Luke mentioned the van. ‘Wouldn’t five strangers be noticed on this marsh of yours?’ he added.
‘Not on a November morning if they knew where they were going and drove straight to Woodruff and the yacht stores. Owners and their agents are always popping up and down that road.’ Burnby’s voice had not quickened, but some of Luke’s own rising excitement was echoed in its drawl. ‘Charlie, I’ve seen that van. I’ve been down there this morning on some other business. That’s why I’m so late. Lucky you rang me. It was a baker’s van and quite empty except for one thing our chap happened to find on the floor. He showed it to me but we didn’t think there was much to it. It was a lens out of a pair of dark glasses. It meant nothing then, but now you start me thinking. I thought it had dropped out of a pair of those sun shields, but our fellow showed me it was a real lens all right. I’ve seen your circular of course. Wasn’t one of the five wearing dark glasses?’
Charlie Luke’s spirits rose so violently that they took his breath away. The luck had come. He knew it as surely as the dairy hand knows that the cream in the churn has turned. For all the delays which had dogged him so far he had received ample compensation in the last quarter of an hour, when every minute thing which had emerged had dovetailed together and built up rapidly in his hands.
Burnby was still speaking. ‘I’ll have the van tested for prints and rush ‘em to you, to be on the safe side. Meanwhile I’ll get the water people out. The Marlene Doreen will be sitting on a mud bank by this time, as sure as Christmas, unless your blokes are fisherfolk born.’
‘Two of them are. Suffolk folk from Weft.’
A thin whistle came over the wire. ‘That’s torn it. She only carries a crew of two. Where will they make for? Do you know?’
‘Sainte-Odile, near Saint-Malo.’
‘Har, I know. They’ll be there by now, then.’
‘What?’
The violence of the exclamation set up a resistance in the countryman. ‘Well, it’s just after one, isn’t it? And they must have taken her out on the tide yesterday morning. High water was ten after ten a.m. Everything went right for them, by gee. That gives them, let me see, twenty-four, twenty-five, twenty-six hours approx. Yes, that’s about right. If their luck held and they didn’t go aground they should be there just about now, or they soon will be.’
‘Are you sure of this, Len? It matters.’
‘I think so, Charlie. I do a bit of sailing when I can, you know. It’s the sport round here. Saint-Malo from Tollesbury Fleet, yes, twenty-six hours with luck if they know the way, and if they’re fishermen they will. She’s small, you see. She wouldn’t have to go out round the Golmers Gat, but could slip through the Spitwee and Burrows Swatch, through the Sands to Margate. And then outside the Goodwins. It’s been ideal weather since the fog cleared and she carries sail as well as the diesel, so she could make speed. Depend upon it, they’re due by now.’
He paused, and as the silence lengthened laughed apologetically.
‘Well, I see you’ve got plenty on your plate, boy, so I won’t detain you. All the best. Let me know if there’s anything you want. I’ll chivvy the Customs and see to the prints. Good-bye.’
Luke hung up. It was not often that he found events outstripping his mental speed, but now he found himself staggering rather than rising to the occasion.
‘The French police,’ he said to the startled Picot. ‘Radio the French police. Here are the details. While I write them out, get me Chief Superintendent Yeo at the Great Western Hospital and ring that bell for Andy.’
He cocked an eye at the window, which showed a square of limpid sky, and his face began to glow again as the fires of his energy reddened once more.
‘If it’s a good drying day, Len, you old so-and-so,’ he murmured, ‘it’s good enough for flying, isn’t it?’
CHAPTER 19
The Mystery of Sainte-Odile-Sur-Mer
—
‘IF ONE WAS not anxious to avoid the profane,’ said the lady in the Citroën, who was really so anxious to display her English, ‘one would remark that the Devil was in it, would one not?’
From the front seat of the Talbot, Meg Elginbrodde smiled polite agreement, and for the third time the two ladies relapsed into silence and watched the little waves receding so slowly from the road.
The November afternoon was as mild as early autumn and in the sunlit stillness the neat countryside lay like a scarf of purple and green and soft gold under a sky of pearl.
