in egregious jargon; a lugubrious forensic medical expert who confirmed that the bodies were too burnt for identification; and a dentist who, 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.