“Henri? Don’t be silly!”
Simon was unmoved.
“The limitation of that trick is that you can only move the glass towards you, or a little to one side, as you pull the thread under the edge of the table. Henri was the only one in a position to send it the way it went.”
She seemed to make an effort to remain sceptical.
“But why should Henri go to all that trouble?”
“That, as Hamlet always said, is the question,” Simon shrugged. “Perhaps he’s a secret practical joker.”
“Not Henri.”
“I didn’t think so. If the glass hadn’t smashed against the column, and brought me into the act, we might have found out. He couldn’t have known that I was standing there, so it was pure bad luck that I broke up the proceedings just as you made your appearance.”
“What are we going to do about it?” demanded Mimette.
The Saint lifted one free hand and shoulder.
“Nothing.”
“Nothing!”
“It’s no crime to fake a séance,” he contended.
“But no one would do it without a dishonest reason.”
“Did I have a dishonest reason just now?”
“No, but you — oh! You... you—”
She was almost spluttering with feminine exasperation at the idiocy of masculine logic.
The Saint was wise enough not to try to score any more intellectual points.
“All we have at the moment is a good reason to keep an eye on Henri,” he said quietly. “And we’ll have a much better chance of spotting something more if he doesn’t know he’s being watched. So just for now, will you keep my little demonstration private, between the two of us?”
Mimette frowned.
“Excusez-moi.” The words were difficult for her to say. “I have no right to speak to you as if I had hired you. It’s only because, since you came here, I’ve been hoping so much—”
“And believe me, Mimette,” he said steadily, “I’m hoping I won’t let you down.”
She looked up at him uncertainly, desperately wanting to believe. Simon Templar looked down into her dark troubled eyes and put down his glass. Before she realized what was happening, his lips were against hers. Her eyes opened wide in astonishment for a moment, but only for a moment. Slowly they closed as the tension dissolved, and she relaxed gratefully into the security of his arms.
As usual the following morning Simon breakfasted alone. Those with work to do were busy doing it, while Jeanne Cor-day’s ideas on the proper time for reveille were even more sybaritic than his own. Today, however, he knew that there would be a surfeit of conviviality to make up for it later. The last of the grapes would be brought in that afternoon, and in the evening there would be the traditional party for all who had worked on the harvest.
He was looking forward to the festivities. Not simply because they would be enjoyable in themselves, but because it would be his first opportunity to observe all the Florian clan and their cohorts in the informal bustle of a sociable free-for-all, which might provide an interesting floor show.
A stroll around the château grounds after breakfast had become something of a ritual, and that morning his route rook him first towards the chai and its dependent storehouse. In the cobbled courtyard which they partly enclosed he found Gaston Pichot leaning on a stout stick and watching a mound of laden baskets being carried in from the truck.
“These are the Petit Syrah,” Gaston explained. “Blended in our own proportion with the usual Cabernet grapes, they are what give the wines of Ingare their unique flavor.”
“I’m glad to see you’re on the job again,” said the Saint sincerely. “And feeling a lot better?”
“I could have felt so much worse,” said the indomitable old man. “But I was born in a good year. My vintage has outlasted many younger ones, and it will outlast many more. We have a proverb in Provencale: Vau miès pourta lou dou que lou linçou — it is better to wear the mourning than the coffin.”
“I shall adopt that as my motto,” Simon laughed. “A bien-tôt, mon ami.”
He sauntered on, around to the storehouse where Gaston had literally stumbled into one of the long-lost secrets of the château.
The floor was now securely pit-propped and the ladder had been solidly braced so that it practically became a steep flight of stairs. The debris had been removed, and a cable run from the generator in the adjoining pressing house supplied power for a couple of light bulbs.
Unexpectedly, the underground chamber was temporarily deserted. Since its discovery Norbert had virtually lived there, leaving it reluctantly only for hurried meals and snatched sleep. Reasoning that even professors are subject to the dictates of nature, Simon decided to wait for Norbert to return.
The statue looked somehow less sinister in the unglamorous glare of three hundred watts than it had in the wavering candle-power of flashlights. As he stood beside it facing the chilling emptiness of its eyes, he saw that it was not set flush against the wall as he had originally supposed. Only the plinth was attached to the wall, but the figure centred on it was well clear. A fetishist, if so inclined, could have put his arms around its horrors and embraced it.
The Saint did almost that, but with the purely idle object of testing whether the statue was integrated with its base or merely planted on it.
And the statue moved, with an ease quite disproportionate to the effort he had applied with respect to its presumable weight. In fact, so smoothly that he was momentarily thrown off balance. It was as if the statue had responded by coming to life in weird co-operation. And to add to the eeriness of the effect, a ghostly squeak and clink of chain whined through the chamber, while he had a visual hallucination of a part of the wall within his field of vision moving away from him.
As he regained his footing, both physically and intelligently, he realised that the wall actually had moved. In fact, a whole section of masonry had turned, in perfect synchronisation with the turning of the statue, opening a door into a passageway that instantly lost itself in total darkness.
Long afterwards, he would be profoundly impressed by the technical sophistication that was evidenced by the smooth working of the secret mechanism. After so many hundred years, anything made of iron or steel would have been rusted into permanent immovability. Yet bronze was an alloy that had been known even in the great days of the Château Ingare, although few engineers of that era seem to have concerned themselves with the problems of corrosion. The Templars who had installed that shrine of Hecate must have been centuries ahead of the thinking of their contemporaries, and what they built had been designed to outlast themselves by tens of generations.
But for those first moments, the Saint was too startled by his own discovery to stop and marvel at the technology which had made it possible. He took a deep breath and exhaled it in a long low whistle as he waited for his pulse rate to slow and a sense of reality to return and shuffle the jumbled sensations of the past seconds into a semblance of order.
That done, he walked over to the opening and peered cautiously in. The light from the bulbs in the crypt reached just far enough into the narrow passage to show that it was cut through the natural rock of the hillside, and the stone blocks of the pivoting secret door were only a few inches thick.
The door had not swung completely open but stood about two feet ajar. A heavy chain was around a toothed wheel at the bottom corner of the door, through the wall and into the base of the statue, where there would have to be another similar wheel. As one turned, so would the other. Simple but perfectly effective, and it still worked.
Two steps into the passage and he blocked his own light, making it impossible to see even inches ahead, and he returned to the chamber to cast around in the vain hope that a torch might have been left there.