Geoffery, who had been dozing at the wheel at the head of the growing line of traffic which waited for the tide to fall so that it might pass, lit yet another cigarette.
‘I feel,’ he observed over his shoulder to Campion and Amanda in the back, ‘as if I had been playing a game of snakes-and-ladders.’
Amanda laughed and nodded towards the dark wedge-shaped hill before them just across the falling water.
‘We can see it, anyway,’ she said. ‘I never thought we should. I’ve travelled unhopefully. Wake up, Albert.’
‘Why?’ inquired Mr Campion not unreasonably. ‘Every vehicle – is a Channel steamer a vehicle? – in which I have set foot in the past two days and nights has stopped dead for an hour or two when just within sight of its goal, and I’ve developed an ability to drop off, as they say, in self-defence. The thing that amazes me, if you’ll forgive me, Meg, is why you, as well as the travel authorities, thought to tell us everything about this doubtlessly delightful village except that it was an island. I understood that it was Sainte-Odile-sur-Mer, not sous-Mer. I am not grumbling because I am not that kind of clot, but, purely as a matter of academic interest, what induced you to forget it?’
Meg did not turn her head, which was all but lost in the collar of her travelling coat.
‘When I was here it wasn’t an island,’ she said. ‘This only happens at high tide.’
‘Which is twice a day,’ murmured Geoffrey, his hand tightening over hers where it rested beside them. ‘Feeling happier, Beautiful?’
‘Much.’ She smiled at him, her eyes as vivid as her little blue cap, gay against the fur lining of her tweed coat. ‘I’ve been happy since last night. Suddenly, just about midnight, everything seemed all right. I’m sorry I made such a fuss. It was that boat being so late after all the delay at the beginning, I suppose. I wanted to get on.’
‘You didn’t, you know,’ said Amanda. ‘You wanted to go back. I think Geoff was wise not to wait at Saint-Malo. Of course the tyre trouble at Les Oiseaux was utterly unforeseeable.’
‘And for some hours irremediable,’ muttered Campion. ‘Let us come and live in Les Oiseaux, Amanda. No papers, no policemen, no garages, no drains, no lights, no post office. Probably no wars. Nice food, happy smiles, and always a nice long day tomorrow. London, Paris, even New York may have blown themselves sky-high by now. We shouldn’t know. How lovely if it was always like that.’
‘That’s age,’ said his wife, ‘or more probably that second omelette. What on earth induced you to eat two?’
‘Hogliness,’ said Campion simply, and the lady in the Citroën, who had been following the conversation with increasing difficulty, gave up in despair and emitted a little cry as her husband let in his clutch.
Geoffrey stirred himself. ‘He thinks he can make it now, does he?’ he murmured. ‘Where France leads, shall England hesitate?’
Campion opened one eye. ‘On our present form we should get half-way across before we float out to sea,’ he observed. ‘Where are we going? To the village first, or straight up to the house?’
‘Oh, the house.’ Meg turned round to him. ‘Please. It’s so late, nearly two. It’ll be dark if we don’t. The road divides when we get across here and the village is down there to the west. If we take the east road up the hill we’ll be there in ten minutes.’
Mr Campion’s reply, which concerned the unwisdom of prophecy where their luck was concerned, was drowned in an hysterical outcry of hooting behind them, and a black car shot through the traffic in thei
r wake, grazed their offside wing, and took to the shallow water like a duck throwing out a wake on either side. Geoffrey glanced after it with interest.
‘See that?’ he said. ‘The gallant gendarmes. Quantities of them. The police, the police, can we never get away from them? They’re across, by Jove! Yes, there they go, away down the west road. We go east, do we darling? Right, well, now for it. We’ll take it steadily.’ He let his engine race and then the heavy car moved smoothly into the tide.
As they came up on the other side the road forked and they edged up the narrow way, leaving the rest of the traffic to take the main track to the village.
The hill rose steeply between high hedges, golden in the sun, and the air was clear and peaceful save for the buzzing of a little silver scout plane which sailed low across the sky, swooped, and turned back again.
