Salvage for the Saint by Leslie Charteris Read Free Book Online

spotted tie done up in a tight little knot.
    “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 holidaymaking 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?”