Salvage for the Saint Read Free Page B

I’ll buy that. And I’ll consider myself roundly rebuked. After all, you did take four days over me. I suppose I ought to wait at least as long before making up my mind about you … But there’s one confident guess I’ll risk.”
    “And what’s that?”
    “That the problem that’s prompted you to call on me—after due examination of my credentials—isn’t entirely unconnected with a certain bullet-bonced Gallic leech—”
    “—that’s attached itself to my connubial other half,” she cut in, smoothly finishing the sentence in almost exactly the words the Saint would have used.
    He laughed, and behind the laughter was a passing inward delight which he couldn’t have expressed, though it had to do with two people’s thoughts being oddly tuneable to the same pitch, and with the rarity of that in the real world.
    “You speak my kinda language, blue-eyes,” he Bogarted. “We must be using the same scriptwriter.”
    “Well, he’s good and he’s cheap, isn’t he?” she Bacalled huskily. “And why should you have all the best lines? … But coming back to the Gallic leech”—she had reverted to the blended tones of Oxford and New England—“of course, you could hardly have missed him. You’ve probably heard his name too. Fournier. Maurice Fournier. Mean anything to you?”
    “The name—no. But that phizog. That does ring some sort of bell.”
    He had already racked his brain repeatedly in a vain struggle to recall where he had seen that unprepossessing face before. Almost the first out-of-key phenomenon to catch his attention among the varied manifestations of boating and boat-watching humanity in and around Cowes that week had been the short thick-set shaven-headed man who seemed to have no higher or more engrossing purpose in life than that of keeping himself glued limpet-like to a point approximately three inches from the elbow of Charles Tatenor.
    Tatenor himself lived on the island. Squarely built, greying, fiftyish, he was a sophisticate of British sporting circles, and the faster and more expensive the sport the better he liked it. Powerboat racing fitted very well; Tatenor’s was one of the leading names around the world, and even if Simon Templar had his own ideas about who was going to win the two-hundred-mile race along the coast to Penzance, it was certain that Tatenor was the favourite in most people’s books.
    Which fact made it all the more surprising to everybody else that he had suddenly decided to ditch his experienced navigator Taffy Hughes in favour of this newcomer who not only seemed to have difficulty telling the sharp end from the blunt end of a boat but gave every appearance of turning pale green as soon as he came within spitting distance of the ocean—incidentally an appropriate expression, as Fournier spat frequently.
    Hughes—Simon had commiserated with him over a drink—was as mystified as anyone. Tatenor had simply told him that Fournier was an old friend from way back, and that for old times’ sake he had agreed to his friend’s joining him in the race. But in explaining this to Hughes, Tatenor had worn a face of acetic sourness that seemed at variance, in Hughes’s alcoholically emphasised opinion, with the professed friendly spirit behind the gesture. And from his own observation the Saint had to agree that Tatenor’s way of eyeing his long-lost chum was anything but chummy.
    But where Tatenor went Fournier went. When Tatenor went aboard his boat, though it might only be to work on the engines, Fournier went along. When Tatenor drank in the Royal Yachtsmen’s Club—usually without Arabella in attendance—Fournier drank too. And when Tatenor went home to his extravagant hillside home above Egypt Point, just outside the town, that dogged French shadow went with him. It was as if the two men were joined by an invisible chain.
    A part of the Saint’s mind was working again at the puzzle of trying to match the Frenchman’s fishy features against something