‘What’s he doing?’ murmured Campion, but no one was listening and the journey was so pleasant that he closed his eyes again. Meg was sitting forward, her eyes eager.
‘It’s somewhere here, Geoff. A white gate. You turn in and drive for a long way up to the actual house, nearly a mile I should think. Yes, here we are.’
They turned out of the road into a lane which ran up across a broad bank of meadow, bare and desolate. The sparse grass grew in tufts on the poor soil, and was grey rather than green. There was no cover anywhere, no tree to break the arc of earth against the sky. The house appeared suddenly and with it the dark green sea and the ragged broken line of coast, lace-edged with surf, stretching out to the horizon on either side.
It was a little stone house, squat and solid as a castle, with a single turret and a wall round it which would have withstood a siege. Until they were almost upon it it looked as neat and circumspect as ever it had done, but as they passed under the arch leading to the forecourt they saw it was deserted and in bad repair. There was no glass in the windows, and grass had grown through the crack which split the stone before the nail-studded door.
They climbed out in silence. The light-hearted mood of a moment before wavered before this sudden picture of desolation. The house was dead, a casualty, and since death has no dignity save that which the living can give it, its uncared-for carcass was ugly and pathetic.
‘I hate this bit of it,’ said Meg, who looked young and forlorn despite the sophisticated swagger of her mink-lined cheviot, which was a wedding present. ‘Come through here.’
Slender silk-clad legs, seeming too fragile for her boxy shoes, carried her across the small courtyard to a door in the wall. She put her weight against it and it creaked open, dragging a fringe of sere grass and weeds with it, and they followed her through into the wreckage of what once had been a formal garden, sloping to the edge of the cliff and bounded there by a wall in which there were now many breaches. Despite its position it seemed strangely airless, and the rents in the masonry through which the sea gleamed so dangerously far below were welcome.
Amanda sniffed. ‘Rosemary,’ she said, ‘and box, and what is it? Oh yes, wormwood. Here it is. That silver stuff. Smell it? Oh. Albert, this garden must have been so sweet.’
Mr Campion slid an arm round her fur-clad shoulders and his lips were near her ear.
‘Now it’s like a horrid old tooth, a big black back one, don’t you think?’
‘That is dirty and disgusting,’ she said. ‘Oh look, they’ve found the ice-house. Is that it really?
Meg and Geoffrey, who had gone on ahead, had paused before a small stone building which crouched in the angle of the main wall. It was not large and was constructed in a pit, so that little more than half its walls and its conical roof was visible among the rank grass surrounding it. The two stepped inside as Amanda spoke and they followed them.
The inside was a surprise, for it was light. The whole of one corner had fallen away with part of the outer wall, so that now there was a ragged window at breast level looking out over the cliff to the sea. The effect was unexpectedly enchanting. Sky and sea merged on the horizon and the afternoon sun, streaming out over the green water, slashed it boldly with gold, while violet shadows and plumes of surf made marblings between.
A little boat lying at anchor, her red sails furled, bobbed in the foreground, a focal-point in the seascape. At that distance she was no larger than a matchbox, and the name, a two-letter word painted boldly in white on her dark side, was unreadable.
‘How very lovely!’ Just for an instant the brilliant vision, so unexpected and so beautiful, took all their mind and Meg spoke with delight. ‘There’s smoke, too. A little bit of smoke on the horizon. Can you see it? Otherwise she’s absolutely alone.’
Geoffrey laughed. ‘First sign of life since we turned east,’ he said. ‘Nice to see it. I thought we’d come to the end of the world. Now, Campion, the great moment.’
They looked at each other and for the first time since the journey began admitted to themselves the sadness and absurdity of the quest. All save Meg were past first youth, and the pathos of the little legacy hidden in this crumbling tomb touched three of them at least. Meg alone was radiant.
‘You say it’s fire-irons, and you say it’s something you’ve forgotten. And you, Amanda, say it’s a set of priceless glass,’ she said, glancing at them each in turn. ‘But I say that whatever it is, it’s mine, and I shall love it very much. Now then, Geoff, no more secrecy, we’re all alone. What have we got to do? Get the floor up?’
