Salvage for the Saint by Leslie Charteris Read Free Book Online Page B

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,