“You have been at Ingare for a long time?” Simon asked as they returned to the daylight.
“I have always been at Ingare,” answered Charles. “My father was butler before me, and his father before him. It is so long ago I am not even sure when we first came here.”
As he carefully double-locked the door to the cellar, Simon asked: “What do you think about this treasure of the Templars that everyone is so worked up about?”
“It is not my business,” Charles replied stiffly. “If there is one, it would belong to the Florians.”
He led the way back into the kitchen and it seemed to the Saint that the further they moved into the house the more Charles became the inscrutable servant and less the wine enthusiast chatting to a fellow connoisseur.
“Perhaps the chamber Gaston fell into yesterday might provide a clue,” Simon ventured. “I should think there are a number of underground passages here that no one knows about.”
“It is very possible, monsieur,” Charles agreed politely. “Is there anything else you require?”
There was; but not the kind of domestic service that Charles was offering. The Saint knew when he was being stonewalled and accepted that any further probing would be useless.
That afternoon he visited Gaston. The foreman’s home was a white-walled low-roofed cottage at the foot of the hill looking towards the Ouvèze, which he had learnt was the name of the river in the plain below. The ground floor consisted of a single room simply furnished with locally made furniture. A massive iron stove set into the fireplace served both for heating and for cooking food. The only decorations were an array of shining copper utensils that hung beside the chimney breast and an assortment of framed photographs on the mantelpiece. Despite its spartan appearance, however, the house had a feeling of warmth and security that the château could never project.
Gaston’s bed had been brought downstairs and he was sitting propped up in it reading when the Saint arrived.
“I am embarrassed, m’sieur,” he said. “I have no wounds, but the doctor orders that I must rest for two or three days until the pain in my back is gone.”
The overseer put away his book and the jumble of papers on which he had been scribbling, and for more than an hour they chatted about the harvest weather, about wine-making, about everything and anything but nothing in particular. The only awkward break in the conversation came when Simon brought up the mysterious underground chamber which Gaston had so dramatically and painfully opened up. It was a subject that Gaston gave the impression it would be disloyal or indiscreet of him to discuss.
“That is for the professor to occupy himself with,” he said gruffly.
As the Saint prepared to leave Gaston became suddenly serious.
“You are still staying at Ingare?”
“Mademoiselle Mimette insists, until my car is repaired, so I see no reason to leave.”
“Even after what happened to me yesterday?”
“That was the purest accident, wasn’t it? Nothing sinister about it. Why should that make me go?”
Gaston did not reply at once. Instead he looked searchingly at his visitor.
“Trust no one,” he cautioned at last. “Not even those you think of no account.”
“Precisely who do you have in mind?” Simon asked, but the old man was not to be drawn and merely thanked his guest for the visit and bade him a deferential au revoir.
On his way back to the château the Saint stopped at the tower. The scene was the same as it had been when the seance broke up. The table, the overturned chairs, the circle of cards, and the shattered wine-glass at the foot of the column had not been picked up or moved. He searched for several minutes before finding what he was looking for. The piece of thread was almost hidden in a crack between the flagstones. Simon extracted it with care and slipped it into an envelope in his pocket. He continued on his way to the château, leaving everything else exactly as it had been.
“I must stop reading detective stories,” he told himself.
It is said that before an earthquake you can hear the silence. The animals and birds depart, only the people remain unaware. The Saint, whose instinct for danger was as finely honed as any animal’s, watched the behaviour of his companions with a naturalist’s detachment during the following two days.
The events of the preceding forty-eight hours were treated with well-bred indifference, as if ignoring them would make them go away. In the same manner his presence became accepted, and he realised how Norbert had managed to turn a weekend visit into a six-week stay. Conventional references to the condition of his car were easily and deftly coped with.
Supplied with the morsels of information the Saint had gathered during his brief stay at Château Ingare, any ordinary private investigator would have exhausted himself trying to unravel the spaghetti of riddles that Providence had heaped on his plate, until he and everyone else around was suffering from acute indigestion. The Saint did not. In fact to any observer unfamiliar with his methods he appeared to do nothing at all.
After the excitement generated by Gaston Pichot’s accidental discovery of the underground chamber had subsided, life at the château returned to as near normal as its motley assortment of personalities would allow, and Simon slipped comfortably into the routine of the household. The time-honoured ritual of the harvest continued, and he followed the progress of the grapes from vine to press to fermenting vat with genuine interest. When not in the fields or watching the wine being made, he behaved exactly as any other guest would have done.
Philippe Florian had returned from Avignon and appointed himself to take charge of the Hecate crypt. His archaeological interest was negligible; but his keenness to facilitate Louis Nor-bert’s study of it was very great. Since every able-bodied worker on the domaine was fully occupied with the picking and processing of grapes, he took on the task of securing the safety of the rest of the ceiling himself, revealing unsuspected talents as a practical handy-man. With the professor fluttering around to fetch and carry and lend an unmuscular hand, he brought in planks and timber and did a very competent job of underpinning the floor above. The scraping of his saw and the hammering of wedges reverberated to the outside for hours at a time.
For his part, Simon was unobtrusive to the point of elusiveness. Jeanne Corday’s clothes and poses placed her in the centre of the spotlight he had previously occupied, and he was content to fade into the background and watch and wait.
After dinner on the fourth day following his arrival, all the others excused themselves early for one reason or another, and for the first time in a long while he found himself alone again with Mimette in the salon.
She wasted no time in taking advantage of the opportunity.
“You must have a lot to tell me.”
It was so close to sounding like an imperious challenge that he was amused to treat it with elaborate carelessness.
“Not really-why should I?”
A slight flush tinged the girl’s cheeks.
“You mean you’ve been doing nothing?”
“I can’t say I’ve been a great help with the récolte,” Simon granted. “And Philippe already has an enthusiastic assistant.”
“Which should have left you plenty of time to do something else useful.”
“What would you have proposed?” he teased her lazily. “Should I have brought in a steam shovel and started digging up your foundations until we found a treasure which may not even exist?”