‘No.’ Levett had crossed the stone to the edge of the gully where water once had run, and was looking at the uncompromisingly Victorian cement garden figure which kept a mildewed guard there. It was a clumsy, cumbrous affair which had never been beautiful or even pleasing. It was an insipid shepherdess, much too large for life, seated on a formalized tree-stump and holding a very small vase in an ill-proportioned hand. Her wide skirts were large as a barrel and about as graceful, and since she was now crumbling badly, and had flaked with an effect frankly piebald, she was, as Lugg himself might have pointed out, ‘no ornament’.
‘It’s in here, whatever it is,’ Geoffrey said. ‘The postscript simply said “The Treasure is hidden in the statue”. I think our best way is to put it down, Campion, so that we can see the base. Shall we try?’
Together the two men, solid-looking in their greatcoats, took the figure by waist and shoulder and tipped it slowly back. It was heavy, but it stood on a plinth a little too small for it, and the wall of the gully steadied it as they lowered it at the first try very gently to the moss-grown flags. It lay there, misshapen and ridiculous, the flat base of the log and barrel skirt together making a ragged O, like an oyster shell.
That they had found the hiding-place was obvious immediately. The original cast had been hollow, for the cement outline of the inner wall was clearly marked, but the inside had been plastered over inexpertly and there was a fold of some sort of material, blanket possibly, just visible in the white mass. Campion tried it with his nail and marked it slightly.
‘It’s soft, but not quite soft enough,’ he said. ‘I think we need expert help with this, you know, as the thing is so fragile. It’s not three yet. Suppose we go down to the village and get the local mason? We can’t possibly get at it without tools.’
‘Isn’t there something in the car?’ It was Meg, her cheeks bright and her eyes dancing as Elginbrodde must have seen her when scarcely out of her teens.
‘No.’ Geoffrey linked his arm through hers possessively, and his virility and happiness were aggressive in the little space. ‘No, Albert’s right. It’s delicate, you see. My letter stressed that. You be patient, sweetheart. No good coming all this way and smashing the thing. We’ll go down to the village. You and Amanda can get us rooms at the pub while we hunt out the workmen. I think it might be easier to move the whole thing… What’s up, Amanda?’
‘Nothing.’ The older girl drew her red head into the building again. ‘I thought I heard something, but it was only the door swinging back. Go down to the village, shall we?’
‘You three go back.
Amanda can see to the hotel, Geoff can get hold of the authorities, and Albert can hunt up a mason. Let me stay.’ Meg spoke earnestly and disengaged her arm.
‘I shouldn’t,’ said Amanda promptly. ‘You’ll only get cold if you don’t fall over the cliff.’
‘But I’d like to stay with my Treasure. Do you mind, Geoff? It matters to me rather. Do you mind?’
Mr Campion did not interfere. In these matters he was a very old bird. His pale eyes rested on Geoffrey’s face where a fleeting flame of jealousy had flared and died of shame.
‘Do anything you like, my dear,’ Levett said awkwardly at last. ‘Stay if you want to. It’ll make us hurry back.’
‘That’s what I thought.’ She was as delighted as a child. ‘I’ll just sit here and look at it and wonder what the Sainte-Odile mystery can be. Hurry, or I shall die of curiosity.’
The Sacred Mystery of Sainte-Odile. A private hollerith in Mr Campion’s mind went smoothly into action. He was a boy of ten again, standing behind his redoubtable Mama in the Église de la Collegiate at Villeneuve over the bridge from Avignon, struggling to translate the rolling phrases booming from the official guide.
‘This work of art miraculous without something-or-other alone in the world except for a sister (that must be wrong) in the custody adoring of the family private of one of the most big gentlemen in France. They call it the Mystery, the Mystery Sacred of Sainte-Odile-sur-Mer.’
‘My hat!’ he said in sudden excitement. ‘This is going to be interesting. Let us do as Geoff suggests. We’ll just go and get a truck and cart the whole thing down to the hotel. We’ll leave you there to fix things up with them, Amanda. You stay here, Meg, since you want to, and we’ll do it under the half-hour.’
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